Amazon's blurb:
Faithful Catholics are beginning to realize it’s not their imagination. Pope Francis has led them on a journey from joy to unease to alarm and even
a sense of betrayal. They can no longer pretend that he represents merely a change of emphasis in papal teaching. Assessing the confusion sown
by this pontificate, Lost Shepherd explains what’s at stake, what’s not at stake, and how loyal believers should respond.
Apparently, this book has been written about in some quarters as early as September 2016 - but since that includes my lost month and a half of Forum work, I failed to see any of that. It will not be out till next month, but it's getting some play already in the Catholic blogosphere, though to my knowledge, the author himself has yet to plug it on his catholic culture.org column.
Christopher Ferrara devotes a long piece to it at year's end 2017 - or rather, to the perceptions brought to bear on the book and its author by two Vatican II Catholics who are proud of being Vatican II Catholics (Ferrara calls them neo-Catholics, and he includes Lawler among them). Which is the paradox of their arguing how many devils can dance on the point of a needle just to keep from admitting that Lawler is merely writing what many traditionalist Catholics have been saying and writing from almost Day 1 of this disastrous pontificate...
Quick background: Both Keating and Armstrong are prominent Catholic apologists, Keating (born 1950) was founder and former president of Catholic Answers, a lay apostolate for apologetics and evangelization; and Armstrong (born 1958) has a blogsite that has published more than 2500 articles defending Christianity. Both have authored several books on Catholic apologetics - Armstrong has 20, Keating has 15.
The importance of not being us
by Christopher A. Ferrara
December 31, 2017
While Francis sows chaos and subverts the Church, three neo-Catholic figures bicker over whether one of them has become a “radical Catholic reactionary” because he has recognized that Francis is sowing chaos and subverting the Church. If only it were a joke...
Someone has brought to our attention a running online debate between Karl Keating and one Dave Armstrong over Philip Lawler’s upcoming book
Lost Shepherd: How Pope Francis is Misleading His Flock. Therein Lawler, a prominent spokesman of the Catholic “conservative” or neo-Catholic* versus traditionalist** constituency, expounds the reasons for
his “reluctant” conclusion that Francis is a “radical [who is] leading the Church away from the ancient sources of the Faith” and is “engaged in a deliberate effort to change what the Church teaches.”
*Neo-Catholic: a Catholic who accepts and defends the officially-approved ecclesial novelties of the past half-century, despite their destructive results and even though no Catholic is obliged to embrace a single one of them in order to be a member of the Church in good standing. These novelties, none of them binding on the Catholic conscience, have arisen primarily under the headings of “liturgical reform,” “ecumenism,” “dialogue,” “inter-religious dialogue,” and the “updating” of priestly and religious formation, which has emptied the “reformed” seminaries and convents.
Neo-Catholicism, whose ensemble of characteristics would horrify a Pope such as Saint Pius X, the arch-foe of Modernism and what he called “the Modernist as Reformer,” is the ecclesial equivalent of “neo-conservatism” in the political realm: i.e., a liberalized, “moderate” form of conservatism that attempts to reconcile true doctrine with novel practices, attitudes and fashions of the day that tend to undermine true doctrine. The current prevalence of the neo-Catholic “style” of Catholicism constitutes the essence of the post-Vatican II crisis in the Church.
**Traditionalist: a Catholic who, being perfectly free to do so, prescinds from the recently introduced ecclesial novelties and continues to practice the unreconstructed Faith of his ancestors, including the traditional liturgy and the traditional formation of priests and religious in seminaries and convents that are full. The descriptor “traditionalist” was unnecessary before the Second Vatican Council, because every practicing and believing Catholic was, by today’s prevailing neo-Catholic standard, a traditionalist.
What Keating and Armstrong think about
Lawler’s exposition of what has long been obvious to traditionalists is uninteresting in itself. Worth noting, however — if only as a kind of sociological observation of our troubled ecclesial commonwealth — is that here
we have two “conservative” Catholics bickering over how to approach a book that essentially echoes the traditionalist view of what Lawler himself calls “this disastrous papacy”.
For Armstrong, it is a matter of maintaining the neo-Catholic polemic of “radical traditionalists” as objects of fear and loathing, even though Lawler, a decidedly non-traditionalist commentator, agrees with them regarding Francis.
For Keating, it is question of how Lawler can be defended
without also conceding that the traditionalists who preceded him by years in reaching the same conclusion were right from the beginning.
Both agree, therefore, on the same implicit premise: under no circumstances can the traditionalist assessment of Francis be credited at all, much less acknowledged as prescient, for this would mean that the neo-Catholic commentariat has been wrong and wholly lacking in prescience.
Wrong not only about Francis, but the entire course of the post-conciliar crisis in the Church whose roots in unprecedented and manifestly destructive ecclesial novelties they, being neo-Catholics, refuse to acknowledge. While Francis has made that refusal untenable as to his own novelties, the neo-Catholic polemic nonetheless precludes any admission that traditionalists had a point concerning him.
As one of our correspondents astutely observes: the argument between Keating and Armstrong, who are friends, is thus really over
how to continue discrediting the traditionalist position now that Lawler, a non-traditionalist, has been driven to accept its accurate diagnosis of this pontificate. The interplay between the two disputants, ultimately joined by Lawler himself in the compendium of comments linked to above, is really rather amusing.
In his approach to Lawler’s book, Armstrong recalls that precisely on August 3, 2013 he coined the term “radical Catholic reactionary” to replace his earlier epithet “radical traditionalist” (“radtrad”) and then revised his many writings accordingly — as if anyone should care — to reflect the new epithet, which he defines as follows:
I define “radical Catholic reactionaries” as a rigorist, divisive group completely separate from mainstream “traditionalism” that continually, vociferously, and vitriolically [sic] (as a marked characteristic or defining trait) bashes and trashes popes, Vatican II, the New Mass, and ecumenism (the “big four”): going as far as they can go without technically crossing over the canonical line of schism. In effect, they become their own popes: exercising private judgment in an unsavory fashion, much as (quite ironically) Catholic liberals do, and as Luther and Calvin did when they rebelled against the Church. They can’t live and let live. They must assume a condescending “superior-subordinate” orientation.
