Cardinal Tobin’s Twist on Heresy

'Nighty-night, Baby' Tobin seems to have come up with a new definition of heresy to accuse actual Catholics of holding, but with a bit of help from Dan 'the Horan of Babylon'.

From One Mad Mom

I’ve been busy and didn’t have time to deal with this one until now, but it seems like there’s a fun new spin on heresy that we’re starting to see from the liberals. Apparently, they also prepped Cardinal Tobin well enough that he could finally string it together. Dan “The Horan of Babylon” floated it a while back here.  The new buzzword is “complexity.” What it really boils down to is, “Complexity requires us to twist truth until it looks like something we want it to and if you don’t jump on that bandwagon, you are heretics, you simpleton peasants!” Sadly, some will look like zombies as they utter “Oh, OK, Master.”

Interestingly enough, Bishop Strickland recently tweeted this: https://twitter.com/Bishopoftyler/status/1483282257628516353

I urge every Catholic who believes that Jesus Christ is Lord of all to study paragraphs 66 & 67 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Public revelation ended with Jesus, any contrary claim of private revelation is measured against the fullness of truth revealed in Jesus Christ”

At the time I was wondering where it came from, but it dawned on me later as I read Cardinal Tobin’s quotes that it might just be aimed at him, and rightly so.   

Cardinal Tobin: Refusing to deal with life’s complexity is a form of heresy. https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2022/01/12/cardinal-tobin-synodality-242186

Michael J. O’Loughlin

January 12, 2022

Critics who dismiss an ongoing Vatican effort to consult Catholics around the world, part of the pope’s efforts to reinvigorate church life, fail to understand how Francis is trying to reshape the church, one of his cardinal advisors said in a speech on Tuesday.

“Synodality is a way of being church, based on the idea, the ideal, that all the baptized are walking together with a shared attention to the Holy Spirit,” Cardinal Joseph Tobin, the archbishop of Newark, said in a keynote address to the Cathedral Ministry Conference, which is taking place this week in Chicago.”

Translation: “Our ‘private revelation’, AKA our whims and desires, is going to let us say anything we want to about the Deposit of Faith.”

In recent days, some critics of the upcoming synod, which has received relatively little attention in the United States, complained on social media that some keywords associated with the synod planning process shared in a tweet from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops seemed too corporate or jargony. At least one bishop weighed in, posting on his Twitter account, “If the synod process is to bear fruit, it has to focus on the person of Jesus Christ, Gospel values and a spiritual vision; and eliminate complex structures, mind-boggling instructions, and secular, corporate language.

That would be Bishop Thomas Tobin (the good Tobin). Not entirely sure why America Mag didn’t identify him. Maybe they thought their readers would confuse him with the awesomeness that is Cardinal Tobin?  I assure them, faithful Catholics really know the difference.

Some critics of the upcoming synod complained on social media that some keywords associated with the synod planning process seemed too corporate or jargony.

Hah! If you haven’t seen this tweet, please do and look at the comments. Hi-lar-i-ous! I was so sad when they finally shut it down. The responses were perfect for the poppycock put out that day. I’m not sure why they don’t hand the keys to the Twitter page to someone else who has a little common sense. You can tell that some of the bishops were a little more than ticked at the stupidity portrayed in that “meme”, for lack of a better term. (Actually, that’s the perfect term!)

Without directly addressing that online controversy, Cardinal Tobin said that it is common for certain themes to emerge during the preparation periods leading up to a meeting of the Synod of Bishops.

Stupidity? That’s the theme they want to emerge? Because, if it is, they’re doing a bang-up job of it. Offensive? There’s another theme emerging. I mean, not to date myself, but that meme was like watching an episode of Romper Room. “OK, children, today we’re going to spoon feed you some corporate buzzwords to make you comply with the immoral agenda that’s going to be thrown at you at the Synod on Synodality.” I mean, all that would make it complete is some sock puppets reading the tweet!

Also, please note that most of this article is Loughlin explaining what Cardinal Tobin means. That’s probably because Cardinal Tobin can never quite get the liberal job done.

Ahead of the 2012 synod, convened by Pope Benedict XVI to discuss evangelization, the cardinal said he noticed “discernment” was a key theme, used two dozen times in the preparatory document.

“I thought, how interesting that at this level of the church, people are recognizing that there are no pat solutions for the challenges the church faces today,” Cardinal Tobin said, “and that the synod is not simply there to rubber stamp something, but to [ask], what is God saying to the churches today?”

What in the what? Just a guy banking on the fact that you won’t look up that document? Let me ruin his day: https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/synod/documents/rc_synod_doc_20110202_lineamenta-xiii-assembly_en.html

Actually, it was made quite clear we can’t do what the liberals are suggesting (emphasis mine).

These potentialities, however, cannot hide the inherent risks when this kind of culture is taken to an extreme, including a selfish concentration on oneself and personal needs; an overemphasis on the emotive aspects of relations and social bonds; the loss of the objective values of experience, reflection and thought, which are reduced in many cases, to ways of reconfirming one’s individualistic feelings; the progressive alienation of the moral and social dimensions of life which makes others a mirror for self or simply a spectator to one’s actions; and, finally, the formation of a culture centred on passing novelties, the present moment and outward appearances, indeed a society which is incapable of remembering the past and with no sense of the future. In this sector, the new evangelization means that Christians need to show boldness in these “new aeropaghi”, where they live everyday, and find the means and approaches to ensure that the Church’s patrimony in education and knowledge, safeguarded by the Christian tradition, has a part to play in these ultra-modern places.

God is not changing what He said to the Church. Discernment on how to get His teachings through to each age is one thing. Changing them for each age? No bueno.

The 2023 synod of bishops will be devoted to the idea of synodality, which dioceses began preparing for last year.

