Pope Francis To Orders: If They’re Not ‘Forward-Looking,’ Screen ‘Em Out As Nut-Cases

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No need for balance or structure

No need for balance or structure

At the Radical Catholic there’s no reason to start glossing over the Pope’s naked contempt for the Faithful.  It’s not like it’s going to stop.

The great Vatican II is the Church in entirety!  Those Catholics who retain beliefs from the prior Church must be branded insane – and this in the Year of Mercy.

Doubling down on Cardinal João Braz de Aviz’ warning to religious vocations directors from around the world about the consequences of distancing oneself from the “great lines” of the Second Vatican Council, the following day Pope Francis gave the same group a short list of warning signs that a young person might not be suited for religious life.*

Given the state of the Church, one might be tempted to expect such a list to include, say, active homosexuality, pedophilia, theological and/or pastoral dissent, careerism, inordinate fondness of polyester pantsuits, etc. But I suspect that even considering such things as being potentially harmful to religious vocations is to have already distanced oneself from Vatican II – perhaps irreparably so. No, the real threat to religious vocations is to be found elsewhere: deep in the Freudian Unconscious. Pope Francis explains:

All the people who know the human personality – may they be psychologists, spiritual fathers, spiritual mothers – tell us that young people who unconsciously feel they have something unbalanced or some problem of mental imbalance or deviation unconsciously seek strong structures that protect them, to protect themselves.

Faithful Catholics, people who are conservative, grounded, Christian; they are unbalanced.  Ask anyone who knows the ‘human personality’ like a psychologist.  Nothing trendy about psychology, no.  It trumps all.

While insinuating mental imbalance in one who seeks structure is somewhat new – I mention only in passing his description of Christian ideology as a “serious illness” – decrying the threefold evil of ‘structures, rules and habits’ is an established trope of Pope Francis’ personal magisterium. As he wrote in Evangelii Gaudium (§49):

More than by fear of going astray, my hope is that we will be moved by the fear of remaining shut up within structures which give us a false sense of security, within rules which make us harsh judges, within habits which make us feel safe, while at our door people are starving and Jesus does not tire of saying to us: “Give them something to eat.”

Again, is there any doubt as to who is meant here? And could the modus operandi of setting up false dichotomies be any clearer?

Why is it that every aspect of the 1970s church, which produced, among other things, the endless sex abuse lawsuits and scandals, has to be replicated today?  How many faithful vocations were subjected to these psychological screening attacks back then?

Personally I find little encouraging in the fact there are about a hundred more ordinations in the U.S. this year.  It’s still a miniscule number for a country with over 300 million people.  I know Pope Francis says he’s all about quality, but I can’t help but thinking they’ve probably become more lax in at least one key area.  After all, they’d probably have thousands of vocations if they really wanted them, not hundreds.

At his core, the place where there should be Faith and wisdom, doesn’t something seem deeply twisted in the mind of Pope Francis?  It’s almost a crushing hatred for those who obstruct his goals, a determination to succeed at their expense.  It’s the kind of force which drove the Protestant Reformation: a deranged (ideological?) mind at the helm with all the powerful establishment lined up behind him.

I hate to say it, but I don’t know what else to call it.

 

 

Is Marco Rubio Catholic or What?

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Seeking the Baptist-Mormon-Catholic Vote

Seeking the Baptist-Mormon-Catholic Vote

Mark Stricherz at Aleteia reports on the Marco Rubio announcement.

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida has told political donors that he is running for president, according to The Washington Post:

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the son of Cuban immigrants whose rapid political ascent was nearly blocked five years ago by national Republican leaders, told supporters on a Monday call that he is running for president, according to two people familiar with his plans.

Five years ago Marco Rubio was reliably conservative.

Rubio is four years into his first term as a senator. Rubio won his race in 2010 by appealing to fiscal conservatives or tea-party supporters, cultural conservatives, and Hispanics. The mixture has made him one of the Republican Party’s top political prospects, according to Harry Enten of FiveThirtyEight.com:

In part because he did so well with Hispanics, Rubio vastly over-performed most other Republican senatorial candidates in 2010, as well as those who ran in 2014.  Rubio won his race by 11 percentage points more than you would have expected controlling for the past presidential vote of the state and incumbency.

That was before Rubio became the conservative poster-boy for illegal amnesty, a wasted expense of political capital by of one of the most trusted and popular GOP leaders.