The reader will note that Armstrong’s “definition” is merely a string of insults and further undefined terms amounting to nothing more than a caricature of the traditionalist view of our unparalleled ecclesial situation.
The resulting cloud of pejoratives allows Armstrong to smuggle back into his polemic precisely the condemnation of “mainstream traditionalism” he professes to eschew, as seen by
his inclusion in the category of “radical Catholic reactionary” pretty much the entire universe of traditionalist and even quasi-traditionalist commentary, including “The Remnant, 1 Peter 5, Lifesite News, Rorate Caeli, [and] the reactionary-dominated Correctio,” the last being that group of Catholics who, like Lawler, have publicly protested the chaos Francis has provoked with Amoris Laetitia, the very document Lawler calls “subversive.”
Armed with his new definition of the same old target, Armstrong has hit upon the saving tactic of denouncing Lawler’s book as a “radical Catholic reactionary” tract while absolving Lawler of the personal delict of radical Catholic reaction. He thus informs Keating: “I didn’t classify Phil as a reactionary, though I can see why someone would think so. I merely noted that in what I have been able to see so far in his book, he is thinking like one in some key/characteristic respects.”
According to Armstrong, while Lawler quacks like a radical Catholic reactionary he is “not a reactionary now, but he may yet be. And if he ends up there, I called it, and warned people that it was coming…”
For his part, Keating protests that “Lawler isn’t a reactionary at all (even though, granted, he is ‘reacting’ to certain papal actions), and I can’t think of any Traditionalist Catholics who would label him even a Traditionalist.” So, Lawler is neither a reactionary nor a Traditionalist. This must be made clear, lest Lawler’s respectable credentials be tarnished. Rather, Keating continues: “he is a man of conservative temperament, slow to draw conclusions, anxious to give Churchmen the benefit of the doubt. He is more a Russell Kirk than a Michael Voris.”
Here Keating reveals more than he realizes, for a “Russell Kirk Catholic” would be precisely the kind of modern conservative — which is to say, a moderate post-Enlightenment liberal — suggested by the ecclesial equivalent “neo-Catholic.”
Just as Kirk accepted the fatal principles of political modernity while arguing for their compatibility with traditional values via a “conservative” application, so does the neo-Catholic accept the officially approved novelties of the past fifty years, despite their manifest incompatibility with the traditional teachings he would defend. Francis, however, has made that exercise impossible. Hence Lawler’s book and the ensuing sociological disturbance it has caused in a neo-Catholic cohort that did not even exist before Vatican II.
But just a moment:
Voris absolutely refuses to criticize Francis [a stupid untenable stance by anyone who criticizes many of the popes statements and actions, and the positions taken by his lackeys], no matter how much evidence accumulates against him. So, what does that make Lawler in comparison with Voris, given that Lawler has concluded that Francis is a radical “leading the Church away from the ancient sources of faith” in “deliberate effort to change what the Church teaches”?
It seems that Voris would join Armstrong in denouncing Lawler as someone who at least quacks like a radical Catholic reactionary. I will leave Keating to sort out his own confusion in this regard.
Armstrong in reply frets that Lawler is “possibly heading down the road to reactionary Catholicism” and is “starting to argue and think more and more like them.” But Keating assures Armstrong that no such awful prospect is in view: “No, Dave, what Steve Skojec may opine tells us nothing. If you were to say something he agrees with on some other issue, he might praise you and claim that soon you’d join his little army. But you wouldn’t be doing any such thing. That Skojec or someone else praises Lawler tells us nothing about Lawler, other than that he has written on a subject that Skojec is interested in. You’re trying to draw far too much out of the situation…. As for Lawler sliding down what you consider to be a slippery slope (and without brakes), someone could take your logic and say about some well-known theological liberal who recently has embraced a few orthodox positions: ‘there’s no stopping his slide, from one extreme to the other–he’ll end up a Traditionalist!’”
Translation: Don’t worry. There is no chance that our man Phil will become one of them. He is the Russell Kirk of papal criticism, who takes his time before declaring that Francis is a dangerous radical who is trying to change Church teaching, that Amoris Laetitia is a subversive document and that his papacy is disastrous. Not like those radical Catholic reactionaries — which Lawler is most assuredly not — who said the same things much too soon. Big difference, you see.
Finally, Lawler has entered the fray personally to assure Armstrong that he has not become a radical Catholic reactionary: “If you give me your email address, I can send you a copy of the proofs, and you can make your judgment on the full book. I don’t doubt that you’ll still have problems with it, but I hope you won’t conclude that I have become a reactionary.”
Perish the thought that any Catholic would react radically against a radical Pope bent on changing Church teaching! Catholics must always remain inert in the face of radical attacks on the Faith, especially when the radical is a Pope. Lawler thus hastens to give assurances of his continued inertness, despite his book.
So, Armstrong, Keating and Lawler himself are all essentially agreed: one must never allow oneself to become a radical reactionary Catholic, even if what those unclean ones at The Remnant and elsewhere are saying happens to be perfectly true.
The neo-Catholic narrative of passive acceptance of the post-conciliar regime of novelty qua superior fidelity to the Church remains intact, even if Lawler has unsettled the quiescent status quo by observing that Francis has gone too far down the road to officially approved disaster they have all been following for decades without protest. Despite this lapse of protocol, Lawler is still not one of them. He has not sullied himself by joining the untouchable caste. And isn’t that what matters before all else?
Such is the profound sociological disease of the human element of the Church in the midst of the worst crisis in her long history.
I do not see, however, why Ferrara chooses to polemicize, and in the process, sound smug and self-congratulatory, instead of being thankful that more Catholics with some degree of influence in shaping public opinion are coming around to the traditionalist views critical of Bergoglio - and for solid reason!
Lawler's decision to write his book reminds me of Aldo Maria Valli's publication of his 200-page 'pamphlet'
266 at year's end 2016 - when AL crystallized all his misgivings about this pope and his pontificate and he begain to write critically of Bergoglio on is blog. Before that, the Vatican bureau chief and anchor of Italian state TV's Vatican reporting had been among the staunchest of Bergoglists. He has not stepped back since then, thank God, nor do I think Lawler will.
