FrancisChurch: See No, Hear No, Speak No…Or You’re Evil!

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Who am I to judge?

Who am I to judge?

Pope Francis has often railed against ‘ideologues’ or, in his mind, people who put some lesser belief system above the Truth.  It’s a trick a generic way for him to attack a specific group of people: faithful conservatives.

The Pope actually is an ideologue because he puts his worldy agenda and biases ahead of the Faith.  It’s just that his own ideology is on the far Left, not the Right. There are no real ‘ideologues’ on the right, just Christians.  True conservatism is not ideological.  It’s simply a refusal to condemn good things from the past, a past formed by the Church itself.

Since his faith can be thin, he’s often contemptuous of the ancient Faith and those who cherish it. Pope Francis clings to physical, current realities which are concrete and solid. He sees Christianity as a radical code to overturn the ‘social’ order and upend the powerful in the world, and in the Church. Yes, the Church is part of the problem!

The Pope’s radicalism just needs to be applied for the faith to be lived.  Like Islam, his ‘Christianity’ isn’t truly observed unless it’s militant.  In that respect he is right. The Church Faithful should be militant.  If only he were preaching militancy for the actual Faith.  Instead, he appears to be a true believer in the mold of South American liberation theologist rebels, and that’s not really very Catholic at all.

In his attacks on ideologues, the Pope hopes that all men would begin to view faithful Catholics as stubborn, proud, selfish and petty, so they would then turn to his own ideology and call it the Faith.

Fr. Longenecker is here to help him.

The teacher in my screenwriting class said, “To create a believable villain you have to understand why he thinks he’s good.”

In other words, nobody gets up in the morning deciding to be just as nasty, mean and murderous as possible.

No. even Darth Vader thinks he’s a good guy, and to give George Lucas the credit for what were three pretty terrible prequel movies, at least we learned why Darth Vader is the baddie.

He was just another young guy in love, but for seemingly good reasons (to rescue then avenge his mother) he started to kill. Then he decided that he had to kill some more in order to bring justice to the galaxy. In other words, Darth Vader is an ideologue. He wants to do good, and is willing to do evil to accomplish his ends, and the greater good he wants to achieve the worse evil he may have to use.

Ideologues are bad, but religious ideologies are the worst.

The secular ideologue believes he is on the side of the right because of his belief system. The religious ideologue believes that God himself is on his side and there ain’t nuthin’ that’s going to convince him otherwise. There’s no discussion. There is no dialogue with the ideologue.

There’s a lot of dialogue with FrancisChurch that’s true.  You’d have to be Darth Vader to object I suppose.

So the problem with an ideologue is that he thinks he’s right and he thinks he follows God.  Why is that always bad?  Isn’t that true at least sometimes?  Is it possible to believe what God thinks and to do it, or must doubt be mandatory for all ‘good’ people?  How can a Catholic think like this?

The religious ideologue will slander, mock, attack, exclude, persecute and finally kill the “enemy” and think he’s not only doing the right thing, but doing God a favor.

Yes, I know, we see the ultimate religious ideologue in the monsters of ISIS.

But hang on. Blaming the other person, the other religion, the other political party, the other bad guy is exactly what makes you bad and takes you into the downward spiral of religious self righteousness.

Sure the wolves of ISIS are demon possessed monsters, murderers, rapists and bloodthirsty, angry monsters and “we hates them my precious…”

But to avoid being a bad religious person myself I have to see where I might be turning into Darth Vader.

This is frightening to me. Blame is what you do when you determine who is at fault.  You don’t need to proclaim it, but you can at least reasonably think it, yes?  If we were all angels there would be no blame.  Are we all Angels then?  Well, some of us are ISIS-like Vaders.

So in the new Francis-LongeneckerChurch I can find no fault with a person, a religion, or a political party without being ‘the worst baddie.’  I hope I don’t seem too self-righteous when I say that it will be more convenient for some people, religions, and/or political parties than others.

Father has three pages of this stuff.

Overnight it seems there is only cheap ruthless demagoguery where there once was Faith.  The gifts of the Holy Spirit: wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, fear of the Lord , how can you have any of them floating down on your head and still be swayed by this kind of false shepherding?

 

 

 

 

 

Take My Advice, Tony

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Take my advise...

The prolific Fr. Longenecker has jumped to the defense of Pope Francis in the wake of the Boston Globe story about the relationship between the Pope and the late Protestant ‘Bishop’ Tony Palmer, who died in a motorcycle accident in England recently. According to the account, Mr. Palmer’s family was Catholic while he remained Protestant.

