The Obamazation of Pope Francis II

I remember being at a dinner party the week before the 2008 presidential election.  I was a reluctant guest—I was brought to the party under false pretenses by a friend who knew that I didn’t care for the host and found his opinions boorish, but who wanted to “liven up” what he feared would be an otherwise dull evening.  “Jack” is a retired army officer from Brooklyn with a strong ethnic identity and a propensity towards stereotypes whether they be matters of race, politics, gender, sexual orientation, or religion.  He also is a devout Catholic—devout in terms of Mass attendance but not necessarily in terms of the Church’s teachings on social issues.  The other guests at dinner ranged from moderate Republicans to the tea-party positions of our host.  I was definitely in the wrong company and still wonder what our mutual friend was possibly thinking of in dragging me along.  I did my best to stay out of the conversation, but after a half hour of hearing how Barack Obama is a Muslim and a Marxist and a “mongrel”—an obvious reference to his mixed race background, I had had enough and told my host that his opinions brought to mind my favorite line from a movie is from the Emperor’s Club when Professor Hundert says: “Aristophanes once wrote, roughly translated; "Youth ages, immaturity is outgrown, ignorance can be educated, and drunkenness sobered, but STUPID lasts forever."  It cast a pall on the conversation and has caused a slight drop in the number of invitations I receive to dine, but my point is that in certain circles Obama was doomed from the beginning and for no reason other than his color.  I am not saying that there are not reasons to be disillusioned with the President—he has made enough blunders to disillusion his most ardent supporters—but rather that he didn’t stand a chance with the crazies from moment one.  Pope Francis didn’t have it any better.  While most of us were bewildered at the entire process—it had been centuries since a Pope had resigned and since a papal election was held with a still-living Pope (or in this case, Pope emeritus) on the scene—there were those who immediately sounded the tocsin that the Church was doomed.   Every action the man has taken since has only confirmed their irrational fears.

The election of Cardinal Bergoglio took us all by surprise.  I remember greeting a friend of mine at the airport that afternoon.  Father Kevin had just flown in from Rome to give a lecture I was organizing and asked me if a Pope had been elected while he was airborne and out of news-contact.  I said “Yes, an Argentine Jesuit who has taken the name “Francis.”  Kevin laughed and said “No, seriously….”  He did not believe me until he heard it for himself on the news.  I don’t blame him—the whole thing was improbable.  For some, it was more than improbable.  Here is what Steve Skojec reports from readers on his blog (http://blog.steveskojec.com/2013/11/13/intuition-infighting-and-our-divided-house/)

 “I read the link, “New Pope Chosen” on my computer earlier this year. I immediately jumped up to watch the event unfold on my TV upstairs. En route to the TV, I stopped at the sink in my kitchen, where the Sacred Heart of Jesus was enthroned. I immediately heard the message broadcast to my soul, “This is a bad decision.” When I saw him, I felt just like you.”

Another wrote

“I too had a similar feeling when Francis stepped out on the balcony for the first time. It is disturbing but I like many continue to look for Satan’s influence on my thinking in regards to Francis.”

And yet another

“When Pope Francis came out on the loggia, my stomach did somersaults, I wanted to vomit — for hours. I had a sense of foreboding.”

 The problem of course was not the color of the Holy Father’s skin.  The problem is that he was not Benedict and his style immediately signaled a change away from that of his immediate predecessors.  And his being a Jesuit didn’t help. 

The “old goat” wrote in a response to a Free Republic (http://www.freerepublic.com
/focus/f-religion/3103487/posts) posting:   

I’m of the mind that this is a very dangerous papacy. The Jesuits have been a very poor example of Catholic orthodoxy for a very long time.

