What is the Francis?

by

Faithful English pastor Fr. Ray Blake was identified in the blogosphere as a target of some pressure since he was silent for an extended period on his very sophisticated website.  Fr. Blake is often critical, in a brilliant yet indirect and qualified way, of some of the faithless initiatives of FrancisChurch.  When Father returned after his hiatus to condemn mafia-like tactics in the Church, a reader noted that it is likely the Pope was behind them to an extent.  To this Father responded that ‘nothing Francis has said’ would indicate that, then he blasted the commenter for libelous talk.

Message:  I’ll do the judgment making, the discerning, and the risk-taking.  You just do the listening, layman.

This is the kind of thing that happens in Mafia-like wards too.  Father’s readers understand this.  They know that he now has lied and compromised his principles in order to protect himself.  After all it’s true, he is the one who has taken the risk and is receiving the pressure, not the readers.  They are under no threats or correction from anyone in this situation, while it is likely he is.

Nevertheless, the fault stands.  A faithful resistance cannot be built upon half-measures, arrogance, lies, and capitulation.  It simply won’t work.

And this isn’t unique.  All of our heroes seem to lay down when the Francis-boom lands.  (That must be what the nuBenedict means when he says Francis is a good governor?)  We have similar problems in the faithful U.S. media too.  We scuttle out like mice or little puppies to do our damage, then run hiding when the man comes around.  It’s really a money issue.  However, the money behind FrancisChurch hurts a lot worse than a rolled-up newspaper.

I’m hearing lately that we need to stifle these bubbling doubts about Francis actually being the pope.  Ann Barnhardt maintains that he is an anti-pope since he resigned under an erronious dual-pope understanding.  Benedict felt that he would continue as sort of a contemplative co-pope, therefore his abdication is invalid.  Louie Verrecchio and Antonio Socci both make the same case without coming to final conclusions.  There is also the issue of pressure, something which would naturally be hard to clearly prove.  Finally, there’s that St. Gallen group: the existence of an illegal and organized movement of cardinals to install Francis prior to and outside the conclave.

All of these considerations have merit.  As Cardinal Brandmuller has reminded, the situation is unprecedented and rife with problems.  I do not think it helps to carelessly toss these questions off as disobedient, uncatholic, or hysterical.  It’s worse to pretend they don’t matter at all and that we should just get past them.  As with Fr. Blake’s readers, the faithful understand when they’re being corralled and of course, though we are sheep in the Lord’s flock, we are still nonetheless men.

‘Sure, ‘maybe’ Francis is a heretic but that’s happened before, and it’s not for us to say.’  We get this message often too.  How many ‘maybes’ must we suffer through?  Hundreds of years ago a pope was deposed for the heresy of permitting a nation to select it’s own bishops.  That’s good, but what we have here today is about 186 times worse.  At what point may we make a conclusion of our own about the situation?  Should we wait until gay sex is a sacrament, or continue to pray and be docile?

My position on the abdication has always been the same.  Benedict appears to have left under pressure but it’s a difficult thing to prove.  The most powerful indicators are the fact that a worldly prince and a heretic was selected to follow him, and that he appears to be under some type of confinement and control today.  Francis is the kind of man who would follow a putsch, and this nuBenedict we keep seeing via third party does not sound anything like himself.  Instead he seems poorly scripted, muddled, and much more like Tucho Fernandez than Ratzinger.

“Your friendship is the air that I breathe and in which I live?”  Wasn’t it something like that the Emeritus said to the Francis on his 65th anniversary?

Whether Benedict was forced out or his abdication invalidated for any other reason, a fact I believe is not unlikely, it’s not the most important thing when it comes to the papacy today.  The main issue is that Francis has clearly demonstrated his heresy, and as faithful laymen it is our responsibility to call for his abdication.  He is not able to defend the faith, priesthood, or Sacraments, or to canonize saints, or do any of the things absolutely necessary to preserve the Church.  It doesn’t matter whether he’s pope or not.  He should not be pope.  He has shown us he is, in fact, incapable of it.

While we continue to resist the faithless wreckage of FrancisChurch, I put the onus on those who know for certain that Francis is pope to prove it.  I don’t advocate calling Francis an anti-pope, but I don’t see any reason to pretend that it couldn’t be the case.

As a compromise, it might be better for Francis to do what Benedict did: retreat to pray for humanity as a contemplative papal element, where he can give gushing interviews and bask in the friendship of an actual Catholic pope.

