Tag: pope francis

Real BOMFOG

Last week, I did the last thing Pope Francis would want:  I yelled at people for not liking Pope Francis.  A few commenters pointed out that it doesn’t help anyone to cement the “us vs. them”  mentality, when we’re all supposed to be part of the same family.  “BOMFOG,” they used to call it — brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God — I guess because Nelson Rockerfeller used to use the phrase constantly, maybe thoughtlessly, in his speeches.

Well, so, now Pope Francis is calling what’s called an “extraordinary synod” to discuss the subject of family.  And man, this is not going to be any thoughtless, jargoned hot air.  According to the Catholic Herald:

The extraordinary synod will see heads of Eastern churches, presidents of the bishops’ conferences, and heads of Curia offices gather at the Vatican from October 5 – 19 for a meeting entitled “Pastoral Challenges of the Family in Context of Evangelisation”.

A 1969 extraordinary session was dedicated to improving cooperation between the Holy See and national bishops’ conferences; and a 1985 extraordinary session, dedicated to the 20th anniversary of the end of the Second Vatican Council, recommended the compilation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which was published seven years later.

Pope Francis had told reporters accompanying him on his plane back from Rio de Janeiro in July that the next synod would explore a “somewhat deeper pastoral care of marriage,” including the question of the eligibility of divorced and remarried Catholics to receive Communion.

He added that at the time that Church law governing marriage annulments also “has to be reviewed, because ecclesiastical tribunals are not sufficient for this. It is complex, the problem of the pastoral care of marriage.” Such problems, he said, exemplified a general need for forgiveness in the Church today.

“The Church is a mother, and she must travel this path of mercy, and find a form of mercy for all,” the Pope added.

Go, Papa!  Bring this family of man together.

Let’s All Panic Over Franciscogenic Papal Change!!!!!!!

This morning, I read Dolan confirms error in Scalfari interview in the National Catholic Reporter.  It confirms that there was at least one factual error in Scalfari’s interview:  he suggests that Francis, upon hearing of his election, left the Sistine Chapel, panicked, wanted to decline, then got his head together, felt better, and went out to get dressed.  But

As veteran Italian Vatican writer Andrea Tornielli has pointed out, however, there is no room next to the balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square, which is located in the middle of a long hallway, raising doubt about the literal accuracy of the quotation.

In any event, Dolan said, the sequence put on the pope’s lips by Scalfari is out of order.

Francis did not hesitate before accepting his election, Dolan said, although there was a moment later when he paused in prayer before stepping out onto the balcony for the “Habemus Papam” announcement.

Okay, not such a big deal, right?  We’re still weathering this huge FRANCIS CRISIS, which is going to spell DOOM AND DISASTER for everybody and everything, and the SEA LEVELS WILL RISE and there will be GIRL CARDINALS, and puppy dog cardinals, and Benedict’s name will be chiseled off all the walls, and the speaking of Latin will be punished with excommunication, and there will be dogs and cats living together, and so on.

Then there’s this:

Respected French Vatican writer Jean-Marie Guénois confirmed with Scalfari that he didn’t tape the interview, nor did he take notes, so the text was an after-the-fact reconstruction.

He didn’t tape the interview.  He didn’t take notes.

He didn’t tape the interview.  He didn’t take notes.  

He didn’t tape the interview.  He didn’t take notes.  

I’m just a teeny, two-bit, part-time writer on the very outer fringes of what could possibly be considered journalism, and even I know that this is outrageous.  Insanely irresponsible.  Something that should make people lose their jobs and all credibility forever.  Holy shit.  As my sister Devra Torres said, “So we’re commenting on a bad translation of a hazy memory in the mind of a presumably heavily biased source.”  One more thing?  Scalfari is 88 years old.  But I’m sure his memory is completely accurate.

So, I know this is a big deal.  But not for one second do I think that the Francis haters will so much as bat an eye.  We’ll get a shrug and a grimace, and they’ll continue with their self-congratulatory dirge celebrating mourning this tragic decline of the papacy.

