Thursday, March 28, AD 2024 11:19am

PopeWatch: Making a Mess

In all the accurate criticisms of Pope Francis sometimes one of the obvious ones is overlooked:  He simply isn’t very good at the job:

 

The China policy, being overseen by Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state — Cardinal Zen described him as a “man of little faith” — is just one example of the confusion and chaos battering the Catholic Church today. Parolin has called Pope Francis’s document Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love — no sniggers, please) a “paradigm change” in the life of the Catholic Church. Paradigm shifts imply a rupture. Critics of the The Joy of Love — they include several cardinals and bishops — say that Pope Francis has called into question the indissolubility of marriage. That would certainly be a paradigm shift for the Catholic Church, given the words of Jesus about divorce in the Bible.

 

The problem for the proponents of this “shift,” as George Weigel has explained, is that the Church “doesn’t do paradigm shifts”; if it did, it would cease to be the Catholic Church. It would become more like the Anglican Church, no stranger to rupture and new ways of thinking. The new resemblance to Anglicanism is not the old division of High and Low Church in regard to the liturgy, although that is certainly part of the contemporary Catholic experience; you never quite know these days whether the priest will just celebrate the Mass or attempt a late-night comedy routine. The really acute division, which is why it is so serious, is over the interpretation of basic doctrine. In Malta, for example, the rules allowing or limiting Holy Communion for a couple one of whose members was divorced and remarried while the previous spouse was still living would be quite different for the same couple if they were in Portland, Ore. “Something is broken in the Catholic Church today,” says Weigel.

 

To the Vatican’s abandonment of Chinese Catholics and of the Church’s ancient teaching on marriage, add Pope Francis’s recent outrageous comments relating to sexual abuse of minors by priests. It was Benedict XVI who first seriously began to tackle the awful problem. To the delight of the secular media, Francis appeared to be pushing an even stronger line. Unfortunately, some cracks began to appear in that narrative early on, with abusers being readmitted if they had friends (such as the pope) in high places; survivor Marie Collins and all other lay members of the Vatican’s commission on the sexual-abuse problem resigned. Now Francis is under fire for apparently shielding a Chilean bishop who had covered for abusive priests and for appearing to be “economical with the truth” about a letter detailing the facts of the scandal in Chile. He said he never received the letter.

Go here to read the rest.  All things considered, it probably is a good thing that Pope Francis is as inept as he is.  A competent Pope with his agenda would be a holy terror indeed.

 

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Tim Capps
Monday, February 12, AD 2018 6:46pm

Most people think they’re harmless, but the Pope Videos are a good example of incompetence preventing even more damage from being done. From a filmmaking perspective they are simply awful. (The last was worse than any but the first.) But an Argentinian production company has the contract. Go figure. The reason the Pope Videos are so dangerous is that the highest-profile Christian in the world is officially turning Christianity into a secular humanitarian NGO by his banal, virtue-signalling PSAs masquerading as “Prayer Intentions.” (So much for those, not, too.) Yes. Apart from everything else, he has by now proved that he is just not up to the simple prudential and intellectual demands of heading a large organization. He is definitely Microsoft top management material.

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