Just when I thought, enough of blasting Francis, I come across this, which I couldn't pass. Covers a multitude of bases.

Crushing indictment.

Francis, the Pope who alienated good Catholics

Simon Caldwell explains:

• “Francis was a serial heresiarch, who deliberately resorted to ambiguity to sow confusion among the faithful and subvert the teachings and traditions of the Church.”

• “He undermined the teaching of Jesus on the indissolubility of marriage, and introduced blessings for same-sex couples. He allowed a pagan earth goddess called a Pachamama to be honoured in a Roman church. . . . He elevated climate change ideology to religious dogma and handed over control of the Catholic Church in China to the Communists, . . . effectively did away with Hell by promoting the belief that it was empty and that only a ‘cult’ believed otherwise. Consequently, one did not have to be sorry for one’s sins to receive absolution under this pope or to be in a state of grace to receive Holy Communion.”

• “Heterodox opinions were uniformly tolerated among the clergy, with Francis refusing to sanction even Bishop Johan Bonny of Antwerp when he argued that the euthanasia of the elderly was as morally justifiable as killing an enemy on the battlefield in a just war.”

• “But woe to anyone who expressed orthodox opinions too loudly. Francis brutally suppressed the traditional Latin Mass because it was attractive to such Catholics and he removed a succession of bishops from office because they dissented from his agenda. He would also sack any priest who dared to publicly criticise him.”

• “He was an extreme authoritarian who ruled by motu proprio (of his own initiative) because such ukase-style edicts allowed him to bypass the checks and balances of normal government.”

• “In this respect, he was like a Russian czar, an absolute monarch or a mob boss, down to the throwing of tantrums and swearing like a dockyard labourer when he was slow to get his way. He wielded his power capriciously, cherry picking Catholic teaching or overriding canon law to give weight to his own prejudices. Sometimes, he would ignore the rules completely. For instance, he made covid injections mandatory for Vatican employees, even though Church teaching upheld their right to reject such medical impositions.”

• “For him the mainstream media have only praise. The reason for this is that they judge popes in purely secular terms. They like what they see in Francis so much that they have effectively canonised him as one of their saints – as a pope of the people and the poor, a reformer and moderniser, a pope for women, gays, the environment, for people of other faiths.”

• “But look more closely, and one will see not a pope of the people, but of the elites, not of the poor but of political systems which perpetuate poverty, a pope not just of migrants but of mass migration, even at the price of what is left of Christian Europe. Take the 2016 murder in Rouen, France, of Fr Jacques Hamel, whose throat was slit by Islamists as he stood at the altar. Afterwards, Francis refused to attribute specific religious motivation to the atrocity. ‘I don’t like to speak of Islamic violence,’ he told journalists. ‘There are violent Catholics!’ True, but in the cold-blooded butchery of Fr Hamel, there was a distinction that Francis had deliberately failed to make.”

• “Informed Catholics don’t give a hoot about the political posturing of Francis because they know it is about as non-binding on them as his favourite colour, breed of cat or football team. His political opinions matter no more than the opinions of anyone else. The political views of Francis had no lesser or greater weight than the political opinions, say, of JD Vance, the Vice President of the United States, a recent convert to the Catholic faith and a man whose views would have been in diametric opposition.”

• “To impart political views is not what a pope is for, unless he is defending fundamental human rights, properly understood, or when the salvation of souls requires it. Catholics took Francis’ with a bucket of salt. In Italy, for example, the public became accustomed to doing the opposite of what he asked them to do, especially on migration, and voted for politicians like Giorgia Meloni.”

• “The same went for his native Argentina where he served as Cardinal Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires but where, perhaps significantly, he never returned as pope. He intervened in the 2023 presidential elections from Rome as much as he could, however, when Javier Milei emerged as the frontrunner. Milei was anathema to Francis, who saw him as a populist, an Argentine Donald Trump guilty of the heinous crime of describing the climate change narrative as a ‘Socialist lie’ which served the promotion of population control through abortion, which he described as ‘murder’.”

• “The Argentinians clearly knew Francis better than the rest of us. In fairness, it is also true that Francis had many good points and that he did many good things. Among them was the canonisation of Cardinal John Henry Newman in 2019 as England’s newest saint. The Victorian cleric might one day be proclaimed a doctor of the Church because of his theological teachings on conscience. Ironically, his writings offer some succour and encouragement to Catholics troubled by popes like the very man who made him a saint.”

• “‘If I am obliged to bring religion into after-dinner toasts,’ wrote Cardinal Newman in his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk of 1875, ‘I shall drink to the Pope, if you please – still, to conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards.’”

• “Newman, a stalwart opponent of religious liberalism, was a prophet of our times. My guess is that he saw Francis coming.”