UPDATE: Asked if Father Spadaro will be receiving a correction from his Jesuit superior for his commentary, and/or if he will be obliged to retract his comments or receive some kind of sanction for them, Father Johan Verschueren, General Counsellor and Delegate to the Superior General for the Interprovincial Houses and Works of the Society of Jesus in Rome, said it was the first he had heard of the matter, that he had “not received any request to sanction Father Spadaro,” nor to start “a doctrinal inquiry.” He suggested asking the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith “if they had received some complaints.”
One of Pope Francis’ closest advisers, Jesuit Father Antonio Spadaro, has been accused of “heretical blasphemy” after portraying the Lord as a flawed human being in need of conversion from “nationalism” and “rigidity.”
Writing in Il Fatto Quotidiano Aug. 20, a highly secular left-wing Italian daily, Father Spadaro reflected on the Gospel story of the faith of a Canaanite woman and concluded that Jesus was healed and freed “from the rigidity of the theological, political and cultural elements dominant in his time.”
The story, from the Gospel of Matthew (15:21-28), concerns that of a woman from the pagan region of Canaan who begs Jesus to heal her daughter possessed by a demon.
Jesus initially refuses to help her, saying that he was only sent to the lost sheep of Israel. However, the woman persists, begging Jesus and even comparing herself to dogs, who are allowed to eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table. Jesus is eventually moved by her faith and heals her daughter.
The Church Fathers and Church tradition have always interpreted the story as a powerful reminder of the importance of faith. The woman did not give up on Jesus, even when he seemed to be rejecting her. She continued to believe that he could help her daughter, and in the end, her faith was rewarded.
But for Father Spadaro, along with other modernist and heterodox preachers before him, Jesus initially has a prejudiced and exclusionist view in the Gospel story, but is converted by the Canaanite woman, making it a story of what today is called “radical inclusion.”
However, the Italian Jesuit goes further, ascribing to Jesus many human failings, including “rigidity,” “nationalism,” irritation and callousness. These are then transformed into acceptance and liberation from “the dominant theological, political, and cultural elements of his time.” Such a transformation of the Lord, Father Spadaro says, is “the seed of a revolution.”
Father Spadaro’s reflection is significant given the audacity with which he ascribes to Jesus such deficiencies, thereby undermining Church teaching on Christ’s divinity, but also because of the Italian Jesuit’s closeness to the Pope, and that he is editor of the historically prestigious Jesuit periodical La Civilta Cattolica.
Here below is my translation of his text (emphases mine) which was first brought to wider public attention by the Italian website MessainLatino:
Seeds of Revolution. Jesus Praises the Great Faith of a Pagan Woman
Jesus is in Gennèsaret, on the right bank of Lake Tiberias. The locals had recognized him, and word of his presence had spread throughout the region, by word of mouth. Many brought him the sick, who were healed. It was a land where people had to welcome and understand him. His actions were effective. But the Master does not stop. Matthew (15:21-28) — who writes for the Jews — tells us that he goes towards the northwest, the area of Tire and Sidòne, that is, to the Phoenician and therefore pagan area.
But behold, cries are heard. They are from a woman. She is Canaanite, that is, from a region inhabited by an idolatrous people that Israel looked upon with contempt and enmity. The story therefore claims that Jesus and the woman were enemies. The woman cries out: “Have mercy on me, Lord, son of David! My daughter is very tormented by a demon.” The body of this woman, her voice, erupts as if at the scene of a tragedy. Impossible for Jesus not to react to the chaos that abruptly interrupted the journey.
Instead, no. “But he did not speak to her, even a word,” Matthew writes laconically.
Jesus remains indifferent. His disciples approach him and plead with him in amazement. The woman was stirring those who also misjudged her! Her cries had broken the barrier of hatred. But Jesus does not care.
“Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us!” His own plead with him, trying to discreetly use the excuse of her insistence and the annoyance that her presence would have caused to the hearth [sic!] of the Lord .
The silence is followed by Jesus’ irritated and callous reply: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel”. The Lord’s hardness is unshakeable. Now even Jesus plays the theologian: the mission received from God is limited to the children of Israel. So, there’s nothing to be done. Mercy is not for her. She is excluded. There is no discussion.
