I remember a pastor who admitted during one of his Sunday rants that he became a priest because his dad would drink on weekends. Father’s sermons were angry. He had a style that alternately yelled then was gentle, sort of beating up the mostly older crowd into a dizzy sense of relief. For some reason this seemed to work. People loved it. I just felt manipulated and foolish for being present.
I couldn’t understand why father would be prompted to make the sacrifices of priesthood just because his own father was weak. It didn’t make sense until I considered how he viewed the Church. This priest saw the Church today as something very different from the Church before Vatican II. In fact he had contempt for the old Church and worked very hard every day to root out its persistent remnants. He felt the same way toward the old Church that he did toward his father: angry.
Pope Francis is similar. Driven by some resentment, he wants his papacy to make things fundamentally different, to change realities that have always been and will always be. It’s a radically destructive kind of mania.
Pope Francis has asked people to pray for October’s Synod of Bishops on the family during Mass in Guayaquil, Ecuador.
He also tied the synod to the Jubilee of Mercy, a year-long celebration that will begin in December.
The synod will be a time for the Church to “deepen her spiritual discernment and consider concrete solutions to the many difficult and significant challenges facing families in our time,” the Pope said.
Celebrating Mass with as many as one million people gathered under the hot sun in Los Samanes Park, Pope Francis asked them “to pray fervently for this intention, so that Christ can take even what might seem to us impure, scandalous or threatening, and turn it — by making it part of his ‘hour’ — into a miracle. Families today need this miracle!”
How can the Catholic Church ‘deepen it’s discernment?’ Are the things it teaches not true? Why do liberals always call it ‘deep’ when they reject something good?
And no Christian is moved by false scandals or threats. Who is Francis impugning?
The Pope is continuing to make it clear that he wants the ‘serene theology on its knees’ of Cardinal Kasper to be pushed-through. He exhibits all the fierce motivation of a cult leader on the verge of some conquest. It’s not hard to see.
Nevertheless, and despite this great new era of New York Times FrancisMercy, the only things that are truly impure are humans, and those need a change of heart to be ‘purified’ by Christ, yes? To ascribe one’s own oh-so-humble and ‘merciful’ intentions to Our Lord would of course be sacrilegious heresy, but Pope Francis wants us to think it’s a divine movement, the kind to which Our Lady was so responsive. Do you think she appreciates that comparison?
The joy of the wedding feast at Cana, he said, began when Mary was attentive to the needs of others “and acted sensibly and courageously.”
“Mary is not a ‘demanding’ mother, a mother-in-law who revels in our lack of experience, our mistakes and the things we forget to do,” he said. “Mary is a mother! She is there, attentive and concerned.”
As with the guests at the Cana wedding, who were offered the finest wine at the end of the celebration, Pope Francis insisted, so, too, for families today “the richest, deepest and most beautiful things are yet to come.”
“The time is coming when we will taste love daily, when our children will come to appreciate the home we share and our elderly will be present each day in the joys of life,” he said. “The finest of wines will come for every person who stakes everything on love.”
Taste love daily? That’s gross! No wonder Francis picks people like this to do his ghostwriting.
Pope Francis said he knows “all the variables and statistics which say otherwise,” but “the best wine is yet to come for those who today feel hopelessly lost.”
Just like the Wedding at Cana, Our Lord’s Church has saved the best wine for last? The breathtaking arrogance of FrancisChurch! For a hundred generations we’ve been building to this moment. What fools we’ve been all these millennia! No wonder we need completely different kinds of new hippie saints. Back to the Gospel!
In the new Final Covenant, socialist planning will save the family so they are all together once more and, though owning few of those evil modern conveniences, no longer poor. All will be united in one big, odd, man-made FrancisFamily; the old, the young, the gay, the remarried, the third wives, the the sort-of cousins, the half-half sisters, their mothers’ boyfriends and their polygamous uncles, all running up together to Holy Communion in one new big utopian pile of mercy.