This weekend I took a break from looking twice at things Pope Francis says.  Not that I stopped thinking, but I was enjoying a bit of a respite and the Pope was making it easy for me.

For instance he said that he was expecting a short papacy, that he misses being anonymous, that he used to be a ‘rover’ in Buenos Aires, and that he’d like to head out for a pizza once again.  Now, my mind said this Pope is too political and too aligned with the wrong centers of power to just assume he’s speaking from the heart, but then again, “Why not?”

He also said that he’d like to come to the U.S. via Mexico, but he couldn’t go there without seeing ‘La Senora’, Our Lady of Guadalupe.  He bragged, I thought characteristically, about his ‘inner peace,’ but he said he gained it by saying three Rosaries a day. The Pope has never been shy about his Marion devotions.  He doesn’t even add in John Paul’s awkward newfangled fourth mysteries!  I found that encouraging.  These aging hippies had their hearts in the right place.  They weren’t wrong so much about the problems, just their solutions…good intentions and all that.

It would be so nice and I want so much to have a Pope who acts Catholic, who has the right goals just different methods, yes?  More than a wish, it’s a desire for so many of us.  Still, I knew this really just had to be a brief break; that if you ever hoped to understand Pope Francis, you couldn’t let yourself become distracted by the faithful things he says.  After all, heresy is only some part poison.  It’s not all bad, except of course it is all bad when you see it over time.

While I was taking this respite, the faithful press was taking apart the new Jubilee Year of Mercy in a big way.  They’d heard enough about FrancisMercy last year, and Cardinal Luis Tagle did a pretty good job squeezing every drop you could squeeze out of that lemon last week in London.

Didn’t we just have a jubilee year?  Why do we have to do everything again all at once?  Laurence England, keen chronicler of The Pontificate for Thugs,  isn’t feeling all the Mercy.

A Jubilee of Mercy sounds wonderful. In previous pontificates I would be very happy about it. But this is no ordinary time.

Was this Cardinal Baldisseri’s idea? Cardinal Kasper’s clever idea? After all, he’s the expert on mercy, isn’t he?

I can only speak for myself. I have had two years of this strange ‘mercy nullifies God’s law, so there’ weirdness streaming from the Vatican. That’s two years in which my cynicism has matured.

Remember Pope Francis has very little ‘mercy’ for faithful Catholics.  In fact, in this new Jubilee Year of Mercy, I think we should prepare to be swamped with contempt.

Faithful Catholics don’t – won’t – say “hurrah” to what amounts to a blanket betrayal by the Hierarchy of Christ’s own teaching by distributing communion to unrepentant adulterers and other unrepentant sinners in mortal sin. They won’t say “huzzah” to treating the Holy Eucharist as if it were unchanged bread and wine, so now we are going to be made to feel really guilty to the point of pariah status for resisting the cunning plan made apparent by the manipulation at the Synod by the even more shrewd institution of a Jubilee Year of Mercy.

“You can’t disagree with us on Kasper’s proposal. It’s the Year of Mercy, don’t you know! And – and – he wrote a book about mercy! So there! If you don’t go along with this, you’re unmerciful!”

As I say, I’ve become quite cynical but I am sure that others feel the same. My good faith in this pontificate with its peculiar ‘agenda’ has been exhausted. I now expect the worst. It is bizarre that suddenly, when it suits the Pope, a Church custom venerated by his predecessors – a custom of incredibly ancient origins, origins that precede even the Traditional Latin Mass he has publicly dismissed – is suddenly seen as a positive – rather than a negative. The cynic might say that this is because, suddenly, an ancient custom suits a personal ‘agenda’.

Still, a Year of Mercy. Let’s go with that. Traditionally, according to Wikipedia a Jubilee is a year ‘in which slaves and prisoners would be freed, debts would be forgiven and the mercies of God would be particularly manifest’.

So…how about lifting all those restrictions on the Franciscans of the Immaculate? No? In a Jubilee Year of Mercy, how about teaching the Faithful and others the Truth through proper catechesis so that we may be convicted of our sins and seek Divine mercy? How about granting the Sacraments to German Catholics of good faith and good will even ifthey haven’t paid their Church Tax? How about a cessation of all insults and a hostile atmosphere of recrimination directed at faithful Cardinals, Bishops and priests whose only crime is to wish to hold fast to the Magisterium and promote traditional liturgy?

All this new FrancisMercy is starting to sound a lot like that thing faithful Catholics who work for American schools are feeling this week, like the mercy Patricia Januzzi is getting from her principle for defending the Faith in her free time, or the intense mercy they’re giving to San Francisco Abp. Cordileone. 

