We Take This Brief Moment to Pause for a Pope

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I was surprised to see Mr. Armaticus, who seemed fairly enthusiastic about SSPX Bishop Fellay’s report on the personal FrancisPrelature he’d been offered, praise Ann Barnhardt’s recommendation today.  Ann thinks the SSPX should declare a belief that Francis is an anti-pope, thereby forestalling further negotiations with the heresiarch trickster who perches in Rome whilst Benedict hides, hugs, and insipid mafia-like statements are issued in his name.

The SSPX should cease all negotiations with Bergoglio, publicly state that it is a moral certainty that Bergoglio is not the pope, and publicly declare allegiance to the one and only living Vicar of Christ, Pope Benedict XVI Ratzinger.

Ratzinger will never do anything – for good or ill – to the SSPX, because he refuses to exercise his responsibility as Pope.  Further, this will make clear that the SSPX will recognize NO actions taken against it by Bergoglio, AND that the SSPX remains exactly as it is, inside The Church, faithful to the Holy See.  And then the SSPX will truly become before this is all over, I strongly suspect, a lifeboat.

I must say that I don’t think this will happen. I think it’s likely what we are witnessing with Bishop Fellay at the moment is a man being bent.  He is taken in by some organized charm offensive.  It reminds me of the time a cop ran into my wife and I at an intersection.  The sun was in his eyes and the red light was his.  The Chief, the State Trooper, the Mayor’s office, everyone was there.  I had to stand on the corner for three hours while multiple investigations progressed.  A parade of police were designated to chat me up the entire time.  I made so many cop friends that day.  The stories we shared!

More persuasive than this FrancisCarrot, there must also be a stick out there somewhere for Fellay.  After all, look what a miserable mess they’ve made out of Pope Benedict.  Nobody seems to remember a thing about him from his long career defending the Catholic Faith.  Now this zombie creation is like, “Defend the Faith?  I’m retired from that, man.  It’s all good.  Popes are popes.  I love this new freshness.  Chill.”

I hate it when these moldy poofs keep saying ‘freshness’.  It’s sad, and dubious, to hear it now from VirtualBenedict.  What is so fresh about Francis? Is the Gospel stale without him?

I would love it if all these SSPX lights were right and the air-tight prelature idea was hopeful and, as they say, a result of the collapse of the Church and their ongoing allegiance to the Faith in the face of rejection all these hard years, but don’t worry:  Lucy’s going to pull the football.  There’s tremendous pressure bearing down on what’s left of the Church and of course, the SSPX is about the only thing that’s left of the Church.

This isn’t a trap.  It’s really just a clean up effort, a ‘delousing’ so to speak.

So Ann’s premise, that ‘agreement’ with the Francis, and ‘unity’ with his fresh new MercyChurch is not an actual option, is true.  Then what choice do they have?  Should they march off and die in a false hope, knowing they were faithful to ‘unity’, and wrecking the only leverage left on the planet for Christians in the process?  Should they just resist and wait for the stick?

No.  They can simply say, “We are not convinced that Benedict’s abdication and it’s subsequent elevation of a new pope is canonical for several reasons.  These doubts are compounded by the manifest heresy of the man who replaced him, Francis.  Since Benedict, who yet lives, may still remain Pope, and Francis is clearly not a true member of  Christ’s Church in faith, we shall persist in union with the Church as we have been, until such time as there are no longer two dubious popes on the scene.

Between a potential mis-abdication and a liberal Lutheran at best, we choose to pause for a pope.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What is the Francis?

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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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It Doesn’t Matter if Francis is an Anti-Pope

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Some discussion resulted from Ann Barnhardt’s published determination that Francis is an anti-pope; that he’s not the Pope and Benedict still is.  This is a happy assertion and I like it.  After all, Benedict’s resignation was ridiculous, not just unfortunate.  Did he mean it?  Perhaps.  His communication, I believe, is often falsified or lied about and, if it were true he was deposed, his few more recent words are still often made under pressure.  It would be a mistake just to believe what seems to emerge from or about him. He’s read statements.  He’s also mentioned his indelible papal character and ‘contemplative’ new role, detailed by Abp. Ganswein, which Barnhardt and others believe nullifies his abdication.

Was he forced?  I think it’s likely, but we don’t know for certain.  He couldn’t have professed and cared about the things he did for the thirty-plus years prior and knowingly enabled the result that he did.  I think he was probably presented with two bad options originating ultimately from someone, some empire outside the Church, and he chose what he thought was the lesser of two evils.  These are just good guesses, but that type of scenario would have constituted a putsch.

How do we respond to this?  There’s really very little precedent.  But it doesn’t matter.  Francis isn’t Catholic, so he has no legitimate role in the Church.  It’s our job to see that he’s removed from the official position and to demonstrate our contempt for him and his destruction in the meantime.  The same is true of anyone who calls himself Catholic.  If they are heretics (or clearly no longer in a state of grace for some reason), then they aren’t a part of the Church.  An open heretic is different than a plain sinner because he can’t achieve a state of grace.  He would have to repent of his heresy first.  Francis should be expected to do so.

Does Francis or any other faithless cleric have certain canonical status?  Are they able to bring us the sacraments?  I believe so.  But regardless, whether the pope’s an open adversary like Francis or a capitulator like Benedict, the ‘Church’ in our lifetime is being ruled by its enemies, falsely.  Why are the bishops usually worse than the pastors, who are worse than the vicars?  It’s because the Church is being crushed.  You’d have to look far and wide today to find a Catholic who doesn’t blame the collapsing Faith on the changing world as if the Church were the world’s fault.  It’s not that.  It’s generations now of ‘bad’ management.

If the Church is ever to become a growing thing again, we have to excise the dead tumors both high and low.  We have to take the long view, see life and death in eternal, metaphysical terms, and act accordingly like children of the Light.  That is done through properly placed contempt.  Contempt is the opposite of honor, and today we use both quite poorly.  We abuse them.  We say one thing, but then we honor what’s evil and show contempt for what is true: Christian charity namely, drawing the hard line.

We have a certain ‘allowance’ to think in our time, but when it comes to treating contemptuous things and people appropriately, then we are circumscribed.  We must follow our minders.  We sketch an outline of a Catholic life, but we don’t enforce it by walling-out trouble and heaping love and respect on what’s good.  We don’t calibrate our honor and contempt correctly because that would mean bringing worldly contempt and ‘dishonor’ upon ourselves and real consequences.  So error and sin flourish in the weedy garden we cultivate while we wave our too-short arms like babies who can’t reach their mothers.  We don’t really stand.

That’s why it’s so important to avoid treating dead things as if they were part of the Church.  It’s a sin to do that.  The Church now is actually quite small.  It’s an underground Church.  It has few buildings or institutions and most of the people who appear to be part of it are not.  They aren’t headed for life.  For them, unless someone faithful has the courage to treat them appropriately and they respond correctly, they will be shortly dead forever.  We can’t leave these things just up to God.  We have to call them out so there is hope.

The same goes for monstrous Francis and his minions willing or compelled.  Is he the Pope?  He’s not even part of the Church.  As such he should be resisted fiercely, treated contemptuously, and his words and actions denounced and ignored, because as a heretic in white, he is an enemy of God and, unless he repents, a child only of death.

Do you think this sounds too harsh?  I know our proud rulers will appreciate your restraint.  In fact, I’m positive they expect it.