Francis is the Antifa Pope

I had not had time to check out Catholic blogs or even most secular news sites for weeks, but I took some time late Friday night to do so to try and catch up.  I came across several articles or posts on Francis, and in reading them I was struck with the sense that, to a very large degree, he could be described as the Antifa (supposedly anti-fascist hardcore communists) Pope.  Just a few ways in which he mirrors this hopelessly silly and pointless but still manifestly destructive group (and I’m not saying the analogy holds in every respect, but I think there is enough overlap for the descriptor to apply):

• Completely beholden to a wholly disproved and outmoded ideology (constantly living in 1968)
• Refusal to accept the historic and contemporary crimes of communism/socialism (as in Venezuela) while constantly attacking “evil” capitalism, liberalism, (authentic) Catholicism, etc.
• Tilting at windmills that probably never existed, or at any rate certainly haven’t in decades (“rigorism in the Church,” severe confessors, hyper-judgmental parishes where people with common moral failings are literally chased away)
• Using unjust, even fascistic practices in the name of fighting ostensible fascism or revanchism in the Church – which are the labels constantly applied, by default, to any perceived ideological opponent

It would be laughable if so much damage were not being done.

At any rate, a few excerpts of some articles from just one week of Francis’ folly:

Francis condemns Catholic “fanatics” about doctrinal clarity:

But there were always those people who, without any commission, go about disturbing the Christian community with speeches that upset souls: “Eh, no, someone who says that is a heretic, you can’t say this, or that; this is the doctrine of the Church.’ And they are fanatics about things that are not clear, such as these fanatics who go about there, sowing discord in order to divide the Christian community. And this is the problem: when the doctrine of the Church, that which comes from the Gospel, that which the Holy Spirit inspires – because Jesus said, ‘He will teach us and remind you of all that I have taught’ –  that doctrine becomes an ideology. And this is the great error of these people.” [Said perhaps the most doctrinaire pope in Church history]

“We must not be frightened when we hear of the opinions of the ideologues of doctrine. The Church has its own Magisterium, the Magisterium of the Pope, of the Bishops, of the Councils, and we must go along the path that comes from the preaching of Jesus, and from the teaching and assistance of the Holy Spirit, it is always open, always free… this is the freedom of the Spirit, but in doctrine… doctrine unites, the councils always unite the Christian community… ideology divides… for them ideology is more important than doctrine: they leave aside the Holy Spirit.”

“Today it falls to me to call for the grace of mature obedience to the Magisterium of the Church, that obedience to what the Church has always taught and continues to teach us…….[Even as I go about, practically daily, dismantling the Magisterium, or, at the very least, proposing contradictions against it as a counter-Magisterium I pretend is the real one.  He is truly a conciliar Jesuit.  It will be well when this order dies a natural death, if it is not suppressed along the way]

Note that Franci’s speech was surely a rebuttal of the speeches given the same day of two of the most ardent defenders of the Faith in these times of horrible trial, Cardinals Burke and Caffara.  As always, Francis snipes from the side, making snide comments (not always on point) and insinuations without the decency, the moral fortitude to address those who call out his heretical “propositions” straight on.

Meanwhile, as Venezuela burns, more and more Latin Americans are asking, “¿Donde esta Jorge?”:

One institution which has remained free of the regime’s control is the Catholic Church. For years, Venezuela’s Catholic bishops have bravely underscored the abuses of the government first led by the man whose personality and socialist policies lit the fuse for the current conflagration—the late Hugo Chávez—and now by his successor Nicolás Maduro.

Venezuela’s left-populist regime has always recognized the Church as a major support for anyone—Catholic, non-Catholic, believer, non-believer—who opposes what Venezuela’s Catholic bishops called in a remarkably clear and tough-minded January 2017 pastoral exhortation a “totalitarian political system” that seeks to impose its “21^stCentury Socialism” upon the country. This is despite the “utter failure,” the bishops added, of “socialism in every country in which this regime has been installed.”

Chávez’s response to similar criticism was to publicly insult Catholic bishops while proclaiming, in near-blasphemous terms, that “Jesus was the first socialist.” Maduro has upped the ante. Chávista thugs regularly attack Catholic priests in churches and Catholic university students in the streets. In April this year, they interrupted the Chrism Mass of the Archbishop of Caracas, Cardinal Jorge Urosa, during Holy Week—which included roughing up the cardinal.

There is, however, one question being consistently asked—with greater frequency and visibly growing impatience—throughout Latin America whenever Venezuela comes up in conversation. And that is: “Where is Pope Francis?”

In fact, as the article goes on to reveal, Francis continues to provide aid and comfort to the murderous Maduro regime by running interference for them and placing onerous demands on the regime’s critics.

Like antifa, he has to pretend Venezuela does not exist, or practically so, as it is too fatal a rebuke to the ideological shibboleths held by both.

And finally, in what amounts to yet another howler of such stupendous proportions one kind of wonders whether or not Francis is all there mentally – or perhaps caught in a reverie of ’65 he can’t get out of? – Francis spoke of an invasion of libertarianism, of all things, into the academy, where daily proof of total Marxist dominance grows more and more insurmountable.

I forget which book I was, but it was a very sad tale of marxist revolutionaries in later life.  These were primarily ex-Soviet revolutionaries, the few alums of 1917 that managed to survive the Stalinist purges that killed the original revolutionary cadres almost to a man.  It was an immensely depressing tale.  All these revolutionaries, even after being betrayed by Stalin (and, some of them, Lenin), actually beat their own breasts for their failure to accord to the Marxist ideal (this is a subject upon which Solzhenitsyn expounds at length, the idiot commies betrayed by the commie system who continue to love and remain loyal to it, so brainwashed are they).  All they could do was relive their youth when they felt they were in the revolutionary vanguard, just at Bergoglio continues to seem to continually be stuck in his 50s heyday of leftist Peronists desperately seeking to return to power, constantly surrounded by “neoliberal” and traditionalist enemies – enemies to be crushed.

Meh, may be going a bit far there at the end, but the evidence that this guy somehow persists in some late-50s to early 70s fantasyland is, I think, beyond dispute.

And the man most imbued in casuistry imaginable constantly finds it in others.  But there you go.

Perhaps less the Antifa pope, he’s Don Jorge de la Mancha.