Doubts

Someone I know uses the following as part of his/her email signature:

“If one has the answers to all the questions – that is the proof
that God is not with him. 

It means that he is a false prophet using religion for himself.
The great leaders of the people of God, like Moses, have always
left room for doubt.”

The person quoted is Pope Francis. The source is America, the dissident Jesuit magazine, from 2013.

This is the same Pope who appears to pay no attention to any doubts expressed about his own off-the-cuff verbal meanderings, nor to repeated requests for clarification of his vague statements in Amoris Laetitia, even when those with questions are Cardinals of the Church who have submitted their dubia officially to him as Canon law allows. Not even the courtesy of a genuine reply. Just a remark, months later, that the interpretation formulated by a group of South American bishops was the correct one, without even mentioning the patiently doubting Cardinals.

This is the same Pope who attacks as "rigid" those who wish to celebrate the Tridentine Mass, or who take Catholic morality seriously enough to put up a real struggle with temptation (and encourage others to do the same). No room for their doubts about the shabby irreverence of contemporary Catholic worship. C'mon, people, have the right doubts, and then everything will be cool!

Did "the great leaders of the people of God, like Moses," really leave much room for doubt? When was that exactly, Your Holiness? I seem to recall that Moses was not leaving much room for doubt when he came down from Sinai and found that "the people of God" had turned to idolatry and vice while he was away receiving the Ten Commandments. I seem to recall something about throwing down the stone tablets in fury. Did Jesus Himself leave tons of wiggle room when He said, "Apart from me, you can do nothing?" Or "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life?" (No ambiguous sentences seeming to leave the door open to worthwhile things that Astarte or Isis or Aphrodite might have to offer the human race in His place.)

Francis here gives us another round of the same game that we've become so familiar with since 2013: invent a straw man and then revel in destroying it. After all, just who was claiming to have all the answers, relying on his own authority rather than on the Faith as it has been passed down to us?

Pope Francis' message to the Americas

The Pope delivered a fine special message to the Americas yesterday:

...When the image of the Virgin appeared on the tilma of Juan Diego, it was the prophecy of an embrace: Mary’s embrace of all the peoples of the vast expanses of America – the peoples who already lived there, and those who were yet to come. Mary’s embrace showed what America – North and South – is called to be: a land where different peoples come together; a land prepared to accept human life at every stage, from the mother’s womb to old age; a land which welcomes immigrants, and the poor and the marginalized, in every age. A land of generosity. 

That is the message of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and it is also my message, the message of the Church. I ask all the people of the Americas to open wide their arms, like the Virgin, with love and tenderness.

Many people will quickly fasten onto the statement's explicit connection with immigration policies. Fewer will notice its explicit mention of abortion and euthanasia, or that these things are actually mentioned before the bit about welcoming immigrants, the poor, and the marginalized.

I'd like to point out that economic freedom such as the people of the United States have enjoyed for two centuries is also a form of embrace. People have flocked here from everywhere else because they had some justified confidence that if they offered goods or services with honesty and goodwill, they would be rewarded with personal prosperity, without facing insuperable barriers because of their race, their ethnicity, or who their parents were.

Mind you, I said insuperable. This is a fallen world. This side of Heaven, there is no perfect ubiquitous fairness or justice. There is only the daily struggle to make those things happen a little more often in our own families, neighborhoods, and businesses. 

That's the Catholic doctrine of Subsidiarity, and it is the friend, not the foe, of economic liberty.

About that Time magazine cover...

Much of the Catholic internet is abuzz with Pope Francis' selection as Time magazine's "Person of the Year." My take: Person of the Year is a recognition of notoriety, not of approval. But even if you think it's a positive thing, enjoy it while it lasts. The video below, from a riot demonstration by pro-abortion feminists outside a cathedral in the Pope's native Argentina, is an accurate expression of the pure hatred of Christ and His Church that bubbles just beneath the surface of Progressive niceness. In case it's not clear, the thing that gets set afire in the middle of the frame is an effigy of Pope Francis.



Michael Voris' post on this event has additional footage that shows how faithful Catholic men linked arms in a cordon around the cathedral to protect it, and absorbed without retaliation the verbal abuse and physical attacks heaped upon them by many in the crowd.



Now, those guys are real men, and real Catholics. How many of us American Catholic men, drowning in the lukewarm banality of the Church of Nice, still would have the guts to do what they did?

Pope Francis on Life, for real

Our liberal friends in the Catholic Church thought they heard a major policy change in Pope Francis' widely-quoted off-the-cuff remarks back in September, when he seemed to downplay the importance of the issue of abortion. Too bad they weren't paying attention the very next day, when, speaking with carefully-chosen words to a gathering of Catholic OB/GYNs, he said:

The third aspect is a mandate: be witnesses and speakers of this "culture of life" . Your being Catholic entails a greater responsibility: first of all to yourself, to be committed to being consistent with the Christian vocation; and then to contemporary culture, to contribute to recognising the transcendent dimension in human life, the imprint of the creative work of God, from the very first moment of conception. This is a commitment to the new evangelization that often requires going against the current, at a cost to the person. The Lord counts on you to spread the "Gospel of life."

Read the rest: http://www.ncregister.com/blog/edward-pentin/popes-strong-words-in-defense-of-the-unborn#ixzz2laPjneTF

It bears repeating that even in the earlier casual statement, the Pope was simply reminding Catholics that preaching Christ must always come first, before we try to advance any social issue.

"Without Me, you can do nothing," Our Lord said, and Francis was just reminding us that He meant it.

Pope Francis puts one over the fence

I've often criticized Pope Francis' careless statements in recent months, but this time I have to say he hit one out of the park:

During his homily at Mass on November 18, Pope Francis called the first chapter of the First Book of Maccabees “one of the saddest pages in the Bible” because “a great part of the people of God withdraw from the Lord in favor of worldly proposals.”

Well, that sure sounds like it could have been ripped from today's headlines.

He continues:

“We would do well to think about what happened in the Book of Maccabees, he continued, about what happened step by step, before we decide to follow an ‘adolescent progressivism’ and go along with what everyone is doing,” the L’Osservatore Romano report added. “We would also do well, he said, to ponder the consequences of their infidelity, to think about the ‘death sentences, the human sacrifices’ which followed thereafter. He then asked those present: ‘Do you think there are no human sacrifices today? There are many, many of them. And there are laws that protect them.’” 

The rest can be found here. H/t CatholicCulture.org.

"An exciting ride"

If Francis really is in the line of Cardinals Martini and Bernardin, as Russell Shaw remarks, we are indeed in for "an exciting ride" in the Catholic Church. Exciting, that is, in the sense that skidding your car into a freeway guardrail is exciting. And to claim that the Church has been too confrontational over the past forty years is to ignore the shabby record of silence of most American and European bishops on any subject that might get them bad press, or even a few scowls from the more dissident members of their flocks. If Shaw is right, Francis' path isn't new; what's new is that we now have papal validation of the worthless habits of thought that have led to so much decline.

For eight precious years of the pontificate of a certain Emeritus Pope, it looked like the "long, melancholy, withdrawing roar" of this blog's namesake poem had finally fallen silent, and that the Sea of Faith was poised for a new flood tide. But with each passing month of Francis' reign, that hope seems to have been, at best, premature.

I posted a portion of these remarks first in the combox of the Alateia website, where the article appeared.