So his lack of a scarlet mozetta and the SJ after his name, was enough to raise the fears that the doctrinaire tone of the two preceding papacies would vanish and with it would disappear fidelity to the faith itself.  Here is a man, according to his critics, who undermines the very office with which he has been entrusted.  Going back to Steve Skojec for a moment: Skoject is no fan of the Holy Father.  He too sees Francis as betraying the Petrine Office of guarding the deposit of faith, if not by outright heresy by an ambiguity

That obligation of “guarding with the greatest vigilance the deposit of faith” is one I don’t see Pope Francis taking very seriously at all, at least in terms of the never-ending stream of misinterpretations of Catholic teaching or the direction of the Church that seem to follow in his wake.

Skojec is not alone.  Many neo-trads are convinced that the Pope has betrayed the faith.  In that same New Republic article cited above, another commentator writes:

The Creed Pope Francis recites at Mass is far from the creed he speaks outside the Mass, in his interviews. And a reader of LifeSite News posted this remark attacking the fidelity of Pope Francis to our Catholic faith:

As far as I can see, the new approach is to meld both Catholics and Protestants into Christians, without worrying about doctrine or dogma, at the risk of being labeled a sect. That seems to be the roadmap for the future, and it worries me.

This is serious stuff.  Another respondent to the same LifeSite News article writes:

If that happens, then those of us in the Romanist Church will have to go Lefèbvrist - which may yet prove to be a good thing!!  Bishop Fellay, who really seemed to be working well with Benedict XVI, seems to be a genuinely good man (just like Joseph Ratzinger aka Benedict XVI). However, I'm really getting suspicious of Francis...

What has Francis done to bring such suspicions on him that people are thinking of going into schism over his papacy?  No doctrines have changed.  The permission for those who prefer the unreformed rites to resort to their arcane ceremonies has not been abrogated.  But Francis is labeled a Marxist, a heretic, and whatever else the crazies want to call him.  A priest friend of mine says that in his 37 years of priesthood, the subject that gets him in the most difficulty with the heresy-hunters is the Mercy of God.  I guess Pope Francis is finding the same thing.  But then Jesus was never very popular with the Scribes and the Pharisees either.  

The Obamazation of Pope Francis

Pope Francis and Barack Obama should form a mutual support group.  Neither one can get a break from the extreme right ends of his constituency.  The criticisms are often not founded in fact and reflect a paranoia more than knowledge and understanding of our institutions and their histories—whether the United States or the Catholic Church.  And it is often the same voices that are raised against each.  I am not going to get into the President and his problems,  but I do want to look at the irrational fears that keep making their way into criticisms of Francis who, for many of us, is the breath of fresh air in what was getting to be a far too stuffy Church. 

  From when his election was first announced and he appeared on the balcony of Saint Peter’s basilica without the traditional ermine-lined papal mozetta favored by his more traditionalist predecessor Pope Benedict, Francis has aroused at first the fears and later the contempt of those who believe that he has changed the direction of the Church in deleterious ways.  The semi-schismatic website Rorate Caeli http://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com published the following report from Marcelo González, a critic of Vatican II Catholicism the  very day the new pope was elected:

Of all the unthinkable candidates, Jorge Mario Bergoglio is perhaps the worst. Not because he openly professes doctrines against the faith and morals, but because, judging from his work as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, faith and moral seem to have been irrelevant to him.

A sworn enemy of the Traditional Mass, he has only allowed imitations of it in the hands of declared enemies of the ancient liturgy. He has persecuted every single priest who made an effort to wear a cassock, preach with firmness, or that was simply interested in Summorum Pontificum.

