Pope Francis will next week publish an apostolic exhortation on holiness titled Gaudete et exsultate, or “Rejoice and be glad”, the Vatican announced Thursday.
Subtitled “on the call to holiness in the contemporary world”, the exhortation will be presented April 9 by Archbishop Angelo De Donatis, vicar general of the Diocese of Rome and archpriest of the Archbasilica of St. John Lateran.
Gaudete et exsultate follows just a little more than a month behind the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s March 1 letter to bishops on certain aspects of Christian salvation, Placuit Deo, which refers to the errors of Pelagianism and Gnosticism in helping to explain the threat of the errors Pope Francis has called “new Pelagianism” and “new Gnosticism.”
According to Placuit Deo, the new Pelagianism is an “individualism centered on the autonomous subject [which] tends to see the human person as a being whose sole fulfilment depends only on his or her own strength.”
The document cites a 2013 address of Pope Francis to explain that the new Gnosticism “presumes to liberate the human person from the body and from the material universe, in which traces of the provident hand of the Creator are no longer found, but only a reality deprived of meaning, foreign to the fundamental identity of the person, and easily manipulated by the interests of man.”
In his latest exhortation, Pope Francis will likely expound on these modern errors giving guidance on how to avoid them and how to achieve holiness in the modern age.
Full story at Catholic News Agency.
Looking forward to the Holy Father’s guidance. May God Bless him and his efforts to lead the faithful and humanity in this crazy world!
I’m looking forward to this.
Oh my. More on executing the will of Vatican II.
I’ve stopped listening to this pope.
Not wise.
JPII and Benedict XVI were both world-class theologians, heavyweights, before becoming pope. Francis doesn’t have theological pedigree. He didn’t write anything noteworthy before becoming pope. Now that he’s pope he magically has the ability to write profound or meaningful things?
Pope Benedict XVI does not agree with you. Did you miss that whole letter thing a few weeks ago? Even if what you said was true, Pope Francis is acting on the theology of Saint John Paul II and Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.
You sound like someone who hasn’t read much of any of their writings.
You are clueless if you think Francis is in continuity with JPII and BXVI.
BXVI didn’t say Francis was a great theologian, only that people shouldn’t make the mistake of contrasting BXVI’s supposedly “intellectual” pontificate with Francis’ supposedly “practical” pontificate.
You sound like someone who has just enough mediocre knowledge to be dangerous with it as a plaything, just like Francis.
If it’s anything like his other writings, it will be difficult to know just what the pope means and there will be hundreds of hours of video commentary and thousands of pages wasted trying to interpret the document, with no resolution. Please, Lord, can we have a pope who speaks clearly, wisely, intelligently and responsibly?
Just read it. Pray over it. Forget all the click bait and BS on the Internet. He speaks very clearly, very wisely, very intelligently and very responsibly in his papal documents.
I grant you that there has been a lot made of things he said in interviews and such which you always have to interpret in the light of the Catholic Faith. There is so many people who just don’t get it. There are so many people who just don’t want to get it.
The Faith and the Pope are always under the assault of the evil one.
Amoris Laetitia is objectively unclear. The famous dubia pointed out the ambiguities and requested clarity. Francis refused to clarify what he meant. So not only was he unclear, he was irresponsible (since it is his role to teach clearly) and he was unwise. He might have been intelligent, if his purpose was to create divisions in the Church; Amoris seems designed to do precisely that. However, that is a devious use of intelligence.
How can you say with any seriousness that he speaks very clearly?
What he said is very clear. People just don’t like what he said. People distort what he said.
I skimmed it. It’s an embarrassment to the papacy and to the Church. There’s some good stuff, of course, but that’s only in there to disguise the poison that you might not be aware you’re reading. The point of his writings is to disguise the poison and weaken the Church gradually.
Anonymous: it is true that JPII and Benedict XVI both earned doctorates in philosophy or theology. However, having a doctorate in either of these two disciplines is not required to be elected Pope. After all, one of the greatest Popes, St Peter, certainly was not a theological heavyweight!