Francis versus the Church, or Francis versus Jesus Christ?

The writer at That The Bones You Have Crushed May Thrill (a sublime bit of Scripture, but I’m not so sure as a blog name) has two excellent posts up on the aftermath of the Synod and Pope Francis.  I will quote extensively from one, you can go read the other.

First, is it really in the “God of surprises” to contradict Himself and change eternal Truth?  How can we reconcile this belief with the idea that one is “a loyal son of the Church?” The post below starts out with an excerpt from Pope Francis’ “media via,” or “middle way” approach in his closing speech to the Synod, in which the Holy Father posits a path between the “extremes” of adherence to the Faith handed down to us and rank apostasy:

“And since it is a journey of human beings, with the consolations there were also moments of desolation, of tensions and temptations, of which a few possibilities could be mentioned: 

One, a temptation to hostile inflexibility, that is, wanting to close oneself within the written word, (the letter) and not allowing oneself to be surprised by God, by the God of surprises, (the spirit); within the law, within the certitude of what we know and not of what we still need to learn and to achieve.  

From the time of Christ, it is the temptation of the zealous, of the scrupulous, of the solicitous and of the so-called – today – “traditionalists” and also of the intellectuals.”

In his speech at the close of the Synod it is true that Francis talked of other temptations, but it is noteworthy that ‘traditionalists’ were first in the line of fire. So I guess that before the ‘liberals and progressives’ (Cardinals Kasper, Madriaga, Schoenborn etc) are punished, we can assume Cardinals Mueller and Napier as well as the already demoted Burke will be first for the chop. [It is the actions that speak much more loudly than words.  Pope Francis may proclaim the need for a “middle way” in the Church, but his actions show that he sees the middle far, far more to the modernist/progressive side than any of his predecessors.  The modernists are promoted and given influential sinecures, while the more faithful prelates are railroaded out of office and banished to the hinterlands.  So the “middle way” seems a farce, a rhetorical tool at most, a hypocrisy at worst.]

…… It is only in the reign of Francis that to hold fast to the Magisterium of Holy Mother Church, to defend with one’s speech the Church’s teaching, as Cardinal Burke has done, on the Sacrament of Marriage and the institution of the family, that it has been posited, by the Pope himself, that to do so is a ‘temptation’. The Church, in her teachings and her law has never been ‘flexible’ with sin. It has always shown leniency to repentant sinners. [Repentant being the key word, meaning recognizing one’s actions as evil, having true contrition for them (meaning willing to remove oneself from the occasion of sin and do one’s utmost to avoid that sin in future), and having a firm purpose of amendment.  Remaining in your adulterous situation with your third “spouse” indicates none of the above.  I know those situations are very difficult, there are probably a few souls who have been divorced and remarried w/o annulment who now have happy relationships, possibly even with children, and who would like to be faithful Catholics. But they remain in sin, and by endorsing their sin, permitting the Blessed Sacrament to be blasphemed, would be only to further encourage more such terrible situations.  We must also recognize, at the same time, that many divorces are made simply for convenience or due to a great deal of flippancy.  The basic problem with the Pope’s position, however, is that it is no charity to permit people to add sin upon sin, that no matter what he says or what disastrous “pastoral” approach is adopted, the sin will remain, and these souls will be judged accordingly. It is truly frightening to contemplate how far von Balthasar’s destructive errors regarding Hell: Population Zero have reached into the minds of even great prelates.]

In his condemnation of the ‘temptation’ to uphold marriage, the moral law, and the sanctity of marriage, presumably Pope Francis is also rather annoyed with Jesus Christ Who said, “Anyone who puts away his wife and marries another commits adultery” and Who said to the woman caught in adultery, “Go and sin no more.”……. [And that is the point of this equally important post.  This second post notes that it is not Francis versus the Church, by which secularists mean the “rigid hierarchy,” but it is Francis versus Jesus Christ, the Bridegroom espoused for all eternity to His Church.  And then we get back to all the false mercy which just happens to accord perfectly with what the world – or the self-anointed elites – demand from the Church.  I do not think anyone, even a Pope, can trust themselves to be truly unbiased or uninfluenced by this utterly dominant worldly view, unless they know without doubt they are clinging with all their might to the Doctrine of the Faith.  Anything else carries the greatest danger, if not the moral certainty, or worldly self-seeking.]

Clearly, once Francis has purged the episcopate and Roman Curia of liberals, progressives and traditionalists, he will be there, all alone, because he alone can embody the Holy Faith of Christ! Nobody else gets it but him!

And that’s a pretty funny point, which I think is true in the sense that I have increasingly felt over the past year or more that Pope Francis seems to think nobody quite understands the Church like he does, that all of the rest of us – perhaps excluding Kardinal Kasper – are deficient to various degrees in our understanding and practice of the Faith.

So often Pope Francis’ rhetoric is very negative.  He has castigated almost every variation in the practice of the Faith imaginable.  He very rarely seems positive and uplifting when describing the efforts of millions of pious souls.  He seems much more comfortable with those outside the Church, than within.  He seems to think, especially, that those of us who adhere to the traditional practice of the Faith are the worst enemies the “Church” – or his reductive vision of the same – has.  It is interesting to contemplate how that mentality has seeped into those now leading the Franciscans of the Immaculate.  Or maybe it was there all along.

I do bear in mind that I think the rhetoric in Pope Francis’ closing address regarding the errors of progressives/modernists was pretty much just that – he criticized faithful Catholics, and probably felt obliged to throw those pious souls a bone by criticizing the other side.  But as I said above, actions speak much louder than words, and Pope Francis’ actions have all been of one kind – advancing and aiding the most egregious modernists, and punishing and inhibiting the more faithful – in proportion to their faithfulness!  And that says a lot.

It reminds me of our own leftist President’s dictum to reward his friends and punish his enemies.

I want to maintain that in spite of the criticism and the increasing clarity of my comments I do have a strong filial love for Pope Francis.  He remains my father in the Faith.  He is the Pope.  I find much of what he does and believes disconcerting and destructive, I pray he changes many of his beliefs and practices, but I am in union with him as the Vicar of Christ.  God permitted him to be elected Pope, probably to remind us all how short we fall in our practice of the Faith.  I am a Catholic, he is my father, and I love and pray for him, even if I disagree with him.  But that does not mean I am blind to reality, or have to behave as a sycophant and pretend everything he does or says is just wonderful and the very embodiment of Catholicity.

That kind of hyper-montanism, on even the most trivial of prudential issues, is how we have gotten into this mess.  God could be chastising the Church and bishops for turning the Holy See into a cult of personality over the past 120 years or so.

Now I’m just spitballing. I’ll stop.