If, after all this, like me your Francis respite is broken and you’re feeling less than jubilant, Archbishop Rino Fisichella has been assigned to help you celebrate.

Mercy in our Church today, in the Time of Mercy, and now in the Year of Mercy, requires many hands, or fists.

 

At Lifesite, Hilary White reports on Cardinal Burke’s latest round of guidance and encouragement for a Church in deep crisis, while also noting the stark difference between his thinking and that of Philippine Cardinal Luis Tagle.  They both spoke in the UK last week.

Tagle is one to watch.  He seems to share much of the Pope’s sheer audacity.  He’s oh so joyous and cheerful while he says the most insidious things; things that seem to pivot on the changing world, the advances in psychology, and that terrible institution that was the Church up until now.

It seems like they are trying to build enough ‘righteous’ indignation against withholding Communion from adulterers, that the few remaining Catholic faithful and Synod hold-outs will be swamped with contempt from all sides.

Cd. Tagle is squarely in the sinful Communion crowd.

“Every situation for those who are divorced and remarried is quite unique. To have a general rule might be counterproductive in the end. My position at the moment is to ask, ‘Can we take every case seriously and is there, in the tradition of the Church, paths towards addressing each case individually?’ This is one issue that I hope people will appreciate is not easy to say ‘no’ or to say ‘yes’ to. We cannot give one formula for all.”

It’s interesting that this is so important to them.  It has a purely spiritual effect.  You would think men with such worldly focus would not think it worth doing, but they do.  It’s not that they hope it will bring people back to Mass. I don’t believe the people pushing the Church really want full Masses.  I think they want exactly what they’re getting: sold-off Churches and government funding.

Instead I think somewhere the people behind these ideas want the sacrilege.  It’s not the faithful that they need out of the way for their brave new world.  It’s the Grace of God.

 

 

The LA Times Reports:

Benedict famously made it easier for priests around the world to celebrate the “extraordinary form” of the Mass — that is, the Latin liturgy celebrated throughout the Catholic world before the changes set in motion by the Second Vatican Council. Francis long has been viewed with suspicion by devotees of the old Mass — and for good reason.

Take the comments attributed to him by Archbishop Jan Graubner of the Czech Republic. According to Graubner, Francis described affection for the old Latin Mass as a “fashion.”

“It is just necessary to show some patience and kindness to people who are addicted to a certain fashion,” the pope reportedly said. “But I consider greatly important to go deep into things, because if we do not go deep, no liturgical form, this or that one, can save us.”

The Pope is so cruel, and has such contempt for faithful Catholics.  Also, it’s infuriating how ‘deep’ liberals always are.  What in the world is down there so deep?

Last week, Francis seemed to double down on his dismissal of Latin Mass traditionalists. On March 7, he celebrated Mass at the Roman church where Pope Paul VI exactly 50 years before had celebrated Mass in Italian for the first time.

On leaving the church, according to the Catholic News Service, Francis said: “Let us give thanks to the Lord for what he has done in his church in these 50 years of liturgical reform. It was really a courageous move by the church to get closer to the people of God so that they could understand well what it does, and this is important for us: to follow Mass like this.”

For many Catholic traditionalists — not all of them elderly — these were shocking words. It’s not just that they find the old Latin Mass more aesthetically edifying than vernacular versions. The old Mass is a proxy for a cluster of theological precepts that have been eroded since Vatican II, notably the ideas that the Mass is primarily a repetition of Christ’s death on the cross (rather than a communal meal) and that the Mass is primarily the action of the priest rather than of the congregation.

The Roman Catholic Church is now experiencing the sort of polarization in public worship that long has been common in Anglican churches, in which some “high church” parishes feature elaborate ceremony while “low church” congregations favor a stripped-down, simpler rite.

This is true.  It’s like someone put a hipster Anglican at the helm.

Separate vocabularies also have grown up: Traditionalist Catholics will say that a priest “offers Mass”; liberal Catholics call the priest the “presider” at what they are more likely to call the “Eucharist.” The implication of the latter terminology is that the priest is the chairman of an essentially corporate act of worship. (Traditionalist Catholics see this as creeping Protestantism.)

Pope Benedict, who grew up in the Baroque Catholicism of Bavaria, left little doubt about which side he was on. Francis, although he embraces some aspects of pre-Vatican II Catholicism (such as veneration of the Virgin Mary), is pretty clearly a modernizer when it comes to liturgical reform. No wonder some traditionalist Catholics still consider Benedict the real pope.

Despite this last slur at ‘traditionalists’, it’s amazing what a clear-eyed secular writer can see when they look at our Church. Vatican II is everything new. The Virgin Mary didn’t quite carry over.  Catholics with a true and consistent faith have little in common with FrancisChurch.