Yes, the tolling Olympic bell also tells that it’s time for another Francis junket, a leisurely farewell to summer on a South Seas vacation…with of course a nod to the business of Synodality. Seems like only yesterday when “his holiness” was in a wigwam and wearing the “sacred eagle” headdress of a 17th century tribal chief, surrounded by descendants of pagan Hurons and savage Iroquois. Yet, the crucifix-free, “Sitting Bull” Jorge and retinue of Red Bull cardinals pledged allegiance, as it were, to a nature-worshipping, pipe-smoking, feathered shaman fanning hallucinogenic ashes of sage, cedar, and grass.
But now, can’t help but remember the French painter Gauguin who also drew the world’s attention by going to (and over-glamorizing) the island jungles of the South Pacific. Gauguin was galvanized by the naturalist pagan lifestyle and indigenous ceremonies of idolatry and black or white magic (cf. his famous “Day of God” c.1894). Yes, images of evil never seem to lose their fatal attraction, perhaps becoming even more prolific and ubiquitous in our own time thanks to Francis’ oh-so sacrilegious blessing of the Pachamama idol and promotion of artists Timothy Schmalz and Marko Rupnik.
Coincidentally, today is the feast of St. Bartolomeo who cast out demons and destroyed idols in polytheistic Mesopotamia, Hindu India, Zoroastrian Armenia and Persia. He converted the King of Armenia. The king’s enraged brother ordered Bartholomew to be skinned alive. Among the colossal statues of Apostles framing the nave of the Roman Basilica of St. John Lateran is St. Bart, timelessly offering a tanner’s knife and his own “hide” to the Lord. Across town in the Sistine Chapel, the same saint is featured with his skin draped over his arm in the 45-foot fresco of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. His martyrdom seems to symbolize the present agony of the Mystical Body of Christ, i.e. the Modernist heresies and sacrileges that appear to be flaying alive the mystical Body of Christ.
Yes, the tolling Olympic bell also tells that it’s time for another Francis junket, a leisurely farewell to summer on a South Seas vacation…with of course a nod to the business of Synodality. Seems like only yesterday when “his holiness” was in a wigwam and wearing the “sacred eagle” headdress of a 17th century tribal chief, surrounded by descendants of pagan Hurons and savage Iroquois. Yet, the crucifix-free, “Sitting Bull” Jorge and retinue of Red Bull cardinals pledged allegiance, as it were, to a nature-worshipping, pipe-smoking, feathered shaman fanning hallucinogenic ashes of sage, cedar, and grass.
But now, can’t help but remember the French painter Gauguin who also drew the world’s attention by going to (and over-glamorizing) the island jungles of the South Pacific. Gauguin was galvanized by the naturalist pagan lifestyle and indigenous ceremonies of idolatry and black or white magic (cf. his famous “Day of God” c.1894). Yes, images of evil never seem to lose their fatal attraction, perhaps becoming even more prolific and ubiquitous in our own time thanks to Francis’ oh-so sacrilegious blessing of the Pachamama idol and promotion of artists Timothy Schmalz and Marko Rupnik.
Coincidentally, today is the feast of St. Bartolomeo who cast out demons and destroyed idols in polytheistic Mesopotamia, Hindu India, Zoroastrian Armenia and Persia. He converted the King of Armenia. The king’s enraged brother ordered Bartholomew to be skinned alive. Among the colossal statues of Apostles framing the nave of the Roman Basilica of St. John Lateran is St. Bart, timelessly offering a tanner’s knife and his own “hide” to the Lord. Across town in the Sistine Chapel, the same saint is featured with his skin draped over his arm in the 45-foot fresco of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. His martyrdom seems to symbolize the present agony of the Mystical Body of Christ, i.e. the Modernist heresies and sacrileges that appear to be flaying alive the mystical Body of Christ.