Fr. Longenecker Finds That ‘Conservative’ Resistance to FrancisChurch

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conservative but not resistant

Conservative but not Resistant

Patheos writer Fr. Dwight Longenecker is the latest to respond to the Wapo accusations of ‘conservative’ resistance, but he sure isn’t very nice about it or very conservative either.

The Post lists nothing specific from which they draw their conclusions.  They mention Cardinal Burke, who seems to have been sidelined fairly well these days, but little else.  Longenecker sees this as proof that there actually is no ‘conservative’ resistance to the Francis agenda among Catholics.

This article from the Washington Post gives a typical progressive slant on Catholic news.

The headline suggests that “Conservative Dissent is Brewing Inside the Vatican.” Ho  hum.

You can guess the tired narrative: Pope Francis is the great reformer who wants to clean up the corrupt Vatican Bank, open communion to divorced and re-married people, lift the ban on artificial contraception, give the nod to abortion, make way for women priests and green light same sex marriage.

Except of course that he’s spoken out clearly against all those things.

Talk is cheap, but the UN’s Paris global warming agreement is expensive.  “Does Francis care about the pro-death agenda of his policy partners,” a conservative might ask?

Nevertheless, he’s a subtle worker don’t you know, and he’s moving things along slowly but surely. Here a clever liberal appointment and there a back room deal. Here a little wink and nudge to journalists and there a promotion of one of his liberal buddies and a demotion of one the bad guys. In other words, the Vatican is working just like Washington DC and any powerful organization–it’s a network of crafty cardinals, manipulative monsignors and corrupt curial officials.

This kind of not-funny sarcasm is a liberal trademark.  You’re supposed to feel stupid.   At least in Washington they don’t pretend to be Catholic.

Of course there will always be politicking in any organization and the Vatican is no exception. Furthermore, there will always be disagreement and dissent within an organization.

Of course, but there’s no dissent in the Church Militant. The heresy is all on the outside – or is Father still talking about Washington?

Is there “dissent” amongst some conservative American Catholics? There is certainly some genuine ugliness rumbling in a few extreme traditionalist blogs, but must we take seriously flat earth bloggers who rant about the pope being a communist antiChrist, modernist, Jew loving, infiltrator who is ushering in the New World Order of Illuminati/Freemasons? Probbly not.

I think we’ve just crossed some of that resistance the Post laments.  You can tell by where Father chooses to bring down his hammer.  If we Catholics weren’t faithful, sincere, and effective, FrancisPriests like Fr. Longenecker wouldn’t smear us.

And if you can’t tell the difference between a destructive pro-communist Pope and a conservative, you belong at Patheos, not among the faithful ‘resistance.’  There’s more to it than a goatee and a gun.

 

 

 

 

 

Fast and Cheap? – Register Goes ‘Ballistic’ Over FrancisMercy Misreporting

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These heathens and the things they say about FrancisMercy!

Why is the Register’s Marge Fenelon so angry?

I saw the headlines and went ballistic.

“Pope Francis Seeks Easier Way for Catholics to End Marriages”

“Pope Francis Simplifies Marriage Annulments with New Fast-track Process”

There were others as bad and these. They are all grossly misleading.

There is nothing easy about ending a marriage and there is no fast-track to annulment. Not even with the Apostolic Letters motu proprio, or “on his own impulse” just issued by Pope Francis.

Why do secularists and non-Catholics have to be the ones to tell the truth about our Church?  An annulment today is a ‘way to end a marriage’ yet still be considered ‘in union’ with the Church.  That’s it.  They just ‘say’ it’s a declaration of nullity.  I suppose that they are right about that every 1/10,000th of the time, though.

You must ask yourself.  Were the bishops wrong in rarely finding nullity for thousands of years up until your grandparents’ day, or are they wrong now?  They can’t be both.

How can  you go to the peripheries, be ecumenical, and walk together with your fellow ‘Christian’ wherever you’re supposed to be going if you keep accusing your ‘brother in Christ’ of lying when he simply reports the truth.  Francis is trying to simplify annulment proceedings by removing steps and participants, and ‘fast-tracking’ several types of situations.  That’s why he thinks it’s merciful, because they’re faster and cheaper.  ‘Catholics’ can be free to abandon their spouses or cheat on them more quickly and the Church will ‘mercifully’ condone it within 45 days.  The mercy part is where you get out of the marriage faster.

Am I saying something heretical here?  Is honesty now a sin?  Is blindness Catholic?

In general, both letters lessen the time and cost required for annulments. They also allow the local bishop to judge annulment cases himself or to delegate the responsibility to a priest-judge with two assistants in places where the normally required three-judge tribunal isn’t available. That’s not so much the case in the United States, but it’s not uncommon in other countries.

‘Less time and cost,’ fast and cheap, ‘fasttrack.’

Neither document in any way questions the indissolubility of marriage, nor do they offer a free ticket for those wanting to take the A Train out of it.

