CaliforniaKid wrote:hans castorp wrote:But it's not necessary for any Catholic to become a devotee. To say it is binding on its devotees is tautologous.
It's not tautological to say that there are people (i.e. devotees) who treat it as binding, or that the revelation
presents itself as binding, which is what I'm saying. The issue of the institutional Church's stance on it is irrelevant to the point I'm making, which is that there are plenty of Catholic and Protestant Christians who believe in continuing revelations and regard them as binding for themselves, for the Church, and/or for the world.
The tautology lies in the fact that by definition someone who is bound to a religious practice is a devotee.
I'm not denying that there are Catholics and Protestants who believe in continuing revelation; indeed, that is what charismatic/Pentecostal prophecy is. I could quibble about the degree to which a devotee of Fatima, say, would feel bound by, e.g., the First Saturdays. Not even the most zealous, I would think, would put it on the level of the Easter duty; it's not a matter of salvation. Nobody I've ever heard has said that omitting the First Saturdays would damn one, though they'd say that one would escape a lot of purgatory time by doing so.
Of course, there are a number of unapproved or condemned apparitions whose devotees believe they are binding on the church, but they also believe in things like audio-animatronic popes and sede-vacantism. But these are vanishingly small groups.
At any rate, I thought I started writing in this thread in support of your point: that there is no impermeable membrane between private and public revelation. I only objected to characterizing the Fatima revelations as binding on the community and original. To restrict the binding to those who have chosen to be bound seems to me to ignore the fact that many, many Catholics have received, indeed honored, the Fatima revelations without feeling that they are bound by them.
hc