Maike Hickson, who is probably the only native German speaker who promptly translates from the German media for the
Anglophone Catholic blogosphere, has of course not missed the story accompanying the above cover. I had actually started
translating the article itself yesterday but had only gone halfway through it, so here first is Ms. Hickson's report on it...
Yet another German journalist makes
a discerning critique of the pope
by Maike Hickson
April 13, 2017
The string of eloquent German journalists who have gradually lost patience with Pope Francis does not seem to stop. Now we have another well-known and honorably independent journalist, Matthias Matussek, who has added his own name to the list of reflective papal critics.
Matussek, who is an eloquent Catholic conservative critic and book author, currently writes for the well-established Swiss weekly magazine
Die Weltwoche (This week in the world) and the German magazine
FOCUS.
In the April 12 issue of
Die Weltwoche – which displays on its cover a picture of Pope Francis sitting on a swinging wrecking ball
[an image previously used by the UK Spectator] – Matussek characterizes Francis as
“gratuitous, appealing, chumming up” and says that this pope reminds us less and less of a Pontifex Maximus. [I translated that trio of adjectives – ‘beliebig, gefällig, anbiedernd’ – as ‘arbitrary, accommodating and ingratiating’ as the most appropriate of the multiple synonyms each word has, in the context of who Bergoglio has shown himself to be these past four years].
With reference to a recent sharp critique of the pope by the British weekly Spectator, “Has the Pope Gone Crazy?”, Matussek proposes to answer the question himself:
“This [query] is not so far off as one would think: in fact, this Argentine Pontifex Maximus has uttered so many confusing, contradictory, and politically provocative things that the members of his press corps have a hard time keeping up with corrections and then recommending certain interpretations. Without judging the truthfulness of the matter here and now, frankly, how does one, for example, moderate this formulation: “Readers of newspapers are inclined toward coprophagy” – i.e., the lubricious consumption of excrement?”
To support his point, Matussek attentively – and with a vivid and sprightly style – enumerates in the following seven pages of his article many of the contradictory scandals that we here at OnePeterFive have extensively – and regrettably – reported on; thus a list of Matussek’s topics should now suffice:
– the scandal that Pope Francis reinstated the perverted priest, Father Mauro Inzoli (“Don Mercedes”) after he had been suspended;
– the pope’s outbursts of temper in smaller circles, as well as his curses, crude expressions and “crudities that are better off not published”; the fact that Pope Francis humiliates his closest collaborators – and this in an increasing fashion;
– the costly decision of the pope to live at the guest house Santa Marta which is a “method of control, in order to get informed at lunch about the happenings in the diverse camps in the Vatican;
– his harsh treatment of his opponents; for example, Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke;
– his decision not to answer the justified Four Cardinals’ Dubia;
– the fact that Pope Francis often makes new laws for the Catholic Church from his own lunch table, rather than going through the channels of the Roman Curia (Matussek quotes here a high-ranking leader in the Curia);
– Francis’s problematic recent comment that it would be better to be an atheist than to be a “hypocritical Catholic”;
– the reaction of the Romans, even to the point of putting up satirical posters about Pope Francis (“The base is mobilizing against Francis - nobody understands him any more.”);
– Pope Francis as the “posterboy of the politically correct way of thinking”;
– that he has twice been on the cover of the magazine Rolling Stone;
– his stopping Cardinal Robert Sarah in his attempt to promote traditional liturgical forms, such as the praying of the Holy Mass ad orientem;
– that the Wall Street Journal declared (in December of 2016) Francis to be the “leader of the global left”;
– his pretentious way ofshowing off his humility by driving in a small used car in front of the White House during his visit to the U.S.;
– his taking Muslim refugee families back to Rome with him, after his visit at Lesbos, but not any Christian refugee families;
– that Pope Francis does not appear to care too much about his own religion (In Matussek’s eyes, the sentence of Our Lord “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life; nobody will come to my Father but through Me”
(John 14:6) does not seem to mean very much to the pope.)
– the recent participation of Paul Ehrlich, the promoter of abortion and population control, in a Vatican conference to which he was expressly invited;
– his inclination to give scope to liberalizing progressive ideas such as female priests and the abandonment of priestly celibacy;
– his “Who am I to Judge?” with regard to the homosexuals (“Who else will judge [immoral practices]?” answers Matussek.)
– his “agenda which could lead to the dissolution of the
unam sanctam catholicam Ecclesiam given to us “by God,” against whose very gates themselves “hell shall not prevail.”
