Friday, July 24, 2015

Fed Up With Francis


Well Pope Francis’s favorability ratings among Americans has taken a serious dip.  All I can say is that it is about time.  For two and a half years now everybody has been falling all over themselves over Francis and I have been asking myself: Are they listening to the man???  Really listening???
Well, ok, not everybody was falling all over him.  The Krazies spotted something wrong right from the first.  A Jesuit?!?  Not a good sign!  “Francis”—hmmm, a break with tradition, shoulda been a Pius or an Alexander.   And where is the papal folderol that we had grown used to again???  You know, the fur-trimmed cape, the floppy Santa-hat, the ruby-reds on his feet???  But the regular joes liked it: living simply, eating in the cafeteria with the staff, the used car to get back and forth to the office.  “A poor Church for the poor”—good rhetoric, clever marketing.  But there were a few more who saw the problem: without the fancy shoes and living on the palace, he becomes just another priest doing his job.  I mean he had might as well just get a bicycle to ride around like the Queen of Holland.  Michael Voris was first to sound the blast of the trumpet against the monstrous regiment of a Jesuit claiming to be Pope when the real Pope is still alive.  Now that Mother A. is incapacitated, thank heavens we have Michael Voris to be our infallible guide when the magisterium fails.   
And then there was “who am I to judge.”  That alienated all the Pharisees.  I mean, if the Pope can’t judge then the rest of us can’t keep score.  This time it is Lions 0, Christians 1.  Game’s over.  Son of a Bitch called an “olly olly in free” for sinners.  Damn.  The I’m-holier-than-thou crowd still hasn’t forgiven him for that.  Poor Carol McKinley at Throw the Bums Out 2010, aka The Tenth Crusade, aka What the Pope Really Means, and Janet over at Restore D.C. Catholicism, and Mary Anne at Les Femmes: what will these women do if they can’t cast the first stone at anyone who doesn’t meet their criterion for worthy reception of Holy Communion.  If we don’t get back on track, next thing you know prostitutes and tax-collectors will be entering the Kingdom of Heaven before us. 
But despite all this, still Francis managed to hold on to the vast majority of Catholics.  Only the spiritually elite were seeing it.   Most of us weren’t interesting in sitting in judgment anyway, and most of us liked the Pope being a bit down at the heels after the previous Pope’s somewhat of a dowager’s penchant for damask and old lace.  And all that Swiss Guard, and Gentlemen of His Holiness, and stamping of feet and saluting of soldiers and thrones and things stand in somewhat dramatic contrast to the plain hard wood of the Cross.  The gilded crucifix thing used to work; doesn’t anymore.  So we could live with this guy: we liked it actually.  But then he began to move from the theatrical to the everyday and that increasingly made us uncomfortable. Of course before we run-of-the-mill Catholics realized we were being hoodwinked by this somewhat commonplace excuse for a pope, there was the famous Father Hunwicke, a refugee from women-priested Anglicanism who has been appalled at Francis’ disdain for the pontifical; but then the good Father is a subject of her Britannic Majesty and so can’t imagine life beyond the fantasy realm of Queens and palaces.  And our own America presbyter vagans, Father Z, another convert, has been beside himself about the Pope’s everyday style.  Why did these people become Catholics anyway: it certainly wasn’t the Gospel.  What did you go out into the desert to see?  A pope dressed in fine clothes?  Those who wear elegant clothes and live luxuriously are found in palaces.    If you don’t like a down-at-the-heels Jesuit from Buenos Aires, you certainly aren’t going to be happy with a carpenter from Nazareth. 
But then it began to get a little to hot-in-the-kitchen for the rest of us.  Frankly, when it comes to the immigrant thing, a lot of us want Donald Trump for Pope.  I mean if this Francis fellow wants to ramble on about Africans swimming ashore at Lampedusa, who cares?  Let the I-talians deal with their own problems, but when he starts talking about those Latino types climbing over our border wall with their diseases and their penchant for drugs and rape and violence, well, he should stick to things he knows about. 
And then it only got worse.  He won’t pontificate at the Traditional-Latin-Mass-of-All-Ages-and-Everywhere-Like-Jesus-did-at-the-Last-Supper (you know when he gave the Apostles Holy Communion—in one kind—on the tongue as they knelt around the table), but he’ll pontificate about Climate Change and how he thinks capitalism is ruining the earth.  He should stick to faith and morals.  In this age of abortion and rampant birth control and same-sex marriage any pope has more than enough to keep him busy without interfering with fracking and strip-mining and deforestation and human trafficking.  I don’t go to Church to hear about this world; I go to hear about the next world.  I mean, we are going to be in heaven (or hell) a long time; much longer than we will live on this earth.  So who cares about this world.  God gave it to us to dominate so strip ‘er bare and make what money you can doing so.  There’s no sin in being rich.  Jesus endorsed trickle-down economics when he told us about how that poor fellow, what was his name?  Lazarus?  How he used to eat the crumbs from the rich man’s table.  We need to hear more about that—what was it that Ronald Reagan said: when enough crumbs fall all boats rise.  No, this Francis fellow will destroy America as we know it.   He’s got to go.  Never trust a Pope who wears black shoes; he isn’t the real McCoy.  

