No one has ever accused the Pope of being a class act. It is incumbent of course that his bad example not effect how we treat him now that it is his turn to experience the frailty of our human flesh.
The Wheel Always Comes Round
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
That’s sad he said that. God have mercy on him.
It is very difficult to feel sympathy for Pope Francis after the mean, hateful, spiteful, and vindictive things that he has said and done to those with whom he disagrees. After all that’s happened – Pachamama demon goddess, deification of “Mother Earth,” blessing of sodomite couples, strangulation of the Traditional Mass, ingratiation with and capitulation to liberal political elitists like Biden, selling out the Chinese Faithful to the Communist Party, trying to sabotage the recent election with the appointment of Bishops known to oppose Trump, elevating sex perverts and sex abusers to Ecclesiatical power, the list goes on and on and on – it’s time for him to be deposed. Sorry, Folks, but that’s how I feel.
It’s very hard, LQC, I agree. I am trying to get past all of those things you listed and genuinely hope he recovers. Not doing very well on that front. The one thing that still ignites all of my uncharitable impulses is his outright persecution of traditional religious orders, especially but not only women, and then stealing their property to sell it off. He might as well have flipped the bird to Our Lord and Our Lady, not to mention the faithful, as engage in such despicable behavior.
Pray for his conversion and for the Holy Spirit to intervene in the next Conclave. That’s the best I can do right now.
LQC,
Very understandable.
However, it’s not to somehow generate sympathy or fond feelings for him that we pray for his salvation and a good death, but for our own salvation: a very concrete way for us, with the help of grace, to exercise the compassion of Christ. “Judgment without mercy to whoever judges without mercy,” as the Apostle warns.
I agree with Frank and Father J. I’ll repeat a prayer that the Bishop of the Anglican Province of America (one of the breakaway Anglican jurisdictions that uses the 1928 BCP and considers itself Anglo-Catholic) posted on Facebook the other day:
O FATHER of mercies, and God of all comfort, our only help in time of need; We fly unto thee for succour in behalf of this thy servant, Francis, Bishop, lying in great weakness of body. Look graciously upon him, O Lord; and the more the outward man decayeth, strengthen him, we beseech thee, so much the more continually with thy grace and Holy Spirit in the inner man. Give him unfeigned repentance for all the errors of his life past, and stedfast faith in thy Son Jesus; that his sins may be done away by thy mercy, and his pardon sealed in heaven; through the same thy Son, our Lord and Saviour. Amen.
As a man, I’d like to *deleted* because that *censored* deserves it.
But, I am not my own man.
I have been bought, ransomed, enrolled in another’s household. As such, I cannot always speak as I would if I spoke for myself alone. Others will judge the quality of that house by the actions of it’s members. I have no authority on how the other members conduct themselves. It is a weighty enough matter to be responsible for my own very limited ambassadorship!
I must remember and serve my Master’s desire -that all men come to be enrolled in His household – that no man is so despotic, wicked, or duplicitous that He does not hope for his healing and adoption.
If I were to write off the malicious, petty, godless, arrogant, and carnal, I would be hypocritical indeed. Three decades ago, before my enrollment, such was I. (And there is still plenty of that man trying, daily, to stage a coup!)
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He has not been a kind or likeable man but we have to set that aside and pray for him anyway.
Thumbs up on this observation by Don McC.