The Truth of Christ summed up in one hanky
The sight of John Boehner sobbing and Jo Biden ‘manfully’ holding back tears behind Francis Thursday might possibly have been the low point in American history, perhaps the entire West. Never has civilization been so scrubbed of manly virtue and never has it been so false. Three fools and three liars; three men of ‘audaciousness,’ none of them Christian. One represents evil, the other capitulation, while Francis the Judas delivers a captive Christ. He did not even mention Him.
In two plus short years Francis and his worshipers and apologists have succeeded in making the Protestant Right, the remnant voice of Faith and reason in America, despise Catholics. Ann Coulter is right. It’s Pope Francis ‘catholicism’ that is flooding Texas. It’s also conquering Europe and destroying the world. After thousands of years of Crusades and battles, what Pope would stand on an Italian rock waving Muslims into Europe and scolding her defenders? Only a man who hates the Faith, the sacrifices of its saints and its soldiers would do such a thing.
After five centuries we’d succeeded in demonstrating to Protestants that Catholics don’t worship their Pope, and now in two years we’ve proved them right all along. If you remove Pope-worshipers from the cult of Francis, delete their faces from the trumped-up and tiny crowds around the country last week and from the airwaves, there would be no one left. Perhaps three Christians would remain who were so unfortunate to have to watch the horror pass by. I don’t believe for a minute there are faithful Catholics enthusiastic about Francis, because people like that are able to discern a fraud. They know Faith in Christ when they hear it, when they see it. Catholic witness and prophecy are not something Biden and Boehner cry over. At least Nancy Pelosi probably maintained a shred of dignity. Can you imagine?
Maureen Mullarky didn’t need to watch the FrancisSpeech to know what it was.
In large measure, Thursday’s propaganda event will prove a concluding flourish to what this pope is on course to achieve: the descent of the Catholic Church into one more geopolitical “ism,” a pious-seeming companion to every other materialist -ism that tempts modern man away from freedom and toward submission to totalitarian order. Since ascending to the papacy, Francis’ actions have served a mongrel papo-caesarism that drains Christianity of its soul. Christian idiom degrades into the carrier of a secular agenda.
“A pious-seeming companion:” that’s our Pope. You can even get a cardboard “Flat Francis” friend to seem to be your companion too, but I think they’re about $79.00. Talk about a throwaway culture of waste and excessive consumerism!
Ideolatry, the idolatry of fixed ideas, is as rampant in the Vatican as in any other directorate, and just as dangerous. Even more so. Because the pope commands deference from the world’s peoples, the present object of his worship—from climate-change dogma to the antagonisms peculiar to an anti-democratic Leftist elite—disfigures the faith of billions. It becomes a golden calf festooned with gospel quotes.
Deference to a pope comes readily to Catholics. We are groomed for it. Within legitimate bounds, there is grace in that. But the boundaries are not totalizing. Outside of them, obeisance falls prey to forces that do not serve the church. Neither do they lend succor to a civilization painfully wrought from endemic tyrannies and universal poverty. Far, far from it.
There comes a moment when deference glides into collusion. At that point, we all become Good Germans. Fascist-friendly. Trust in respected authority curdles into a thing entirely different—a willed blindness to something dark in the particular voice commanding assent. Decent and dependable, we incline toward the beckoning circle of connivance.
Our own lifetime has not prepared Catholics for such a moment. But it is here now. We can adjust our sensibilities, our priorities, and our hopes to counter this juncture. Or we can surrender our children and grandchildren to a downward slide into a retrograde world order built on contempt for the bases of those very structures that have lifted a still-increasing portion of the earth’s population out of the misery that is history’s norm.
FrancisChurch, it’s henchmen, and it’s dupes are not only shepherding the world into totalitarian death and squalor. They’re shutting down the Church, the instrument of Grace which saves souls. When the Church, already rendered dysfunctional and now being fitted for slaughter, is gone from the Earth, there won’t just be a return to paganism, to savage animism, or totalitarian slavery. There will be Hell on Earth, or if we’re lucky, Islam. It will be something much worse than just Cuba. Hell itself is also a ‘post-Christian society.’
Something in me gave way at the sight of an exultant image of Che Guevara overseeing the altar in Plaza de la Revolución, the approved site of the recent papal Mass in Havana. A sadistic, murderous thug looked down on attendees in an obscene burlesque of Christ Pantocrator. Under the gaze of a butcher and amid symbols of the regime, Jorge Bergolio joined his fellow Argentine in service to the calamitous Cuban revolution. The entire spectacle played like a farcical inversion of John Paul II’s presence in Warsaw’s Victory Square, in 1979, and in stark contrast to the message he brought to Cuba in 1998.
What collapsed was any lingering sense of obligatory constraint. Gone is the time for courtesy extended to an occupant of the papacy despite his hubris and ruinous impulses. Out the window is dutiful tolerance for this man’s accusatory or incendiary language. Politesse has run its course. Historian Roberto de Mattei, writing on the wound to marriage delivered by Francis’ recent motu proprio (a personal mandate) ends his analysis with this: “Silence is no longer possible.”
The rest is here.
The seedbed of Catholic Truth and defense of the Church in our country used to be found in the faithful American Catholic Media, re-established by people like Mother Angelica during the reign of John Paul II. Today, from those desperate pages we hear the cry of “anti-Catholicism” at Protestants and faithful Catholics who still love Christ’s truth and justice, but faith ‘in Francis’ is, unfortunately, not Catholic. Faith in Christ is. To call out FrancisFaith for what it is, is not to reject the Church; it’s the way to embrace it and stick close to it.
Manly Christian duty demands that we uphold the Church. The formula is simple: encourage those who hold the Faith and live it, but correct those who do only one of those or who do neither. That formula doesn’t change for anyone. Obedience to the Pope only goes so far as he holds the Faith and lives it. When he fails, our duty tells us direct action must follow.
Our own neglect of this duty to correct those who live outside the Church has crushed her in our time. On this Earth enemies are the rule. Christian resistance is the exception and the way to Heaven.
With whom does Francis, the author of fast, cheap, and false annulments, have more in common: King Henry XIII or his resistor Pope Clement VII? Must we obey now that Henry is Pope or instead challenge him in the name of Christ?
Our Lord is not a man of tearful compliance in the face of evil. Soldiers are great because they fight, risk, and die, not because they kill. Our Lady is the Queen of Lepanto, not of Catholic Charities. In the face of an unprecedented and unchallenged reign of a heretic king, Thomas More was ‘disobedient’ in the minds of many, but the saint maintained he acted out of love for King and country when he said, “I die the king’s good servant, but God’s first.”
St. Thomas did not say, “but the Pope’s first.” His obedience to God was also loyal to the Pope because Clement was faithful. In true Christian unity, not the type Francis rails about, all are united in Faith. But the reign of Francis is like the reign of Henry. It’s against the Church and cannot be a source of unity. Popes are supposed to uphold the Faith, not destroy it in the name of ‘mercy’ and ‘the poor.’ We must go on being loyal sons of the Church even when the Pope is wrong, not lay down and lie in the name of obedience.
Tears are for the field of battle I’m sure, and for men like Boehner, hopefully at the judgment seat of Our Lord, but they’re an ugly and pitiful sight standing behind ‘the Francis’ in Congress. The Church needs men of duty, not men like that.