Posted on 11/17/2016 9:10:12 PM PST by BlessedBeGod
Whether by coincidence or otherwise, on US election day, Pope Francis welcomed one of Hillary Clinton’s political soulmates — albeit well to the left of the Democrat candidate — to the Vatican.
Emma Bonino, 68, is a former Italian Foreign Minister, abortionist and abortion activist, founder of the Transnational Radical Party that embraces notions of one world government and a board member of George Soros’s Global Foundation.
She is also, in Francis’s words, “among the great ones of today’s Italy’’ for her work as a refugee advocate, especially for Africans.
Fallout from the US election has drawn several civil wars — political and theological — being waged at the highest levels of the Vatican to boiling point. In a complex chess game, one has even drawn Francis into public conflict with a group of four cardinals.
Barack Obama’s departure and Clinton’s defeat prompted Rome-based professor and Vatican commentator Roberto de Mattei to describe Francis this week as “the only point of reference for the international left’’, especially over climate policy and open borders. The pope is doing little to play down that impression. In a newly published book-length interview, he was asked whether he favoured a Marxist society: “It has been said many times and my response has always been that, if anything, it is the communists who think like Christians’’.
At a Vatican Mass for prison inmates last week, one of the pope’s personal altar servers was a young Muslim, in jail for sexual offences and stalking. He brought his prayer rug. A week earlier, greeting leaders of “grassroots’’ movements (promoting various green, “human rights’’ and anti-development causes) who met at the Vatican from five continents, Francis denounced “the basic terrorism that derives from the global control of money’’ and promised “I make your cry mine’’.
He has also lent support and encouragement to the left wing presidents of Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela.
Like many, Francis has not hidden his disdain for Donald Trump, insisting during a midair press conference between Mexico and Rome in February that “A person who thinks only about building walls … and not building bridges is not Christian’’.
Not all of his flock agreed. Exit polls suggested Trump captured 52 per cent of the Catholic vote to Clinton’s 45 per cent, an outcome influenced, to some extent, by a coterie of bishops, priests and lay activists, who blogged, posted, emailed and tweeted relentlessly to churchgoers and others against Clinton’s LGBTI and partial birth abortion (up to delivery day) policies.
Many of the missives also acknowledged Trump’s serious flaws. Influential New York priest George Rutler summed up the approach on the eve of polling day: “It is incorrect to say that the coming election poses a choice between two evils … there may be some bad in certain candidates. Evil is different: it is the deliberate destruction of truth, virtue and holiness’’.
US archbishops who backed such efforts will not be among those receiving red hats on Saturday when Francis inducts 17 new cardinals (including the first locally-born cardinal from Papua New Guinea, Archbishop John Ribat), in St Peter’s Square. Even Philadelphia’s archbishop Charles Chaput, a partial Native American who condemned both presidential candidates as “a national embarrassment’’ and called on Clinton to apologise for “contemptuously anti-Catholic’’ emails circulated among her staff, has been overlooked. Chaput has a far stronger record of attracting priestly vocations than Archbishop Blase Cupich (Francis’s “captain’s pick” to lead Chicago), who is being promoted. Both archdioceses are normally led by a cardinal.
Curiously, no formal meeting between Francis and the college of cardinals gathered for the event is scheduled. In the current climate, such an encounter would be a showdown.
Questions could be asked, for example, about whether Francis’s “surprise” visit to a group of seven ex-priests and their wives and children in Rome last week signalled a forthcoming change to the discipline of priestly celibacy. Vatican radio blamed “isolation, lack of understanding and exhaustion’’ for the men abandoning the priesthood.
Some cardinals might also wonder why Francis, who is unfailingly kind to outsiders, sometimes castigates sections his own flock. Most recently, he singled out young people who exercise their right to attend the pre-Vatican II Latin Mass: “I have at times found myself in front of people who are too rigid … You dig, you dig, this rigidity always hides something: insecurity, at times perhaps something else’’. It went down like a lead balloon.
The Vatican equivalent of the 18C row over freedom of speech could also feature at any cardinals’ meeting. In what read like a spoof but was deadly earnest, a group of “thought police’’ calling themselves the Observatory for the Implementation of the Church Reform of Pope Francis (OARCPF) has written to academics at church universities, including the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family, announcing their intention to monitor academics’ teachings and publications.
In Australia, incidentally, Archbishop Denis Hart recently announced the closure of the JPII institute’s Melbourne campus, due to falling student numbers and to save money. In Rome, veteran Vatican watcher Sandro Magister, who has observed half a dozen popes, dubbed the OARCPF the “Banana Gestapo’’.
The group is primarily focused on ensuring church academics uphold Francis’s controversial apostolic exhortation “Amoris Laetitia’’ (The Joy of Love), released in April. A key section of the text has drawn warm praise from some quarters for recalibrating 2000 years of church teaching on the eucharist, divorce and the indissolubility of marriage but intense criticism from opponents, who insist such change is heretical.
As The Australian has reported, AL is at the centre of the most serious challenge facing Francis. That has come from two German cardinals, an Italian and an American. Judging by a cautionary letter to Francis during last year’s Synod on the Family, at least a dozen other cardinals, including Australia’s George Pell, share some of their concerns.