Let me indulge myself by re-posting what I did about Valli and his book at around this time last year. '266', of course, refers to the fact that Bergoglio is
the 266th Successor of Peter. (Maliciously, I like to think Valli chose it for his title because it is only one number away from '666').
Aldo Maria Valli:
Questions about this pope
from a son of the Church
by Lorenzo Bertocchi
Translated from
January 2, 2017
The documented summary-review of Pope Francis's nearly four-year Pontificate so far by Italian State TV's Vaticanista Aldo Maria Valli leaves the reader with many questions, as in an unanswered quiz.
In almost 200 pages, Valli offers a long and detailed series of episodes and citations from the 266th Successor of Peter, raising courteous questions but without leaving any doubt as to the 'perplexities' that this pope has engendered.
In the beginning was Cardinal Kasper. As everyone recalls, at his very first Angelus remarks, the Pope made a praiseful citation of the German cardinal-theologian, who at the time, was rather on the fringes of the Catholic intelligentsia.
Called by the new pope "a theologian on the ball, a good theologian", and praised for his book about mercy, Kasper can be considered the academic reference for what would become - perhaps not all that strangely - the heart of this pontificate: mercy.
[Of which, one must note, there's mercy and mercy!]
And we must go back to Kasper again in order to understand the two 'family synods' which this pope synthesized in the apostolic exhortation Amoris laetitia. The synodal marathon over almost a two-year period got underway with Kasper's infamous 'gospel of the family' preached to a secret consistory in February 2014
[on express assignment by Bergoglio], which has now led to allowing communion 'in certain cases' for remarried divorces living together adulterously and continuing to do so.
Of all the dissertations on the possible controversial interpretations of divine mercy according to Kasper, there remains the paradigmatic passage that seems to guide the pontificate of someone who is a man of action, and certainly not a theologian or a philosopher
[not that theologians and philosophers cannot be men of aciton, as well]:
"from the logic of doctors of the law to that of the Good Samaritan". [Typically false Bergoglian dichotomy!]
It is unfortunate, writes Valli, that this line "entails numerous problems".
The most serious - especially in the light of 'case by case' erected as a system in AL - would be the apparent "triumph of the contingent over the absolute, of the transitory over the stable, of the possible over the necessary".
Struck by propositions like 'discernment' and 'accompaniment', we ask ourselves
whether reality does not end up resolving itself as simply the experience of the individual as the sole judge of himself, of what he believes is good or evil. Many have described this as ignoring moral absolutes and the triumph of situation ethics, which John Paul II condemned in the encyclical
Veritatis splendor.
Valli's book hammers away at these questions - questions effectively condensed in the famous FIVE DUBIA presented by the Four Cardinals to the pope regarding AL Chapter 8.
The 'who am I to judge' pope - who made this Generation-Me mantra into a cult phrase, drawn from one of his answers in his first inflight news conference - is the pope of repeated confidential encounters with the king of Italian secularists, Eugenio Scalfari, during which the pope has used other catch phrases like the much-cited "There is no Catholic God".
He has called Martin Luther 'medicine' for a Church that was sick, and took part in opening the fifth centenary year of the Reformation, expressing possible ways towards interfaith communion which he had first treated equivocally
[many saw it as an endorsement in yet another relativistic formulation, "Do what your heart tells you!] during a visit to Rome's Lutheran Church in 2015.
On his visit to Lund, Sweden for that joint celebration of Luther's Schism, he took it for granted that the problems separating Catholics and Lutherans on the doctrine of justification would be overcome (despite the 1999 Joint Catholic-Lutheran Declaration on Justification, towards which Cardinal Kasper had been among the most diligent of its drafters)
[and to which the CDF, under Cardinal Ratzinger, felt it was necessary to issue a document listing the problems that remain open on that question].
On Islam and terrorism, Valli says the problem is that
this pope says nothing "about the problem of violence in Islam". "Just as reductive [as well as irrational and willfully blind] is his reading of terrorism only in sociological and economic terms".
Still on terrorism, this pope let loose another unfortunate buzz phrase in essentially
equating Catholic 'fundamentalism' to the Islamic kind. Returning from his WYD trip to Poland, the pope told newsmen on the plane that
"I don't speak of Islamic violence because everyday when I read the newspapers, I see the violence taking place in Italy - someone shoots his fiancee dead, another kills his mother-in-law, yet these are baptized Catholics! They are violent Catholics! If I would speak about Islamic violence, then I must also speak of Catholic violence". [Surely one of the most idiotic (and fundamentally anti-Catholic) statements ever made by a pope, by a leader, even by an average person!]
Socio-economic issues are among the repeated topics of 'analyses' presented by this pope - they are cited especially in his advocacy of climate activism as expressed in his encyclical
Laudato si, but especially in his sponsorship of 'popular movements' which generally have a clearly Marist matrix. And so, he repeatedly makes generic attacks against 'the system'
["This economy kills!] and the 'idolatry of money', which he even blames as a cause for why young people are more and more rejecting marriage.
[When Francis's follies and fallacies are enumerated like this, you have to wonder whether he is not somewhat mentally 'not there'!]
All this, and much more, is found in Valli's 200-page book which details the perplexities that wrack him as a result of his papal chronicle.
At one point, he cites an unnamed journalist who offers a synthesis of the Bergoglio who is pope. It has been pointed out that the Argentine pope is rather repetitive
[tiresomely so, ad nauseam] and so, the journalist summarizes using the pope's own recurrent themes and terms:
God? He is merciful ("He is greater than all our sins!") [Another IDIOTIC statement! So idiotic one cringes in embarrassment for Bergoglio! How can one compare God to sin???? It's like comparing him to Satan himself!]. The Church? let it be poor and for the poor, going outwards to the peripheries, let it heal wounds as in a field hospital.] [I suspect he does not really know what a field hospital is, otherwise he would realize that it is a most faulty metaphor for the Church] Pastoral care? Don't impose duties. just facilitate an encounter with the Lord.
