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Sandro Magister has not deigned to remark so far on his inclusion in the Tornielli-Galeazzi 'Bergoglio enemies list' - his latest blog posts someone's
reaction to Rocco Buttiglione's defense of AL. But his topic and tone for this week's Espresso/www.chiesa analysis is answer enough, I think!
So many errors, Your Holiness! And some must be red-pencilled!
Francis likes his talk freewheeling, with all the risks that go with it.
Here is a review of his latest whoppers, a dozen in four months. The most sensational with China
by Sandro Magister
ROME, October 19, 2016 – Last June,
www.chiesa registered and analyzed a certain number of misinterpretations, gaffes, memory slips and/or errors in the discourses of Pope Francis:
> The Pope Is Not Infallible. Here Are Eight Proofs (13.6.2016)
Since then, Jorge Mario Bergoglio has again committed two of the errors pointed out there.
The first was that of flattering Cardinal Christoph Schönborn with a role that he has never held: “secretary” of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
The first time the pope 'promoted' him to this role was April 16, during the press conference on the return flight from the island of Lesbos. And that time, in transcribing the pope’s words in the official bulletin, the Vatican press office had corrected the mistake, replacing the word “secretary” with “member.”
But on June 16, in a discourse to the priests of Rome at the cathedral of Saint John Lateran, the pope repeated his error. In telling the priests how to interpret “Amoris Laetitia” correctly, he advised them to pay attention to the “great theologian who was secretary of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith, Cardinal Schönborn.”
This second time, in the official transcription of Francis's words, the error was not corrected.
A bit further on, however, in that same discourse of the pope, a corrective “ex post” intervention was made: In describing the episode of Jesus and the adulterous woman, Francis is supposed to have said, according to the official transcription: “And Jesus sort of plays the fool, he lets time go by, he writes on the ground. . . .”
But in reality the pope had said: “And Jesus sort of plays the 'scemo'...,” an expression that sounds rather harsh in Italian (comparable to "retard").
[Actually, the online English translation given for 'fare lo scemo', the Italian expression JMB used, is 'play the fool', but scemo itself means idiot or fool, and as an adjective, it means dimwitted, dull or stupid. So yes, a retard, if you will. But obviously, JMB was not saying Jesus was any of these, only that he pretended not to understand what the Pharisees were asking him... ]
The second relapse has to do with an imaginary translation - coined in the West and fashionable in the United States on the lips of politicians - of the Chinese word “
wei-ji,” conflict, according to which this is made up of two ideograms, one of which stands for “risk” [wei] and the other for “opportunity” [ji]. But Sinologists have pointed out that 'ji' has many meanings, of which the one with the right context in 'wei-ji' is 'critical point', and that 'opportunity' is not conveyed by a single ideogram but by two, 'ji-hui'.]
The first time the pope presented this “hearsay”
[really more of an entrenched and widespread error] was on April 24, in a conversation with members of Focolare. And he repeated it a second time on June 18 on a visit to the community of Villa Nazareth.
But then Francis has gone on to new mistakes to be added to the list. One of these has created a certain amount of discussion and has been corrected in the official transcript of the pope’s words.
In the already-cited discourse of June 16 at Saint John Lateran, Francis at a certain point said that he maintained that “most of our sacramental marriages are null,” because the spouses “do not have the awareness” of what they are doing. In the official transcription, “most” was scaled down to “some.”
Few noted, however, that immediately afterward in the same discourse, Bergoglio expressed a somewhat conflicting opinion. After having said, in fact, that he holds most sacramental marriages to be null, he said that on the other hand
he maintains as “true marriages,” endowed with “matrimonial grace,” the simple cohabitation practiced in rural parts of Argentina, where - he explained - they start families young but marry in church only later in life.
Another questionable opinion that Francis loves to repeat concerns a [columnar] capital in the medieval basilica of Vézelay, in France.
“On that capital,” the pope has said on at least three different occasions, “on one side there is Judas hanged, with the eyes open, the tongue out, and on the other side is the Good Shepherd taking him with him. And if we look carefully, with attention, the face of the Good Shepherd, the lips on one side are sad, but on the other side they form a smile.”
