Vulnerable FrancisChurch defender at risk from ‘conservative’ attack
The Washington Post is seeing things.
VATICAN CITY — On a sunny morning earlier this year, a camera crew entered a well-appointed apartment just outside the 9th-century gates of Vatican City. Pristinely dressed in the black robes and scarlet sash of the princes of the Roman Catholic Church, Wisconsin-born Cardinal Raymond Burke sat in his elaborately upholstered armchair and appeared to issue a warning to Pope Francis.
A staunch conservative and Vatican bureaucrat, Burke had been demoted by the pope a few months earlier, but it did not take the fight out of him. Francis had been backing a more inclusive era, giving space to progressive voices on divorced Catholics as well as gays and lesbians. In front of the camera, Burke said he would “resist” liberal changes — and seemed to caution Francis about the limits of his authority. “One must be very attentive regarding the power of the pope,” Burke told the French news crew.
To call Cardinal Burke, or any other faithful Catholic ‘conservative’ is simply a slur. We aren’t in love with old things. We just don’t run with the popular pack, afraid, or over the cliff with the herd of swine. We stand on the eternal Rock of Truth.
Papal power, Burke warned, “is not absolute.” He added, “The pope does not have the power to change teaching [or] doctrine.”
Burke’s words belied a growing sense of alarm among strict conservatives, exposing what is fast emerging as a culture war over Francis’s papacy and the powerful hierarchy that governs the Roman Catholic Church.
This is last year’s revolt. The post is replaying the 2014 Synod, trying to gin up a sense of repeated resistance before this year’s attack. But where has Cardinal Burke been the past several months? What has happened to that faithful front? They’ll be watching for Edward Pentin this time, and Michael Voris has placed himself under restriction.
They’ve also knotted up all the rules so that working groups have absolutely no means of open communication either with the outside or with each other. Did you think they were going to repent their thuggish tactics and become Christian gentlemen this year? Synod 2015 is designed so that no Synod father will obstruct the ‘holy spirit’ and his frightening surprises.
This month, Francis makes his first trip to the United States at a time when his progressive allies are hailing him as a revolutionary, a man who only last week broadened the power of priests to forgive women who commit what Catholic teachings call the “mortal sin” of abortion during his newly declared “year of mercy” starting in December. On Sunday, he called for “every” Catholic parish in Europe to offer shelter to one refugee family from the thousands of asylum seekers risking all to escape war-torn Syria and other pockets of conflict and poverty.
Yet as he upends church convention, Francis also is grappling with a conservative backlash to the liberal momentum building inside the church. In more than a dozen interviews, including with seven senior church officials, insiders say the change has left the hierarchy more polarized over the direction of the church than at any point since the great papal reformers of the 1960s.
Read ‘destroyers.’
The conservative rebellion is taking on many guises — in public comments, yes, but also in the rising popularity of conservative Catholic Web sites promoting Francis dissenters; books and promotional materials backed by conservative clerics seeking to counter the liberal trend; and leaks to the news media, aimed at Vatican reformers.
Is a ‘FrancisDissenter’ an actual dissenter?
What websites do they reference here? The mainline faithful Catholic press retains a very thin slice of its old glory. They are for the most part FrancisApologists and cheerleaders. They have even become pitiful sycophantic environmentalists. It would be better just to link to a cover page that reads: “Nothing to see here, just some fearful chiselers trying to hold onto their jobs in the era of ObamaChurch.”
No. The rising popularity is in what used to be called ‘traditionalist’ Catholic media. In FrancisChurch the faithful flock has been hewn right down the middle. One side has gone ‘Voris,’ and left intellectual honesty behind to chase money and visibility. The rest have been tarred as freaks who love long red dresses.
But those freaks are just Catholics. LifeSiteNews, 1Peter5, The Remnant, our site PewSitter, and a host of learned and passionate writers from the Catholic and secular worlds remain to fight. The non-specific Post may be referring to these.
In his recent comments, Burke was also merely stating fact. Despite the vast powers of the pope, church doctrine serves as a kind of constitution. And for liberal reformers, the bruising theological pushback by conservatives is complicating efforts to translate the pope’s transformative style into tangible changes.
Good!
“At least we aren’t poisoning each other’s chalices anymore,” said the Rev. Timothy Radcliffe, a liberal British priest and Francis ally appointed to an influential Vatican post in May. Radcliffe said he welcomed open debate, even critical dissent within the church. But he professed himself as being “afraid” of “some of what we’re seeing”
A poisoned chalice is one taken unworthily, ‘Father.’ If you’re so afraid of these dangerous Catholics perhaps you should register a micro-aggression complaint and enforce some kind of ‘safe space.’ After all, there’s nothing organic about the church to which you belong. It’s already dead and dying, but the true Faith only grows. It must be forcibly smothered and suppressed by men like you and their secular masters so that the ‘awful horror’ can go on ‘standing in the place where it should not be.’
