Canon212 Update: Don’t You Try Riding Into Heaven on That Depraved FrancisCloseness

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WWW.CANON212.COM

FRANCIS DOESN’T GIVE INTERVIEWS, BUT HE NEEDS TO GIVE INTERVIEWS.  HE SPEAKS UNPREPARED AN OFF-THE-CUFF, BUT IT’S MAGISTERIUM. HE MUST RISK BEING MISINTERPRETED.

IF YOU CUT THE CORD AND THROW AWAY YOUR TV, THEY CAN’T CONTROL YOU…

RORATE: WE CALL ON ALL PEOPLE OF FAITH TO BOYCOTT THE IRISH WORLD MEETING OF GAY FRANCISFAMILIES

500 YEARS OF POTTY TALK: LEST WE FORGET THE PROBLEMS WITH LUTHER’S MOVEMENT

VATICAN II ‘FATHER’ GREGORY BAUM, DEAD AT 94

SHOULD PRIESTS WHOSE PASTORS IGNORE SACRILEGIOUS COMMUNION, JUST ‘BIDE THEIR TIME’ AND PRAY FOR THE OFFENDING COUPLES?

The Era of the New Hippie Catholic

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Humble FrancisChurch Pilgrims en Route

Humble FrancisChurch Pilgrims en Route

Hippies are so cute, right?  Just don’t look too closely.

Hippies are also perfect for FrancisChurch.  They love nature, have poor humble carbon footprints, and they hate those stuffy rules!  CNN reports:

The freewheeling Volkswagen bus, painted a Caribbean turquoise, rolls down Guatemala’s CA-9 highway. Hot wind blows in and out of every open window, and the noise from the rear engine is loud. But no one seems to mind.

Sandwiched between four kids in the back, I can’t help but think these travelers’ attitude might be mistaken for flower power. But this is no magic bus on a hippie trip. This family is on a mission rooted in their Catholic faith.

Catire Walker, 41, and his wife, Noël Zemborain, 39, packed their children, camping gear and a few belongings in March and left their home in Buenos Aires on a daunting 13,000-mile journey through 13 countries.

Their family and friends called them crazy. Maybe they were. But they figured it was about time that they did something crazy. About time that they devoted more time to what mattered most: family.

There final destination is Philadelphia to see the Pope.

Pope Francis, who has made family one of his hot button issues, is visiting the United States for the first time later this month. The Walkers plan to attend the 2015 World Meeting of Families, a central event of the papal visit. The VW bus is plastered with a sticker emblazoned with the event’s logo. Everywhere the family goes, the curious stop and ask.

These people aren’t crazy.  This is a marketing stunt and Mrs. Hippie is a marketing professional.  That VW is over forty years old.  It only means something to old liberals and collectors.

Faith, for the Walkers, has never been about church and its rituals but about the everyday occurrences of life. In Francis, they finally saw a pope who understood ordinary people like them, a pope who talked about things no pope had discussed openly before.

They may be ordinary people but they’re not Catholics!  They don’t believe in anything.  They like Francis because he doesn’t remind them of the Church.

Besides, they felt immensely proud that Francis was a fellow Argentine. They had followed Jorge Bergoglio closely when he was archbishop of Buenos Aires and had even seen him up close right after he was named Pope.

They were in Rome on a business trip and stood among the crowd at the Vatican. When Francis drove by in the Pope Mobile, Catire screamed “Jorge!” and held up their youngest child, Carmin, then only 10 months old. One of the security guards carried the baby past the barricade and lifted her up so Francis could kiss her.

What kind of poor hippies can afford to take their entire family of six to Rome on business, yet still find it in their hearts to beg their way north for five months?

The Walkers don’t know how far they will get today or where they will sleep tonight. This is how it has been in their months of travel on a tight budget. They raised a few dollars through a crowdsourcing site but mostly, they depend on the kindness of strangers, many of whom open up their homes and become lifelong friends.

The journey has been humbling, Noël tells me.

“We have learned how to ask for help,” she says. “We have learned how to be grateful, how to live with very little. And just to let go and not to try and always control everything.”

They’ve also learned how to be cogs in the left-wing FrancisHype machine, sort of like hippie-capitalists.

 

Do Your Part to Share the Selfie Francis Faith

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Is this our Faith?

Believer?