Why?  Because Francis haters are like the prophets of climate change.  No matter what happens, it’s just more evidence for what they’ve been telling us all along.  Got a hurricane? Expect to see more and more of this kind of thing, because climate change!  One of the calmest hurricane seasons in the last 62 years?  Continue to panic!  Because climate change!  Polar ice caps melting?  You see, that’s climate change!  Polar ice caps growing and getting icier?  Have you not been listening???? This isclassic climate change.

When you’re completely wedded to the idea of anthropogenic climate change, bad news is bad news, and good news is bad news, too.

Same with the Francis haters.  Absolutely anything you say about the man — and about the demonstrable, incontrovertable good effects of his papacy — it’s all just more evidence of bad news.  They don’t like what he says, and then they hear that he didn’t actually say it, and the response is, “I’m tired of the excuses!”  Okay.  So you’re tired of the truth?   Yeah, I thought so.

Even things that have nothing to do with him are magically attributed to his malign influence.  And when we hear about — oh, people becoming interested in the Church again . . . people asking their Catholic friends questions, because they’ve heard there’s something interesting going on in Rome . . . people considering joining RCIA, or getting their marriages regularized, or going to confession in droves . . . well, there you have it.  Proof that Francisogenic Papal Change is ruining the Church.  Because they are not the right kind of people, you see.  Their hearts aren’t having the right kind of conversion.  Their experience of the love and mercy of Christ isn’t authentic enough.  How can you be so blind?  THIS IS A CRISIS, PEOPLE.

Because if it’s not a crisis, we might have to change how we look at the world.

Well, we shall see, won’t we.  If the climate really is changing, there’s not a hell of a lot we can do about it.  If Francis really is ushering in a new era, he is the Pope, and he calls the shots.  So we’ll see what’s changing, and why, and how it all shakes out.  I’m putting my faith in the Holy Spirit.  If you’ve been paying any attention at all, you’ll know that

The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going.

The wind is blowing, and so far, it feels good.

Father Pavone praises Pope Francis’ approach

Thanks to Steve Jalsevac of LifeSite News for linking to this letter!

Fr. Pavone, the National Director of Priests for Life, says,

No, the Pope is not diluting the anti-abortion focus of the Church.

As the Director of Priests for Life, known worldwide as a ministry within the Catholic Church that urges more preaching, teaching, and action against abortion, I was asked by many alarmed and confused people these past few days about the reported comments of the Pope that the Church should not be “obsessed” with this issue, and that there should be “balance” and “context.

Is the pope saying we should talk less about abortion? Is he saying that the emphasis the Church has placed on this issue has been a mistaken emphasis?

When I first received these inquiries via emails and text messages, I was actually in the presence of Pope Francis, in the dining room of his residence. I had spoken just hours earlier, at the invitation of the Vatican, about the Church’s defense of the unborn child, and about the clear and strong position of the Church, expressed in many documents, that the right to life is our first right and the foundation and condition for all the others.

So the news came to me with more than a little irony, and I immediately began to tell worried pro-life warriors that they had no reason to think that the Pope no longer wanted the Church to focus on abortion.

 The Pope is, as I said myself, giving the world context for the pro-life movement.  The letter from Father Pavone is short, clear, and reassuring, and concludes this way:

This approach radically strengthens the Church’s opposition to abortion, because the Pope is saying not simply that it breaks the Fifth Commandment (“You shall not kill”), but that more fundamentally it breaks the First Commandment (“You shall not have other gods besides me”) and that to disrespect life is to abandon God himself.

Nobody should worry or think that the Pope is in any way diluting the Church’s strong and unchangeable stance against abortion, or contradicting all that has already been said and written, in documents like The Gospel of Life, about the urgent priority that this issue deserves. Some 50 million children are killed by abortion around the world each year. If we want to know how much we should focus on it, we only have to use human reason and ask what our response would be if 50 million adults throughout the world were killed each year by terrorism.

Long live the pro-life movement, and long live the Pope!

Hear, hear!  Thank you, Father Pavone.

Worst! Pope! Ever!!1!