– Pope Francis and his ‘democratic’ questionnaires about marriage sent out to the world, instead of first and mainly referring to the Bible;
– his “angry” demand to all European countries to “open all borders for immigrants”;
– his neglect of Catholic doctrine - inspite of the fact that the world today increasingly demeans man and lowers him to the level of animals or even plants (Matussek quotes G.K. Chesterton’s “trees have no dogmas; beets are extremely magnanimous”!);
At the end of his breath-taking and spirited – but somewhat disheartening – overview of the recent papal scandals and misdeeds, the German journalist comes back to the truths of our Faith. Matussek defends the Catholic Faith and its truths against his own pope and reminds us that this Faith has existed visibly since the Incarnation of Jesus Christ and His Nativity.
He also explains to his non-Catholic readership that, since the Second Vatican Council, the traditional Mass as it had developed over centuries was “destroyed,” “altars were cut down” and “brutal blocks of sacrifice were put into the spaces of the altar.” Church art decayed into “semiotic delicacies”; the priest addressed the congregation “like a TV moderator”, celebrating Mass “so that people could look at his fingers, just like with a magician in a third-class variety show.”
In light of all this destruction of spiritual and visual beauty, Matussek concludes with piercing words: “The former barricade stormers - all of them now in their eighties and beyond – still hold on to their juvenile nonsense of modernization and adaptation to the Zeitgeist.” With gratitude, Matussek remembers here the act of Pope Benedict XVI to free the Tridentine Latin Mass which, since then, has attracted especially the young. “Mystery returns into the emptied out modern churches, and with it, genuine adoration and meditation.”
Matussek ends his Rundumschlag (tour de force) on a positive note, proposing to Pope Francis that he start working in the direction of restoring Tradition, rather than speculating as to whether “I [Pope Francis] might now go down the history as the pope who split the Church” – as reported by
Der Spiegel last December. He adds a passage from the second letter of St. Paul to Timothy, where St. Paul instructs his disciple to “teach the Faith in season and out of season.”
Dare we hope that such wholehearted and faith-inspired articles might also help Pope Francis to convert, after a deep and candid examination of conscience?
For a taste of Mr. Matussek's colorful prose, here is the part I have translates so far:
A pope of sorts
Arbitrary, accommodating, ingratiating – Francis, the pope of the Zeitgeist (spirit of the times)
is less and less one’s idea of a Pontifex Maximus, even as he himself has remarked that for many,
he is seen as the cause of the division in the Church.
by Matthias Matussek
Translated from
DIE WELTWOCHE
April 12, 2017
With refreshing directness, the British weekly
Spectator recently asked on its title page, “Has the Pope gone mad?” Which is not so far-fetched as one might think: In fact, since the beginning of his pontificate, the Argentine pope has generated so much confusion, contradiction and partisan provocations that his media-minders cannot keep up with corrections and explanations of ‘what he really meant to say’. For example, how could they ‘moderate’ a formulation like ‘media consumers tend to coprophagia’ (eating excrement)?
And how to explain contradictions such as this: At the beginning of the year, he called on the bishops of the universal Church to adopt a zero-tolerance policy towards any abuse of young people. Something which his predecessor always demanded and carried out.
But one of the over 800 priests and bishops defrocked by Benedict XVI was the Italian priest Mauro Inzoli, nicknamed ‘don Mercedes’ because of his predilection for luxury cars. But he also had a weakness for minors.
Two years after the suspension of his priestly faculties by Benedict XVI, "Don Mercedes" was back on the Roman scene. Pope Francis had lifted his penalty. But when the pedophile priest renewed his swineries even from the confessional, Italian authorities intervened and asked the pope for cooperation in their prosecution of Inzoli. But ‘zero-tolerance’ Francis apparently declined. It seems Inzoli is a friend to some of the pope’s closest friends, and well, ‘my friend’s friend is also my friend’. A rule that applies to most friendly relations in Italy.
And enemies are enemies – and it is really going very bad for this pope’s enemies.
One hears that in his small circle of close associates, this pope gives vent to strong expressions, curses, and unprintable ribaldry, and that recently his outbreaks of rage have become more frequent. It is said he loves to humiliate those around him.
Humiliation, he apparently believes, is an important spiritual experience, as though it were a lesson he has drawn from the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola.
Perhaps he should have taken another rule more seriously. That which prohibits Jesuits from aiming for higher ecclesiastical office - unless the Pope expressly requires them in individual cases. Then they would be bound by the rule of obedience. But how do you deal with a Jesuit who has become pope?
Vatican insiders report that, unlike with Pope Benedict, very few refer to Bergoglio – the secular name of the current Successor of Peter – as ‘Holy Father’, and when they do, it is in an ironic way. As in,
“The Holy Father has declared, in his immense wisdom, that people love to eat shit”.
The fact that he does not live in the papal apartment three stories above the Bernini colonnade but rather – at considerable financial expense – in the Casa Santa Marta, the Vatican’s four-star hotel, we now believe is not really a sign of modesty and humility, but rather a method of control. In that it enables him to be better informed about what is happening among the various factions in the Vatican.
