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Was the pope about to tumble headlong into the aisle?
It can be frustrating for someone like me who has been convinced for months and months that Jorge Bergoglio is, very simply, anti-Catholic
and has no business being pope at all, when veteran Vatican watchers like Sandro Magister continue to appear giving this pope the benefit
of the doubt even when they see and criticize all the individual and cumulative facts that make up his core anti-Catholicism. All right,
perhaps it's residual 'reverence' for the office of the pope that's operative here, but to call Bergoglio 'a low-intensity pope' as Magister
does here is outrageous and gross understatement. Even to extrapolate it to the fact that Magister means a pope who practices 'low intensity'
Catholicism is an understatement, when in many documented instances, including AL, he has been no Catholic at all but downright anti-Catholic!
A 'low-intensity' pope
as the times demand
April 30, 2017
The most updated diagnoses of the religious phenomenon in the West converge in defining it as “low-intensity.” Fluid, with no more dogmas, without binding authorities. Highly visible, but irrelevant in the public arena.
Even Catholicism is reshaping itself this way. And the pontificate of Francis is adapting in a spectacular way to this new phenomenology, in its successes and in its limitations.
As a good Jesuit, Jorge Mario Bergoglio instinctively goes along with the signs of the times. He is not even trying to stem the growing diversification within the Church. On the contrary, he is encouraging it.
He is not responding to the cardinals who submit “doubts” to him and ask him to bring clarity.
He is giving free rein to even the most reckless opinions, like those of the new general of the Jesuits, the Venezuelan Arturo Sosa Abascal, according to whom it is not possible to know what Jesus really said “because there were no recorders.”
And he himself has been telling some whoppers, without any fear of toppling the fundamental articles of the Creed.
Last March 17, during an audience at the Apostolic Palace, to explain what he means by “unity in difference” he even said that “inside the Holy Trinity they’re all arguing behind closed doors, but on the outside they give the picture of unity.”
On April 19, in a General Audience at Saint Peter’s Square, he said that the death of Jesus is a historical fact but his resurrection is not, it is only an act of faith.
[NO! I don't think the Catholic media ever reported this or I would have noticed! It has even escaped Antonio Socci! This has got to be the final nail in the coffin of Jorge Bergoglio's Catholicism. If the pope can deny the objective reality of the Resurrection - which is the founding principle of Christianity - then is he even Christian???...
So I turned to the Vatican bulletin reporting the April 19 GA catechesis,
press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/2017/04/19/1704...
in which he is indeed quoted as saying:
Because faith is born from the resurrection. To accept that Christ is dead, that He died crucified, is not an act of faith, it is a historical fact. However, believing that He rose is [an act of faith]. Our faith is born on Easter morning.
I've checked the Italian original - and the translation is exact. He does say beforehand, after citing St. Paul's account in 1 Corinthians, that "This is the fact: He died, He was buried, He rose and He appeared. That is, Jesus is living! This is the kernel of the Christian message." So maybe that attenuates the starkness of saying afterwards "Believing that he rose is an act of faith" and therefore unlike his crucifixion and death, it is not historical fact?
Let us attribute his statement that the Resurrection is an act of faith and not historical fact to his sloppy thinking which results in sloppy language - which may also explain why no one in the Catholic media or blogosphere sat up and took notice of the very anti-Catholic idea that the Resurrection was not historical fact despite the eyewitness accounts of the Risen Lord, which the pope cites in the catechesis! What were his apparitions then - mass hallucinations on the part of followers who believed his divinity???]
On April 4, in a homily at Santa Marta, he said that on the Cross “Jesus made himself devil, serpent.”
And these are only the latest of a not-small collection of reckless statements, which however glide away like water on marble, without effect on public opinion both Catholic and not, for which this pope continues to be popular in part because he will say anything, with tranquility.
Luca Diotallevi, one of the most observant sociologists of religion, has identified a number of similarities between the pontificate of Francis and the Donald Trump phenomenon, among which is a shared resentment against the establishment. [No, excuse me, that's a copout. It's one thing to resent the establishment, but when you are pope, you are not free to tinker with the deposit of faith that you are dutybound to protect, uphold and defend. But tinker and tamper is what Bergoglio has been doing - and increasingly daring now, in questioning or putting the wrong spin on the words of the Lord in the Gospel, and now this, to say like the most pitiless of Christian critics that the Resurrection is an act of faith but not historical fact. Surely, the entire Catholic blogosphere would have descended in mighty outrage on any other priest or prelate who claimed that, in any way! Yet Bergoglio keeps getting a pass!]
The price has been paid by the Vatican Curia, but above all by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which today is a shadow of its former self, when it watched over even the slightest word that came from the pen and mouth of a pope. Francis ignores it altogether.
The national episcopates have also disappeared from the news, starting with the Italian episcopal conference, once powerful, now annihilated.
The metamorphosis of this “low-intensity” Catholicism is glaringly evident in the political arena. The United States and Italy are two examples.
In both countries, Catholics are present in large numbers and at the highest levels, more than in the past. In the United States vice-president Mike Pence is Catholic, as is Trump’s “chief political strategist,” Steve Bannon. Five of the nine supreme court justices and 38 percent of governors are Catholic. 31.4 percent of congressmen are Catholic, ten percent more than among the adult citizens of the country as a whole.
And yet, in spite of this solid presence of Catholics in politics, it is not the case that the inalienable principles of the Church on the matters of divorce, abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality have a proportional influence on the laws. On the contrary, they are ever more removed.
In Italy it is the same way. All of the recent heads of state, from Mario Monti to Enrico Letta to Matteo Renzi to Paolo Gentiloni, have been practicing Catholics, as is the current president of the republic, Sergio Mattarella. A large number of cabinet members and parliamentarians of all the parties are Catholics.
But the Church’s influence in the political sphere is almost nil, as proven by the laws on homosexual unions and the end of life.
A “political Catholicism” on the level of a Sturzo or a De Gasperi is long gone. But we also have a pope now whose deliberate intention is to hold himself and the Church back from any high-intensity engagement in political issues that divide consciences. And this is another reason why he is so popular. [It's one thing to focus so singlemindedly on a secular agenda as Bergoglio does, because he is a leftie political activist before he is 'pope', but to question the historical fact of the Resurrection is simply unheard-of for a pope - which raises the question of why he is even pope (or rather, why he was ever elected pope. But God has his reasons...]
Magister used the ff photo to illustrate his article:
He explains: The first person on the right is the Argentine theologian Emilce Cuda, a professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica of Buenos Aires, very close to Archbishop Víctor Manuel Fernández, rector of the same university and a prominent advisor and ghostwriter for Pope Francis.
She is the one who reported the words of the pope on the Most Holy Trinity, within which “they’re all arguing behind closed doors, but on the outside they give the picture of unity,” spoken on March 17 during an audience with the group Catholic Theological Ethics in The World Church, to which she belongs. They were made public by the English vaticanista Austen Ivereigh, the trusted biographer of Jorge Mario Bergoglio.
For the category of “low-intensity religion” as applied to the new forms of the religious phenomenon, see the essays by Bryan S. Turner, "Religion and Modern Society,” Cambridge University Press, 2011, and by Luca Diotallevi: "Fine corsa. La crisi del cristianesimo come religione confessionale,” Edizioni Dehoniane, Bologna, 2017, this latter with a chapter on “Italian Catholicism at the time of Francis.”[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 01/05/2017 00:50] |