This week, the four cardinals released the “please explain’’ letter they sent the pope privately eight weeks ago. He declined to answer. Such public, formal questioning of a pope’s teaching has been unknown for centuries. The AL row has also baffled and upset Catholics in the pews, who hold immense respect from the papal office. Some would welcome a relaxation of rules, others believe such change is not Catholic and not possible.
Two days ago, one of the four, US Cardinal Raymond Burke, 68, who was the Vatican’s top church lawyer until Francis sacked him two years ago, upped the ante. Like the other three cardinals, he has nothing to lose.
In an interview, the quietly-spoken prelate said that unless Francis corrected his own document the cardinals would do it for him, by issuing “a formal act of correction of a serious error’’. There was, Burke said, a rare tradition in the Church, “the practice of correction of the Roman Pontiff’’.
Cardinals cannot depose a pope. But in formally notifying the entire Church that Francis’s teaching in AL was erroneous and that Catholics were obliged not to accept it, the cardinals would be declaring “game on’’. In political terms, Francis is facing an unprecedented wedge.
“At a Vatican Mass for prison inmates last week, one of the pope’s personal altar servers was a young Muslim, in jail for sexual offences and stalking.”
Uh...say what?!?
I wonder if he received Communion...
This guy needs to go.
Time to brush the dust off of those old altar-boy jokes.,p.
I’m gonna start calling him Pope Barack Hussein I.
Pope Francis needs to stop behaving as if he doesn’t owe anyone an explanation for his choices and behavior.
The last one that tried to fix the Vatican Bank mess died drinking tea if I recall.
Yet he is the logical conclusion of where the Catholic Church has been headed for several decades. There is no surprise of any sort here to people who have been paying attention.
Pope Francis needs to stop behaving as if he doesn’t owe anyone an explanation for his choices and behavior.
~ ~ ~
So did obama - but we never got it.
I have been calling this disaster of a Pontiff the Anti-Pope Francis since about two weeks after he was elected. A serious problem is afoot in Rome and it is high time the REAL Pope, Benedict, reasserts himself and this Anti-Pope is forced out.
There is one aspect of the Pope Francis story that always needs to be borne in mind. However it happened, it was the College of Cardinals who elected this man to his office. What does that say about the leadership of the Church?
Same thing I've said for decades now.
I started years ago complaining that the government of the church needed to do something about The Kennedy's, Kerry, Pelosi, Biden, ect for voting for abortion( and later sodomy) and nothing happen in the church. How does Massachusetts keep voting Dem if most are RCC's? NYC? Chicago? The same Bishops hobnob with criminals, mobsters, politicians, et al, and then preach pro life on Sunday. Kennedy dies and there are thousands acting like he won't burn in hell after the life he lived. I would watch the usual suspects vote on Planned parenthood and make the rounds on the talking head shows with ashes on their foreheads like they had repented or something. Jesus said we would know them by their fruit. They say who am I to judge? Well, I'm a fruit inspector when it comes to murdering babies.
It's the leadership in the church that is demon possessed. People here would ask why I would "bash" the church and accuse me of Catholic bashing. Well, as Rev Wright says, the chickens have come home to roost. Francis has to go,....now how do you get him out. Going from John, to Benedict, to Francis shows the decline in the church dramatically.
Sure, people will say "My priest is fine and I get the Word each weekend" or "I have a conservative parish" or whatever, but we all see the top is rotten.
There will come a time to decide between Jesus, or the church. It's happened to Lutherans, Episcopalians, Methodists, and others. To think it won't happen in the RCC is burying you head in the sand.
Same thing I've said for decades now.
I started years ago complaining that the government of the church needed to do something about The Kennedy's, Kerry, Pelosi, Biden, ect for voting for abortion( and later sodomy) and nothing happen in the church. How does Massachusetts keep voting Dem if most are RCC's? NYC? Chicago? The same Bishops hobnob with criminals, mobsters, politicians, et al, and then preach pro life on Sunday. Kennedy dies and there are thousands acting like he won't burn in hell after the life he lived. I would watch the usual suspects vote on Planned parenthood and make the rounds on the talking head shows with ashes on their foreheads like they had repented or something. Jesus said we would know them by their fruit. They say who am I to judge? Well, I'm a fruit inspector when it comes to murdering babies.
It's the leadership in the church that is demon possessed. People here would ask why I would "bash" the church and accuse me of Catholic bashing. Well, as Rev Wright says, the chickens have come home to roost. Francis has to go,....now how do you get him out. Going from John, to Benedict, to Francis shows the decline in the church dramatically.
Sure, people will say "My priest is fine and I get the Word each weekend" or "I have a conservative parish" or whatever, but we all see the top is rotten.
There will come a time to decide between Jesus, or the church. It's happened to Lutherans, Episcopalians, Methodists, and others. To think it won't happen in the RCC is burying you head in the sand.
Unbridled arrogance with a humble veneer.
Was Benedict XVI the last pope?
Two weeks ago, we attended a Papal mass along with a group from the Diocese of Ft. Worth and 250,000 of our closest friends. I had studied Italian for the trip. I understood the address fully and disagreed with almost all of it. It dealt with the obligation of Europe and America to refugees from Islamic countries.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.