Van asked:I’ve heard about sede vacante. Can you give a response on the accusation of modernism that they've put on the pope? Can you also talk about their ordained clergy and how they aren’t current with Catholic teaching?Patrick Madrid replied:"It’s never the proper response to cut your nose off despite your face ... There’s a parallel there when people say, ‘Look at all those bad Catholics in the Catholic church. I’m going to leave the Church and I’m going to go form my own church. I’m going to claim I’m part of the remnant church. There is no validly elected pope. Everyone else is wrong and I’m the only one who’s right.' ... That’s always the wrong answer. It’s not Catholic. It’s certainly not biblical to cut one’s self off from the unity and life giving sacramental grace of the Church.That’s what the term sede vacante refers to. It’s somebody who believes there is no currently valid pope currently sitting on the throne of Peter ... It entails the kind of despairing position that Jesus either lied when he said, ‘upon this rock I will build my Church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.’ Or he didn’t know what he was talking about because the gates of hell did prevail against that church. It leads to intolerable conclusions in my view ... The Church has problems. You mentioned modernism and modernism is understood variously, Pope Pius the tenth is the one who emphasized the danger of modernism in his encyclical letter Pascendi Dominici Gregis ... It’s the word for feeding ... feeding the flock of sheep of the Lord. And how modernism is as he put it, ‘the synthesis of errors.’ So it’s a real danger ... most people now a days don’t have any concept of what modernism is much less do they recognize it when they see it ... Even though they claim that they are not leaving the Church, they would claim that the pope himself left the Church or that that priest over there left the Church. It’s just a rationalization for in effect leaving the Catholic church and still insisting that you’re in the Church and everyone has left you.” Copyrights:© 2013 Immaculate Heart Catholic RadioEditor's note: This is an excerpt of the answer provided. For the complete response download the podcast. |