Wait. I guess that would be ridiculous.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

EWTN’S FIRING OF SHEA AND SIMCHA WAS POLITICAL

by

People are writing and speculating about the firing of Mark Shea and Simcha Fischer at EWTN’s National Catholic Register.  Many are happy about it.  I don’t know if too many are unhappy.  Perhaps.  Some see a change on the horizon.  Where?

Shea and Fisher served a purpose.  They were instigators and they were tasked with muddling the heads of faithful Catholics, especially to promote leftist political issues.  Lies and anger were some of their tools.  EWTN didn’t work with them out of loyalty and indulgence.  They wanted them there for as long as they had them.  They wanted the muddled heads.

Many imagine that the National Catholic Reporter or America Magazine might become a new outlet for these two writers, but that would be surprising.  There is an affinity, but not an enough of an ideological match.  More importantly they don’t have the required skill set.  FrancisChurch, from its top to its parish pastor has, unfortunately, a very effeminate homosexual quality and character.  It’s slippery.  Writers on the left are quite talented, capable and extremely careful.  They can be furious like Michael Sean Winters or Fr. Thomas Rosica, but in this they are much more like snakes than bulldogs.  They know when to come in and go out from under their rocks.  Crux’s John Allen is a highly talented and intelligent writer who sees exactly which way the wind is blowing, but he manages to maintain an air of honesty while applying very little of it.  He and others like him are persuasive, and masters at turning and twirling readers so they’re pointed off course.  Think Elizabeth Scalia and everyone at the New York Times.

A lack of persuasion is the cardinal sin for which American Catholic’s Donald McClarey faults Shea and Fisher.  Boniface says it’s that they were loose cannons off stage.  Both very true.  Mr. Armaticus thinks an unCatholic, liberal EWTN is a money-losing proposition.  I don’t agree.  There is always money in modern times for people who help to wreck the Church.  I don’t think they were fired for any of these reasons.  I think it was politics.

Politics was the reason Shea and Fisher were retained for years.  Politics was their purpose and they knew it.  They did their jobs.  It’s just that EWTN is no longer in the market for their unique (odd) services.  Why?

Well, as Wikileaks has been the latest to demonstrate, Francis – I mean the idea of a Francis as pope – is about politics (Did you think it was about Christ and his saving mission?) and the Catholic media do seem to be bending along the Francis lines.

Others have paid for it, and those payers expect Francis and his Church to turn the ‘catholic’ vote.  Shea and Fisher were just helping, but I guess EWTN has now decided they don’t want their help that much.  Has FrancisChurch jumped the shark?  Is it in fact having the opposite effect on voters?

I’m often too optimistic.  I don’t follow sports.  I know life is, in a sense, a game, but since it really isn’t, I prefer not to look at it that way.  But I’m not convinced Trump is losing right now.  I think he probably will ultimately lose because the entire establishment is lined up against him and they will mount and count the votes, but I believe he’s actually quite popular.

When Trump dinged the Francis on his U.S. Border stunt, it teased out the Pope’s monstrous hubris and contempt for decent people.  Normal people really don’t like the hyped Francis program.  They don’t like Hillary.  They don’t like people like Shea and Fisher.  You can’t just make normal decent people, sacramental Catholics who live their faith in other words ‘conservatives’ into liberals, even if you foist a Francis onto Peter’s chair.

The actual operation of the Church has always relied upon benevolent power and suffered without it.  If Trump is on the way to becoming president, my guess is it will have a certain good effect upon the Church.   Maybe for some reason EWTN now wants to anticipate that hopeful day with a remaining shred of respect.  Maybe Shea is right.  It was about Trump.

 

Our NeverTrump Betters Betray Us For FrancisChurch

by

Janet Baker at ‘Restore D.C. Catholicism’ blog has been working carefully to counter the onslaught of NeverTrump moralizing by faithful Catholic leaders.  The latest loathsome example comes from Philadelphia Abp. Chaput.  Baker’s message to leaders like these is clear:  If you stand on your conscience, then why is your conscience wrong?  A conscience is not a means to an end (unless of course you’re a Pope Francis catholic and you want to go to Communion too).

In her latest effort, Baker adds:

I think for some of the #nevertrump crowd, their animosity towards Trump is a very strange sort of pride.