It’s true, Francis really is — as long as you understand that, as a Catholic, it is our duty and responsibility to read the words of the Holy Father only after they’ve been run through the MSM juicer a couple of times.

 

JoAnna Wahlund handily shreds “oh Lord, why are we being tormented by this dreadful, careless, foolish pope?” crowd as they rend their garments over what they see reported on MSNBC:

“Pope Reiterates 2,000-year-old Teaching of the Church” doesn’t make money; “Pope Declares that All Atheists Go to Heaven” does. Truth has nothing to do with it, and this type of misrepresentation for personal gain is something that’s been happening as long as the papacy has existed.

She give us a sample of all the times that the words and actions of  Benedict XVI and John Paul II were bizarrely twisted by the media.

And, lest we forget,  it’s not just a matter of misrepresentation.  Wahlund points out that, if you’re really desperate to find a pope who is ruining the Church, you could always fall back on:

  • Pope Stephen VI (896–897), who had his predecessor Pope Formosus exhumed, tried, de-fingered, briefly reburied, and thrown in the Tiber.
  • Pope John XII (955–964), who gave land to a mistress, murdered several people, and was killed by a man who caught him in bed with his wife.
  • Pope Benedict IX (1032–1044, 1045, 1047–1048), who “sold” the Papacy
  • Pope Boniface VIII (1294–1303), who is lampooned in Dante’s Divine Comedy
  • Pope Urban VI (1378–1389), who complained that he did not hear enough screaming when Cardinals who had conspired against him were tortured.

Etc.  Wahlund says,

We once had a Pope who was murdered while engaging in the act of adultery – and the Church survived! After that, can anyone honestly believe that the Church will be utterly decimated and destroyed simply because the current pope made statements about atheists that were deliberately misconstrued by the media in order to boost ratings?! If I was the Holy Spirit, I’d be insulted by the implication that my protection of the Truth was considered so weak and ineffective.

Maybe I have a soft spot in my heart for fed-up pregnant writers who imagine how they would feel if they were the Holy Spirit, but I loved the heck out of this piece.  Read the whole thing.  Rock on, JoAnna!

I repent of my early support for the Iraq War

I wish I had listened to John Paul II at the time, and I have learned my lesson.

Pia de Solenni explains why we’re praying and fasting today, and includes links to an Italian/Latin booklet so you can follow along with the Pope as he leads a prayer vigiltoday (Eastern Time 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.) for peace.

An indulgence for THAT?

Probably you’ve heard, you can get an indulgence if you follow the events of World Youth Day via Twitter.

Of course the secular media is reporting that you can get an indulgence “through” Twitter, as if it’s something you can download.  And wouldn’t that be an interesting topic for another day?  I can’t be the only one who reifies technological processes in my imagination, picturing digitized data as twinkling clouds that swirl through the air and down through the vent in the side of my laptop.  Zwoosh!  Downloaded.   I may be a technological moron who engages in magical thinking when it comes to computer stuff, but the typical secular person is just as childish when it comes to understanding and imagining spiritual things.  I suppose that, when they hear “grace” or “salvation,” they think of moonbeams or pixie dust.

Anyway, about those Twitter indulgences.  The usual crowd of indignant neckbeards are grousing at the loosey goosey way Francis is handing ‘em out for cheap  — forgetting, apparently, that there’s a long tradition of earning indulgences through doing things that by no means guarantee a spiritual experience.  The actual action you perform — going to Mass at a certain church, finishing a certain novena – isn’t necessarily a difficult thing.  In part, it’s kind of a hook, something to grab your attention and give you some structure, so that you get the spiritual benefit of the proscribed action, and you’re also motivated to do the other things necessary to gain an indulgence.  Here’s a good overview.

It occurs to me that Francis has actually done something brilliant here — something even the Frankophobes can’t argue with:   he’s making the media help him catechize the world.

 

I mean, imagine if he sent out a tweet saying, “Your word of the day is ‘indulgence,’” and then went on to define it.  No one would care.  Instead, he’s made it into a story, and now people are actually having to look it up and see what the deal is.  Haters gonna hate, but plenty more people will learn something they never would have otherwise.

