NEW YORK (RNS) That’s always been the jokey answer to a dumb question, but it’s now a serious issue for Catholic intellectuals who have been criticizing, and defending, the Catholic bona fides of Pope Francis, especially since the pontiff released a landmark document on family life earlier this month that some say calls into question the church’s teachings on the permanence of marriage.
“A catastrophe,” one traditionalist blogger called the apostolic exhortation, “Amoris Laetitia,” or “The Joy of Love,” which was released by the Vatican on April 8. Francis “departs from church teaching” in the exhortation, wrote another.
“Suddenly the rhetorical question, ‘Is the pope Catholic?’ doesn’t seem so rhetorical anymore,” Claire Chretien wrote in a pointed critique at the conservative Web outlet The Federalist.
The unusual debate — after all, it’s not often that a pope is accused of heterodoxy — has grown so serious, in fact, that on Tuesday evening (April 19), the Jesuit-run Fordham University hosted a panel of Catholic experts titled: “Is the Pope Catholic?”
The Muslim Times’ Editor’s comments
Every religion and tradition needs to adapt to the needs of the time. It has been made all the more necessary in our age of instant information and when we are interacting with people of other faiths as much as our own faith.
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