But the woman is stubborn. Her hope is desperate, and she breaks down not only any supposed tribal enmity, but also opportunity, her own dignity. She throws herself in front of him and begs him: “Lord, help me!” She calls him “Lord,” that is, she recognizes his authority and his mission. What else can Jesus expect to do? Yet he replies in a mocking and disrespectful way towards that poor woman: “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs,” that is, to domestic dogs. A lapse in attitude, manner, humanity. Jesus appears as if he were blinded by nationalism and theological rigour.
Anyone else would have given up. But not the woman. She is determined: she wants her daughter healed. And she immediately grasps the only fissure left open by Jesus’ words, where he had referred to domestic dogs (and therefore not stray ones). They share their masters’ house, in fact. And so with a move that desperation makes cunning, she says: “It is true, Lord, and yet the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” Few words, but well posed and such as to upset the rigidity of Jesus, to conform him, to “convert” him to himself. Indeed, without hesitation, Jesus replies: “Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.” And from that instant his daughter was healed. And Jesus also appears healed, and in the end shows that he is free, from the rigidity of the dominant theological, political, and cultural elements of his time.
So what happened? Outside the land of Israel, Jesus healed the daughter of a pagan woman, despised for being Canaanite. Not only that: he agrees with her and praises her great faith. Here is the seed of a revolution.
***
MessaInLatino summed up Father Spadaro’s descriptions of the Lord Jesus Christ as follows:
– indifferent to suffering;
– irritable and insensitive;
– inscrutably harsh;
– unmerciful theologian;
– mocking and disrespectful towards the poor mother;
– showing a lapse in attitude, manner and humanity;
– blinded by nationalism and theological rigorism;
– rigid, confused and in need of conversion;
– sick and imprisoned by rigidity and the dominant theological, political and cultural elements of his time;
– glorifier of the pagan faith.
Here is St John Chrysostom’s homily on Jesus and the Faith of the Canaanite Woman.
See also this helpful article by Nicholas LaBlanca in which he unpacks similar modernist and heterodox interpretations of this Gospel story.
***
The Faith of a Canaanite Woman
Matthew 15: 21-28:
21 Leaving that place, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon. 22 A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to him, crying out, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is demon-possessed and suffering terribly.”
23 Jesus did not answer a word. So his disciples came to him and urged him, “Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.”
24 He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”
25 The woman came and knelt before him. “Lord, help me!” she said.
26 He replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.”
27 “Yes it is, Lord,” she said. “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”
28 Then Jesus said to her, “Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.” And her daughter was healed at that moment.
Pachamama devotee….and we would expect nothing less from this failed papacy…
Dominus flevit..
Count me in as one of those “American Catholics” with a streak of traditional faith that will run deeply until judgment day….
One cannot call Spadaro’s musings Christian. He needs to be corrected, post haste.
Who will correct him? The Pope spouts off similar stuff at least a couple of times a month (that we publicly know of), and he ignores or cancels/tries to cancel any Bishop who tries to correct heresy.
“For the Holy Spirit was not promised to the successors of Peter that by His revelation they might make known new doctrine, but that by His assistance they might inviolably keep and faithfully expound the Revelation, the Deposit of Faith, delivered through the Apostles. ”
The facts are: 1) Jorge Bergoglio’s heresy was external and made public and notorious, when as a cardinal, he stated in his book, On Heaven and Earth, in regards to same-sex sexual relationships, and thus same-sex sexual acts, prior to his election as pope, on page 117, demonstrating that he does not hold, keep, or teach The Catholic Faith, and he continues to act accordingly: “If there is a union of a private nature, there is neither a third party, nor is society affected. Now, if the union is given the category of marriage, there could be children affected. Every person needs a male father and a female mother that can help shape their identity.”- Jorge Bergoglio, denying The Sanctity of the marital act within The Sacrament of Holy Matrimony, and the fact that God, The Most Holy And Undivided Blessed Trinity, Through The Unity Of The Holy Ghost, Is The Author Of Love, Of Life, And Of Marriage, while denying sin done in private is sin.
“It is not possible to have Sacramental Communion without Ecclesial Communion”, due to The Unity Of The Holy Ghost (Filioque), for it Is “ Through Christ, With Christ And In Christ, In The Unity Of The Holy Ghost, (Filioque), That Holy Mother Church, outside of which there is no Salvation, due to The Unity Of The Holy Ghost, (Filioque), exists.
You can only have a Great Apostasy from The True Church Of Christ, The Church That Christ Has Founded, Christ’s One, Holy, Catholic, And Apostolic Church, Through The Unity Of The Holy Ghost.
