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Fraternity - word of the year - as L'Osservatore Romano announced.
It took quite a while for Maureen Mullarkey to complete her essay reacting to the reigning pope's 'word of the year' - fraternity - as he bandied it about in his
Christmas Day urbi et orbi message. Part 1 was published Jan 8 and Part 2 only on Jan. 29. Because of the lag, I am posting both parts together here:
Francis and mirages of fraternity - Part 1
January 8, 2019
Pope Francis’s Christmas message, clotted with the word fraternity, was such a brew of pernicious banality that it is hard to know where to start. From the perspective of our 24-hour news cycle, a Moloch that feeds on contrived obsolescence, the papal dispatch asks to be addressed before the end of Christmastide.
However, what matters is not one passing item in the news but its substratum, something steady and abiding. In this case, that bedrock something is hostile to the very civilization — however flawed —which has sustained the Church that gave it life and breath.
This pontificate hungers for a kind of matricide. So, permit me, please, to work toward Francis’s baleful Christmas message by degrees.
Step back from the mess of it and begin, instead, with Daniel J. Mahoney’s The Idol of Our Age. The book’s subtitle How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity applies in spades to Francis and his doctrinaire maunderings.
Mahoney, a political philosopher, places discussion of “the perplexity that is Francis” in a larger historical context: that of the modern, “progressive” moral order derived from the convolutions and fallacies of what is termed “social justice.”
Writing as a Catholic layman, he summarizes his approach to Francis in the Introduction:
For the first time in the history of the Church, we have a pope who is half-humanitarian and thoroughly blind to the multiple ways in which humanitarian secular religion subverts authentic Christianity.
With winks and nods, he challenges the age-old Catholic teaching that there are intrinsic evils that cannot be countenanced by a faithful Christian or any person of good will. In a thousand ways, he sows confusion in the Church and the world. His views on politics are summary, to say the least, and partake of ... inordinate egalitarianism.
Pope Francis has displayed indulgence toward left-wing tyrannies that are viciously anti-Catholic to boot. His views on Islam are equally summary and partake of an unthinking political correctness (the Koran, he insists against all evidence, always demands non-violence). He has spoken respectfully about Communism, the murderous scourge of the twentieth century.
Mahoney wastes no sympathy on Francis’s open flirtation with pacifism. While Christianity is incompatible with terrorism and wars of aggression, charity requires legitimate authority to shield those in its care from tyranny and aggression. He quotes Roger Scruton: “...the right of defense stems from your obligation to others.”
Mahoney echoes Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man in Immoral Society (1932). Niebuhr’s tragic view of history and human nature contrasts with Francis’s failure — or refusal — to face the world’s complexities by ducking behind a sentimental utopianism that paralyzes. As Niebuhr understood, morality does not imply passivity in the face of evil. Mahoney draws on that insight to remind us that few Christians know how to think politically. Jorge Bergoglio is not among those few.
The Sermon on the Mount is not a call for societal suicide or even a guide to public policy. As scholars have noted, Christ’s “effusive” praise for the Roman centurion on the road to Capernaum (Mt 8:5-13) is hardly compatible with pacifism.
Yet in a recent book of interviews with a French social scientist, Pope Francis declares that “no war is just” and that one “always wins with peace.” He has obviously not considered “the peace of the grave”. By seemingly siding with peace at any price, he prevents statesmen, Christian statesmen, from carrying out their responsibilities to justice and the common good.
Francis does not consider the potential existence of that moral monstrosity: an unjust peace. His thinking on such matters avoids engagement with the varied motives that animate human ambitions — from blind hatred and religious fanaticism to lust for power: "One expects more expertise in the soul from the Holy Roman Pontiff, and not the crude and reductive economism he regularly displays." (Mahoney)
Francis blesses the city of Rome, and all the wide world, with a wish for fraternity. Weightless, the word replays as if promoting a brand name.
- Shelves are stocked with the product line: “bonds of fraternity,” ” relations of fraternity,” ” wishes for fraternity,” “the foundation and strength of fraternity.”
- Cans are labelled: “Fraternity among individuals of every nation and culture. Fraternity among people with different ideas . . . . Fraternity among persons of different religions.”
Jesus of Nazareth said nothing about fraternity. Rather, he told us to love our enemies. That is not the simple, smiling precept it is too often taken to be. It is more clear-eyed than it sounds to us. We moderns are two thousand years past the precariousness of Jewish listeners chafing under Roman domination.
Implicit in Jesus’s injunction is recognition that enemies are real. They exist. Beyond the bounds of pity and remote from feelings of kinship, enemies marshal themselves against us and seek our ruin.