This gets to the heart of the ‘conscience voter’ problem but it’s too generous.  Pride isn’t the issue for some NeverTrumpers.  It’s an issue with all of them – both their pride and their pliant capitulation to power.  Trump has a knack for teasing out his opponents’ pride.  His stumbling bluster and his insulting careless manner bring out their worst.  But the problem of too-proud elites is not strange at all.  It’s very common thing among leaders and paid ‘thinkers’ in our totalitarian world.  That’s why we try to employ democracy: because the will of the people, on balance, has a salutary effect in face of an arrogant oligarchy.

Insofar as votes actually counted, democracy gave us Obama.  But the GOP establishment tried, just as they did again this year, to undemocratically foist liberal and unpopular candidates in opposition.  Now democracy has given conservatives Trump, but the NeverTrump geniuses inside and outside Catholic circles disagree with its choice.  The people, they imply, are duped, foolish, unintelligent, ignorant, and depraved.  If that’s true, why is it so easy for us to detect when we’re being sold out and patronized to protect someone’s lofty perch?

Our traitorous ‘conservative’ Catholic leaders are half right though.  Many people are the way they describe, but those ugly characteristics trend among liberals: people with malformed consciences who are ignorant of the truth.  The NeverTrump Catholics of the world are treating the actual faithful like we’re wicked and stupid.  Why?

Archbishop Chaput:

Presidential campaigns typically hit full stride after Labor Day in an election year.  But 2016 is a year in which two prominent Catholics [it’s a scandal, particularly for a bishop, to call Biden and Kaine Catholics, when they clearly neither hold nor keep the Faith] – a sitting vice president, and the next vice presidential nominee of his party — both seem to publicly ignore or invent the content of their Catholic faith as they go along.  And meanwhile, both candidates for the nation’s top residence, the White House, have astonishing flaws. [Obama has at least as many flaws as Hillary.  He’s just better at it.]

This is depressing and liberating at the same time.  Depressing, because it’s proof of how polarized the nation has become.  Liberating, because for the honest voter, it’s much easier this year to ignore the routine tribal loyalty chants of both the Democratic and Republican camps. [If I hear that word ‘tribal’ again!  It doesn’t make you civilized to say it.  It betrays your own disloyalty.  ‘I’m too sophisticated and Catholic to lean one way or the other, you know.’]  I’ve been a registered independent for a long time and never more happily so than in this election season.  Both major candidates are – what’s the right word? so problematic – that neither is clearly better than the other.

This outrageous statement is typical.  It’s nothing but assertions, too lofty to present an argument.  This is the bishop who so many ‘conservative’ American Catholics love to praise.  Did you see Abp. Chaput tell people Amoris Laetitia didn’t encourage sacrilegious Communion?  The problem’s solved!  What was all the fuss about Francis for, Our Very Holy Father?  But here is a bishop whose ‘conscience’ is so refined he has never been a Republican, yet he’s telling the Church how to vote, or in this case, not vote.

It’s amazing how Abp. Chaput has been able to rise to such heights in the American Church and not promote Republicans, yes?  I’m sure none of the other bishops would blindly advocate abstaining from supporting the GOP platform and self-righteously hand power to the oppressive pro-death Left.  Who could imagine a bishop of the Church throwing his moral weight to the Democrat agenda that way?  How is it ‘socially just’ to enable mass murder and an impoverished, terrorized country?  The bishops must all be Republican voters, right?

The fact is there’s no longer any political resistance to the Left in the Catholic Church.  What remained was kicked, kit and caboodle, out of the entire apparatus the moment Benedict read his odd notice and disappeared.  So now we have to endure the brilliant conclusions of the better sort like Bishop Barron who, without even mentioning a name, enlightens us on how St. Thomas Aquinas would react to Trump.  To state Trump’s name would be inappropriate and hurtful, I suppose.

We learn of course the Angelic Doctor employed a much higher method of discourse than the candidate to say the least.  Barron closes his lesson thusly:

What this Thomistic method produces is, in its own way, a “safe space” for conversation, but it is a safe space for adults and not timorous children. It wouldn’t be a bad model for our present discussion of serious things.

Bishop Barron is only harmlessly instructing the faithful on political rhetoric, on a ‘catholic’ method of discourse that’s neither dangerous nor childish, and appropriate to serious things.

According to our betters like Bishops Chaput and Barron, and the Weigels, the FirstThings, and the NRO Catholic pundits of the world, there’s nothing ‘serious’ about Donald Trump – except that he’s the landslide GOP nominee for president.  But somehow ever since Fidel Castro was lowered into the Chair of Peter true Catholic voters get handled like enemies of the Faith.