It didn’t take long for the fears to be confirmed.  Only two weeks after his election, on Holy Thursday, the Pope celebrated Mass not in his Cathedral of Saint John in the Lateran or in the Vatican Basilica as his predecessors, but in a juvenile prison.  And he not only broke the tradition of a grand pontifical liturgy in one of the patriarchal basilicas, he “broke the law” that insisted that only men are to be included in the washing of feet by washing the feet of two young ladies, one of whom is a Muslim.  (Actually, we should say that the Pope shattered the law as he set an example that lets the rest of us know that the liturgical guidelines on this need not be interpreted strictly. And for some that is even worse than breaking the law because it obviously gives permission to “go and do likewise.”)    A blog out of Gaithersburg Maryland run by a particularly dyspeptic woman by the name of Janet wrote:

I refer, of course, to the now-infamous and yes, scandalous conduct of the Holy Thursday service at Rome's Casal del Marmo prison for minors. The Holy Father washed the feet of twelve minors - including two women, one of them Muslim. This is in direct contravention to canon law that stipulates that only the feet of men be washed, if that ceremony is included in a Holy Thursday liturgy.

So the Holy Father caused scandal.  I am not sure for whom.  For Janet, certainly, and probably a half dozen or so of her friends.  For most Catholics this was the first clear sign of hope that we are back on track with a Christian faith that is free of the control of the scribes and the Pharisees who have taken it on themselves to police liturgies and make sure every little infraction is reported and punished. 

But Janet, like the foes of Jesus in the Gospels, is not concerned only with the weightier matters of the law, but even the jots and tittles.  She worries, for example, about his sartorial simplicity. 

This current Holy Father seems to have a disregard for some of the traditions of the papacy, most particularly that of the vestments. In perhaps a misguided zeal for "simplicity".

Misguided zeal for simplicity?  Frankly the liturgical fashion shows of his predecessor were becoming an embarrassment in a world that has moved beyond renaissance costuming.  This is not to say that Pope Benedict did not have exquisite taste in matters of apparel—he does—but we need a Pope who reminds us that the least of Christ’s brothers and sisters are too often homeless, naked, and in want.  Francis is a constant nudge to our consciences. 

As to this point, there were mainly matters of ritual and style that disturbed people about Francis, but the criticism began to pick up steam at and after World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro in the end of July.  The papal liturgies were wildly enthusiastic but there was much criticism of a “dance” that had bishops and kids alike in a sort of flash mob scene.  It was hugely popular among those present, but not among the neo-trad bloggers who were “appalled” at “this lack of gross decency and respect for the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.”  What set of the alarms bells for many, however, was not the dance, but the papal interview on the plane back to Rome when the Holy Father said “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?”  Who is he to judge?  The bloggers were quick to tell him who he is to judge.  After all, if he can’t judge, they can’t claim that right and with that comment Francis became for them the Grinch that stole Christmas.  Not judge?  The Catholic blogosphere would shut down if we can’t sit in moral judgment of one another.  Fortunately, we still have Phil Robertson.  Maybe we should dig out the old tiara and put it on Phil—he does look a bit like Pope St Pius V. 

Pat Buchanan, the good Catholic and evangelist for the Republican Right, wishes the Holy Father “would judge gay people more.”  The American Spectator called Francis “The Poster Boy for Gay Marriage.”

The problem is this—Francis’s new approach—while not altering doctrine—is altering practice. 

Well, we will do more on this in future posting as we are only beginning with the criticism of Pope Francis and as every day goes by—and Cardinal Burke falls further from grace—the crazies get crazier and crazier as they see the Church that reinforces their prejudices and dreams fade in favor of a very new—but also very old—vision of what Christ calls his Church to be.   A lady named Pamela wrote in to Life Site News http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/pro-life-leaders-shocked-by-removal-of-cardinal-burke-from-important-vatica/ about the distress she is finding with Pope Francis and his leadership as it trickles down to everyday life in her parish,

My uneasiness is turning into outright fear of what is happening to our Church. I am seeing this same theme play out in my local parish, where the new pastor says we have to be more accepting and tolerant of every single social ill I've been fighting to stop. I'm praying for our clergy daily and also praying for discernment to see the Truth and the Good in all of this (because I sure as heck can't find it on my own). Please, everyone, pray with me!

Well, Pamela, we are praying with you but most likely not for the same end result.  Where you find fear, we find hope.