Spending just a few minutes each day reading the Bible, with the help of a plan and some notes, makes the it easier to understand.
The Papacy – a law unto itself
It is interesting for us to view from a Scriptural
perspective the current crisis in the Roman Catholic
Church over abuse by priests: even more so, the
method the church has adopted in not dealing with
this crisis. Compare the following quotations:
2 Thessalonians 2.4:
"Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God."
Many interpret this verse as refering to the Papacy. In this context consider the quotations below from Time magazine and the Belfast Telegraph. Time magazine, June 7, 2010:
"The church is hard-wired with extraterritorial prerogatives that go back more than a millennium. The Catholic Church believes it is Christ's representative on earth, with all the sinlessness and omnipotent authority of its Saviour. The statesmen of the church have always known that to preserve that authority, the realm of the Popes could not simply be an otherworldly City of God. It also had to be an earthly power, if not equipped with military divisions (which it once possessed) then at least wielding the clout of secular government. The church must be a state.
"That became more imperative as the secular authority of the papal states in Italy was stripped away by French and Spanish monarchs, Napoleon and Garibaldi, Mussolini and Hitler. The historian Melloni points out that the papacy was able to take advantage of its weakened condition to buttress support among the faithful by resorting to vittimismo (self pity), playing the victim and blaming others for preying on the church. 'This actually had the effect of raising the devotion to the Pope', he says. That was the legacy of the 32-year reign of Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti, Pope Pius IX, who stagemanaged the First Vatican Council into approving infallibility in 1869 with a suspect majority of bishops. In obedience to its divinely absolute monarch, the Vatican bureaucracy, the Roman Curia, became even more centralized and domineering. So even as the Pope lost his divisions, the empire of Christ based in Rome constructed a government to rival the civil institutions in countries where its clergy served the faithful. Churches and cathedrals became the embassies of God and his vicar, the Pope, in the secular world."
The situation described above – both culturally and practically – enables the Papacy to evade the laws of individual countries to a large extent. They can, for example, move offending priests to another country. And the Pope enjoys diplomatic immunity, which means he cannot be legally held to account for the actions of the church.
This is in fact the theme of a controversial recent book by Geoffrey Robertson, QC, titled The Case of the Pope. Similarly, Belfast Telegraph:
"Why the Vatican's diplomatic immunity days are numbered" by Eamonn McCann, Tuesday, 7 September 2010: "Now you Holy See him, now you don't. One minute, Benedict XVI is a head of state, like Elizabeth II, Omar al- Bashir or Emperor Akihito. Then, in an instant, shazam!, he's the leader of a religious organisation, on a par with the Dalai Lama, the Archbishop of Canterbury ...
"His sojourn to Britain, beginning on Thursday week, will have the status both of a state visit and a pastoral journey. On some stopovers he will be the representative of a state recognised at the UN and enjoying diplomatic relations with, at the last count, 156 countries. His role at other engagements will be as leader of a religion with 1.2 billion followers scattered across the planet."
The title of the Belfast Telegraph article is interesting. We can expect that it proves to be an incorrect prediction. The power of the Papacy is very much in line with what we expect from prophecy. Unsurprisingly for us it has a unique position amongst world religions. What other religion has statehood! By culture, attitude, religious and diplomatic position the Vatican is very well qualified to be the anti-Christ that will oppose the Master on his return. In this respect it is encouraging for us to see it hold on to its power and weather the current storm.