“Brothers All,” Including “Families” of the Same Sex. The Pontificate of Francis Under the Analyst’s Lens

(s.m.) The benedictory words of Pope Francis for homosexual “families,” in the recent film named after him, and his encyclical “Fratelli tutti” on universal brotherhood, with only 4 timid paragraphs out of 287 dedicated to “Christian identity,” have prompted Professor Pietro De Marco to make a comprehensive critical evaluation of the current pontificate.

On the genesis and effects of the pope’s words from the film, Settimo Cielo has offered this detailed reconstruction:

While for a properly theological interpretation of “Fratelli tutti,” here is an instructive analysis by Fr. Thomas Weinandy, a member of the International Theological Commission:

But here is what De Marco writes - a philosopher and historian by training, former professor of the sociology of religion at the University of Florence and at the Theological Faculty of Central Italy - on what he calls “the disorder” of this pontificate, and at the same time “the deformed, unnatural agreement” that envelops it, both of them “such as cry out in the sight of God.”

Does the tenderness of a Church that obscures divine revelation really serve the man who receives it?

After Pope Jorge Mario Bergoglio invoked “legal protection” for same-sex couples, a friend brought to my attention a text that afterward was widely cited: “Those who would move from tolerance to the legitimization of specific rights for cohabiting homosexual persons need to be reminded that the approval or legalization of evil is something far different from the toleration of evil. In those situations where homosexual unions have been legally recognized or have been given the legal status and rights belonging to marriage, clear and emphatic opposition is a duty.”

It is a passage from the “Considerations regarding proposals to give legal recognition to unions between homosexual persons,” published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on June 3, 2003, the feast of the Ugandan saints Charles Lwanga and companions, martyred - the learned friend tells me - because they had resisted the sodomitic demands of their king. But today whom and what should we oppose if - as a theologian writes with whom, in friendship, I always disagree - “with the pope the field is no longer divided into two conflicting sides, truth and freedom, duty and law”? Does cultured Christian opinion, anti-Augustinian and anti-Pauline, really believe that man is floating in a warm therapeutic bath, where there is no longer either drama or risk for conscience and decision?

Truth and freedom, duty and law would be pacified only in a man alienated from himself, in an anthill of virtue such as God the creator did not intend humanity to be. This dream is by no means Christianity, not that of the Catholic Church or the Orthodox Churches. Freedom and truth will always be in conflict in our finiteness, and in the face of the fact the attempted destruction of metaphysics is useless. Indeed, only a “katéchon” Church (2 Thessalonians 2:6-7) could keep this fall of the Human into a-patía from happening.

This “katéchon,” in spite of the hope of Fr. Antonio Spadaro in “La Civiltà Cattolica” of January 4 2020, cannot be constituted by the Church of the vision of Pope Francis if - as the Jesuit proclaims - this vision makes spiritual and pastoral “conversion” coincide with the “structural” one. The struggle against the "end of history" has less to do with economic and social structures than with the ideological and moral worlds that penetrate and alienate existences.

In this light, after decades, much more appears to be mistaken in the theological work aimed at demonstrating that faith and the Church must, in order to "renew themselves" (a thesis that destroys itself, since there can be no novelty in the proper sense of the temporality of a Tradition), accept that nonsense as well, or indeed become the weakness of "beyond belief,” as some authors put it. A stance that accelerates the end without bringing about regeneration.

While discussing a bit warmly with a postmodern friend who is all about feminism, freedom, and individual rights, all “here and now,” the finiteness of living and euthanasia for all, I happened to hear her praise Bergoglio, “this pope I like so much.” We know that the pope's public appearances and irrepressible talk - one good example of which is the recent disjointed sortie on homosexuals and civil unions - act as a balm on the nihilism that is widespread today, as a sort of justification, since the false awareness of having emancipated himself from the truth is not enough to permit the post-Christian man to "live for death.” I often remember, in the face of the safe and misguided subjectivity of postmodern self-sufficiency, the prediction of the “last man” reformulated after the war by Alexandre Kojève: we are about to be - wrote the philosopher - protected and healthy men who thus allow themselves to live, pure happy animality without history and without soul. Of course, it will then be difficult for us to protect life if we begin to be a burden on our social circle, but by then, they tell us, we will have lived long enough; dogs and cats, so “human,” will live more than we will. Pope Bergoglio seems to be aware of this tendency of the Western world, diagnosed once again by Fukuyama over thirty years ago, but resolves it in the mannered deprecation of liberal individualism, which then leads back to the selfishness of economic interests. The reality is entirely different and the lack of anthropological diagnosis strikes at the heart of the pope's pastoral and political strategy.

Even the most lucid defenders and apologists of Francis are unable to use any argument other than the "method of gentleness" and the "praise of brotherhood" as new forms of Catholic truth and the Petrine function. “The pope brings love back to the evangelical dimension,” I read, with regard to his utterances on the homosexual drama. Whoever believes this has never read the Gospels: does the "evangelical dimension" of love - and which one? eros, philia, agape? - imply my consent now to marriage between divorced persons, now to the homosexual couple and related figures? And tomorrow what else? To incest, to child sex? And if the laws that decriminalize, and then encourage, this or that conduct bear the seal, the profile of Caesar, is there not perhaps the likeness of every man with God to be proclaimed? The man-creature, the essential man that the Church declares and protects, is in this likeness. The "great mystery" of the man-woman couple is in this first and last order, which is the Trinitarian one (Hans Urs von Balthasar).

