Pope Francis has been accused of heresy for his efforts to liberalise the churchs understanding of divorceA group of conservative clerics has accused Pope Francis of heresy for his attempts to liberalise the church’s treatment of divorced people. This raises an interesting question: how long must a pope be dead before his opinions can safely be ignored? For many people the respond is no time at all: it is not just humanists,Muslims and Protestants, but the vast majority of the world’s Catholics who take diminutive notice of Catholic doctrine when they disagree with it. The Catholic upright ignores more than a hundred years of consistent papal teaching against the excesses of capitalism, and along with more recent denunciations of the death penalty,of wars of aggression and of environmental destruction. The Catholic left ignores the pope’s teachings on sexuality – and everyone ignores the ban on contraception.Popes themselves, however, or are meant to take their predecessors very seriously even though neither party is writing infallibly. Papal encyclicals read like legal documents,buttressed with footnotes to prove that doctrine has not changed, and that they are just repeating what their predecessors meant, or even when they contradict what was plainly said. Those magnificent robes conceal some very fancy footwork at times. It is an article of faith – literally – that doctrine can never change,only develop, and the eye of faith can clearly see the subtle differences between change, and development and decay. So the 19th-century denunciations of democracy and freedom of thought and conscience are now ignored,but pope John Paul II’s refusal to confess women priests looks certain to stand for another couple of centuries at least.
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Source: theguardian.com