A controversy has been generated over Pope Francis using the euphemistic pro-abortion phrase ‘interruption of pregnancy’ in a message delivered for pro-life activists. In the message on the Vatican website Pope Francis states:
“let us be close to and together pray for the babies who are at risk of the interruption of pregnancy, as well as those who are at the end of their life”
As pointed out by pro-life and RC writers on the LifeSiteNews, this language was, in fact, condemned by John Paul II! Also brought out has been the continual drift in Francis papacy toward more and more open modernism, especially on questions of sexual morality. However, this is all to be expected; the institution of the Vatican and its attendant religious bodies in theoretical subjection to it, are, in fact, not even the same creature they were 100, or even 50, years ago. In many case, Orthodox apologists and polemicists who engage in debates with RCC ideas and doctrines are only debating a small minority of the total RCC population who even care about these things; apologetics and proper polemics are still necessary, however, we should realize that the mainline RCC institution, especially the Vatican, doesn’t believe enough of what they used to even have a rational or meaningful debate. We are essentially debating pantheists, deists, and agnostics in religious garb.
Question of doctrine and moral praxis don’t fundamentally matter to figures like Bergoglio and others; while a few people saw this from the beginning in the 1960s and turned away from Roman Catholicism (many becoming Orthodox), the vast majority of RC clerics chose to stay, and, in fact, embrace modernism and ecumenism wholesale. This is why you have Pope Francis praising Martin Luther; essentially, to him, and to most, theology is ‘nonsense’, or it is non-essential to some amorphous message of ‘love’ (similar remarks were made by the Greek Patriarch of Alexandria at the recent Council of Crete; where he castigated any attempts to delve into ‘theological’ issues as too arcane for the average person).
The modernist-ecumenist leadership of the RCC, the various Official World Orthodox bodies, most Protestant communities, views religion as basically a tool for social work and social activism; however, many of the activist works they endeavour to promote are completely alien to traditional Christian understandings of good works.