Cardinal Tobin, who serves on the Vatican Congregation for Bishops, said Pope Francis has continued seeking answers to the question of synodality, and that he has emphasized similar themes.

“The longer and the farther we journey together, the more we encounter each other, the more everything becomes clearer,” he said. “Right now, accompanied by Francis, they’re the same words: mercy, joy, discernment, dialogue. And of all of them, the most misunderstood, in my experience, is synodality.”

And another Cardinal Tobin translation is needed: “Down with patrimony!”

“In his talk, Cardinal Tobin recalled a meeting in 1960 between the French Jewish historian Jules Isaac and Pope John XXIII. Mr. Issac urged the pope to consider how the church had contributed to anti-Semitic attidues in Europe and its role in creating conditions that led to the Holocaust. That conversation helped lead to the promulgation of “Nostra Aetate” and the beginning of a period of reconciliation between the church and the Jewish people.”

“What Pope John was able to do only was possible because he listened,” Cardinal Tobin said. “He listened to a voice that he would not have heard in all the Vatican or probably in any Catholic church at the time. He listened to somebody who had been deeply hurt.”

He’s comparing Jews to active homosexuals, divorced and remarried couples, etc. with this example. Don’t believe me? Read on.

Cardinal Tobin said that listening deeply as part of the synodal process is “essential for our shared growth in the body of Christ.” That posture is “what Pope Francis sees clearly and advocates for openly as the model the church the Lord expects of us in this millennium.”

He cited the pope’s insistence about the church’s need to be on the literal and figurative peripheries and asked, “I wonder what voices can speak to the church today?”

He cited his own diocese’s outreach to young people, individuals in prisons and L.G.B.T. Catholics—a gesture, he said, “that cost us a lot.”

“But it’s a cost we must pay, and it reaps tremendous benefits,” he said.

It cost those with same-sex attraction a lot because Cardinal Tobin did it all wrong. I’m a HUGE fan of reaching out to the same-sex attracted. However, I don’t believe you offer them stones instead of bread. I also don’t believe in aiding them in spiritual death. I believe in offering them truth and TRUE accompaniment. I’d love to know what his “outreach” (and I’m finding that word kind of creepy when it comes to him) cost him. And, again, the benefits were only to him, but I really don’t want to know what those were. Let’s just look at the types of things Cardinal Tobin has done and/or never bothered to address. https://www.nj.com/hudson/2017/05/cardinals_historic_outreach_to_lgbt_community_fait.html

Catholics uncomfortable with a synodal model of the church, he said, may be put off by the messiness dialogue often unearths. But, he said, refusing to live with tension can be a form of heresy.

“My favorite definition of heresy is a refusal to deal with complexity,” he said. “If you look at the heresies of the church, the great heresies, they couldn’t accept one thing or the other, and they didn’t want to live with the tension. There is an essential tension and a necessary tension in so much of our life.”

Please cite your source on that one. Was it Dan? I like St. Thomas’ a wee bit better.

a species of infidelity in men who, having professed the faith of Christ, corrupt its dogmas.

Nailed it. In fact, much of the article in the Catholic encyclopedia describes many bishops and cardinals today but definitely doesn’t sound like Cardinal Tobin’s defintion. This sounds like him though:

the other by restricting belief to certain points of Christ’s doctrine selected and fashioned at pleasure, which is the way of heretics.

Most of us live in the real world, Cardinal Tobin. We’re definitely not in your tower. Tension is our way of life, but “dealing with complexity and tension” doesn’t mean saying “Go and do as you please.” It means embracing the truth even when it causes suffering because, ultimately, embracing the Church’s teachings is the best thing for us.

“If you destroy that tension,” he continued, “then the church, the sacraments, the Word of God becomes something else. It is no longer the Word of God.”

The cardinal said he is hopeful that churches can open their doors and listen deeply, but he is also aware that the process may not be easy.

“We have a long way to go in coding into our ecclesial DNA, this way of being church,” he said”

So, in short, we have to listen to all the babbling about where the Church, in teaching TRUTH, hurt people, then we have to change that truth to accompany them in a lack of truth because, well, it’s nice to all get along? That pretty much sums up the liberal position on synodality. Oh! That, and if you don’t agree, you are a heretic. Sorry. Truth is THE most loving thing we can pass along to people. We must accompany them in their struggle to accept it, not change it.

As Bishop Strickland points out in that tweet (and I have no idea if it was actually aimed at Cardinal Tobin, but I suspect it was considering it fits nicely with what Cardinal Tobin is trying to peddle). Let’s look at the Catechism citations, shall we? (emphasis mine)

66 “The Christian economy, therefore, since it is the new and definitive Covenant, will never pass away; and no new public revelation is to be expected before the glorious manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Yet even if Revelation is already complete, it has not been made completely explicit; it remains for Christian faith gradually to grasp its full significance over the course of the centuries.

67 Throughout the ages, there have been so-called “private” revelations, some of which have been recognized by the authority of the Church. They do not belong, however, to the deposit of faith. It is not their role to improve or complete Christ’s definitive Revelation, but to help live more fully by it in a certain period of history. Guided by the Magisterium of the Church, the sensus fidelium knows how to discern and welcome in these revelations whatever constitutes an authentic call of Christ or his saints to the Church.

Christian faith cannot accept “revelations” that claim to surpass or correct the Revelation of which Christ is the fulfillment, as is the case in certain non-Christian religions and also in certain recent sects which base themselves on such “revelations”.

Cardinal Tobin can “discern” away, but “discernment,” nor making the Deposit of Faith more explicit, has anything to do with changing the Truth. Black will never be white no matter how long you “discern” it, although the good little liberals will try to tell you it’s possible. The Church loves us too much to say that.