Then there are the corollaries, similarly repeated over and over:'Pastors should take on the odor of the sheep, they should stop gossiping, they should not be careerists. Society? Fight the throwaway culture and money as god ("Corruption is an evil worse than sin") [Another can-you-believe-how-idiotic line!] Grandparents must be respected. Housing, land and jobs must be guaranteed for everyone. [Another one of those mindless Bergoglian Marxist formulations. 'Land' for everyone? In a society that is rapidly and universally urbanizing??? What planet is he living on?]
I will leave it to the reader who gets a copy of Valli's book to discover the conclusions he draws from the many questions that constellate the pages of this freely open book written with respect by a true son of the Church.
[Remember JMB's copout when asked about his attitude towards homosexual practices? "I am a son of the Church - Read what the Catechism says!' Some 'son of the Church' this anti-Catholic pope is!]
THE DUBIA OF ALDO MARIA VALLI
And here is my translation of the chapter Valli chose to post on his blog. It is a formidable analysis that comes from someone who has been a lifelong progressivist Catholic and who, until several months ago, was quite Bergoglian. But AL came along and changed his view of this pontificate to the point that he felt compelled to write a book documenting his critical inquiry into this pope, his statements and his actions.
Truth, justice, mercy:
Analyzing the 'Francis method'
by Aldo Maria Valli
Book excerpt published in
“I believe in God. Not in a Catholic God. A Catholic God does not exist. God exists”. Words of Pope Francis.
The concept is not new, because it was already expressed, more completely, by Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini
[whose definitive biography so far was written by Valli] in his interview-book with fellow Jesuit Fr. George Sporschill.
But now an analogous question is being asked, but with a different subject. Not “Does God exist?” but “Is Pope Francis Catholic?”
September 2015, eve of the pope’s trip to the United States: On a pitchblack background, the face of the pope appears in half shadow. It is the cover of Newsweek, and the device is familiar: Whenever the Roman Pontiff is the subject of discussion, he is always depicted in obscurity, or else, facing away, back to the people. But it is the title that is immediately striking: “Is the Pope Catholic?”
The newsmagazine, an expression of a cultural, religious and political world that is certainly not approving of the Catholic Church, dramatizes the provocative question, which arises in part from Francis’s famous words “Who am I to judge a gay person?”, and more generally, because of Papa Bergoglio’s pastoral line, characterized not by condemnation
[But which contemporary Pope’s pontificate has been characterized by condemnation???],, not by conflict with modernity but by dialog.
The weekly’s intention was transparent. By asking the question, it hits two birds with one shot: It accuses the Church pre-Bergoglio of having been always retrograde, while at the same time, touching the open wound of the divisions that the Argentine pope has been provoking in the Catholic Church by his decisions and by his
[anti-Catholic] line in general.
In fact, the magazine hastens to note that the pope’s popularity in recent surveys of American Catholics, has been in free fall, because many conservative Catholics see him as the Fifth Column of he left and of radical ecologism, while acknowledging that the pope is a ‘superb communicator’
[How can someone who so habitually confused and confusing,If not outright incoherent when he is not insulting, be a ‘superb communicator’?], and
“a cunning reflection of the Catholic image’ insofar as he "makes it superfluous to remind Catholics what they believe in”, relying instead on eloquent gestures such as renouncing princely vestments
[What contemporary pope has dressed in princely vestments, unless one considers the traditional liturgical vestments preserved from previous popes in St. Peter’s sacristy and occasionally worn by the popes before Francis ‘princely vestments’?], using a utility vehicle for moving around, and choosing to live in a small room in Casa Santa Marta.
[Such is the substance of myth that by constant repetition, gets to be established as a convenient factoid. But his room at CSM is hardly small – it is the hotel’s equivalent of a royal suite, and has an adjoining sitting room and study. In fact, a whole wing on one floor of the hotel is occupied by him and his personal and security staff, and if someone would report on the actual square-footage in this papal wing, it could well be beyond the square-footage of the papal apartment in the Apostolic Palace, which did not have to provide lodging for security personnel because by its very location, it is internally as secure as anything could be in the Vatican.]
But the title of Newsweek’s cover story is a reason to reflect:
If this question arises in anyone, does it mean that Francis himself is legitimizing it? Is there something in the words, in the teachings and in the gestures of this pope that clashes with the Catholic faith, or at least, does not fully mirror it?
December 8, 2015. An appeal from the American biweekly newspaper
The Remnant, which expresses the sentiments of traditional Catholic groups, calls on the pope to step down because
“a growing number of Catholics, including cardinals and bishops, are starting to acknowledge that your pontificate… is the cause of serious harm to the Catholic Church. It has become impossible to deny the fact, they wrote, that you, Holiness, do not possess the capacity nor the intention to fulfill that which is the duty of every pope according to the words of your immediate predecessor: “He must constantly link himself to the Church in obedience to the Word of God, in the face of all attempt to adapt or dilute it, as in the face of every opportunism’.
According to the
Remnant,
instead of focusing on the teaching of the Church on the Word of God, Francis is instead bent on proclaiming his own ideas, doing it in
“…multiple homilies, news conferences, off-the-cuff statements, interviews with newsmen, discourses of all kinds and idiosyncratic interpretations of the Gospel. These ideas, which range from simply disquieting to plainly heterodox, are perfectly represented by a document that is more or less his personal manifesto, Evangelii gaudium, containing a series of incredible pronouncements which never befoe had any Roman Pontiff dared to say.
“Among this, we must list a statement like “the dream… of transforming everything in the Church because the customs, the styles, the scheduled, the language and every ecclesial structure may become an adequate channel for the evangelization of the present world, rather than for self-preservation”. It is inconceivable that a Roman Pontiff could even hypothesize an inexistent opposition between the self-preservation of the Holy Roman Catholic Church and her mission in the world. [See? That was one of the idiocies I missed noting in my perfunctory scans of a document I find unsupportable in style as well as in content. Idiotic because how can the Church carry out her mission if she does not also take care to preserve who she is and the faith she embodies??? ]
The signatories do not excuse the pope for writing in EG of the temptation to which Catholics could yield, namely, in the Catholic
enclosing himself in ‘structures’ that offer ‘false protection’, in ‘norms’ that transform believers into ‘implacable judges’ and in ‘habits’ whose only purpose is to keep things tranquil.
What the pope calls structures, norms and habits are, in fact, the appeal’s signatories write, the very framework of doctrine that prevents the Church from disintegrating.
