I appreciate reading, learning and being warned about these problematic programs. Orthopraxy - right practice - must be informed by orthodoxy - right belief. Our first-world culture is too pragmatic - whatever works instead of what's right; I don't care if you
can clone human-animal
beings, it's an abomination!
Norwegian Blue wrote:
And thank God also for the succession of amazing popes he gave us in the last century, and not least for the first pope in this.
Amen! IMhO - it also shows what dire times we are in; in better times we could endure the likes of
Pope John XII....
Michael Francis wrote:
One last thing, if Anthony DeMello, S.J. is mentioned at all, run away, far away. His writings have been condemned by the Church as being dangerous and harmful to the faith.
Too
true! As a Protestant, studying to be a minister, DeMello was recommended to me by a former Jesuit seminarian who had left school and lived for a year in a nudist colony. Curious, I checked his books out anyway and they were rife with new age philosophies and errors about very basic truths (like who God is and what He is like). Unfortunately, especially in the heresy-rife US, there are just too many errors popping up for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to keep up. We need an inquisition - not that our corrupt, inefficient, Quaker-based penal system would know justice if it saw it; we seriously could use one to try the Catholic universities, groups like this, and all the English books and publications with Imprimaturs - to test their orthodoxy. Rather than weeding out Islamic extremists like the original inquisitions this one would weed out the Christophobic extremists.
chrism wrote:
Small groups according to Robert Lipton, an expert on brainwashing, are the easiest way to "change people's thinking". Think of the communist chinese home cell groups. Many protestant churches have been taken in big time by the 'small group' programs and there has been a push for years starting with 'renew' to get these things going in the Catholic parishes....under many different names.
I am not ready to throw out all small groups. They can be problematic; even in small Protestant churches, small groups are only as good as their leaders, and normalizing that even through rigorous discipleship programs was always a challenge - and they can be pools of ignorance where everyone talks about how they interpreted this or that. That being said, I'd love to find a small group with a Catholic leader of the right caliber. The real support (not just 'sense of community') and catechesis can strengthen faith and relationships to endure very hard trials. I believe the late, great JPII led many, and in a sense that's what DCF is to me.
Doug C. wrote:
I believe the bishops did crack down on that one, but the Renew crowd revised it and it became more subtle.
Fool me once (Renew) shame on you, fool me twice (Renew2000) shame on me, fool me three times (Why Catholic) - wait is this the Darwin Awards? I don't need to dig through trash to know it stinks.
Can bad trees produce good fruit? (
Matthew 7:15-20) Can salt springs produce fresh water? (
James 3:12)
Even if they are producing orthodox stuff to fill their coffers, what will they use that money, trust and prestige for? We have a big Church and an old Church with a robust intellectual tradition - we don't need new materials as an excuse to meet, learn or evangelize.
Summa anyone?