BAD AND DANGEROUS MAYBE BUT NOT MAD: FRANCIS

To comment please open your gmail account or use my email address, FB Messenger or Twitter.

Santa Maria in Traspontina, Rome - round the corner from St Peter's, a demonic manifestation 

 

You'd think by now it should be obvious to all that Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Jesuit 'pope', must fully intend to destroy the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. 

Like the horror story that New Zealand is rapidly becoming, ever since our newly-begonged ex PM babykiller Ardern took office under the aegis of Klaus Schwab of the WEF, Rome since Bergoglio offered the pagan Pachamama idol on the altar of St Peter's has become a happy hunting ground for the devil and his demons. 

The devil and his demons must know that Bergoglio, who's not so much under the aegis of the global elite at the WEF as in cahoots with them as their necessary 'spiritual' figurehead, is running the Catholic Church into the ground in the same way the Labour/Greens are busily  performing that office for Soros, Schwab Gates and Co here. 

In the Eternal City, Satan and his minions have commandeered a church consecrated to the Blessed Virgin Mary just around the corner from St Peter's Basilica. In plain sight. But the lukewarm, the wishful thinkers, the fence-sitters and the just plain ignorant Catholics who Dante Alighieri in his "Inferno" consigned to "the darkest corner of Hell" just don't want to know.

Dr Regis Martin,  professor of dogmatic and systematic theology at Franciscan University of Steubenville Ohio since 1988, is pretty clear on the reasons for believing this pope who is not a pope, not on your nelly, is destroying the Catholic Church. But whether from charity, naivety or regard for reputation (with an eye to book sales) he steers well clear of the conclusion that Bergoglio is in hock to Satan.

 

Unlike everyone else who witnessed the Holy Father taking a phone call in the middle of a General Audience in St. Peter’s Square the other day, I was not the least bit surprised. And why should I be, since I was the one who made the call? 

No sooner had I dialed the number than I was put immediately through to the pope, who seemed quite delighted to hear from me. For about five seconds, that is, no doubt thinking I was the Reverend James Martin, whom I had instructed the switchboard operator at the Vatican to inform the pope was on the other line. 

 

Fr James Martin socialises with Cardinal Dolan at the Met Museum of Art's 'Heavenly Bodies'

And until things fell apart, which happened fairly quickly, I was hoping for a productive exchange. Once he realized he’d been snookered, however, he abruptly hung up, leaving me to imagine the number of heads likely to roll on the floor of the Vatican switchboard.  

But not before I had succeeded in leaving my own message, which was to tell him to stop all the madness. At once. Otherwise, I managed to blurt out just before the papal smartphone slammed shut, it would not be possible to acquit His Holiness from complicity in the disasters taking place in the life of the Church. He will own them. Whether wittingly or not scarcely matters anymore. The point is, it has got to stop, and until he steps in to do so the Church will continue to fracture and unravel, spiraling completely out of control.

Will he do so? Will he finally decide to put an end to the madness? 

What madness? In setting out the pathology report, where does one begin? Why not begin with the Deposit of Faith, the depletion of which appears to have been a programmatic theme of this pontificate from the beginning. (Bishop Strickland of Tyler, Texas, a fearless fellow, is not the first to take notice, but he needs brother bishops to step up and do likewise.) 

There are many others, notably Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, Bishop Athanasius Schneider, Cardinal Gerhard Muller, the cardinals who penned the Dubia, Bishop Thomas Paprocki, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone ... sadly, in New Zealand not one. 

Take for instance the agreement struck back in February of 2019 when the pope and Sheik Ahmed El-Tayeb met in Abu Dhabi. What did that portend? There was certainly no ambiguity on the part of Francis when, pronouncing on the “pluralism and diversity of religions,” he went on to insist that it was all “willed by God in his wisdom, through which He created human beings.”

Say what? When exactly did God change his mind and decide to include all religions in the plan of salvation? Is Islam now to be considered a necessary player in divine revelation? An instrument of divine grace? What does that do to the importance heretofore assigned to Christ, without whom no one can be saved? It would seem, in light of the language agreed upon by both the Grand Imam and God’s Vicar, that the place occupied by Christ for the last two thousand years had just been downsized. The absolute singularity of the Christ Event will no longer apply. 

How does one reconcile that alongside all the Gospel accounts in which Christ is presented not as an optional extra but as the real deal, the pivotal figure in the entire history of the world? In other words, once the Incarnation happened, everything and everyone changed, nothing would ever be the same again. Otherwise, it could not have been God who came down among us more than two millennia ago. And if Christ is no longer the authoritative center of the cosmos, why be Christian at all?  

 

A female priest, gay pride insignia: this is not the Catholic Church, it's Bergoglio's

Which brings us to Synodality, that vaunted process whose outcome threatens to strip the Faith of all that renders it distinctive. And Pope Francis has done absolutely nothing to stop it. He simply will not unplug the engine of destruction now running at high speed across Germany and elsewhere. Why is that? Does he want to see the Church imploding everywhere? 

So, the centerpiece of Christian faith having just been relativized, what next? Shall we take a look at the moral order, which seems to have been equally gutted? In fact, it has been so cheapened and debased that it hardly matters where the Church draws the line. I mean, are there any lines left to draw?

 

Making the Disney doco: it's okay to sit on a table to chat with the Vicar of Christ 

One immediately thinks of the Disney documentary recently released, featuring ten young people firing off questions at the Church’s Chief Shepherd as if he and the Church he leads were the object of carefully targeted airstrikes. About what? Sex, of course, concerning which the pope pretty much gave the store away, assuring his young friends that, well, actually, the Church’s “catechesis on sex is still in diapers.”   

Can he be serious? After two thousand years of reflection on the human condition, the level of understanding is no more than infantile? Was St. Thomas Aquinas in diapers when he distilled his moral theology? Or St. John Paul II, for heaven’s sake, whose insights into the mystery of human love—like a stick of dynamite waiting to go off—became so many iconic intimations of the inner life of the Triune God? These were not men wearing diapers.

 

+Paglia got a homosexual to paint this, complete with his own portrait (in red cap) on the walls of his cathedral and diverted charity funds for a reno on his apartment

Perhaps, then, the pope is serious. How else does one explain the dismantling of the John Paul Institute in Rome? Or the radical redirection of the Pontifical Academy for Life under the leadership of Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, who disdains the image of a Church as “dispenser of truth pills,” as if she were somehow the custodian of transcultural values and verities, “a priori given truth,” he calls it. 

But isn’t that precisely the claim she makes? In fact, she gives it a name, which is Jesus the Christ, the Word of the Father, who burst into time in order to gather it all up and thus return the whole ball of wax back to the Father in what we dare to call the Easter miracle. If the Church is not the guardian of “a priori truth,” if she cannot speak for God in the world His Son suffered to save, then she is a complete fraud. 

Regis Martin

Regis Martin is Professor of Theology and Faculty Associate with the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at the Franciscan University of Steubenville. He earned a licentiate and a doctorate in sacred theology from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome. Martin is the author of a number of books, including Still Point: Loss, Longing, and Our Search for God (2012) and The Beggar’s Banquet (Emmaus Road). His most recent book, published by Scepter, is called Looking for Lazarus: A Preview of the Resurrection.