The Upside-Down Church

The American Spectator ^ | July 25, 2021 | George Neumayr

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The Upside-Down Church

Pope Francis can’t rest until all Catholics are modernists.

Pope Francis has often compared the Catholic Church to a “field hospital.” It is an odd analogy in his case, given his penchant for quackery and malpractice. The healthiest patients at his field hospital have their limbs hacked off while the sickest ones receive increased dosages of a medicine that doesn’t work. The pope’s conception of health in the body of Christ is the opposite of his predecessors. They saw the absence of orthodoxy as a cancer in the Church, whereas Pope Francis sees the persistent presence of orthodoxy as the poison.

According to this twisted view, the crisis in the Church derives not from the modernist heresy but from the unwillingness of Catholics to succumb to it. Laboring under this view, he has devoted much of his pontificate to undoing the post–Vatican II conservative retrenchment of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. In complaining about the Church’s reluctance to embrace “modern culture,” he has implicitly criticized those predecessors. Where they viewed the liberal “spirit” of Vatican II with concern, he welcomed it.

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The pope, of course, embodies the very division that he claims to deplore. He is dividing Catholics at the deepest possible level — from Catholic tradition itself. A “unity” rooted in heterodoxy is a sham.

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Ping

[rhinohunter]

...he has devoted much of his pontificate to undoing the post–Vatican II conservative retrenchment of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI

Ding...ding...ding..We have a winner!

[irishjuggler]

Alas, it’s pathological with him...

“However, Bergoglio did not heal the split in the Jesuit family. He made it worse with his inexperienced autocratic style. So deep was the division that one senior Jesuit wrote privately, on the eve of the papal election, that a Bergoglio papacy would be “a catastrophe” for the Church, concluding: “We have spent two decades trying to fix the chaos that the man left us.”
Newsweek, 2014
https://www.newsweek.com/2014/10/31/crisis-changed-pope-francis-279303.html

[cpt_dave]

Remember the old joke: “Hey, is the Pope Catholic?”. It’s no longer a joke.

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