PopeWatch: His Base

John McCain sometimes jokingly refers to the media as “his base”.  (McCain seems to still be completely clueless, in spite of 2008, that the media gives him good coverage simply because he is a Republican who can always be counted on to stab other Republicans in the back or in the front.  When he is up against a Democrat who can beat him, the media then views him just as another knuckle dragging Republican.)  Recent developments indicate who the Pope considers to be his “base” as the author of the Dictator Pope notes:

A few days ago Pope Francis told the bishops of the Catholic Church that they need to be prepared to resign when the right time comes for them. He even said that he hoped he would know when the Holy Spirit wants him to resign, a remark that was taken as a hint (not the first he has given) that he intends to do so at some point. As we waited for a manifestation of this resolve, on 18 May we were given a dramatic sign. The entire Catholic hierarchy of Chile (all thirty-one active bishops, with three retired ones thrown in) have offered their resignation, supposedly because of failings in the handling of clerical sexual abuse in that country.

Any thought that this represents the new promptings of the Spirit would be off the mark. It is an effort to save face after the biggest public-relations blunder in Francis’s pontificate, the one he committed on January 18, when he defended Bishop Juan Barros against accusations of complicity in sexual abuse by the notorious Father Fernando Karadima in Chile. Pope Francis’s off-the-cuff pronouncements, which have earned him such popularity with the journalistic profession, on this occasion backfired on him. He declared that he had seen no proof of the sexual crimes alleged and that the accusations were slander. It was later demonstrated that Pope Francis had indeed seen the evidence, and he was dismissing the claims of victims who had been trying to gain justice for years.

The reason why this was such a disaster for Pope Francis was that, for the first time, it earned him criticism not only from such a senior figure as Cardinal O’Malley but from the liberal media, to whose applause he had been successfully playing for five years. A rescue operation was urgently needed. First of all, the Pope organised one of what may be called his “humility opportunities”, which he welcomes the way other celebrities like photo opportunities. There was a meeting with victims, and Pope Francis admitted his own failings; but this was nowhere near enough. To expiate his mistake, the Pope called all the Chilean bishops to Rome and told them — what? — that they were all to blame. One sentence from his rebuke is especially worth quoting: “No one can exempt himself and place the problem on the shoulders of the others” — a classic case of Francis’s frequent habit of denouncing other people for the faults of which he is the prime exemplar.

Go here to read the rest.  To understand the Pope one must view his Pontificate through a political prism, and an Argentinian political prism at that.  One must always pretend to be on the side of the poor and downtrodden while carefully cultivating the politically well connected and powerful.  That explains why the Pope rarely takes an action, as opposed to words, that would not garner him positive reviews in the New York Times, and its think alike colleagues throughout the West.  The role of a Pope is to convert the world to Christ.  The role of this Pope is to convert Christians to positions acceptable to the dominant mindset of the secular elites throughout the West.