{"id":15436,"date":"2016-03-30T13:17:25","date_gmt":"2016-03-30T17:17:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/?p=15436"},"modified":"2016-03-30T13:17:25","modified_gmt":"2016-03-30T17:17:25","slug":"theologians-debate-thelogical-significance-of-finger-pointing-towards-heaven","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/2016\/03\/theologians-debate-thelogical-significance-of-finger-pointing-towards-heaven\/","title":{"rendered":"Theologians debate thelogical significance of finger pointing towards Heaven"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>At the end of his weekly general audience today, Pope Francis pointed to the sky and said Mother Angelica \u201cis in heaven\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>The Holy Father gave his blessing and made the remark to members of EWTN\u2019s Rome bureau as he greeted the faithful in St. Peter\u2019s Square.<\/p>\n<p>The staff had brought with them an image of EWTN\u2019s founder as a sign of affection and remembrance for Mother Angelica after she passed away on Easter Sunday at the age of 92. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ncregister.com\/blog\/edward-pentin\/pope-francis-mother-angelica-is-in-heaven?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NCRegisterDailyBlog+National+Catholic+Register#When%3A2016-03-30+12%3A46%3A01\">National Catholic Register<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>In response to the Pope\u2019s action todays several noted theologians are divided on the theological significance of the Pope\u2019s index finger point to Heaven with a statement referring to Mother Angelica.<\/p>\n<p>Fr. Cyrus Winfield questioned the idea of whether the Pope\u2019s digitus secundus pointing up exercised an infallible act. He noted the missing of words such as \u201cformally declare or define\u201d and the context regarding speaking to a group of faithful and not to the whole Church. He said \u201cWhile this is certainly in the area of faith it is uncertain as to whether this must be held by the whole Church or locally such as in regards to beautifications.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Lay theologian Irvin Brock, who entered the Church last year, had more definite ideas about this. \u201cIf the Pope had simply said she &#8220;is in Heaven\u201d than this would be a simple case of him speaking off-the-cuff and would in no way have have invoked the charism of infallibility.\u201c He went on to say &#8220;Still that combined with the finger pointing in the traditional direction of Heaven makes this a totally different act. This could be papal sign language for &#8220;I define\u201d we will just have to wait and see.<\/p>\n<p>In the meantime Fr. Lombardi has not yet issued a statement regarding this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At the end of his weekly general audience today, Pope Francis pointed to the sky and said Mother Angelica \u201cis in heaven\u201d. The Holy Father gave his blessing and made&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15436"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15436\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15437,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15436\/revisions\/15437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}