Pope says certainties are a jail that imprisons the Holy Spirit

"Bergoglio: Our certainties can become a wall, a jail that imprisons the Holy Spirit. Those who isolate their conscience from the path of the people of God don’t know the joy of the Holy Spirit that sustains hope. That is the risk run by the isolated conscience. Of those who from the closed world of their Tarsis complain about everything or, feeling their identity threatened, launch themselves into battles only in the end to be still more self-concerned and self-referential."







Cathcon- there are Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit, all of which lead to some sort of certainty, not least among them understanding. Great caution should therefore be exercised with such arguments or otherwise gifts of the Holy Spirit or even truths of the Faith could be rejected, so to speak by accident.
At least, we don't hear much about the particular Spirit of Vatican II anymore, which was used to justify pretty much anything. One trusts that the Pope will not be suddenly saying that he is moved by the spirit to ordain women.
 
This statement ties in well with the Pope's support for the charismatic movement. Se at this link his Charismatic Mass in the Cathedral. A one sided devotion to the Holy Spirit has a tendency to detract from devotion to the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity.

Comments

Aged parent said…
As has been Papal custom for the past forty years-odd, the words quoted from the new Pope are so ambiguous that they could mean anything.

Trying to parse out and make sense of papal utterances is so exhausting that many, myself included, give up trying to understand. Clarity has been notable by its absence in Rome for a very long time.

But if he is somehow intimating that Catholics cannot have certainty about their faith then the Holy Father has some explaining to do.
Geremia said…
Truth agnosticism is at the core of Modernists' philosophy.

E.g., Communion & Liberation's founder Luigi Giussani, who Bergoglio admires, writes: "The summit of the conquest of reason is the perception of an existing, unreachable unknown." This is at least semi-agnosticism, despite its apophatic appearances.