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William Kilpatrick<\/a> – July 20, 2022<\/p>\n In a recent article<\/a> I made the case that the main thrust of the Francis papacy is to deemphasize sin.\u00a0 Whatever he might say about a moral issue such as abortion, same-sex marriage, or adultery, Francis has consistently given his support and praise to those on the permissive side of the issue.<\/p>\n By contrast, his harshest criticisms have always been reserved for traditional Catholics who worry about moral decay in the Church and society.\u00a0 Francis frequently attacks these \u201crigid fundamentalists\u201d as the modern-day counterparts of the pharisees.<\/p>\n Judging by Francis\u2019s actions, one might think that the Church was just emerging from a long dark night of narrow-minded puritanism\u2014a real life Handmaid\u2019s Tale.\u00a0 But the opposite is true.<\/p>\n Starting in the early sixties, Church leaders increasingly took their moral cues from secular sources\u2014particularly from psychologists. Middle-school religious studies texts were peppered with the theories of humanistic psychologists. In California, an entire order of 600 nuns left the Church in search of self-fulfillment. With the coming of the self-esteem movement, feelings of guilt were replaced with feelings of OK-ness.\u00a0 Almost overnight the long lines outside the confessional booths disappeared.\u00a0 Newly enlightened Catholics couldn\u2019t think of any sins to confess.\u00a0 The new gospel was all about self-acceptance and self-love.<\/p>\n Many couldn\u2019t think of any reason to attend Mass, either.\u00a0 The Son of Man came to save sinners; but since the label \u201csinner\u201d no longer applied to those who had learned to esteem themselves, thousands upon thousands simply stopped going to church.<\/p>\n This doesn\u2019t mean that they lost their faith entirely.\u00a0 Many simply re-adjusted their faith to bring it into conformity with the changing times.\u00a0 One Catholic writer<\/a> recounts that until her mid-twenties, \u201cI saw God as a permissive parent who was too \u2018loving\u2019 to enforce His own boundaries.\u201d<\/p>\n This slide into permissiveness was slowed during the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI; however, the Church, at least in the West, continued to lose members.<\/p>\n https:\/\/www.frontpagemag.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" William Kilpatrick – July 20, 2022 In a recent article I made the case that the main thrust of the Francis papacy is to deemphasize sin.\u00a0 Whatever he might say about a moral issue such as abortion, same-sex marriage, or adultery, Francis has consistently given his support and praise to those on the permissive side … Continue reading Francis Forgives Everyone<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[16],"tags":[1920,175,16865,26,16864],"class_list":["post-21218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-white-horse","tag-catholics","tag-christianity","tag-francis-papacy","tag-religion","tag-sin"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8fAkI-5we","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/setapartbytruth.org\/wordpress-watchman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/setapartbytruth.org\/wordpress-watchman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/setapartbytruth.org\/wordpress-watchman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/setapartbytruth.org\/wordpress-watchman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/setapartbytruth.org\/wordpress-watchman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21218"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/setapartbytruth.org\/wordpress-watchman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21218\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21220,"href":"https:\/\/setapartbytruth.org\/wordpress-watchman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21218\/revisions\/21220"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/setapartbytruth.org\/wordpress-watchman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/setapartbytruth.org\/wordpress-watchman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/setapartbytruth.org\/wordpress-watchman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}