Posted on 04/26/2020 1:32:44 PM PDT by ebb tide
In an interview with The Tablet, Francis rightly condemns the barbarity of eugenic abortion and the Malthusian mentality behind the practice of contraception, but only in passing. From Francis we never see as to these moral issues a formal declaration as explicit as his demand for abolition of the death penalty — a just punishment for a guilty party convicted of the crime of murder — which he falsely equates with abortion, the intrinsically evil mass murder of innocents.
If only the interview had ended there. But, of course, it didn’t. Francis was invited to ramble, and ramble he did — directly into a gnostic fog bank, which is where his musings lead so often, even as he condemns Gnosticism (the heresy of secret revelation to the initiated few).
I will skip over the Pope’s nebulous musings on the need for “an economy that is less liquid, more human” as a response to the Wuhan virus epidemic. Suffice it to note that his Easter Sunday call for a “universal basic income” is precisely an appeal to liquidity: tax the “rich” — meaning the upper middle class as opposed to the billionaires for whom taxes are a trivial matter — in order to redistribute hard cash to those who prefer not to work. Yes, prefer not to work. For welfare and unemployment benefits already cover those who, in theory, are unable to work through no fault of their own, whereas “universal basic income” is simply “a government guarantee that each citizen receives a minimum income.”
We encounter the gnostic fog bank when Francis answers a question about whether he sees emerging from the “crisis” of the virus a Church that is “more missionary, more creative, less attached to institutions?” To which Francis replied:
“Less attached to institutions? I’d say less attached to certain ways of thinking. Because the Church is institution. The temptation is to dream of a de-institutionalised Church, a gnostic Church without institutions, or one that is subject to fixed institutions, which would be a Pelagian Church. The one who makes the Church is the Holy Spirit, who is neither gnostic nor Pelagian. It is the Holy Spirit who institutionalises the Church, in an alternative, complementary way, because the Holy Spirit provokes disorder through the charisms, but then out of that disorder creates harmony.”
Utter nonsense. First of all, there is nothing “Pelagian” about an institutional Church whose institutions were divinely established 2,000 years ago, which is the Catholic Church.
Secondly, a Church without fixed institutions is by definition not an institutional Church but a church whose structure is in flux.
Third, if this flux is supposedly guided by the Holy Spirit, “who makes the Church” in an ongoing structural revelation through history, then someone has to claim the ability to discern what “the Spirit” is producing in the ecclesial flux right now, and there we have precisely a gnostic conception of the Church dependent upon the claimed knowledge of “people who knew.”
Finally, “a Church that exists in the tension between harmony and disorder provoked by the Holy Spirit” is likewise a gnostic enterprise whose ever-changing contours are read onto her by enlightened interpreters of “the Spirit’s” endless provocation of “tension between harmony and disorder.” A gnostic idea if there ever was one.
No Pope before the Second Vatican Council would recognize such thinking as remotely Catholic. Rather, Pope Saint Pius X would condemn it as the essence of Modernism, according to which “the Church itself is fed by the need of accommodating itself to historical conditions and of harmonising itself with existing forms of society. Such is religious evolution in detail.” And such is a Church that, according to Francis, must accommodate itself to a “post-COVID world.” Quoth Francis: “This is the freedom of the Spirit in the midst of a crisis, not a Church closed off in institutions.”
Perhaps the Wuhan Virus is better named the Gnostic Virus, whose emblem in politics is the face mask, imposed by Democrats, and in the Church the shuttered parish, imposed by Modernists who despise a Church “closed off in institutions.”
Ping
I’m reading between the lines of his quotes and realizing this Pope is worse than I thought.
And I already thought he was terrible.
Modernism - Rudyard Kipling used the phrase “Gods of the Marketplace.
AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.
We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.
We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.
With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.
When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”
On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”
Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
I think the strongest insult to Francis would be to imagine what characteristics his successor should have.
Much like President Trump has successfully erased any semblance of Obama “legacy”, so too the new pope should erase the heterodoxies and outright heresies of Francis. Those he brought into positions of power need to be displaced; and the many good Catholics he stripped of power should again be made whole, their pride and honor restored.
For once the new pope must proclaim that socialism and communism are philosophies of evil and are as incompatible with Catholicism as is paganism and satanism. Abortion and euthanasia are anathema.
This list goes on and on, and is both a description and criticism of Fracisism.
Finally the new pope must seriously consider if it is once again time to suppress the Jesuit order.
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