After years of working with the Cd. Bergoglio Palmer wanted to become Catholic too, but was urged to remain outside the Church by the Pope ‘for the sake of the mission.’ This is a discouraging but not ‘out of the blue’ story and Father’s response is distracting.

My comments in red:

Can you disagree with the Pope? Sure. Last week I posted about some traditionalist Catholics who do nothing but correct the Pope. These extremists correct Pope Francis, Pope Benedict, Pope St John Paul II, Pope Paul VI and Pope St John XXIII. When I said they resemble the liberal cafeteria Catholics they so dislike I also pointed out that there is nothing wrong with questioning or challenging a pope’s personal choices. Extremists? This borrows language from the enemies of the Church. Didn’t he just say that correcting a Pope was ok – Sure, but?

The underlying question is “Do you have a basic trust in the Holy Spirit working through the Body of Christ the Church? Do you have a rock solid belief that the Pope is working for the best of the church and the promulgation of the Catholic faith? Can you listen to him and obey him as your shepherd and as the Vicar of Christ?” Is this our Faith that everything every Pope says must be taken as the work of the Holy Spirit?

If “yes” then criticisms of the pope’s style, his personal choices, his taste and his decisions in pastoral matters are just talking points. It’s like having a good marriage but you can’t stand your wife’s new hairstyle. It’s like loving your husband but you wish he’d give up bringing fish home and gutting them on the kitchen table. It’s like loving your wife but cringing when her mother comes over. (Fr. Longenecker is a married priest. It’s good to remember, and to appreciate the tremendous gift of celibate priests.)

With this in mind, I read with consternation Austen Ivereigh’s article for the Boston Globe which gives more detail about Pope Francis’ relationship with freelance Anglican Bishop Tony Palmer. For those who don’t remember, Palmer met the Pope when he was working in Argentina as a Protestant missionary. Tony Palmer, a South African, was married to an Italian Catholic, and the question of his converting to the Catholic church arose in his conversations with the then Archbishop Bergoglio.

Palmer and Bergoglio had intense discussions about Christian separation, using the analogy of apartheid in South Africa. They found common ground in believing that institutional separation breeds fear and misunderstanding. Bergoglio, whom Palmer called “Father Mario,” acted as a spiritual father to the Protestant cleric, calming him (“he wanted to make me a reformer, not a rebel,” Palmer told me) and encouraging him in his mission to Christian unity. A reformer, rather than rebel is good. Christian unity is good if that means unity with the Church.

At one point, when Palmer was tired of living on the frontier and wanted to become Catholic, Bergoglio advised him against conversion for the sake of the mission.

“We need to have bridge-builders”, the cardinal told him. This is, on its face, not Catholic and not charity.

Should the then Cardinal Bergoglio have advised Tony Palmer to convert to Catholicism? In fact, the more we learn about Tony Palmer, the more interesting the question becomes. He was very involved in joint Catholic-Charismatic renewal and evangelization ministries.  Wouldn’t that ministry have been undermined if he became Catholic? Was Cardinal Bergoglio, in this instance, correct in advising him to stay put? This is where Father begins his rationalization.

The doctrinaire would say, “The Catholic Church is the one, true Church. Everyone outside it is going to hell and therefore it was wrong to tell Tony Palmer not to convert!” Unfortunately it’s not always that easy. Sometimes it is better, for all sorts of reasons, for a person to stay where they are. That is a terrible thing to say. ‘Doctrinaire’ means cruel and unbending. Someone who follows the doctrines of the Church is neither. They are called saints. Those of us who work with converts–especially clergy converts–(and I get about two or three emails a month from clergy thinking of converting) realize that for family, faith and financial reasons immediate conversion is not always the answer. If a person is moving towards the Catholic faith we meet the person where they are and walk with them on that journey. It took me twenty years to finally take the step to become a Catholic. Maybe someone should have told Father to wait even longer? Still, the circumstances, background, and timing of this story could certainly be different than the Globe’s account.

Therefore one can’t judge Cardinal Bergoglio’s call with Tony Palmer. This is the essence of Fr. Longenecker’s point. We don’t know the actual situation, so we should not be rash.

However, what about that bit about ‘the sake of the mission?’ It’s the stated reason for the Pope’s direction to Palmer. Is that a reason? Is there ever a reason to refrain from union with the Church of Christ, with the saving Sacraments, and with Heaven? No. There’s not.

Father goes on to make a strong faithful defense of his conversion and those of countless others who have helped the Church with their love, but these facts are not really relevant to the troubling story that appeared in the Boston Globe this weekend about Pope Francis and his late friend, Tony Palmer.