Church Discipline – Roman Style
The disgraced former Roman Catholic Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh, Keith O’Brien, will not perform any public functions as a clergyman, though he will retain his title of Cardinal and the status of priest. O’Brien will not participate in any election of a future Pope and he will continue to live outside Scotland. This is the outcome of a special investigation by a personal envoy of the Pope, Archbishop Charles Scicluna.
It seems absurd and perverse, however, that O’Brien is still allowed to perform mass in private. According to the grossly-unscriptural Romanist dogma of transubstantiation, this means that O’Brien, who is admittedly guilty of heinous sins and under some semblance of church discipline, is still fully invested with the power to change the substance of bread and wine into the literal physical body and blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. The power of the priesthood is bound up with the falsehood of transubstantiation, and this case further demonstrates just how far from Scriptural teaching the Roman Catholic Church really is in its views of sin, church discipline, repentance and the sacraments. AWM