In reality, no art historian identifies Christ as the second figure, someone who is simply taking the hanged man away for burial. But the pope likes to interpret it this way, in order to confirm the mercy of God for every sinner.
[And to underscore his bizarre notion that Judas was never condemned by God, and that in fact, as he and his ghosts write in AL, [B]"No one is condemned forever, because that is not the logic of the Gospel" - never mind how many times the Gospels cite Jesus speaking about eternal damnation.]
[A French specialist in medieval iconography wrote Beatrice on her site www.benoit-et-moi 2016 last June to give a definitive answer to the puzzle of the Vezelay 'capital', which illustrates one of the miracles of St. James (Santiago) for the edification of pilgrims who undertook the pilgrimage to his tomb in Compostela starting off from the Cistercian basilica of Ste. Marie Madeleine (Mary Magdalene) in Vezelay.
Her explanation bears a full translation which I will do later, as a separate post, but in effect,the central figures are neither Judas nor the Good Shepherd, but simply a wicked innkeeper hanged for his crime of accusing two German pilgrims (father and son) of stealing from him in order to appropriate their assets. The father was condemned to hang but the son offered to be hung instead so his father could finish the pilgrimage to Compostela, where he prayed at the tomb of the saint.
Returning home 30 days later, he wished to pray where his son had been hung, and the corpse spoke to him saying he should not grieve but rejoice for he was now with St. James, but that he should seek justice. When he reported all this to the authorities, the innkeeper was arrested and hanged. The son's body was returned to the father and given the honors of a saint.
Therefore, the supposed Judas figure is really the wicked innkeeper who is punished for his sins and goes to hell, while the other part of the capital shows the dead son on the shoulders of his father who is all set to bury him. The son is shown in accordance with medieval iconography which represented souls ascending to heaven as completely nude, hands joined in prayer... Perhaps, someone should send JMB a copy of the Codex Callistinus, the 12th century Book on The Miracles of St. James, where this story is found.]
But he has insisted on his wrong interpretation
[though I don't think he would ever admit to being wrong on anything!] on June 16 with the priests of Rome, on August 2 with the bishops of Poland, and on October 2 with journalists on the return flight from Azerbaijan to Rome.
Moreover, Bergoglio sometimes falls into linguistic misunderstandings. For example, with the word “estracomunitario,” which in Italy simply indicates someone who does not belong to the European community.
Francis, however, is convinced that this word has an underpinning of cruelty: “That very cruelty which turns you, who are from another country, into an ‘extra-comunitario’: they take you out of the community, they do not welcome you. Which is something against which we must fight very much.” The pope said this to young Italians on July 28 in Krakow, during world youth day.
Still other times the error is descriptive. For example when on October 12, in addressing the conference of “Christian World Communions,” Francis cited the martyrdom of the “
Coptic Orthodox friars slaughtered on the shores of Libya.”
[We've all seen photos and videos of that seaside execution - if the murdered Copts had been made to wear execution hoods, which they were not, the pope might have had an excuse to mistake them for 'friars' (not that there are even any friars as such in the Coptic Church)!]
Who were indeed Coptic Egyptians, but laymen, not “friars.” No correction was made
post facto to this part of the address, in the official transcription.
Then there was the case of the Spanish trans-sexual whose story Bergoglio told during the return flight from Azerbaijian to Rome on October 2. The story told by the pope differs on various points from the one told by the transsexual after in his audience with the pope, which took place on January 24, 2015, together with his “wife.”
But in recounting the story, the pope appeared to take it as a matter of course that absolution and communion should be given to “married” trans-sexuals, remaining silent on the fact that the applicable discipline of the Church does not permit sacramental marriage for trans-sexuals.
More than an omission, here Francis has indicated a deliberate break with this discipline, but without making a declaration.