Then there’s his religion.  Is he Catholic or Protestant?  It depends on who you ask.  At one point it was rumored he began to return to his Catholic roots, but that was a while ago.  Today, on the point of his entering the GOP field for president, Stricherz picked up something from Rubio’s autobiography:

Rubio was baptized as a Catholic, turned to Mormonism as a youth, married a Southern Baptist, and has gone to Baptist and Catholic services. As reporter Lauren Markoe of Religion News Service notes, in his autobiography Rubio explained his devotion to Catholicism this way:

“I craved, literally, the Most Blessed Sacrament, Holy Communion, the sacramental point of contact between the Catholic and the liturgy of heaven,” he wrote. “I wondered why there couldn’t be a church that offered both a powerful, contemporary gospel message and the actual body and blood of Jesus.”

Starting in late 2004, he began to delve deeper into his Roman Catholic roots, reading the whole catechism, and concluding that “every sacrament, every symbol and tradition of the Catholic faith is intended to convey, above everything else, the revelation that God yearns, too, for a relationship with you.”

The “sacramental point of contact between the Catholic and the liturgy of heaven?”  What does that mean?  Does it work for the non-Catholic?  Why must you ‘crave’ it so, and if you do, why not go to Mass somewhere?  Catholics are doing ‘powerful and contemporary’ all over the place these days.

“every sacrament, every symbol and tradition of the Catholic faith is intended to convey, above everything else, the revelation that God yearns, too, for a relationship with you.”

So the entire Catholic faith is all about God’s yearning to have a relationship with me?  This is a man who, despite having read every page of the tedious Catechism, holds only a tangential and Protestant faith.

It’s telling how these top-tier Christian politicians can only cobble together some nonsense to express their beliefs.  Jeb Bush can’t seem to find anything the least bit meaningful to say about his Catholicism either, but at least he can be found in a Church occasionally.

Faithful Catholics need Christians to represent them in government.  If they are Protestant, at least we can support them for the elements of Faith that they share and apply.  What we don’t need are men who will play with us and feign Catholicism when they show little respect or understanding of its beliefs or evidence of its practice.

U.S. Traditional Catholic Communities Being Crushed in FrancisChurch

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Don't try this at home.

Don’t try this at home.

I used to work two full time jobs.  One of them was an hour away.  I was determined, after many years of experience, that I would not let my work obligations get in the way of daily Mass.  (Daily Masses would have more young people if they said them when they weren’t at work or in school.)

Well, I hated my first job.  It was government make-work and bickering.  I had to travel to an ugly, busy part of town.  I tried finding a Mass somewhere on the way because they only have one daily Mass in my hometown, and it’s too late in the morning.  I had to drive several miles out of my way to sit in a cramped florescent chapel.  It had unsettling priests too.

Then I found St. xxxxx.  It was five minutes from the office, and they had a noon Mass!  I worked five years at that job, and went out to lunch exactly once, it didn’t make me unpopular.  I used to get lots of prayer requests on the way out.  I used to get a lot of Catholic questions directed my way too.

This parish had signs requesting quiet, pictures of how not to dress and altar rails.  The pastor said Mass facing the tabernacle.  He sung most of the prayers, many of them in Latin.  What a blessing!  His associate was also the head of the local TLM Mass group closer to my home.  The parish was full of very faithful, humble people, many from the local university.

In the past year St. xxxxx picked up a new young priest.  His homilies were quite painful: loud, long and brutish.  His message, from what I could tell, was about love, love, and feminism.  I knew why he was there.  It was now FrancisEra.

This week we’ve learned the Pastor of St. xxxxx is being ‘retired’ and removed.  The younger vicar, who also says the Ancient Mass nearby, is being sent somewhere unknown.  The faithful group they’ve served doesn’t know what to do.  (There are really two communities involved.)

Asked by parishioners for a meeting, the bishop has scheduled something eight months out.  The transfers, however are immediate. I don’t know how unusual this is.  I don’t know if it was precipitated by some complaint, if there’s some pretext.  I’m sure it doesn’t matter.

I have wracked my brain about how I can help personally.  Sometimes when you have trouble deciding what to do, it’s because you have too many good options.  This isn’t one of those times.  This is FrancisChurch.

Catholic teachers can’t teach the Faith.  Gay sex must be promoted.  Faithless anti-Catholic people must be employed, must be admitted.  Morals codes are crushed.  The Ancient Mass, or even a holy modern Mass are both suppressed, illegal.  The priests are all Protestants.  Do you ever see a nun anywhere?  Perhaps they hide in plain sight.

We must be honest with ourselves and ask, “Where is our Church?” 

The reason we must ask is because we have to stop pretending it’s where it is not. People yell, ‘Schism, schism!’  I’m not calling for some break.  I’m just trying to find the Church to which I should adhere.  I think the Church is a real thing.  As a real thing, shouldn’t it have characteristics?   I think it does have characteristics; I just don’t see them anywhere.

When it’s doing Satan’s dance, will you still call it Catholic?  Will you dance?  Where does this end?