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I've seen many people cope and say you can pray for dead non-catholics privately because God can consider your prayers outside of time before they died, however many Popes say we are not to pray for them. Should we not obey the Popes/Church?

Pope st gregory the great

On praying for dead non catholics

they say, And where then is their saintship, if they will not pray for their enemies, whom they will then see burning, though it is expressly said to them, Pray for your enemies? [Matt. 5, 44] But we reply at once

They pray for their enemies at that time when they are able to convert their hearts to fruitful penitence, and save them by this very conversion. For what else must we pray for our enemies, except that which the Apostle says, That God may give them repentance, and that they may recover themselves from the snares of the devil, by whom they are held captive unto his will? [2 Tim. 2, 25. 26.] And how will prayers be made at that time for them, when they can no longer be in any degree turned from iniquity to works of righteousness? There is, therefore, the same reason for not praying then for men condemned to eternal fire, as there is now for not praying for the devil and his angels who have been consigned to eternal punishment And this is now the reason for holy men not praying for unbelieving and ungodly men who are dead for they are unwilling that the merit of their prayer should be set aside, in that presence of the righteous Judge, when in behalf of those whom they know to be already consigned to eternal punishment

https://www.lectionarycentral.com/GregoryMoralia/Book34.html

Source for quote by Pope Nicolas 
https://sourcebooks.web.fordham.edu/basis/866nicholas-bulgar.asp

I've seen many people cope and say you can pray for dead non-catholics privately because God can consider your prayers outside of time before they died, however many Popes say we are not to pray for them. Should we not obey the Popes/Church?


Source for quote by Pope Nicolas
https://sourcebooks.web.fordham.edu/basis/866nicholas-bulgar.asp

Thank you for sharing this important information. I never understood the argument of praying for a non-Catholic after they died, since God, being outside of time, could accept our prayers on their behalf, beforehand. Practically speaking, the moral results of religious indifferentism in our own souls will be the same regardless, which is what the Church is warning us about in these teachings you have shared.

The reality is, is that the dead person who is being prayed for has already been judged and given their sentence, so our prayers will not change anything. I think the Church would have mentioned the ability to do this, if it was morally acceptable.

Yes, we should obey the Popes and the Church, and not our feelings as most people do today.

This high esteem for personal sentiment is that "vital immanence" which Pope St. Pius X spoke of in Pascendi; modernists have created this concept, and it consists in obeying our own feelings and thoughts over that of God's teachings. It is the deification of man. 

Modernists assent to dogmas, because of their feeling for them, not because they were revealed by God and are deserving of our submission. This is why they simultaneously assent to heresies, because of their feeling for certain errors also. Bishop Williamson did a really great series of conferences on modernism, it truly brings many things to light. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IMv2jide2g