The pope’s rebukes, they add, are generic and produce disconcert, whereas
his epithets, sometimes insults, which the pope reserves for those who do not think like him, are quite specific against those whom he variously calls ‘fundamentalists’ , ‘Pharisees’, ‘Pelagians’, ‘triumphalists’, ‘gnostics’, ‘nostalgics’, ‘superficial Christians’, ‘gang of the privileged’, ‘peacocks’, ‘pedantic moralists’, ‘uniformists’, ‘arrogantly self-sufficient’, ‘aristocratic intellectuals’, ‘Christian bats who prefer the shadows instead of the light in the presence of the Lord’, and the like.
There are many accusations against the pope in the letter-appeal. In the foreground,
his banalization of the concept of mercy, that he has been propagating in the name of a generic ‘tenderness’ which overshadows binding moral rules, whereas the only true ‘revolution of tenderness’ takes place through Baptism.
Now, another magazine cover. This time, in November 2015, the British weekly
The Spectator, which has a conservative outlook. It is a cartoon: Francis merrily rides a giant wrecking ball that crashes into a church and reduces it to a pile of rubble, with the title
“Pope vs Church: The anatomy of a Catholic civil war”. The thesis of Damian Thompson, who wrote the cover story, can be summarized thus:
The ‘disordered’ reforms of Bergoglio and his ‘wild’ declarations are generating apprehensions among average Catholics who think that the pope has gone out of control.
So then: Is Francis not Catholic? Or hardly Catholic? On September 22, 2015, while this pope was in flight from Cuba to the USA, correspondent Gian Guido Vecchi of
Corriere della Sera asked the question directly: “First, it was said that the pope is communist, and now some are asking whether the pope is Catholic, more or less? What do you say?”
Here was the pope’s response:
A cardinal friend of mine told me that one day, a lady came to him very concerned – she was very Catholic, a big rigid, this lady, but a good Catholic, who asked him if it was true that the Bible spoke of an anti-Christ. And he explained to her – that this is said in the Apocalypse, right? Then, she asked if it was also true that it speaks about an anti-pope. ‘But why do you ask this?” the cardinal asked. “because I am sure that Pope Francis is the anti-pope”. “Why would you think that?” he asked. “Because he does not use red shoes”. [See, how consistent he is even in this hypothetical, perhaps imaginary anecdotes! He ridicules this hypothetical ‘very Catholic, good Catholic but 'rather rigid' lady for being idiotic in her ‘rigid Catholicity’! Obviously, this was another notable milestone I missed in the documentation of Bergoglio’s inability to simply say Yes or No to a question.
One would have thought that a pope would have begun by answering, “Of course, I am Catholic. I was elected to lead the Catholic Church. I would not have been elected if I were not Catholic”. Not relate an anecdote that reduces opponents to objects of ridicule.]
So that's the way it is... there are historical reasons for thinking that one is Communist or not… I am sure that I have not said anything that is not within the social doctrine of the Church. .. [Evasion, evasion, your name is Bergoglio! So he shifts to the other accusation without ansswering the first at all, not that he has answered the second either!]
On another trip, when I was preparing to address the meeting of the ‘popular movements’ [in Bolivia], a colleague said to me: “You have held out your hand to these popular movements … but will the Church follow you?” And I said, “It is me who follows the Church”, and in this, I think I am not wrong, I believe I have not said anything that is not in the social doctrine of the Church.
Everything can be explained. Maybe the explanation will give the impression that I am being a bit ‘leftist’, but it would be an error of interpretation. No, my doctrine, in all this, in Laudato si, on economic imperialism and all that, is that of the social doctrine of the Church. And if it is necessary that I recite the Creed, I am ready to do so. [Excuse me! Where did that come from? As if by reciting the Creed if called to do so, he would thereby prove he is Catholic and not a communist???]
Bergoglio’s response, even if it was off the cuff and in imprecise Italian, allows us to understand the pope’s attitude in the face of some criticisms.
First of all, regardinjg the concern of the ‘good Catholic lady’ who sees in him an anti-pope, he has recourse to the rhetorical device of ridiculing her. “What, I am an anti-pope because I don’t wear read shoes?” As if to say: These ‘good Catholics’, so attached to tradition, are nothing but formalists. Then comes his substantial self-defense: “Actually, I have never said anything that is not contained in the social doctrine of the Church”.
[Yes, but that addresses the accusation of being Communist, not of whether he is Catholic!]
But this pope is too intelligent not to know that even the way one says things have a certain importance. In fact, he acknowledges that some of his explanations could appear ‘leftist’.
A bit ingenuous and a bit sly, as he has described himself, and as he always appears when he is with journalists, he says that in order to avoid any doubts, he is even ready to recite the Creed, with which he makes known that he is quite aware of the disconcertment he is provoking in some sectors of the ecclesial community.
But he moves ahead the way he wants to, because he is convinced that today, it is more important to intervene on social injustices, on old and new poverty, on ecological problems and the ‘throwaway culture’ rather than speaking on doctrinal matters and moral questions (those famous ‘non-negotiable values’ in Benedict XVI’s Pontificate – abortion, euthanasia, homosexual practices, artificial procreation) - messages which, in the recent past, were hammered home.
That explains his strategy, although in truth, it has not kept him from
reiterating the line of his predecessors on abortion, euthanasia and artificial procreation.
[Hardly reiterating, but rather studiously avoiding having to say anything on such topics, because as he told the Italian bishops shortly after he became pope, it is not necessary to have to say the same things again and again. Of course, he does not follow his own counsel because on the secular issues which he has made his priority, he does tirelessly repeat himself again and again!]
Nonetheless, the covers of
Newsweek and
Spectator, like the petition from
The Remnant, tell us that
there is a certain discomfort, perhaps even distress about this pope, yet these are only three cases among the many that can be cited. A distress that has only worsened after the publication of Amoris laetitia, his post-synodal apostolic exhortation on ‘family love’.
Although I have become used to discussions and polemics regarding the work of popes (I have been doing this for more than 20 years),
I must admit that I have never witnessed a confrontation as strident as this. In Italy, it is perhaps still a bit imperceptible, but it is underway especially on the Internet. And at the center of all the polemics is he, Pope Francis. Praised by some, criticized and opposed by others.