I suppose we should be grateful that Pope Francis didn’t include in his letter that marriages are now dissoluble.  It would be so much worse if he decided just to call every broken marriage a non-marriage automatically, then on top of that add a note saying divorce is OK.  It makes me feel so relieved to hear that, because of some inane technicality, I never was married all those years, but at least I’m not divorced like a Protestant!

“What God has joined together, let no man put asunder.” (But if you want to pretend that God never joined them together in the first place, that’s entirely up to you.)

It’s like robbing a bank then saying it wasn’t really a bank anyway and there was no money in it.  If Pope Francis called that mercy, you’d probably scold the entire world about how he never said once that banks weren’t banks.  You’d go “ballistic.”

Marge, if you get married in the Church, take the marriage prep, gather the family around, have four kids and live together twenty years, then complain you didn’t know what you were doing and your husband was mean and neglectful, you can call it whatever you like, but you’ve got that train ticket out, no problem. Lying about it sets a bad example.  It makes people think the Catholic Church is full of adulterous cheats, hypocrites, and brown-nosing reporters – more of a mud puddle you’d want to step over than a vast ‘ocean of mercy.’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hungary: A Bishop Says Something Nice About Francis And ‘Refugees’

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A Bishop AND a man. When does that happen?

A bishop AND a man. When does that happen?

In the terrible era of FrancisChurch there is yet an occasional bishop.

BUDAPEST — Pope Francis’s message Sunday couldn’t have been clearer: With hundreds of thousands of refugees flowing into Europe, Catholics across the continent had a moral duty to help by opening their churches, monasteries and homes as sanctuaries.

On Monday, the church’s spiritual leader for southern Hungary — scene of some of the heaviest migrant flows anywhere in Europe — had a message just as clear: His Holiness is wrong.

“They’re not refugees. This is an invasion,” said Bishop Laszlo Kiss-Rigo, whose dominion stretches across the southern reaches of this predominantly Catholic nation. “They come here with cries of ‘Allahu Akbar.’ They want to take over.”

The bishop’s stark language reflects a broader spiritual struggle in Europe over how to respond to a burgeoning flow of predominantly Muslim men, women and children onto a largely Christian continent.

This language is so hopeless.  Is it a ‘broad spiritual struggle’ to figure out how to respond?  The fact that they are invading is in itself a broad spiritual loss!  Struggle over.  Time to lose.

Even as Catholics in other parts of Europe heeded the pope’s plea for help Monday, there was little evidence here that church leaders were prepared to elevate what has so far been an anemic response to one of the worst humanitarian crises Europe has seen in decades.

‘Anemic?’  I’d say the continent was bleeding profusely.  What more does the Washington Post want from what’s left of Europe?  We’re not there yet!

And despite the heat that Orban has taken worldwide for attempts to crack down on some of the globe’s most vulnerable people by halting their journeys or throwing them into prison, his stance has seemed to only burnish his reputation here as a no-nonsense nationalist who will defend the country against an onslaught of “tens of millions” of new arrivals.

“I’m in total agreement with the prime minister,” Kiss-Rigo said in an interview Monday.

The pope, by contrast, “doesn’t know the situation.”

The situation, as Kiss-Rigo describes it, is that Europe is being inundated by people who are posing as refugees but actually present a grave threat to the continent’s “Christian, universal values.”

Isn’t that comforting.  At least the Archbishop is deferential enough to pretend that Francis doesn’t know these people aren’t refugees.  Poor Pope Francis is just uninformed.  That’s why on almost every single policy point he pushes the UN-Obama-EU-Castro-Islamist agenda.  He just has a big heart and not much of a nose for news I guess.

Oh, wait.  Francis doesn’t like abortion or euthanasia.  He said it.  He just likes handing the reins to it’s mass-murdering power brokers, that’s all.  It’s a complex world and you want to be 100% consistently pro-life; pro-life in a way that really kills.

Even though the majority of migrants who have crossed the border in southern Hungary are from Syria — where war has claimed more than 320,000 lives in the past four years — he judged them unworthy of assistance because most of them “have money.”

They leave rubbish in their wake, he said, and refuse when offered food.

“Most of them behave in a way that is very arrogant and cynical,” said Kiss-Rigo, who has been bishop for nine years in an area that is home to some 800,000 Catholics.

Who does this Catholic bishop think he is making value judgments!  You’re not supposed to call victim groups selfish people of low character.  How is that even relevant? Next you’ll be knocking their holy religion.  That’s not Christian!

Aid workers on the border and at Budapest’s central train station — where hundreds of refugees awaited trains Monday to Western Europe — gave a different account. They described people desperate for assistance and grateful to receive it.

Whew. Finally some honest information from government-sponsored aid groups.  Well they would know, yes?  And they’d be sure to tell the press if it weren’t so.  It’s not like they’re paid to lie about it.