Some still uphold a diagnosis that was already very widespread in the post-conciliar period, that there is a growing "number of those who, in order to give shape to their faith, must put themselves, if not out, at least on the margins of the Church"; or that the Church is not yet a place for true believers, at most it is "for those who are fond of religious practices.” But the widespread reality is entirely different: those “fond of the practices" are a minority mistreated by the average parish priest, pastoral ideology and parish practices have for years been pursuing those who want to "give shape" to the faith. This is what would make it right, according to the famous theologian and essayist Giuliano Zanchi, for the pope to concern himself with the “belief of all,” so that, regardless of the form that faith takes in each, “all may believe.”

A shrewd consideration, and one perhaps shared by the pontiff, but discredited by a long series of "universalistic" reductions of the faith, or rather of the faiths, to the lowest denominator destined to be the faith of all: Christian social utopianisms, experiments of liberal religiosity in the manner of Lamennais, world congresses of religions in the pre-modernist season, the real Catholic modernism, the very “religion” of the revolutionary proletariats and, after a pause, the resumption of ecumenical visions of religions or of “ethics” à la Hans Küng, all preceded this plan - or this instinctive practice? - of Pope Francis. But after more than two centuries of illusory scenarios, no “religion such that all may believe” has taken shape, neither at the pole of mysticism or at the opposite pole of civic ethics. A “true religion,” in fact, is demanding, strengthens and binds, requires love of God, formation, and oblation, asks for the whole of life; it is not some giddiness over a buzzword set out to flutter on the balcony.

The current chorus on Bergoglio's innovation, which arms itself with umpteen accusations of inadequacy against the Church - still a “Church of nos” in spite of the pontificate’s production of yeses” - pretends to ignore the extent to which Christian tradition has assimilated the Holy Scriptures in order to find answers to the ongoing obscurity of human history: which is history redeemed or indeed without answers, as ancient tragedy attests. The care of souls has always led back to love for the Gospel, while remaining free from the enchantment of the “amour passion” or “amor concupiscentiae” that every human being has experienced but cannot compare with the love of God and neighbor that the Gospels see embodied in Christ. Among other things, there is something paradoxical in claiming Christian legitimacy for the “amour passion,” the “facts of love” romantically assumed as absolute and inhabited by God. Can one defend their liberty in the face the law, extending the latest encyclical’s category of "brotherhood" even to the sexual relationship, as the theologian Andrea Grillo would like? Philadelphian love, then, or (more likely) an oratory metaphor without correspondence in things?

Let's get back to the pope. Anyone with the slightest familiarity, inside and outside of Catholic culture, understands that assuaging the last man, he of the verbose display of self-sufficiency - something that has never happened in human cultures open to the beyond, to the sacred - is the opposite of the Christian message and of the duties of truth that have always accompanied it. Faced with the half-culture of finiteness without transcendence, with the preaching of the happy immorality of the self, of a nothing as ridiculous as it is hypersensitive, the call to brotherhood and sociality cannot on its own lead souls to a recovery of meaning and depth. They are exhortations that hold no sway over the sad arrogance of the last man, not beyond an emotion. The great ideals of the poor, of world fraternity, of God as love will occupy, in the contemporary ego desiring gratifications according to its own modest measure, the time and place set aside for words: the hobby hour.

Valuing at the same time the “faith of all” in order to wrest from the confusion a universal drive toward fraternity will have devalued, once the emotion has vanished, the faith of every strong believer. A religious faith is something else. Thinking of it in terms of an anthropocentric common denominator - humanistic, in fact - has never produced nor will produce any new plausibility of believing in those who do not believe. The Christian West has been immersed for many centuries in the way (in the new time) of the risen and glorious Christ, in universal history, in the full and supernatural meaning of existence. Never in an “intimate” and at the same time absent God, apart from the minority. This latter seems instead to be the God that the pope recommends in “Fratelli tutti” (nos. 277-280): a useful human belief in an inert legislator of all, as in the deistic culture. What would be the point?

It is true: we certainly cannot agree with the “being for death” of polemogenic men, contemptuous of the common or “bourgeois” man, or of another breed, ready to eliminate the waste of humanity or to make it - with the same result - another being or a new people. But neither can we authorize with mercy the “being for death” of men who, alongside us, cultivate nonsense for the sake of preparing for a good chemical death. I believe that the preaching of Pope Francis will end up confirming post-Christian worlds in the nonsense to which they condemn themselves. And assuaging nonsense is not even part of setting up the all-too-famous “field hospital,” it is allowing the ideology of mass escape in the face of a life endowed with meaning, from the truth and pain of the struggle that occupies everyone's daily life.

