Pope Francis Goes to Meet God

It’s official now.

It has been my custom to reproduce sentiments of people who have died which I wrote while they’re living, and I’ll do the same for Pope Francis.

First: I would quote from my 2019 piece Pope Francis to Bossuet: Hold My Beer, but it’s the best summation of my attitude towards the recently deceased pontiff and so I commend it in its entirety to my readers.

From The Catholic Church Will Lose Again With the “Reverend Jesuit Fathers”:

The bad part of the rondeau is that the Jesuits did indeed seek a New World, which explains much of the quality of Latin American Catholicism.  Now we have a product of both region and religious order as Pope, and the consequences aren’t pretty.  He and others been so inculcated with the Marxist idea that the top of society sets the rules to oppress those below that they are ready to move towards a more “liberal” idea not only for “social justice” purposes but also to keep their system full of people.  They do not understand that the austerity of Jansenism and like systems, with emphasis on clear rules and discipline, is in fact the real “way up” for the bourgeois in a Christian context, and that entangling morality in Jesuitical complexity only benefits those who pull the strings from the upper reaches of society.

As we all know, the triumph of the Jesuits (the Jansenists made something of a comeback, but it wasn’t enough) didn’t stop the advent of the Enlightenment, even with their “concessions” to the world around them.  The bourgeois turned elsewhere for inspiration and ultimately toppled the monarchy which had supposedly backed what was “best” for them, wrecking the Church in France in the process.

I said a long time ago that the Roman Catholic Church is only one bull away from disaster.  We now have the possibility that this bull may be in the wings (some people think it’s already been issued.)  Or perhaps we’re looking at a series of them.  But Francis and his ilk need to wake up to the fact that playing to the crowd–or to the powers that be–won’t save the Church but destroy it, just as it has its liberal Protestant counterparts.

From The Pope, Technology and Slavery:

The Holy Father has once again ambushed American Catholics with Laudato Si, his encyclical on the environment and global warming.  As was the case with his earlier document on social teaching, we should not be too surprised; there is a great deal of precedent for this kind of thinking.  As R.R. Reno points out:

In this encyclical, Francis expresses strikingly anti-scientific, anti-technological, and anti-progressive sentiments. In fact, this is perhaps the most anti-modern encyclical since the Syllabus of Errors, Pius IX’s haughty 1864 dismissal of the conceits of the modern era.

Buried in the Catholic psyche is a longing for a Ptolemaic, village-centred world where the church, at the heart of things both physically and spiritually, rings out the daily cycle of Mass and prayer and orders the life of the people.  This was before Copernicus and Galileo had the bad taste to point out that the earth wasn’t the centre of the universe, which didn’t sit well with the Aristotelian intelligentsia that dominated Catholicism.  The fact that post-modern progressives find a congenial ally with such a mentality speaks volumes of their own scientific level.

From The Big Differences Between Pope Francis and the Prosperity Charismatics:

What Francis is probably banking on is that, sooner or later, prosperity teaching is going to hit the wall.  This is for two reasons,

The first is that prosperity teaching doesn’t really account for situations–and everyone has them–when God doesn’t do either according to our expectations or those that are drilled into us from the pulpits or television.  When I was growing up, liberals would bawl over how they didn’t believe in God any more because he didn’t do what they expected him to do (remember Gilbert O’Sullivan)?  The New Atheists have taken this up with a vengeance: how can there be a God when so many bad things happen?  (I deal with this in more depth here).  Prosperity teaching plays right into this and, in many ways, atheists and prosperity charismatics are working from the same assumptions, only coming to different conclusions.

The second is that the ability for prosperity charismatics to accumulate wealth has always depended upon an economic system that permits it to the extent that ours has.  That’s in jeopardy for two reasons.  The first is the growing inequality and class stratification of our society.  Prosperity Charismatic Christianity is the preferential option of the poor par excellence; when they find that they have a bulletproof glass ceiling above them, they may change their attitude towards the aspirational spirituality they have adopted.  Moreover in the West the heavy hand of the state is tilting against any form of Christianity.  That is at the heart over the current fracas over bakers and florists refusing same-sex civil marriages; making economic activity of any kind a matter of conscience, and forcing people to make decisions that will cost them economically, goes straight against prosperity teaching in a way that few other things do.

On the other hand, prosperity charismatics, triumphalistic by nature, may figure that God is on their side and the Pope and the Church under him will come their way.  But given current realities and the durability of Roman Catholicism, I wouldn’t put money on the prosperity teachers.  They’d probably take it anyway.

From Pope Francis and Two-Way Ignorance:

Pope Francis isn’t much of a fan of things American these days, but his visit to this country was a revelation:

Prior to his election Francis had never set foot in the United States, making him the only pope in the last eighty years other than St. John XXIII who had never been to America before taking office…People close to Francis also say his U.S. trip last year helped him to better distinguish between ordinary Americans and “the system.”

But when another world leader discovered something, the evaluation was different:

Latin Americans also tend to have long memories, and many still recall moments such as Ronald Reagan’s famous reaction upon returning from a 1982 trip to the region: “You’d be surprised … they’re all individual countries.” The fact that national differences could strike a U.S. president as a revelation still rings in Latin American ears as proof of our capacity for condescension.

What I think we’re looking at is two-way ignorance.  There’s a lot that people in the U.S. need to learn about Latin America, but the converse is also true, as we see with His Holiness.

I’ve spent a considerable time on the subject of the deceased pontiff, but do not be deceived: the real white-knuckle (and white smoke) part is just beginning.