And this pope makes short shrift of his enemies. He relieved the conservative Cardinal Raymond Burke of his Curial office as Prefect of the Apostolic Signatura (i.e, the Church’s ‘Chief Justice’). Recently
[after unceremoniously relieving Burke of his demotion-appointment to be Patron of the Order of Malta – Bergoglio simply appointed a Vatican bishop to take over full powers as the pope’s envoy to the Order, which is the function of the Patron], he sent Burke off to the Pacific island of Guam “to adjudicate an extremely complicated case of abuse that required great expertise”
[The Bishop of Guam is accused of misconduct in dealing with clerical sex abuses].
What brought on Bergoglio’s ire against Burke? Because with three other cardinals, he has opposed the Bergoglian liberalization of Church practices regarding communion for remarried divorcees.
Catholics know that marriage is a sacrament, a sign especially in our times when nearly one of every two marriages ends in divorce. The Catechism of the Catholic Church considers marriage – in which the spouses pledge to be faithful to each other ‘for better for for worse’ – indissoluble for three reasons.
First, because the essence of marital love is total and unconditional surrender of the self to each other; second, because it reflects God’s own unconditional faith to his creatures; and third, because it represents Jesus’s gift of himself to the Church with his death on the Cross. And so, a Catholic marriage is not just church bells and wedding cake, but a sacrament, a consecrated act of faith that consolidates the Gospel passage “What God has brought together, let no man take asunder”
(Mt 19,6).
At first glance, Francis's document, "Amoris Laetitia," would seem to confirm traditional Church morality. The loosening of the marriage vow is hidden in a footnote with proverbial Jesuitic cunning, one is tempted to say.
It was logical that some cardinals saw the need for clarification. They formulated the DUBIA, questions answerable by a simple Yes or No, whereby the pope could easily dispel the doubts related to the five points that they wish to be clarified.
One of the DUBIA signatories is German Cardinal Walter Brandmüller, a Church historian of undisputed rank. He told
Der Spiegel that Sacred Scripture is not a self-service cafeteria. “According to St. Paul, we [bishops] are administrators of the divine mysteries, but without the right to dispose of them as we please”. Meanwhile, he and his three colleagues have not been answered by the pope
[who, for all intents and purposes, has made it clear he does not intend to answer them at all, nor the DUBIA directly].
In any case, the Curia is not finding it easy with this ‘Sponti-Hirt’
[the German word for spontaneous is spontan, so it’s a portmanteau word for ‘spontaneous shepherd’, or more precisely, ‘shepherd of the spontaneous’] who loves formlessness and who seems to thoroughly despise his Curial associates.
A high-ranking Curial official says it has come to a point when the pope prefers to decide on Church legislation over lunch with his associates, bypassing Curial committees.
Nor can the Curia forget the way in which, at his last Christmas address to them as in the one he gave in 2014, he denounced the entire Curia as lazy, hypocritical and negligent of their duties, calling them Pharisees, which seems to be his idea of being ‘Jesus-like’.
Now, the chief pastor and teacher of the Catholic Church has declared that is “better to be an atheist than a Catholic who leads a hypocritical double life”. Meanwhile he has described himself ‘a sinner and fallible’ in public, which in itself sounds hypocritical. Should he not rather fight his own hypocrisy, and as a pastor, and ensure that even the most hypocritical ‘atheists’ can see the way back to the Church, to the faith and to truth?
Not a few cardinals are now concerned about possible successors to this pope who has said that he does not think he will be pope for longer than four or five years – a deadline that is due.
But meanwhile, the protests against him have reached the streets, so to speak. Several weeks ago, central Rome was papered with posters carrying a mocking message for the pope, as Romans have for centuries expressed themselves against popes and other leaders. It is as if the base is launching a mobile move against Francis, in ways not less cunning than he.
Before his election, which had been driven by German-speaking cardinals and Benedict-adversaries, his electors ought to have asked questions in his home diocese of Buenos Aires which he ran without gentleness or humor, pushing his policies with the subtlety of a butcher's knife.
In Rome, his pontificate began on a note that was almost ludicrous, greeting the waiting crowd with 'Buona sera' which they cheered enthusiastically. And he was quickly portrayed as a humble simple man, soon to be built up in the secular world as the poster boy of political correctness.
In fact, he has just made his second appearance on the cover of Rolling Stone, a publication not known for citing the Catechism of the Church. This time, he is quoted for his line "This economy kills!" in a flourishing capitalist media enterprise supporting the multibillion-dollar music industry of the United States.
[His first Rolling Stone appearance was a Man of the Year tribute for the line "Who am I to judge?" about homosexuality.]...
[I am only halfway through my translation. To be continued...]