To love them is first to know them. And the knowing does not absolve them from their intentions nor exempt them from the consequences of their acts. Neither does it disburden us from protecting those in our care. In this context, to love is to wish ultimate good, not damnation, to the enemy. It is a love that has nothing sentimental or emotionally tender about it.
The Book of Genesis presents us with an elemental, cautionary story about man’s aptitude for brotherhood. Untethered from a biblical sensibility, Francis forgets that history began east of Eden, in that place where Cain slew his brother Abel. Cain’s act of fraternal enmity insures that, pace Baudelaire, there is no such thing as the race of Abel. Righteous Abel died childless. It is the race of Cain that fills the world. From within the dogma of Original Sin emerges realization that we are Cain’s progeny, not Abel’s.
No reference to fraternity appears in the gospels. It was the Enlightenment that bequeathed us the word. It is from Robespierre, not Jesus Christ, that the word fraternity acquired its laurels. In circulation during the French Revolution, the tripartite motto —fraternité, égalité, liberté — gained public currency from Robespierre’s 1790 speech celebrating the organization of the National Guard.
Every tricoteuse in Paris, knitting beside the guillotine, could mutter fraternité. It is a bloodstained locution. Unmindful of its historic resonance, Francis seizes the word, drenches it in treacle, and intones:
Our differences are not a detriment or a danger; they are a source of richness. As when an artist is about to make a mosaic, it is better to have tiles of many colors available, rather than just a few!... As brothers and sisters, we are all different from each other. We do not always agree, but there is an unbreakable bond uniting us, and the love of our parents helps us to love one another. The same is true for the larger human family, but here, God is our “parent,” the foundation and strength of our fraternity.
Francis shrinks the complex realities of cultural difference —o f distinct patrimonies, of disparate aims and interests — to the accidents of skin color. “Tiles of many colors” falsifies the realities of the lived life in the trenches of geography and time.
Fidelity to truth — truth on the ground where we live — demands we ditch mawkish references to the “human family.” There is no such entity. We are all one species, but we are a family only in the taxonomic sense (Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, et alia). To pretend otherwise is to denature the concept of family, dissipating the word, bloating it into a mystical fog drained of humane application.
Pope Francis & mirages of fraternity - Part 2
January 29, 2019
In his book The Idol of Our Age, Daniel J. Mahoney devotes a chapter to “Pope Francis's Humanitarian Version of Catholic Social Teaching.” Mahoney’s subtitle — How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity — sets the tone of his appraisal of Francis. A careful writer and a courteous man, he is concerned to give due weight to both the consistencies and inconsistencies of Francis’ relation to traditional Catholic teaching:
We need a “hermeneutic of continuity” that forthrightly confronts Francis’s ample continuities and equally ample discontinuities with the great tradition that preceded him. We owe the pope both respect and the full exercise of the arts of intelligence.
[Yes, of course, but the obvious problem with Bergoglio is that even just one of his 'ample discontinuities' far outweighs and nullifies his 'ample continuities' which are to be expected because, after all, he cannot simply reverse more than 2000 years of Catholic teaching wholesale - he's mad but there is method in his madness, a method that will not make him stab himself in the heart by professing total apostasy from the Church in one fell swoop and threby undercutting the very authority that now conveniently enables him to dismantle that teaching brick by brick, as it were!]
Assertions of respect for the papal office thread through the text, a careful hemstitch joining obeisance to critique:
“We owe this pope our respect and our judgment, but..." .
“Pope Francis is admirably critical of abortion and population control . . .but . . . .”
Evangelli Gaudi “draws on the work and insight of Franciss’ great predecessors . . . but . . . .”
“Pope Francis has important and interesting things to say about sin, relativism, and divine mercy . . . but . . . .”
“He is at his best when he thinks and writes in continuity with the full weight of Christian wisdom . . . but . . . .”
Dyads pile up. It is a courtly convention to assure us that Mahoney is no flame thrower: "Be advised, Reader, that the author is a judicious scholar mindful of manners due the dignity of the papal office." Nevertheless, the heap of buts signals severe discrepancy between soothing precedent and disquieting intent.
When “the arts of intelligence” are applied to the actions of an office holder who distorts his office, it is reasonable — even mandatory — to withhold respect from him.
- An office confers authority.
- How that authority is used determines the degree of respect held out to the officeholder.
- Respect is earned through right use of authority.
- It is forfeited by misuse.
- Deference toward a man who disfigures his office is a species of complicity in the disfigurement.