The mainstream media is really pushing these life-size cardboard Pope Francises.  Why?  Is it just because it’s fun, or funny.  Is it just for the money?

In keeping with previous papal visits, Pope Francis’ U.S. visit in September has spurred a mad dash among souvenir sellers. For $160, you can order an official, life-size “cutout” of the pontiff from the group organizing one of the events in Philadelphia.

Why is it so expensive?  Is it a collector’s item already?

Those 69-inch “standup” versions of Pope Francis, whose global popularity is perhaps the only thing larger than the replicas themselves, are being placed around Philadelphia so people can take selfies and share them on social media, the Associated Press reported.

So the point is not just to have a big Pope Francis around to bother you.  It’s to take a selfie with it and ‘share on social media.’

“Pope Francis is described as the people’s pope. So we have him in places where many people can see him,” World Meeting of Families digital content manager Nancy Caramanico told the news agency. “People are just really excited to be around him and are anticipating his visit to Philadelphia.”

Nineteen-year-old college student Jennifer D’Angelo will be in school when Pope Francis visits her hometown, the AP reported, so she took the opportunity to pose with a two-dimensional cutout of the pope on display at a food court.

“It seems like he’s trying to bring the Catholic Church together,” D’Angelo, 19, said. “I think he’s doing a great job. I’m just kind of sad that I’m not going to be in the city when he comes.”

Aren’t all the popes ‘people’s popes?’  Why just Francis?  Was Benedict only for rich fancy people?

Is Pope Francis bringing the Catholic Church together?  I think he’s just rallying non-Catholics, dissidents, media people, and dictators.  How many actual Catholics are excited to be around Pope Francis?  Are we thinking with our televisions?

For those seeking a less-grand papal presence, you can also order a variety of posters, a coffee mug emblazoned with some of the pope’s more notable quotations, and a 10-inch tall Pope Francis “plush doll” that is “surface wash only.”

Merchandising papal visits has a long tradition in the United States and elsewhere. In 1987, the U.S. tour undertaken by Saint John Paul II, then in the ninth year of his pontificate, inspired such items as a “Pope-Scope,” a cardboard tube with small mirrors at an angle, so people could see his motorcade over the heads of others. Other souvenirs included buttons, a T-shirt inscribed “Your Holiness, Welcome to Texas” and additional booklets, a selection of which was for sale via the online auction site eBay for $49.99.

Everything that happens in FrancisChurch is always framed as part of a long tradition but it’s not.  It just manipulates and morphs traditions.  It abuses them.

Six years later, mindful of such kitsch as “Pope-on-a-Rope” soap bars, Catholic leaders in 1993 prepared for another Pope John Paul II visit to America by hiring the Famous Artists Merchandising Exchange of Dayton, Ohio, to handle licensing of the pope’s image, according to The New York Times (paywall).

“More than 100 items were deemed acceptable, including those … approved to bear the Pope’s countenance: medallions, T-shirts, posters, postcards, lithographs, fanny packs and the Pope-Scope,” the newspaper reported.

Perhaps one of the most notable pope-related products emerged during a 1965 visit to New York by Pope Paul VI. It came during a newspaper strike, leaving journalists for The New York Times and other print outlets to cover a story they couldn’t distribute in those pre-Internet days. The answer? An “instant book” created by Times staffers and Bantam Books, a paperback publisher that released 500,000 copies of the story within four days of the visit. As the Times reported, Pope Paul VI “got his copy for free.”

Don’t be fooled.  A few vendors promoting and capitalizing off previous papal visits is nothing like the worldwide media/marketing efforts behind Francis today.

At the top of the article there is an enormous photo  of a man kneeling in prayer before his Pope Francis cutout and grasping its cardboard hand. Francis swag is not about fun or money.  It’s McKinsey & Company’s idea of worship, worship of their new catholicism.

If St. Peter lived in our time and had access to cardboard images and selfies, would he make sure the countries he evangelized were filled with life-size statues of himself first?  Is there going to be a single image of Christ anywhere near Francis next month?  I suppose one or two are unavoidable.

The Francis cutout is symbolic because his papacy really a contrived event.  It’s something orchestrated and Francis is just filling the life-size pope spot within it.

Real Francis is not flat.  He’s very round and so is the Church.  It has depth and it lives.  But FrancisChurch doesn’t.  It’s just a pasted veneer, a stage set.