Another belated post of a Maureen Mullarkey essay...
Notes on our Pope of Peace
May 29, 2017
In Jorge Bergoglio’s lexicon, the words love and peace are vacant of meaning. Love dwindles down to nice feelings; peace shrinks to an ostrich-like refusal to acknowledge encroaching peril.
On the flight back to Rome from Fatima, our shepherd delivered this
reversal of reality to the court press:
An atheist said to me: “I am an atheist”. He didn’t say what nationality he was or where he came from. He spoke in English, so I couldn’t tell and I didn’t ask him. “I ask you a favour: tell Christians that they must love Muslims more”. That is a message of peace.
When he speaks of peace, the pope is directing himself to the West. He is pacifying any lingering impulse — among Europeans especially — to defend themselves, their children, and their civilization against an enemy rising.
The enemy is ancient; the papal memory, short. His invocations of peace are little more than the mewlings of an unsuspecting sacrificial goat.
Pope Francis is keen to exhibit solicitude for Muslims en bloc. Does that unhealthy habit qualify him for comparison to women who make marriage proposals to serial killers in prison?
That question came to mind when I read the opening paragraph of Theodore Dalrymple’s
City Journal review of Paul Hollander’s new book on why intellectuals (and aspirants to the category) fall in love with dictators and totalitarian regimes:
Imprisoned serial killers of women are often the object of marriage proposals from women who know nothing of them except their criminal record. This curious phenomenon indicates the depths to which self-deception can sink in determining human action.
The women making such offers presumably believe that an essential core of goodness subsists in the killers and that they are uniquely the ones to bring it to the surface. They thereby also distinguish themselves from other women, whose attitude to serial killers is more conventional and unthinkingly condemnatory. They believe they see further and deeper, and feel more strongly, than their conventional sisters.
What better way to describe Bergoglio’s dogged refusal to grapple with the Islamic worldview and Islam’s theological imperative to violence?
Elimination of the hated kafir is a binding requisite of the faith; terror is its sacrament. The Bergoglian mind, a cocoon of self-congratulation, claims for itself the gnosis required to tame Islam and achieve universal brotherhood.
Bergoglio’s pontificate has taught us that he sees farther and deeper than you and I. And how greatly he feels! For his trip to Egypt, our Pope of Hearts adopted the moniker “Pope of Peace.” By addressing
Laudato Sí to every person on earth, Francis insinuated himself as Pope of the Entire Planet.
He is the agent of Mercy, an open spigot of empathy with the enemies of his own faith and the civilization that houses it.
Francis has a taste for lethal leftists and a lunatic faith in his personal capacity to piece a fractured world back together again. By his accounting, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men should take lessons from him. His pontificate is a gateway to Eden. But Eden is only for some.
Outside the gate are Catholics with faces like “pickled peppers,” and ones who not share his politics or preen in front of the same mirror. These are the
small-hearted “museum mummies,” “slaves of superficiality,” “self-absorbed neo-Pelagians,” “Creed-reciting parrot Christians,” or, most recently, “ideologues of doctrine.”
Yet while he derides traditional — i.e. doctrinally and liturgically conservative — Catholics on one hand, he throws them a bone with the other. It is primarily these traditionalists
(“Christians with all the paperwork, all the certificates in order”) who maintain devotion to Fatima. For all his dislike of them, Papa Francis has just pitched some heavy paperwork at these “rosary counters.”
He certified the two Fatima tykes, Jacinta and Francisco Marto, as saints. And he did so on the high ground of heroic virtue, a quality these children never lived long enough to exhibit.
The youngest non-martyrs ever to be canonized in all of Church history, they died quietly in their beds of Spanish flu. Francisco, just short of his eleventh birthday, and Jacinta, ten, were simply two among tens of millions killed by the 1918 pandemic. (
Within a week of Francis’s visit to Fatima, Our Lady of Fatima Church in the archdiocese of Hyderabad, consecrated on May 13, was vandalized by a mob of one hundred. Its crucifix was destroyed and statues smashed.
Sajan Geery, president of the Global Council of Indian Christians stated:
"The growing hostility to the Christian faith and the intolerance towards the Christian faithful is an alarm signal".
It is a signal that Jorge Bergoglio gives little evidence of heeding. Were the destroyers Muslim or Hindu? [The majority of Hyderabadis are Hindu; Muslims comprise the largest minority.] AsiaNews does not say.
But what the desecration does tell us is that a pope would serve his office more credibly by enjoining adherents of non-biblical religions to love Christians more.