It is absolutely no coincidence, rather it is structural, that in the post-Christian worlds “brotherhood” - appreciated in words - ceases in the face of unwanted motherhood, the terminally ill, the old man out of his head, tomorrow the teen with a severe handicap. A “monstrum” custom that combines without contradiction the brotherhood of sentiments and the complementary murderous action of behavior and the laws, to which those same “fraternal” people contribute as voters.

Now, this humanity that runs on the inclined plane of the “good life” as a yardstick of dignity, or legitimacy to live, is assuaged only by practicing the “as if Christ did not exist” of “Fratelli tutti.” There is no salvation in the pope's “samaritanus bonus,” but existential, personal, and political palliatives, which do not suit the Church: the “sponsa Christi” must not accompany souls toward their death but must affirm the truth of Christ so that they may live. Evidence that shows how erroneous is the comfortable “secularism” of the separation between “religious” truth and the legal and political perspective, accepted for decades by democratic and liberal Catholicism. The Church has always had responsibility and command over the ultimate anthropological realities - birth, male and female, marriage, death - because it has that integral vision of them which is biblical anthropology. There is nothing about man - the created reality par excellence - that, with the oblivion of these cornerstones of the Christian conception, does not tend to become perverted.

It should be borne in mind: when Catholics, and sectors of the reformed world, fight against the normative innovations produced by the victory of the desiring ego over the ordering and elevating tasks of the “Nomos,” they are fighting for man, not “for religion.” In Italy there was also a fight at the time against the elevation of "de facto unions,” because it was our duty. And the different position of Jorge Mario Bergoglio cannot be worth more than one opinion. Certainly it would not serve man if the Church were to falsely humanize the truth of Christ.

Instead of looking after “civil unions,” and on top of this spreading incoherent opinions, Pope Francis should concern himself with raising his voice, in a formal and reasoned way, against the ongoing rupture of every ethical and legislative bond in the euthanastic liquidation of human beings. This unclean tendency concerns the future of man at the root, and there is no fear of conflict with the civil authorities, Dutch or otherwise, that applies. “Hic Rhodus!” is the decisive point here, not in a mythical battle of the “people” against economic modernity and delicate international equilibria. Christianity has always accompanied souls throughout history in the light of the theological virtues, instead of deceiving them about “another possible world.” The other world is in the vision of God, here it is in the supernatural life. A “tenderness” that affirms itself without a horizon of ends and without the God of revelation in Christ will not make contemporary man a generator of fraternal humanity, but a pathetic deserter of the history in which God the creator has placed him. Toward the “end of history.”

Those who complain about the many reservations and criticisms toward the pope must realize that His Holiness is currently out in the open, in an unprecedented form and in every respect counterproductive for Rome and for the Church, through a combination of responsibilities and weaknesses: the continuous confusion of private and public, the improvised and confused form of the utterances in everyday speech as in magisterial settings, the blatant ignorance of Catholic teaching of which he should be the guardian. And all this, according to many, to give substance to his projects and to a vision of the Petrine office that appears instrumental to them. This has to be said, because the individual and global scale on which Bergoglio intends to experiment with a new face of the Church - as a universal place for “new believers,” someone hazards - already risks the rash alteration of the truth of the Church and of faith.

Of course, the pope does not see that the intelligent people who praise him are using the “historicity” of the Church and of the Gospels as an argument to liquidate every Catholic paradigm - even the cautious one of Cardinal Gerhard L. Müller's memo of October 23, which Andrea Grillo considers “fundamentalist” - and to assume in the face of divine revelation that freedom which in Christian history has always led to error.

I know that I am not observing at all that "condescendance" towards superiors that the merciful Saint Francis de Sales - also a great instrument of God in the conversion of the Huguenots - recommended in the “Entretiens.” But the disorder of this pontificate and the deformed, unnatural agreement that arises around the pontiff are such as to cry out in the sight of God.

This Pope sucks, probably literally. I suspect he is a homo.

That’s the problem. He doesn’t even believe in a Hell. He believes bad people’s souls are merely “extinguished” when they die.

That’s why he’s a nice pope; nice to homosexuala, nice to abortionists, nice to islamist terrorists, nice to communits etc. The only people in his way are those traditional Catholics.

He wants to go down in history as Pope Francis the Nicest.

Point taken...HE WANTS TO BE LOOOOOOOOOOVED BY THE MASSES...God ,not so much

Odd that an Encyclical on this subject should have a title that is so easily remembered as “Tutti-Fruity”.

I cannot bring myself to call him “His Holiness”.

Begone, Bergoglio! And take all the other heretics with you.

All I know is that Jesus is my King, my one and only King. Don’t know what da pope be thinking right now.

He makes so many disparate and confusing statements, creating vagueness and shocks and confusion, so how can you trust anything he says?

He makes so many disparate and confusing statements,..

Oh, Bergoglio channels God directly.

“The Holy Spirit is a Disaster” (Pope Francis)

AA-1025: Memoirs of the Communist Infiltration into the Church.. read it and you’ll see why this evil clown is the pope.

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