As a former journalist, I know how important it is to be objective in reporting any story - to try and present as best as one can the pros and cons of any issue
involved, without expressing your own judgment or opinion about such issues (or, at least, honestly labelling any statements that may amount to your opinion or
judgment on the underlying issues).
Commentators - who are expected to have opinions on the issues they present - are under no such constraints, beyond presenting contrary arguments fairly.
However, some critics of the reigning pope tend to bend over backwards to try and seem objective about him, no matter how well-known their overall
judgment about his anti-Catholic words and deeds, and therefore, they seek to find some merit somehow in his major papal texts despite their appalling
major defects.
I used the argument earlier: Does all of Bergoglio's pious recycling of orthodox Catholic teaching about the matter on hand - family, or marriage, or
holiness, in the latest case - really make up for the parts of his documents where he is heterodox, near-heretical, anti-Catholic and even anti-
Christian? I don't think it does at all, for he is thereby contradicting much of the orthodoxy he faithfully parrots pro forma, thereby manifesting
his utter hypocrisy and dishonesty on matters Catholic.
Carl Olson and Jeff Mirus - not to mention the now-ubiquitous Chris Altieri whose basic attitude is "Bergoglio can be awful, and let me tell you why, but he's still
the pope and give him a break, will you?" - have preceded Robert Royal in this misguided charity towards Bergoglio in re his recent call to holiness.
Indeed, I would gladly offer extra Masses for this pope if he had limited his 'call to holiness' to only the orthodox part of it, leaving out all the unholy
barbs against those who disagree with him and his self-serving justifications of his questionable actions. Because that way, he would have presented
Catholic teaching uncluttered by his unholy biases.
But he can't and does not do that because he is Bergoglio, because he cannot bear to waste the exercise of his papal authority simply reiterating Church
teaching (much of which he privately rejects anyway) without using it as a vehicle to propagate his own views. He obviously believes they are superior
to anything any Catholic thinker has thought of before, and he means to institutionalize these views so that future generations of 'Catholics' will be citing Bergoglio
instead of Augustine or Aquinas...So let's hear Robert Royal's 'balanced' opinion of Gaud-ex, aka 'Goad and insult':
Pope Francis’s call to holiness
by Robert Royal
April 11, 2018
Among the many sad consequences of the divisions Pope Francis has exacerbated within the Church, we’re now forced to live with an undeniable reality: even when he says good things
[none of it original from him] – and there are many such in his new Apostolic Exhortation Gaudete et Exsultate (“Rejoice and Be Glad: On the Call to Holiness in Today’s World”) – they inevitably get drawn into the trench warfare he helped create.
[Of course, Olson, Mirus and Royal don't seem to realize that praising the 'good things' in Bergoglio's documents is like praising a pope for being Catholic, when what else should he be and ought to be? "Oh, so this pope is Catholic, after all! Look what he repeats of authentic Catholic teaching!" DUH! Recycling some Catholic orthodoxy is his obvious battle camouflage, ideological Trojan horse and shameless pretext to call attention to his anti-Catholic, anti-Christian worldview.
He keeps railing against 'gossip' and so-called 'gossipers' but what he is doing is worse. Gossip is usually speaking behind the back of whoever is the target of gossip. Bergoglio is openly and relentlessly denouncing his critics and other Catholics he dislikes with all the armamentarium to which a pope has recourse! Just where is the holiness there, or even the elementary charity?]
His supporters often argue that opposition to the kind of changes he made in a document like Amoris laetitia stems from something like Franciphobia, an irrational dislike.
[No! Speaking for myself, all of my antipathy for him is rationally based on the documented anti-Catholicism of what he has said and done since he became pope (and, it turns out, even before he became pope). Raymond De Souza, Aldo Maria Valli, Phil Lawler, Dwight Longenecker, even Raymond Arroyo, all started out being great enthusiasts of the 'new pope' and his 'new springtime for the Church' - until all the evidence started piling up to show how wrong they were in their initial enthusiasm. One can certainly not call their current critical attitude towards this pope 'irrational'. The thing is once you see the emperor is naked, then you tend to notice everything else laid bare by that nakedness and much of it is never pleasant.]
It’s true that some Catholics now show a kind of blind fury at what they believe he is doing. But for many more, as Ross Douthat explains in his must-read book
To Change the Church, it didn’t have to be this way.
That’s quite evident in how 'Rejoice and Be Glad' invokes many traditional elements of Catholic spirituality and shapes them for current use. The pope states early on that he hasn’t written a comprehensive treatise on holiness, though in his meandering and sometimes self-contradictory way, he touches – helpfully – on almost everything.
The overall aim is exactly right: “The Lord asks everything of us, and in return he offers us true life, the happiness for which we were created. He wants us to be saints and not to settle for a bland and mediocre existence.”
And most of the pages that follow show ways we can all – whatever our state in life – walk that path.
[Then why does he not lead by example, instead of making his 'call to holiness' yet another vehicle to hit out against those who do not agree with his world view! He is not content with his daily bullying from the pulpit at Casa Santa Marta and sundry other ways in which he constantly communicates his flagrant disunity with his Catholic targets. The whole world is his BFF except those members of his flock whom he constantly takes to task without ever uttering a single word to reach out to them!] Pope Francis even warns near the end:
We will not admit the existence of the devil if we insist on regarding life by empirical standards alone, without a supernatural understanding. It is precisely the conviction that this malign power is present in our midst that enables us to understand how evil can at times have so much destructive force. . . .Hence, we should not think of the devil as a myth, a representation, a symbol, a figure of speech or an idea. This mistake would lead us to let down our guard, to grow careless and end up more vulnerable. . . .When we let down our guard, he takes advantage of it to destroy our lives, our families and our communities.