Something similar happened with John XXIII, especially after his decision to convoke the Second Vatican Council. Even Papa Roncalli, who was so loved as to pass into history as ‘the good pope’, was in fact accused of modernism and progressivism. And like Francis, he too was considered by some to be ‘Communist’, or too ecumenical and
with little respect for Tradition. [A strange accusation against someone who happily followed every papal tradition, including wearing the red shoes, hats and capes that popes are entitled to wear ‘casually’, and who loved Castel Gandolfo as much as his predecessors and successors, except the present one.] In some circles, his call for
aggiornamento [keeping up to date] was seen by some as a betrayal of tradition, and the debate on his actions became heated, but never as harsh and strident as for Francis today, if only because at that time, mass media were not omnipresent 24/7 as today, and there were no social networks which are catalysts of extremisms.
In any case, Bergoglio is between two fires: If the greater part of the criticisms continue to arrive from the ‘right’, even the more progressivist circles are in a state of fibrillation, and after having invested so much hope in him, are now starting to accuse him of inconclusiveness.
So there is a ‘Francis case’. Which one must look into with some inconvenient but inevitable questions: Wny, alongside the hosannahs from many, the increasingly hard stands against him continue to grow? What has gone wrong? What no longer convinces? And what do his opponents fear?
Many claim that those who are ranged againsgt this pope are
fearful of the future and of losing their privileges. [??? Ordinary Catholics like me who only wantw to continue living the faith in which I grew up – because it represents a firm foundation for what one must do to be worthy of God’s grace – have no privileges to lose! Daily life is a continuing struggle, but we make do with God’s help which does not have to be material but which does bring joy and comfort in the midst of difficulties.] This hypothesis is widely held, and probably there is some truth to it. But if it's happening, there is more to it.
Juan Carlos Scannone, the Argentine theologian who is a friend of Bergoglio and a Jesuit like him (the theoretician, with Lucio Gera, of that ‘theology of the people’ that has influenced this pope considerably)
[a variant of Liberation Theology which advocates its Marxist goals but rejects armed militancy] explains that
with Francis, the Church has finally become the paradigm of Vatican II. That from
the preceding paradigm, considered a-historical because it started off from ‘what must be’ without considering the reality of the time, we came to the historical paradigm desired by John XXIII, who wanted to take the personal and the subjective more in consideration. [Not true, of course. One only has to read his opening address to the Council in DEcember 1965!]
This was a change, Scannone explains, that is evident in Gaudium et Spes – the root and inspiration for Evangelii gaudium, which seeks to put into practice the method of ‘see, justify, act’, the central pastoral strategy of the Conference of Latin American Bishops in Medellin, Colombia, in 1968, and at every subsequent continent-wide conference until the 2007 Conference in Aparecida, whose final document, drafted under Bergoglio’s chairmanship , is the other source of inspiration for this pope.
[What Valli does not point out is that despite all these Latin-American bishops’ conferences and their hefty final documents – the first of which (Medellin 1968) spelled out the goals, strategy and tactics of frankly Marxist liberation theology with the establishment of the so-called ‘base communities’, going on to more radical documents in Puebla and Santo Domingo in the next twenty five years.
Meanwhile, the churches of Latin America simply continued to hemorrhage their members who joined assorted independent evangelical churches so that by the time Bergoglio became Pope, a continent that had once been 90% Catholic (forever, it seemed) was down to 69% - and in more than half of the countries of Latin America, Catholics now make up less than 50% of the population.
Aparecida in 2005 obviously did nothing to staunch the bleeding. Yet what did a 2014 Pew survey show, conducted during the first year of Bergoglio's Pontificate?
- Protestant Latin Americans attend Church more frequently, read the Scriptures and pray more often than Catholics.
- Catholics, the survey said, are less morally opposed to abortion, homosexuality, premarital sex, divorce and contraception.
- About 60 percent of Protestants surveyed in Latin America said they were looking for a church that “places greater importance on living a moral life.”
What was Bergoglio doing in Argentina all that time? Playing kumbaya with the evangelicals – even then, he had no interest in converting anyone to Catholicism, nor obviously, in stopping Catholics from leaving the Church. The pollsters had a catch phrase: While the Catholic Church was proclaiming an empty ‘preferential option for the poor’, the poor were manifesting a preferential option for the Protestants.
And that is why, Scannone says, this pope is committed to accompanying the poor, why he denounces the throwaway culture, and why he asks pastors to pay attention and solicitude to every single person:
Reality is more important than ideas, Bergoglio already liked to say this in 1974, when he was head of the Jesuits in Argentina. [Another Bergoglio idiocy – as if reality could be appreciated independent of the mind!]
To inquire into the roots of this pope's thinking makes us understand how much he is bound to a certain climate – cultural, social and theological – that continues to influence him. But we can ask legitimately: has not that season passed by - at least in some of its important aspects - however heady it may have been for him?
[What exactly did he do that kept the church in Buenos Aires together, if he tried at all, and with his decision to give priority to pastoral leniency, if not downright license, was he not bucking the obvious trend that the Catholics leaving the Church for Protestantism were not finding what they wanted in the Catholic Church? As the Pew survey found, the median percentage of converts from Catholicism to Protestantism left the Church for the following main reasons:
Are seeking a personal connection with God: 81%
Enjoy the style of worship at a new church: 69%
Wanted a greater emphasis on morality: 60%]
Today, in the face of the spread of subjectivism and relativism, immersed as we are in ‘liquid’ culture of post-modernity, exposed to the risk of seeing all the instruments that could assure us of moral stanards vanish before our eyes, can the ‘historical paradigm’ introduced by the progressivist reading of Vatican II still be our principal interpretative tool? Is it not perhaps necessary to update and integrate what has gone before into new reflections? Is not the problem today perhaps the opposite of what it was half a century ago?
Today, as a Church, don’t we risk now – which we did not before – of becoming too immersed in history so that we are incapable of having stable points of reference that can enable us to help orient a humanity that is morally out of control?
