{"id":511,"date":"2015-03-15T20:03:27","date_gmt":"2015-03-15T20:03:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/66.147.242.160\/~stumbli4\/?p=511"},"modified":"2015-03-15T23:27:53","modified_gmt":"2015-03-15T23:27:53","slug":"no-respite-for-the-newwicked-in-the-jubilee-year-of-mercy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/?p=511","title":{"rendered":"No Respite for the NewWicked in the Jubilee Year of Mercy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"fisichella\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This weekend I took a break from looking twice at things Pope Francis says.\u00a0 Not that I stopped thinking, but I was enjoying a bit of a respite and the Pope was making it easy for me.<\/p>\n

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 <\/a>once again.\u00a0 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<\/a>?”<\/p>\n

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’,<\/a> Our Lady of Guadalupe.\u00a0 He bragged, I thought characteristically, about his ‘inner peace,’ but he said he gained it by saying three Rosaries <\/a>a day. The Pope has never been shy about his Marion devotions.\u00a0 He doesn’t even add in John Paul’s awkward newfangled fourth mysteries!\u00a0 I found that encouraging.\u00a0 These aging hippies had their hearts in the right place.\u00a0 They weren’t wrong so much about the problems, just their solutions…good intentions and all that.<\/p>\n

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?\u00a0 More than a wish, it’s a desire for so many of us.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 After all, heresy is only some part poison.\u00a0 It’s not all bad, except of course it is all bad when you see it over time.<\/p>\n

While I was taking this respite, the faithful press was taking apart the new Jubilee Year of Mercy in a big way.\u00a0 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 <\/a>last week in London.<\/p>\n

Didn’t we just have a jubilee year?\u00a0 Why do we have to do everything again all at once?\u00a0 Laurence England, keen chronicler of The Pontificate for Thugs<\/a>,\u00a0 isn’t feeling all the Mercy.<\/p>\n

A Jubilee of Mercy sounds wonderful. In previous pontificates I would be very happy about it. But this is no ordinary time.<\/p>\n

Was this Cardinal Baldisseri’s idea? Cardinal Kasper’s clever idea? After all, he’s the expert on mercy, isn’t he?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Remember Pope Francis has very little ‘mercy’ for faithful Catholics.\u00a0 In fact, in this new Jubilee Year of Mercy, I think we should prepare to be swamped with contempt<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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 <\/i>adulterers and other unrepentant<\/i> 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 <\/i>to the point of pariah status\u00a0<\/i>for resisting\u00a0<\/i>the cunning plan made apparent by the manipulation at the Synod by the even more shrewd institution of a Jubilee Year of Mercy.<\/p>\n

“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!”<\/i><\/p>\n

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\u00a0ancient <\/i>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’.<\/p>\n

Still, a Year of Mercy. Let’s go with that. Traditionally, according to Wikipedia <\/a><\/b>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’.<\/p>\n

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 <\/i>mercy? How about granting the Sacraments to German Catholics of good faith and good will even if<\/i>they haven’t paid their Church Tax? <\/i>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?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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<\/a> 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.\u00a0 <\/a><\/p>\n

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

Mercy in our Church today, in the Time of Mercy, and now in the Year of Mercy, requires many hands, or fists.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This weekend I took a break from looking twice at things Pope Francis says.\u00a0 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 …<\/span> Read More →<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=511"}],"version-history":[{"count":33,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":546,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511\/revisions\/546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}