“When Bad Popes go good”

https://catholicstuffpodcast.com/podcast/2010/09/28/when-bad-popes-go-good.html

https://catholicstuffpodcast.com/

Oh man I’m so glad I found this!

Reader-land, let me tell you a story.

As I have often said, I work from home now, and I am exposed to a lot of things, news, messages, kids, puppies, bad news, religious news, left wing or right wing news… The inturwubs has broken me.  Even on Catholic websites, it’s all doom and gloom.  You win, world web net.

But as I removed myself from the series of tubess, I began going back through the ENTIRE CATALOG of Catholic Stuff You Should Know podcasts, linked above, and this came on today.  Give it a listen, but I will also commentate.

First of all, the Catholic websites and YouTube channels and Books of Faces pages that are calling for papa Frankie to resign?  Stop.  Next, there have been much worse popes than him, he’s just viewing Catholic charity as socialism.  I mean, he also might have had people killed, had lovers, started wars and covered up crimes while making himself richer, and he STILL wouldn’t come close to the bad popes we’ve had the last 1986 years, if you go by the year thirty-three as the year of the Ascension.

Let’s start with this guy Vigilius.  Not a saint, by the way.  No less a scholar than Dr Warren Carroll wrote about this guy.  Vigilius was shady, and made a deal with the Empress Theodora that would depose a rightfully elected pope and put him there.  So he became an antipope!  Then, shortly, the real pope died and they elected… Your boy Vigilius, now no longer antipope but real pope.  Vigilius, in a nutshell, was given the papacy so he could pronounce the Monophysite heresy as the teaching of the Catholic Church.  No less than a matter of faith and morals.  “Whoa,” you say, “I remember hearing the popes are infallible if they talk about faith and morals!”  You’re right.  So he would have been speaking on this topic… And Christianity would have changed forever.

Except he didn’t, and it didn’t.

So, was he a liar, a fraud, a betrayer, a no account?  Well, yes.  So why, if he was put into that position of such power and would enjoy the favor of the Empress and be politically and religiously untouchable, why didn’t he just do it?  A deep-seated belief that he hid to get the popery?  He was a good guy, even if he imprisoned the previous pope?? Uh, nope.

It’s called the Holy Spirit.  See, it seems that the pope should be able to make infallible statements on faith and morals, right?  His role as pope.  For all you nonCatholics out there reading this, it actually means the pope physically cannot speak against faith and morals instituted by Jesus when the pope is definitively teaching as the head of the Church. I That is what happened here.

You can tell a person by their actions, that’s how I know I am a lazy no account.  Our boy Vigilius led a rather immoral life before becoming the real pope, and then actually went against the Empress and Emperor.  In fact, this guy Vigilius went on to defy the bribes and spent eight years in prison in Constantinople, dying on the journey back to Rome.  Please explain to me why he would contribute, allegedly, to the death of the previous pope, then do the same thing that guy did?  Something happened to him. 

The podcast does a much better job explaining this than me, so give it a listen.  It’s only sixteen minutes, and they mention Dr Carroll.  That has to be enough for the Seton crowd to spend a FEW minutes!

So to get back to all those websites and stuffs that made me take a moratorium on Facebook, pay attention.  Pope Francis is the steward of the deposit of Faith.  He can’t change it, not officially as pope.  He can muddy the waters, sure, and we must call the truth to clear the water.  But instead of calling for him to resign, pray for him.  He’s not an elected official in a democratic Republic, like the US.  You fall into the same trap he fell into by politicizing religion, and that isn’t the answer.  Don’t be silent in the face of evil but remember the Church isn’t a democracy.  There is only one person in charge and it ain’t the pope. 

Just remember, the Holy Spirit is real, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against His church.