See, in this regard, the commentary of Christian Spaemann, a psychiatrist by profession and the son of the illustrious German Catholic philosopher Robert Spaemann:
> Papa Francesco e i transessuali. Le obiezioni di Spaemann
On another occasion the pope made a mistaken prediction, with the result of then finding himself on a collision course with an entire episcopate, that of Colombia.
The error regarded the outcome of the October 2 referendum on the agreement between the Colombian state and the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.
Francis, speaking on September 26 at Santa Marta with representatives of the World Jewish Council and predicting that the Colombian people would ratify the peace agreement, went out on a limb, praising supporters of the agreement as persons who “risk everything for peace,” and dismissing its opponents as persons who “risk everything to continue the war, and this wounds the soul.”
Except that the Colombians voted NO, and among the opponents was a large part of the Colombian Church, also desirous of peace but not under the conditions established in the accord.
So much so that for the signing of the document on September 27, Cardinal Parolin came hurrying in from Rome, but no bishop was present, and the episcopal conference called on Colombians to vote for or against the agreement according to their conscience.
Fortunately those words of the pope did not go into the official records, since they were spoken in a private meeting. But they were made known by participants at the meeting:
> Papa Francesco dialoga con membri del Consiglio ebraico mondiale
An attempt at repairing the rift was made by the president of the episcopal conference of Colombia, Luis Augusto Castro Quiroga, who told Vatican Radio:“It’s not that some say yes to peace and others say no. Those who say no consider that the agreement must be corrected in some points, but they too want peace. This is not a case of war and peace.”
But perhaps the most sensational error into which Bergoglio has stumbled lately concerns China.
On October 2, on the return flight from Azerbaijian to Rome, Francis gave a couple of news items that at the time no one was able to verify.
The first: “The Vatican Museums have presented an exhibition in China, the Chinese will present another at the Vatican.”
The second: “The other day there was a conference at the [Pontifical] Academy of Sciences on ‘Laudato Si’,’ and there was a Chinese delegation from the president. And the Chinese president sent me a gift.”
On October 7, however, the agency “Églises d'Asie,” the authoritative voice of the Paris Foreign Missions Society, published a thoroughly documented note that demolished both news items:
> Le président Xi Jinping a-t-il vraiment envoyé un cadeau au pape François? (Did President Xi Jinping really send a gift to Pope Francis?)
To begin with, the Vatican Museums did indeed organize an exhibition, from February 5 to May 2 of this year, on the papacy, the Catholic mission to the Orient, the liturgy and the sacraments. Not in the People’s Republic of China, however, but in the house of ... 'the enemy' to Beijing: in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan.
As for the presumed gift from the Chinese president, a detailed reconstruction made by “Églises d'Asie” ends up defining it as nothing less than “unthinkable.”
On October 11, the agency Asia News of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions in Milan conveniently made the reconstruction by “Églises d'Asie” available to readers of Italian, English, Spanish, and Chinese:
> Églises d'Asie, “Did President Xi Jinping really send a gift to Pope Francis?"
[Maybe that was why AsiaNews - for all its yeoman's job of dutifully translating and reporting promptly everything this pope says and does - was included in the Tornielli-Galeazzi 'enemies list'!]
P.S. It's one thing for a pope to say erroneous things out of sheer misinformation - even 'the perfect pope' JMB is supposed to be can't be expected to know everything - or even to say some harmless white lies, once in a while.
But to distort or truncate Jesus's words or to adapt facts to suit your own version or interpretation or wishful thinking of what these facts ought to be - even if, and especially because, you are pope - is simple dishonesty... when we're speaking of everything else but what Jesus said according to the Gospels. In which case, it is sheer blasphemy, an even more fundamental sin than heresy or apostasy. But, of course, none of the Bergoglio-besotted incense bearers would ever see it that way - how he is, in effect, continually flouting the First Commandment.
His most objectionable megalomania is to think he knows better than Jesus and has license to tinker around with what Jesus said and did to suit his own purposes. If you use the word 'God' which Jesus is, instead of Jesus, then Bergoglio is re-creating the Original Sin of Adam over and over.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 21/10/2016 00:20]