George Neumayr nails it:
Before his election to the papacy, Jorge Bergoglio had already earned a reputation as an exponent of “pastoral” Catholicism. But out of it came few pastors, as those familiar with his tenure as archbishop of Buenos Aires knew. They noted that his local seminary was suffering from a small number of vocations. Even John Allen, a Vatican correspondent sympathetic to the pope’s liberalism, reported in 2013 that “vocations to the priesthood have been falling in Buenos Aires on his [Bergoglio’s] watch, despite the fact they’re up in some other dioceses. Last year the archdiocese ordained just 12 news priests, as opposed to 40-50 per year when Bergoglio took over.”
That the pope’s “pastoral” Catholicism produces few pastors is no surprise, given its open hostility to orthodox candidates. The pope rarely misses an opportunity to criticize them as “rigid.” Last week, he urged the Italian bishops to keep their eyes peeled for seminarians who take doctrinal teaching too seriously. “We frequently have seen seminarians who seem good but rigid,” he said.
Go here to read the rest. This piece of news is therefore ominous:
Pope Francis has asked an Italian bishop, Msgr. Egidio Miragoli, 65, to carry out a visitation of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Clergy, which has oversight of the more than 410,000 Catholic priests around the world.
Bishop Miragoli broke the news today, June 7, in a letter to the priests of the Diocese of Mondovi, in Italy’s Piedmont region, where he is pastor. In the letter, obtained by America, he revealed that at the end of the recent plenary assembly of the Italian bishops’ conference, Pope Francis told him he wanted “a favor” and asked the bishop to carry out a visitation of the congregation for clergy “in his name.”
Go here to read the rest.
The singularly important mission of a pope, as head of God’s church, is to bring the untwisted words of God to the masses and seek their conversion, that they may someday be with their Creator in heaven. Deliberately failing to understand and accept that mission (and focus instead upon worldly politics) is to insure that Holy Mother Church becomes barren. It is little more than spiritual contraception.
I’ll say it.
If COVID was a form of biowarfare from China, Biden and Francis prove how ineffective it was.
KEN
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COVID has proven to be very disruptive. Biowarfare doesn’t need to be lethal to have an effect on an adversary. The Trump economy was doing very well until the pandemic and the economic lockdowns. In ways the pandemic looks like a less lethal version of an Andromeda Strain Wildfire incident. China’s uncooperative conduct has been suggestive of an opportunistic version of biowarfare. They got rid of Trump, who was a thorn in their side.
Is it fair to say that they could only get rid of Trump through a tactic such as biowarfare…? That perhaps it may have been deliberate, and the collateral damage (killing millions) was just a side advantage. I mean, they tried everything else to get rid of him multiple times…
I’m not sure if it was deliberate, that’s why I used the word opportunistic. China appears to view the world in the same way that they view Hong Kong. The CCP engaged in suppression of information about COVID in its early stages. How would China behave any differently if they were to engage in deliberate, premeditated biowarfare? The pandemic has brought to the surface serious institutional rot and corruption in Western societies and governments. It could very easily be a real world case study to add to the study of biowarfare scenarios.