By denying The Unity Of The Holy Ghost, Jorge Bergoglio demonstrated that prior to his election to the Papacy, he no longer was in communion with Christ and every validly elected Pope, Through The Unity Of The Holy Ghost (Filioque) and thus he could not possibly be a successor of Peter.
“The Catechism says that Christ desires “the gates of forgiveness should always be open to anyone who turns away from sin.”[37] As did St Augustine,[38] the Catholic Church today teaches that only dying unrepentant for one’s sins is the only unforgivable sin.[39][40][41][42] Indeed, in Dominum et vivificantem Pope John Paul II writes “According to such an exegesis, ‘blasphemy’ does not properly consist in offending against the Holy Spirit in words; it consists rather in the refusal to accept the salvation which God offers to man through the Holy Spirit, working through the power of the Cross”, and “If Jesus says that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit cannot be forgiven either in this life or in the next, it is because this “non-forgiveness” is linked, as to its cause, to “non-repentance,” in other words to the radical refusal to be converted. This means the refusal to come to the sources of Redemption, which nevertheless remain “always” open in the economy of salvation in which the mission of the Holy Spirit is accomplished.”[43]
Not a failed papacy but a non existent one
Jesus had to fulfill the Mosaic Law while He was on earth; but He also criticized the rigidity of the Pharisees. I don’t believe that the Canaanite woman changed his perspective. He understood the value of faith in others as well as her. Eventually, under the new covenant, faith became the only way of connecting with God.
Fr Spadaro’s statement is not the only one to puzzle over. He was simply enfleshing Pope Francis’ very own Sunday homily on the same Gospel where the Pope opines that after the Canaanite woman’s plea, Jesus changed His attitude because of the strength of the woman’s faith. I suppose the Pope means that Jesus was lacking in faith-and that she taught the Son of God a lesson. That is blasphemous.
It is more than that father it is demonic. Anyone or anything which portrays Christ as the “Weak One” mimics the demon’s name for Christ during exorcism. This goes beyond Modernism!
Jesus Christ was fully human, in addition to being divine. Fully human means He had all the instincts, needs, desires, and experiences of a human being. All of them.
As long as “human” here does not imply sin and its moral deficiencies, which Catholics believe Jesus, Mary, Adam, and Eve did not have as they were created. Adam & Eve later fell and introduced these to all of us, but it would be illiterate in the Catholic Faith to think “Human nature” includes sins & moral deficiencies, which is rather descriptive of FALLEN human nature, not simply Human nature.
Fully human in all things but sin.
Your point being?
In all but sin. He did not sin nor violate His neighbor as Spadaro claims. Spadaro denies His Divine nature
New Testament commentators refer to this exchange between Jesus and the woman as an example of the kind of wit of those who lived in the Near Eastern context. John L McKenzie SJ goes on to say this: It is “the same wit that is called wisdom in the OT; it is the ability to match riddle with riddle, to cap one wise saying with another, to match insult with insult, or – as here – to turn the insult into a commitment.” In other words what sounds to others as harsh language is actually quite acceptable in the context within which Jesus was speaking. Jesus then goes on to call her a woman of great faith and grants her request. Spadaro’s interpretation of the text is bizarre in itself, takes no account of the context in which Jesus spoke with the woman, and sees it as an example of Jesus’ sinfulness from which he must be delivered. This is an example of the very rigid literalism from which Fr Spadaro needs to be delivered because it has led him into heresy and sin.
It is demonic beyond “rigid literalism”. It depicts Jesus as “the weak one” a demonic mantra.
It is a grave duty to defend the honor of the Divine Majesty. We should not sit around and talk about Spadaro’s outrageous blasphemies against the Son of God, we should demand a Provincial Council in the Ecclesiastical Province of Rome to denounce him, censure him and excommunicate him if he does not publicly recant. And all Bishops in the province who do not likewise denounce his blasphemies and heresies should be forced to resign. Canon Law gives a provincial council this authority. If Pope Francis does not want to denounce Spadaro, in council his resignation should be demanded.
When will more USCCB bishops, like Bishop Strickland of Tyler TX, speak out against the heretical ideas/discussions of our Jesuit pope & his clique of Jesuit brother priests & other elevated cardinals!🙏🙏
This pontificate is sick to the core. Francis not only tolerates heresy — he promotes it, by making Spadaro one of his advisors, and by offering his own commentary on this Gospel that was not much different from Spadaro’s.
