PopeWatch: Not Orthodox Enough to Be Protestant

More than any other pope in modern times, Francis gives the impression of being a good hater. His hostility is reciprocated in spades. I’ll never forget the look of blazing contempt that swept across the features of a former curial cardinal when I mentioned his former boss.

This is not normal, even in the often backbiting atmosphere of the Vatican. The vacillating Paul VI, who banned the old Latin Mass after the Second Vatican Council, was undoubtedly despised by traditionalists. But respect for the papal office kept most of them from slagging him off as if he were just another bullying bishop. In contrast, it’s quite common to hear hardline conservatives refer to the current Pope as ‘Bergoglio’ or ‘Frankie’. Paul didn’t enjoy picking fights and didn’t have Francis’s reputation for twisting the knife after dismissing someone at short notice; nor were there reports of the air turning blue during papal rages.

All of which, coupled with Francis’s pursuit of a liberal policy agenda, means that debate about the crisis in the Catholic Church concentrates heavily on the record and personality of this pope. The other inescapable topic, of course, is the sex abuse crisis, which shows no signs of dying down as the spotlight moves from the English-speaking world to continental Europe. According to an independent report published in France last week, 330,000 children were abused by clergy and lay Church employees over 70 years. The Catholic Church in Germany is reeling from similar allegations. If the Church in Africa and Asia ever comes under proper scrutiny, we can expect some grotesque revelations. Pope Francis himself is heavily implicated in the protection of certain Latin American clergy, a big story that is being played down by a supine Vatican press corps.

The crimes against children were committed on such a vast scale, and countless prelates were so wickedly complicit in them, that one hesitates to say that the Catholic Church is facing an existential threat. But there is an even more fundamental problem which it would have had to confront anyway, though it has been made worse by sex abuse.

Put simply, the Barque of Peter was heading for the rocks long before Pope Francis got his hand on the tiller. It is being carried there by the same demographic wave that has caused Sunday attendance at Church of England services to fall from 740,000 to 690,000 between 2016 and 2019 – that is, before a Covid pandemic during which both Anglican and Catholic bishops were stupidly eager to ban even socially distanced services.

Sociologists of religion used to believe that the unique teachings, cultural identity and structure of the Catholic Church afforded it protection from secularisation. Secular culture has all but wiped out ‘mainline’ denominations such as the Episcopal Church in the United States. But as the American cultural critic Mary Eberstadt argued in her 2013 book How the West Really Lost God, Western Catholicism merely lags behind.

Most US Catholics commit what the Church teaches is the mortal sin of missing Mass on Sundays – and, in the past decade, they have flipped their views on gay marriage and abortion. She suggests that secularisation is ‘the phenomenon through which Protestants, generally speaking, go godless, and Catholics, generally speaking, go Protestant’ (that is, adopt roughly the positions occupied by liberal Anglicans and Lutherans 20 years ago).

Go here to read the rest.  Not Protestant but a liberal Catholic, one step behind liberal secularists and running to keep up.  This, alloyed with a really nasty personality along with a Peronist view of the world, sums up the current Pope.  Next time perhaps a real Catholic should be elected Pope.