(Consider Yeats’ question. It applies here: “How do we know the dancer from the dance?”)
Mahoney’s politesse is the requisite stance of a distinguished faculty member in a Catholic institution (Assumption College, Worcester, MA). It is also a deflection from the fact that this pope’s “ample continuities,” all scrupulously observed, are carriers of rupture and contradiction. Protective coloration, they camouflage intent, disguise fracture, and conceal political ideology under stripes of synthetic piety.
It is a devious tactic — the old Fabian approach. Francis is waging, by degrees, a war of indirection and attrition against the very civilization that honors and sustains the papacy. Francis brings to the Chair of Peter a ruinous cunning that lulls the credulous to accept his reduction of the Great Commission to a left-wing policy mandate.
Put simply, Jorge Bergoglio knows how to boil a frog.
It is difficult to determine what else he knows that is of significance. Francis’s Christmas hymn to fraternity was an embarrassment of politicized porridge and theological incoherence. It goes from bad:
What is the universal message of Christmas? It is that God is a good Father and we are all brothers and sisters.
To worse:
I want to mention, too, all those peoples that experience ideological, cultural and economic forms of colonization and see their freedom and identity compromised, as well as those suffering from hunger and the lack of educational and health care services.
Reference to colonization is code for sins of the West, a hint that migrants flooding toward the West are simply claiming their due. These “pilgrims” herald a new dawn of fraternity between competing religions and national interests. The lion will lie down with the lamb on the Korean Peninsula, in Africa, the Ukraine, the Middle East. It’s easy. All you need is love.
Even the most besotted papalist should spot the rot in this:
May this blessed season allow Venezuela once more to recover social harmony and enable all the members of society to work fraternally for the country’s development...
Social harmony? Absence of it is the engine of Venezuela’s tragedy? Not hyperinflation and the starvation economy created by the same anti-market “social justice” nostrums that socialist dictators admire? Monica Showalter responded to the delusional tenor of the Christmas address:
Venezuela became a hellhole in no small part because of the heavy permeation of the social fabric by Liberation Theology... I recall that back in the Hugo Chávez heyday, when the country was beginning its road to servitude, the Maryknoll magazines were full of praise for the Chavista government, even when it was starting to get obvious that the social fabric was unraveling. . . Remember when Chávez announced on the radio that it was OK for the poor to steal, based on biblical doctrine?
That last refers to a 2000 “Hello, President” talk by Chávez in which he declared people were “allowed to steal if you’re hungry.” Venezuelans wasted no time accepting this unofficial invitation to crime.
Earlier this month, Venezuelan bishops issued a statement that Nicolás Maduro’s new, contested presidential term is “morally unacceptable” because “his government has caused a human and social deterioration in people and in the wealth of the nation.”
Mary Anastasia O’Grady reported that within hours of the swearing in of opposition leader Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s interim president, he was recognized by the U.S. and some 20 other democracies, 11 of them in Latin America. [The European Union quickly followed suit.] Others advised Maduro to leave the country.
Rightly calling Maduro “an international symbol of human rights abuse,” O’Grady adds: “The tyrant isn’t entirely alone. Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Hezbollah stand with him.” S
Still, Francis refuses to censure Maduro. He prefers the role of mediator — as if it were possible to split the difference between despotism and freedom, economic collapse and solvency, cruelty and the common good. Or between good and evil.
Negating his own emphasis on fraternity, the pope stonewalls his brother bishops in Venezuela. He will not join his voice to theirs in calling tyranny to account. Calculated neutrality toward the source of Venezuela’s desperation suggests that Francis’s insistence on impartial mediation covers a preference for Maduro.
Francis’s Urbi et Orbi message appealed to the child Jesus to “bring relief to the beloved land of Ukraine “ and to . . “ the inhabitants of beloved Nicaragua.” “May the child Jesus allow the beloved and beleaguered country of Syria to . . . find fraternity.” “May the little child whom we contemplate today . . . watch over all the children of the world.”
These milksop pieties mimic charitable empathy but lack its substance — the spiritual dignity that resides in political intelligence and in truth-telling. Francis would have Catholics binge on syrup while he travels the world flattering global anti-market forces poised to create more Cubas, more Venezuelas, more poverty and desolation.
The child in the manger grew into a Man Who bled out on a Roman cross. Here in the shadow of that cross, it is to Him we send our prayers. Francis’s infantilizing sentimentality contributes nothing to the welfare of nations. It serves only to impair understanding — of the Incarnation no less than of governments.[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 02/02/2019 15:41] |