by PAUL COLLITS – AUSTRALIA’S bizarrely appointed Ukrainian Cardinal, Mykloa Bychok, was unsurprisingly fulsome in his praise for the late Pontiff.
There are several reasons to tilt towards kindness towards the late Pope Francis.
- Traditional seminarians were ejected for practices which had always been held as spiritually beneficial.
- For Francis, “personal fulfilment” became an indicator of spiritual maturity.
- He left a trail of tension, division and confusion.
Don’t speak ill of the dead. If you can’t say anything nice, keep schtum. There have always been bad popes before. The Pope is dead, long live the Papacy. After all, what real harm did he do? He had his merits. Always look for the good in people. It was the Holy Spirit at work.
Well, as the cliché goes, God works in very, very mysterious ways. As I know from recent personal experience.
TRUTH
Or, you could tell the truth.
Gavin Ashenden at Catholic Unscripted mercifully takes the latter view.
Ashenden’s primary reaction was one of relief – “thank God it’s over”. Twelve long years. And, if the Holy Spirit was at work during the pontificate of Francis, perhaps He was simply telling us what not to do as Christians.
For you can only get to the unvarnished truth of any subject by being open to hearing all views. And observing what is right in front of you.
There is also the St Paul approach: “I reproached Cephas to his face!” He did indeed. Truth in charity.
One thing unusual – to my eye, at least – is the extent that people are urging prayers for the repose of the Pope’s soul. This seems odd, in the light of the holiness routinely expected of the top prelates.
Cardinal Pell is already working miracles. Will Francis, I wonder?
Twenty years ago, almost to the day, John Paul II the Great passed away.
His sad passing, which certainly had me in tears at the time, was widely greeted with the loud call of “Santo Subito”. Probably not with the most recent incumbent.
Every Pope since John XXXIII, bar Benedict and the unfortunately short-lived John Paul I, has been canonised.
In Pope Ratzinger’s case, it is only a matter of time, and he is also, one day, likely to be made a Doctor of the Church. He should be. Will Pope Frank ever be canonised?
Some of the pundits’ views are interesting. For RR Reno, Francis was, above all, a Jesuit.
As Reno says, “a remarkable man has passed the scene”. Well, there is absolutely no doubt about that.
Upon attaining the highest office, Francis told fellow Catholics to “make a mess”, and, by George, he sure did so himself. The other George (Pell) said he would be a “surprising pope”, back in 2013. Yes, again.
For Compact magazine, Francis was a managerialist, who brought HR to the Vatican.
That would explain a lot. James Burnham meets Rome.
CONFUSION
For some, the late Pope was “the apotheosis of Vatican II”. For many, he was “a sign of confusion”. For still others, even, a Marxist. Not a Marxist so much as a Peronist. A product of the St Gallen mafia? Undoubtedly.
A successor to Cardinal Martini, the so-called “pre-pope? You bet.
According to many, Francis was elected to clean up the Vatican. As with so many things, good and ill, he didn’t execute, but simply left a trail of tension, division and, again, confusion.
He was way beyond unsettling. It would be a long stretch to suggest that the return to Catholicism among some of the young has anything to do with the most recent pontificate.
Christopoher Akehurst at Quadrant Online provides as useful a summary as any I have read. He calls Francis “a puzzle”.
Pope Francis was the direct heir of liberalism, largely of Teutonic or other northern European manufacture – influenced by Protestantism – that captured large sections of the Catholic Church during and after Vatican II.
He is the council’s progeny, formed in a tradition which saw seminaries in the immediate post-conciliar years turned into “agents for change” in the Church in “the spirit of Vatican II”.
To him, “personal fulfilment” became an indicator of spiritual maturity and the measure of good and bad became indistinguishable from Marxist criteria.
As with all “liberal” ventures, this culture of clerical formation was ruthlessly enforced, so that traditionally inclined seminarians were sometimes ejected for adherence to practices which not long before had been held to be of spiritual benefit.
A favourite Catholic parlour game of the future might be to name, in order, Francis’s ten worst errors. Yes, the short list is that long:-
- Will it be making climate realism a sin?
- Pachamama?
- Sending heroic Chinese Catholics to the dogs? Via, of all people, the strangely reinstated, corrupt, thuggish and perverted Uncle Ted.
- The war on Catholic tradition?
- Winking and nudging towards blessing homosexual unions?
- Getting and staying relentlessly political? (Trump, anyone?)
- The repugnant sin of globalism and the repellent advocacy of open borders?
- The synodal farce that threatens the very Magisterium.
- His pastoral cruelty towards opponents, rendering them homeless (never George, though)?
- His theological tin ear?
There’s ten, right off the bat.
Two final questions.
First, did JD Vance’s visit hasten the late Pope’s passing, as some on the Left have surmised? We can safely let that one pass.
Second, did the Peronist Pope ever know Argentinian Adolf?
Now that President Javier Milei has given timely voice to the perfectly plausible theory that Hitler passed his latter years not in Berlin but in the uplands of Patagonia, is it possible that the Peronist (Catholic) German met the then young, Peronist Pope? And, perhaps, taught him a trick or two in terms of pastoral care.
We can only speculate. Requiescat in pace.PC