Theologian Inos Biffi
[one of two winners of the 2016 Ratzinger Prize], in an article which never mentions Pope Francis but seems to be addressed to him indirectly, warns against any deviations of contemporary culture that the Church could well assume.
When subjectivism prevails above all, Biffi explains, the subject is "prey to impressions” and “human action ends up missing enlightened solid reason” which is what makes it possible to make good choices.
It is the great problem of our time. We no longer have principles and fundamental ideas to explain who we are and what we do. Or, better said, we have principles and notions which fatally lead us back “to instinctivity or incontestable opinions”, which is to say, allergic to any measure whatsoever.
Which leads us to
"the absolutization of the subject, which has become the undisputable principle of good and evil, of valid and invalid”. A question, says Biffi, that would seem at first to be merely anthropological and logical inevitably becomes theological.
To reject this ‘liquidity’ of reality is to reclaim for man his faculty of “discerning intelligibility, order and the light of things as being a reflection of the Word, and therefore of the Father".
This is the dramatic challenge that faces all of us, especially the believer, in this age of a liquid society. But Pope Francis does not seem interested to assume this challenge.
On some occasions he has used harsh words against that which he calls
‘pensiero unico’
[In current discourse, usually used in its original form pensée unique" (French for "single thought") - a pejorative expression for mainstream ideological conformism of any kind, almost always opposed to that of the speaker], except that he uses the term in its original economic and social meaning
[that neoliberalism is the only correct way to structure society, implying that mainstream discussion is limited by ideological assumptions of what is possible], not in its philosophical meaning and its possible theological implications.
Therefore, Bergoglio’s theology appears to reduce itself to a theology of rights that excludes duties, or relegates them to the background. [Is this properly called theology, or is it not, rather, ethical philosophy?]
“Spiritual intrusion into personal life is not possible,” he says in that first interview with
La Civilta Cattolica in July 2013.
This is one of the most problematic of his dicta.
In which Bergoglio takes upon himself, voluntarily or not, a commonplace typical of post-modernity – that individual judgment, or what is commonly called conscience, is always good, or at least, is always valid, something that no one can judge externally, with any universal standard.
But if individual choice, by the very fact of being taken ‘in conscience’, is in itself good and incontestable, are we not in full relativism? [That is quite obvious but very few, even among serious orthodox commentators, ever remarked on Bergoglio’s blatant relativism, evident almost from Day 1 of his pontificate. And we must be thankful Valli calls it by its name. Otherwise, it has been a continuing omission after four years that I find inexplicable considering that his predecessor had been the first world leader and intellectual who ever took such a strong – and widely quoted – public stand against the dictatorship of relativism the day before he was elected pope!]
And is it not perhaps true that along this road of relativism, it would be so easy to arrive at the idea – already widespread in the pastoral activity of the Church’s ministers – according to which ‘sincerity’ and spontaneity cancel out the nature of sin? [One of the heresies proposed with technically evasive casuistry in AL Chapter 8.]
And is it realy merciful to respect the choice of life of every individual who has made his choice freely and sincerely? [Sincerity is in itself a relative term – one can been completely sincere and be totally wrong at the same time.]
Is it not the duty of the Church to expose lifestyles characterized by sin? And is doing this not perhaps the highest form of mercy?
If the Church does not expose sin, if she is not able to make a sinner see clear within himself following Christ’s law, does she not condemn herself to irrelevance? [Which the 9aforementioned experience of the Church in Latin America abundantly demonstrates – in which 60% of those who left the Church for Protestantism claimed their principal reason was that they want ‘greater emphasis on morality’. That seems to me to be the most damning verdict on the church of Bergoglio – the pope’s personal extension to the universal Church of his ultra-permissive, ultra-lenient governance of the Church in Buenos Aires.]
Primacy of conscience [not in the sense of the Catholic formed conscience, but conscience as ‘what I think is right and good for me’] does not mean the impossibility or incapacity to judge. [But a relativistic conscience, what one might call purely self-referential, to use a Bergoglian pet term, is incapable of making any judgment that is not what it wants, what it thinks is right and good for itself.]
At stake here is not just the eternal destiny of the souls who think this way but the authoritativeness of the pope himself.
[So why have not more intelligent Catholics with access to media exposure ever spoken out against this most un-Christian Bergoglian idea of conscience, taken verbatim from the ‘me-myself-I’ self-centeredness of the generations formed by the 1968 cultural revolution – Bergoglio among them.
And with all due respect to Valli himself, who has finally taken off his progressivist blinders to the horrible reality of who Bergoglio really is and what he represents, he was among those who just let Bergoglio’s un-Christian, anti-Catholic ramblings and rantings pass unremarked!]
When Francis says that “everyone has his own idea of good and evil, and must choose to follow the good and combat evil as he conceives them” [one of the most outrageous statements in the first Scalfari ‘interview’ that the Vatican never refuted – even if Scalfari admitted that what he reported were his own paraphrasing of what he deduced from his conversation with the pope – and indeed, for months, reproduced Scalfari’s report on the Vatican webpage dedicated to Pope Francis’s Documents after finally taking it off but including it in the first anthology of the pope’s interviews collected and puiblished by the Vatican publishing house, and what better imprimatur/nihil obstat can there be?], what are we to think?
This is a subjectivist relativist conception of moral conscience which certainly is not what the Church has always taught. Does true good not exist objectively for the Catholic/ [or for anyone using his reason sanely and not selfishly]?
Besides the media manipulations and omissions (that one must always take into account), one must return to the greater problem which comprehends all other problems:
In a cultural and spiritual context like ours – which is profoundly characterized by subjectivism (reality must be solved within the particular life experience of the subject, who is the sole judge of himself) and by emotionalism (the criterion for moral action does not come from well-formed reason but in the emotion evoked by living through a particular experience), does not the Bergoglio paradigm make a formidable contribution - not to say, a surrender – to the spirit of the times [Zeitgeist, to use the German term that has been absorbed into English usage],
which is already characterized by the trioumph of the contingent over the absolute, of the transitory over the stable, of the possible over the necessary?
In short, is Pope Francis a product of relativism? [HE IS ITS VERY EXPRESSION!] A question which carries another within itself:
On the basis of AL, is the “Francis method’ that it proposes intended to bring sinners to salvation, or simply for the ‘wellbeing’ [a subjective feeling] of the individuals concerned?