Bazinga.  

3 comments:

  1. Simply wonderful. You named the pain with precision. The Magic Kingdom Krazies prove themselves more and more to be pathetic Disneyland Katholiks far from the Kingdom of God. Once Mickey (Minnie?) Mouse vacated the Kastle and took with him all the costumes and props, with Prince Charming at his side, all the Tinker Bells that flit around the palace just couldn't handle it -- they and all the Sunday evening viewers at home who watched in horror as the Kodak moments in technicolor turned a rather drab black and white. So they have turned the channel. Ed Sullivan at least has interesting acts, mostly comedians and Broadway showstoppers with all the props and costumes you could ever want.

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  2. Excellent article. I'm working my way forward from about the beginning of July on here.

    As I keep saying many times when I'm reading most of these: I wish that all of these sentiments and arguments could be distributed to young priests and seminarians across the country. The neo-traditional movement is full of people who haven't been given a solid defense and proper perspective on the developments of the church since Vatican II.

    I've seen too many a young man enter seminary with the best of intentions to cultivate a spiritual life and become a "soldier for Christ," and then they are approached by one of the Krazies who, much like the Mafia, smile condescendingly and say "well, you know how it was *always* done, right?" and the slide downward begins as previously even-keeled, well-intentioned kids are schmoozed by the Krazies. Pretty soon they offer arguments that masquerade as tolerance- and diversity-based: "the Church is big: there is room for both the ordinary form and the extraordinary form." A semester later, they're talking about the benefits of the Divine Mercy incantations being superimposed on the Holy Week liturgies, and a year later has them alternatively smirking when a visiting bishop isn't dressed like a drag queen or sweating and salivating when (s)he is. By the fourth year, they are themselves leading semi-clandestine trips to "TLM parishes" at odd hours and interjecting into normal conversations with the same twinkle in their eyes that was initially used on them, knowing that they have the backing and idol worship of one or two entire, whole, DOZEN people when they sneak out to pre-conciliar goings-on and bemoan the sad, liberal, hippie, now-geriatric faculty that "just doesn't get how beautiful these things are." Then they fantasize about how their first mass "really should be" the usus antiquor because x, y, and z. Then, they go to theology and come out four years later as a "newly-minted priest" who is useless and panders, along with a solid third of seminarians today in some arch/dioceses, to the tiny fraction of those who relish in the antiquated rites of bygone eras.

    It would be like a third of the workers of AT&T deciding that they only wanted to focus on the "telegraph" portion of the company's name in 2015, and would, if pressed, grudgingly work with land lines. Cell phones? Screw that. In the meantime, the older workers are embracing cell phones and broadband and the like, as they interface with the 99% of Catholics and non-Catholics who are on board with the present world.

    Not only are there very few young priests, but even those that we have are largely backward-looking. Even most "moderates" prize JPII's so-called "theology of the body" and simply say and think things within the well-worn tracks of the safety zone. The sad reality is that in some (arch)dioceses today, philosophy is nothing more scholasticism and theology is nothing more than regurgitating the old trusty Baltimore catechism. It's sad.

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