PopeWatch: Lesson

Even so, there is no precedent for the bizarre moral compromises of Vatican foreign policy under an unreformed Peronist who, as I’ve reported, has repeatedly shielded his sex abuser allies from justice. Previous popes sometimes betrayed local Catholics in order to bolster their central authority; arguably the cynical Beijing concordat falls into this historic category, though none of Francis’s recent predecessors would have approved such an egregiously stupid deal.

What distinguishes this Pope are his embarrassing genuflections to an international Left that treated him like a superstar when he was first elected but now barely acknowledges his existence. Partly that is because he has not delivered the changes to doctrines on women’s ordination or homosexuality that they expected; mostly it’s because today’s champions of globalist orthodoxy, compared to those of 2013, were never educated to give a stuff what the Catholic Church thinks about anything.

Yet Francis keeps clutching at straws, identifying foreign policy and other political positions agreeable to the liberal Left and then attempting to commit the Catholic Church to them. And he does so clumsily, not bothering to hide personal prejudices against (for example) the state of Israel or conservative border policies that are not shared by most practising Catholics. These drive him into alliances with enemies of traditional Catholic teaching who don’t think his support is worth much — which, to be fair, it isn’t.

Go here to read the rest.  If  there is any larger lesson to this kidney stone of a pontificate, perhaps it is that too many Catholics had come to the false conclusions that Catholicism consists of simply agreeing with anything proclaimed by the current Pope, and that criticism of a Pope is verboten.  This is not what the Church has held throughout history.  If anything, it is a fairly modern accretion that is best consigned to the “Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.”archives of the Church.