Was Francis a liberal? If not, what? Plus list of offenses: Upheaval. Ambiguity. Ignoring critics. His "penchant for draconian disciplines." "Unrelenting" attack on the Traditional Mass. And more . .
Jude Russo, American Conservative:
Where commentators, especially the dear old earnest American press, erred about Francis was in the belief that the man was sincerely ideological in some way.
Was he sincerely anything?
He was disruptive, yes, and disruptive in ways that often favored liberals. Yet it was the disruption itself that was the point, not the liberalism. He was quite happy to make cracks . . . at the expense of “faggots” or to talk about Satan in dark, medieval terms. . . . No, the essence of the Franciscan papacy was control . . .
How did that work? That is, what did it involve?
The constant reshuffling of the curia, disrupting long-standing power-bases and not coincidentally putting egg on the faces of prominent papabiles; foregoing elevating bishops from the usual places to the cardinalate, instead preferring to hand out red hats in far-flung parts of the world with weak and poorly understood interests; throwing the underground Chinese Church under the bus in the badly conceived and executed deal with the PRC; these are all moves to ensure that there was no power but Francis’s power in the Roman fold.
Indicting, that.
The shabby handling of traditionalists is best explained along these lines. Even as he crushed traditionalists within the Church . . . he cultivated friendly relations with the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X.
By granting them faculties for confession, he functionally brought them out of schism, but their canonical status remains irregular and confusing. Where the law is unclear, power is the judge’s.
Secret in this is keeping hold of the reins. Crafty fellow.
Keep in mind in all this: To slam Francis is to inform us and to get ready for what’s to come. Public figures are studied all the time. So it is with him. Doesn’t mean we do not pray for him, alive or dead for that matter.
That said, and Fr. John A. Perricone says it in a long listing of offenses during Francis’ 12 years in office,
Let us all pray for the immortal soul of Pope Francis. Let us respectfully keep the nine days of his obsequies. Let us have Mass after Mass offered for his happy repose.
His long listing of offenses has a theme, mentioned after each:
Good Catholics were confused.
“Upheaval followed upheaval . . . ambiguity was compounded by ambiguity. . . . More than a few prestigious theologians . . . were signing onto international statements fearful that Pope Francis had fallen into heresy.
“Papal apologists twisted and turned in their attempt to fit the square peg of rupture into the round hole of orthodoxy. Nothing worked . . .
Francis “dug in his heels and published a reiteration in the official Acta Apostolicae Sedis,” repeating his “departure from traditional doctrine on Marriage,” giving it “quasi-magisterial approval.”
Four prominent cardinals made “a careful request for . . . clarification” an “extraordinary” happening. Catholics waited months for a reply, “as muddled as the . . . encyclical.” This from a leader who claimed an “appetite for transactional governance” — a practice of ‘give and take’ with subordinates.
“Then there was [his] penchant for draconian disciplines,” otherwise considered “unfashionable” in a “dialogical” church, “especially one marked by the laissez-faire air of synodality.”
He “punished, silenced, and sacked bishops and clerics with abandon,” his supposed “non-judgmentalism” notwithstanding. He behaved instead as “one of the most judgmental.”
Indeed, “no pope in recent memory removed as many bishops from their dioceses, even excommunicating seemingly innocent priests.”
“It appeared as though only those upholding Revealed teachings were in his crosshairs.” This while he adopted “passivity in the face of the significant apostasy of the German bishops and other such prelates throughout the world.”
He indulged an “appetite for the ideological fashions of the day . . . brought pagan idols into St. Peter’s Basilica, happily welcomed known enemies of the Church into his audiences, promoted . . . eco-justice and transsexual rights . . . exhibited an unusual passion for tiny, sexual niche minorities while being utterly indifferent to faithful Catholics suffering the whiplash of ecclesial tremors.
“One dramatic example comes to mind: Chinese Catholics, among them cardinals, bishops, and laity who presently suffer persecution and rot in dungeons.”
He “promoted equality of religions and misrepresentation of the rights of nations to defend their borders from aliens . . . . trumpeted assorted causes dear to the Left and often scolded Catholics for excessive ‘proselytization,’ leaving Catholics in a dazed wonderment. . . . as if dissent was rewarded and fidelity penalized.”
“Most disconcerting was his unrelenting attack upon the Traditional Mass, which . . . . in surprisingly large numbers, is becoming the home of large families, robust fidelity to the Faith, and scores of vocations to the priesthood and religious life.”
In this he “mounted a pogrom [!] of complete exclusion to . . . Catholics who showed the greatest respect to his Office as well as perfect loyalty to the articles of the Faith.
“This program of abolition represented a determined and pronounced rupture with both [Pope John Paul II’s] Ecclesia Dei Adflicta and [Pope Benedict XVI’s] Summorum Pontificum, his predecessors’ corrective to the Montini/Bugnini prohibitions of the ancient Traditional Mass.
“He was clearly wedded to a liturgically discredited paradigm which had acted as a vehicle for the wildly secularist motifs of the first half of the 20th century. . . . “
“In speech after speech, he ranted against seminarians and priests who preferred the classical vesture for Holy Mass or the donning of the cassock,” casting “a pall over the enthusiasm of new seminarians and freshly ordained priests,” and demonstrated his “unconcealed contempt for a liturgical expression venerated in the Church for centuries.”
“He promoted bishops who deployed oppressive disciplines against traditional expressions of the Faith while aggressively promoting ideologies at odds with it,” giving his approval “of new liturgical forms, such as an Amazonian Rite, which, at the very least, obscured the Faith,” seeming to leave us “in a collapsed mine shaft, with only teaspoons to dig out.”
He kept his promise of “creating a mess.” With that “mess” arrived the demise of peace in the Church. Factionalism ensued. Heightened tensions erupted. Not a few Catholics embraced eccentric notions of sedevacantism.
The writer offers consolation in the words of St. John Henry Newman :
The whole course of Christianity from the first is but one series of troubles and disorders. Every century is like every other, and to those who live in it seems more worse than all times before it.
The Church is ever ailing, religion seems ever expiring, schisms dominant, the light of truth dim. . . . The cause of Christ is ever in its last agony . . . But the Church is like Noah’s ark, which did not hinder or destroy the flood but rode upon it, preserving the hopes of the human family within its fragile plan.
And adds his own:
Let us all pray for the immortal soul of Pope Francis. Let us respectfully keep the nine days of his obsequies. Let us have Mass after Mass offered for his happy repose.
“But, after all that,” he concludes, “Pope Francis still leaves us confused. But not God.”