Edward Pentin is a source of Catholic faith.
Here’s the homily I heard on August 20. Based on his age, this priest was probably in seminary in the 70s so he’s not entirely to blame. But from about the 3rd or 4th sentence my mouth was open in shock throughout the 10 minute ordeal. After the “daddy” comment my 12-year-old grandson whispered, “Grandma, is he mocking Jesus?” Out of the mouth of babes.
“Just in case you’re wondering, there’s two things I’m going to do when I become Pope.
I’m going to sit on the Pope’s throne and say Leon and Mary Spitzley are Saints of The Universal Church – my parents; and I’m going to give a name to this Canaanite woman – Mrs. Gentile from the Region of Tyre and Sidon – will be declared a saint of the universal church because [of] her great faith. Then I’m going to go up to Jesus and say, “What were you thinking?” Let us not forget that Jesus is true God and true Man. I don’t know how you do that, but he had to do that. Our Bishops have come out again and again declaring that racism is a sin and any time we engage woefully in it we should be confessing it. So let’s talk about why Jesus is so anti-Canaanite woman. Well first of all he was a Jew and the Jews have nothing good to say about Samaritans. Why? Because Samaritans are half-Jew. Well if they don’t like the half-Jew Samaritans you can kind of guess they want nothing to do with your and my ancestors – the Gentiles.
So we better be grateful that Saint Paul came along and discerned, “Somebody needs to be an
apostle to the Gentiles.” And that’s basically what happened. Peter focused on the Jewish community that they all came from
and Peter (sic) and Paul rather went to the Gentiles. One
of the things in high school seminary is you get to draw a map of the three missionary journeys of Saint Paul. Always made me want to go to Greece. When I got older I did. Whatever. But let’s walk through this Canaanite woman.
If Jesus was having this issue, don’t you think the Canaanite woman was probably having an issue approaching this healer – this person everybody thought was God even though he looked quite human? And note she’s not asking for herself; she’s asking for her daughter and she lays the salvific title on Jesus, “Have pity on me Lord son of David. My daughter is tormented by a demon. But from a public relations point of view she had it together. And what does Jesus do? Nothing. Maybe he was hard of hearing. Maybe he needed hearing aids. But Jesus did not say a word in answer to her. So his idiot disciples come along and they say, “Send her away for she keeps calling out after us.” So then Jesus reinforces what he’s been doing. “ I was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel.” Well I can understand where he came from. Maybe daddy didn’t give him all the instructions at first. But the woman came back [and] did Jesus homage and said, “Lord help me.” Now I ask you, when’s the last time you or I said that beautiful prayer, “Lord help me?” We all have things we’re dealing with either mentally, psychologically, physically, spiritually. If we follow the faith of the Canaanite woman we’ll just pray, “Lord help me.” That would help a whole lot. But Jesus [replied]- I really want to talk to him about this – “It’s not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs.” He’s calling the woman a dog. I don’t think that’s good. Remember He is without sin – He’s just a victim of his profoundly racist culture. And here’s where our woman of faith, the woman I would
canonize on the spot, [says] “Please Lord, even the dogs eat the scraps that fall from the table of their masters.” And now Jesus hears her faith, “ Oh woman great is your faith. Let it be done for
you as you wish,” and the author notes, “and the woman’s daughter was healed from that very hour.”Jesus says in another scripture from Matthew, “Ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be opened to you.” We all need to intensify our
personal relationship with the Lord and today’s gospel gives us an excellent example of perseverance.
You know, maybe Jesus is busy; he’s preoccupied and he can’t answer us right away and once in a while the answer is “no” then how do we like that? But if we persevere we can be assured that God’s will will be done here on Earth as it is in heaven because that’s the prayer Jesus taught us to pray and if we’re smart we’ll be humble enough to go along with it. May God who has begun this good work of faith, hope, and love in your hearts bring it to completion. God bless you all. If you’re ready for the Nicene Creed I am.”
Heresy, denying Christ as perfect. Calling God among us as imperfect?”. A true Antichrist spirit among us in the flesh. The Judge is Christ and He is coming to take His believers, His called out of the world assembly who are the Church and this so called wolf in sheep’s clothing will be judged according to his words against God’s Truth. Life and death are in the tongue. The Jesuits are into ‘Liberation Theology,” a communist approach to the Gospel as was described in the book “The Jesuits’ by Malachi Martin. Find his interviews on Youtube.