From a spirituality based on the rights of God and the duties of man, have we now come to a spirituality focused on the duties of God and the rights of man?
“If by fundamentalist one means someone who insist on fundamental things, I am a fundamentalist. As a priest, I do not teach my own thoughts and I do not act for myself. I belong to Christ”. So spoke Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, canonist. A way of saying that he does not agree with the Bergoglio line.
But even the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, is very explicit:
“We have the doctrine of the Church which is expressed in the Catechism, in the Council of Trent, in the two Vatican Councils, in declarations from our congregation.
Pastoral care cannot have a concept different from that doctrine – doctrine and pastoral ministry are the same thing. Jesus Christ as Pastor and Jesus Christ as Teacher of the Word are not different persons. And the mercy of God does not contradict the justice of God”. [Brave words said before his recent January 8 capitulation asserting that AL presents no danger to the faith.]
And what about Cardinal Robert Sarah, who in his best-seller
God or nothing, maintains that
the Church is headed for self-dissolution if it fails to indicate a cure doctrinal and moral way?
“‘I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life’, Jesus said. That is what remain stable. And it is what I seek to bear witness to”, Sarah said in an April 2016 interview.
Despite Benedict XVI’s warnings against relativism, Sarah said, we now find ourselves in a world [and a Church] where everything is possible:
“We no longer have roots. Nothing stable. But we do have a stable doctrine – we have Revelation. And for us bishops, it is a duty to make our faithful go back to the roots of our faith, to Revelation.
We cannot leave our faithful without a sure and secure way to follow. Without a rock on which to rest and lean on. In the parish, that rock is the parish priest; in the diocese, the bishop; and in the universal Church, the Pope.
We must help the Holy Father assure the faithful that there is stability in the Church. That there is a way, one way forward. And that is Jesus Christ”.
When he was asked if, like Cardinal Burke, he considers himself a ‘fundamentalist’, he smiled and said, “Yes, of course!”
A pastor like Sarah is too faithful to the pope to engage him in direct polemics, but
when he says, for example, that the greatest injustice is to give the need only ‘bread’, forgetting they need God, first of all, then his opposition to the Bergoglio line is not hidden at all.
Moreover, according to critics like Sarah,
there is an error underlying Bergoglio’s propositions. That when he and his followers speak of the ‘poverty of the Church’, he really means desacralizing it. That when they say the Church should accompany the needy [in the material and emotional sense], they seem to deny a perception of the grandeur and majesty of God, in whose place, they would substitute human action.
Christ said the truth would make us free, but today, the question of Truth is hardly ever taken into consideration. We have become preoccupied only with freedom, thus our thinking is crippled and incomplete, because there is no authentic freedom without truth.
If the Church will not remind the faithful, on the basis of correct doctrine, of the line between authentic freedom and slavery, then who will show them the way. Sarah says:
“True freedom is that which commits us to seek the true, the good and the beautiful, to seek true justice. We can only be free in Jesus Christ. Only he can liberate us. And his freedom has nothing to do with what I personally want for myself. The Church should stay along this path”.
It is not surprising that, especially since AL was published, many observers, including pastors, announced
the birth of a new church – ‘the church of Pope Francis’, a Church that is no longer judgmental but ‘in dialog’ in the sense that the dominant culture understands dialog, namely, a neutral and neuter Church, devoid of the ability and will to distinguish, to evaluate, to express a judgment.
Which makes it inevitable to ask:
If the Church does not judge, does not distinguish, does not evaluate, then what is her function?
This pope, with his pastoral paradigm of ‘mercy’, seems to say that the purpose of the Church is to console and to accompany, but can one give comfort without any evaluation of the situation? Can there be any accompaniment without first making some judgment [about what accompaniment is necessary]?
Has the pope not decreed, in effect, that the subjective way of living any experience is the only measure to evaluate the moral quality of the experience?
If a grieving Paul VI, in a now-remote 1972, came to the conclusion that “through some fissure, the smoke of Satan has entered the Church”, can we not now ask: Through which fissure has relativism also entered? [The fissure has a name: Jorge Mario Bergoglio, pope and dictator of relativism par excellence!]
At this point in our inquiry, we can maintain that basically, there is not just one kind of relativism, that there are at least two – one bad and one good.
- Bad relativism leads directly to nihilism, and eventually to desperation, to the impossibility of harboring any kind of hope in anything that is stable and absolute.
- Whereas good relativism would be that which, while acknowledging the extreme variablity of human situations, continues to believe in an Absolute.
[‘Absolute’ here does not mean only a Supreme Being who is absolute, but also all the truths that have come to us from this Supreme Being, none of which can be relativized in evaluating any human experience. So, in this sense, all relativism – a rejection that anything can be stable and unchanging despite continually changing circumstances - is just BAD without ifs or buts. This is the relativism so strongly denounced by Benedict XVI and which his successor champions primarily as situational ethics, roundly denounced by John Paul II in Veritatis splendor.]
Some observers claim that with his paradigm of the Good Samaritan, Pope Francis is exercising ‘good’ relativism: he announces Christian hope but takes into account that everything in life is contingent.
Now the great question is:
How is he announcing Christian hope: In his catecheses on mercy, he reiterates: “We are all called upon to follow the example of the Good Samaritan who is a figure of Christ. God has bent down towards us, has made himself our servant, and thus he saved us because we too can love eash other as he loved us”.
But what does it mean, exactly that “God has bent down towards us”?
It can be answered: It means sustaining us, encouraging, showing his compassion, help us concretely”
[No, he does not always help us ‘concretely’, for which he has reasons we do not understand, but we don’t have to understand in order to bow to his will. If he, the Creator, bends down to us, can we do less than bow to his will?]
Yes, but only that? If we speak about giving Christian hope, does that not mean first of all to ‘transmit’ Jesus? And does this transmission of Jesus [which is a good definition for Christian mission!] consist only in helping others materially and emotionally, or does it not also mean the transmission of essential and inseparable moral standards, without which ‘transmitting Jesus’ would only consist in proof of human solidarity without witnessing to the Truth?
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 03/01/2018 22:14]