[I find these words incredible, since I am quite convinced that the 'spirit' Bergoglio keeps invoking as dictating everything he has said and done since he became pope is not at all the Third Person of the Holy Trinity but rather Lucifer-Satan. The Holy Spirit has no need to be hubristic as Bergoglio is - since the Holy Spirit is God himself - but Bergoglio's hubris is that which led Lucifer and his band of angels to rebel against God and which keeps the demonic legion from tirelessly seeking to wrest power over human beings from the Creator himself.]
Still, despite such robust warnings, many Catholics now are wary about where such papal sentiments “cash out.” And there are particular problems, some stemming from Francis’s inattention to consistency.
For example:
“It is not healthy to love silence while fleeing interaction with others, to want peace and quiet while avoiding activity, to seek prayer while disdaining service. Everything can be accepted and integrated into our life in this world, and become a part of our path to holiness.”
Quite true, of course. But this might equally describe a problem that doesn’t much exist in the modern world – overly “spiritual” Catholics – or refer to contemplative religious orders. The Church admits of many vocations, including contemplative lives, which elsewhere in the document receive praise.
[See, when you simply parrot orthodox lines, you don't even realize you are contradicting yourself with your own original statements in the same document! Even the most diligent and Bergoglio-devout proofreader would be unable to remedy such errors in the text!]
I, for one, wish the pope had put greater emphasis on the Catholic contemplative tradition, which is on a par with anything Westerners – especially young people – are seeking in Buddhism or Hinduism.
Instead, he spends pages
denouncing contemporary forms of Gnostic and Pelagian heresies, which do exist. But it’s rather obvious that we should be neither too otherworldly nor worldly.
Every reader will have to judge for himself. But for me, amidst the good insights, the pope seems to be wrestling with a world that perhaps once existed, but not very much anymore.
His constant pressure here and elsewhere to turn people away from “abstract” theological knowledge or an excessively individual spirituality, towards an otherwise commendable love of God and neighbor, addresses, exactly, who these days?
It would be one thing if Catholic universities, seminaries, chanceries, charities, hospitals, relief agencies, religious orders, lay groups, etc. were bursting with people rigidly and reductively clinging to bare theological formulas – as Francis often seems to suggest.
The reality, as even secular commenters recognize, is that we’re living in a post-truth, profoundly chaotic world, and Church. To seek stable principles in order not to be swept away by the tsunami of secularism and heterodoxy is not “rigidity,” but sanity.
I’ve said it before, but in our circumstances, Francis’s famous “field hospital” needs doctors who have studied real medicine. Otherwise, they may have a good bedside manner, but they can’t really cure anything.
[And I must once again register my vehement objection to the image of the Church as a 'field hospital', because field hospitals, by their nature, have to send onwards their patients, once their vital signs have been fairly stabilized, to other facilities better able to meet their high-priority health needs. The Church does not do that - it is meant as a refuge for all people needing spiritual assistance, the agency through which they can find God. For intelligent people simply to accept Bergoglio's greatly-flawed metaphor is a measure of how uncritical even they tend to be of this poseur.]
There’s more. Pro-lifers were stung early in the pontificate by his harsh language about Catholics “obsessing” and “insisting” about abortion. They will be once again upset about his own insisting: that social questions such as poverty and immigration are life issues “equally sacred” compared with violent death in the womb and at the end of life.
This version of the “seamless garment” contradicts what the Church has taught since legalized abortion became common. The numbers don’t tell the whole story, of course, but
if – say – American border agents were killing 3000 people daily trying to enter the country (roughly the number of children killed daily in America in the womb), the whole world would be outraged.
Refugees, for example, should be of deep concern to Christians, but how to deal with them is a question of prudential judgments, not an absolute like the prohibition against killing innocent life.
The peoples of the world know that this is more than an argument about welcoming the stranger. All over Europe – from Britain to Poland, Scandinavia to Hungary – there is a populist backlash against easy admission of hard-to-assimilate immigrants, often not refugees fleeing war and oppression, but economic migrants seeking a better life. The United States and even Mexico, police their borders, like Australia, New Zealand, and every sane nation.
In spite of such questions, Catholics will benefit from reading this text. There’s much here in the tradition that it’s good to have presented anew. Besides, perhaps the greatest spiritual challenge for Catholics in the modern world is how to practice an authentic spirituality even amid division – and to find the deep spiritual resources that may help us overcome it. [But why would I or any other Catholic waste my time trying to read Bergoglio when, in the Internet age, I can go straight to Augustine or John of the Cross or Teresa of Avila to read about genuine Catholic spirituality? Whose writings, moreover, are in the superlative prose of truly great thinkers, and not the warmed-over commonplaces of a mediocre unoriginal mind?]
Worth noting here what Donald McClarey says about the parity Bergoglio gives to abortion and mass migration in 'Goad and insult':
One of the keys to understanding this Pontificate is to pay zero attention to what the Pope says and to focus on what he does. The Pope regularly verbally condemns abortion, but his actions are completely the reverse. From kneecapping the Pontifical Academy for Life, to celebrating pro-abort politicians and giving papal awards to them, to having pro-aborts speak at papal conferences, the Pope has routinely given the impression that he could care less about the fight against abortion. For the ordinary Catholic pro-lifer the best they can hope from this Vatican is malign indifference.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 15/04/2018 05:47]