Love that man.

Oh, Francis-haters, you sound very lovely when you get played that way.

Good heavens, I’m completely disgusted at some of the comments I’m reading aboutPope Francis’ “snub” of some concert.

 

Here’s the only completely sensible thing I’ve heard: this is a big deal about nothing.  As one commenter pointed out, maybe the guy had diarrhea and didn’t feel like telling anyone.  Maybe an old friend is on his death bed.  Who the heck knows?  We don’t.  I’m fairly sure it wasn’t just a passive aggressive fabrication when “an archbishop told the crowd of cardinals and Italian dignitaries that an ‘urgent commitment that cannot be postponed’ would prevent Francis from attending.”

Here’s the thing:  you outraged ones, do you seriously not realize that you’re getting played by the media?  Some pissy cardinal got mad and told the media that it was a story.  It’s not.  Think I’m wrong?  Do you really think that Benedict went to every last thing on his schedule for eight years?  Really?  He never skipped anything, ever?  Or if he did skip something, were you there to see how he let people know he wouldn’t be there, and were you also there to see how Francis let people know he wouldn’t be there?  And Benedict did it right, and Francis did it wrong, every time, because if Benedict did it wrong, then the media would have written a story about it?  And Francis deliberately arranged for there to be an empty chair, but Benedict definitely and personally made sure that nobody was disappointed ever?  You know this?  Because of all the stories you’ve read, written by the totally impartial media, whom you have always trusted in the past to get all the details right about all things Catholic?

Please.  You. Are. Getting. Played.  If you don’t like him, fine.  (I think you’re nuts, but what do I know.)  But if you’re seriously calling him “tyrannical” for not showing up at a concert, or refusing to pray for him because, according to a transcript of some unscripted discussion, you think he’s not properly grateful for prayers, then you have a serious problem.

The same goes if you like the pope, and you have read a few stories and have concluded that he is Sending a Signal to the Musico-Ecclesial Complex about how, from now on, we will be scraping all the gold leaf off St. Peter’s and melting it down to buy clean needles for addicts and christening gowns for the children of prostitutes.  People.  Get a grip.  He’s a very interesting pope.  But this just plain isn’t a story.

Yeah, I feel kinda bad for the people who practiced their music and then didn’t get to play for the pope.  That stuff happens sometimes.  But I have no sympathy for people who are just horrified, just bowled over with revulsion and dismay, at his rejection of everything that has been sacred to us lo these many years.  Because the people who are the most horrified are the same people who pooh-pooh their fellow Catholics who leave the Church over truly painful issues — things like divorce and remarriage, or the abuse scandal.  You expect the entire world to just . . . . get over stuff, and yet you are climbing up your own assholes over an empty chair at a concert.

Yeah, so, that’s what I think.

Now avalable: Encountering Christ: Homilies, Letters, and Addresses of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio

The book my sister, Devra Torres, helped translate and edit is now available from Scepter Books:

Encountering Christ: Homilies, Letters, and Addresses of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio (Pope Francis)     

pp56.1_EC_

 

Here is the short interview I did with her about the experience of translating Bergoglio’s words; and here is an entertaining post she wrote on her blog, giving a little preview of the riches to be found in our new pope’s words.

The book is available in paperback and Kindle.  Looks like a great read, with lots of variety.  Check it out!

Start your week off right . . .

with a little comeuppance.

Now pretend the silver cowboy is Pope Francis, and the guy in the purple shirt is saying, “Um, scuze me, let me tell you what true humility is like!  Um, Your Holiness, don’t you realize that there’s no possible way to lead the Church when you’re not in ermine?  Um, Frankie-boy, whatcha doing washing the feet of women, huh, huh?  You do realize you’re bringing about the ruin of Christendom, right?  Now if you’d just read this blog post I wrote, you’ll see the error of your ways . . .”

Feel better, dontcha?  And now back to Lent.

Her Latin’s a little shaky, but . . .

 

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