WHERE'S FRANCIS? IN HEAVEN - OR WHAT?

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Pope Leo XIV prays at the tomb of 'Pope Francis'

'Pope Francis' "accompanies us and prays for the Church from Heaven". To millions of faithful Catholics, that seemed a strange thing for Pope Leo XIV to say. Francis isn't canonised - yet - and millions of Catholics believe he was either an apostate, an heretic, a schismatic or an unbeliever or all the above. In which case, St Thomas Aquinas, the "Angelic Doctor" tells us in Summa Theologica not to pray for his soul because our prayer would not profit him.https://catholicus.eu/en/should-we-pray-for-all-the-dead-st-thomas-aquinas-clarifies-only-for-the-faithful-not-heretics-and-apostates/

Presumably the Holy Father knows something we don't. Maybe +Leo had a vision of Francis enjoying celestial bliss. Or maybe he knows that he confessed all his sins, repented and received an Apostolic Pardon which would have remitted all temporal punishment due to those sins. An Apostolic Pardon may be given any Catholic dying in a state of grace, so surely a pope - even a faux pope - would obtain it. The moral of the story for all Catholics being, make sure you get one! But there's a catch: the requirement that all attachment to sin, even venial, be absent.

And as the war in Ukraine escalates, Pope Leo has asked Vladimir Putin, in their first phone call, for a "gesture" for peace. That ball is surely in the Pope's court: the best gesture for peace would be a proper Consecration of Russia, at last, to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. 

"The Vatican, as represented by the Pope, is very interested in hosting negotiations" - President Trump

 

And so to Sebastian Morello writing for The Catholic Thing:

Where is Pope Francis? 

It seems a decision has been made among many outlets of the Catholic commentariat to remain, for the time being, uncritical of the new pope, Leo XIV. Undoubtedly, this approach is the right one, as everyone should proceed in good will, hoping that with Prevost’s election will come a new chapter after the unhappy decade or so of Francis’s pontifical reign.

 

But, troublingly, for the third time since his pontificate began only a short while ago, Pope Leo XIV has declared that the soul of Pope Francis is in Heaven.

 

Most recently, Pope Leo asserted this to be the case via an official Pontifex ‘tweet’ on the social media platform X, which stated that Francis had “returned to the Father’s house. He accompanies us and prays for the Church from Heaven.”

 

But this eccentric habit of declaring, outside any official canonisation process, that, as it were, no such process is needed, is deeply problematic. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the faithful of the Catholic Church are being prepared for this highly controversial figure (who, as one journalist friend put it to me, “lingered over the Church for twelve years as if he were an enormous dark cloud”) to be canonised soon, as if it were inevitable and unavoidable.

 

There are several very serious problems with Leo repeatedly stating that Francis is in Heaven. For one, such statements cause the faithful to doubt the gravity of Francis’s public sins. These sins are not inconsiderable, given that they include idol-worship (Pachamama), the suppression of an ancient apostolic rite of the Church, syncretism and religious relativism, the protection and promotion of predators and deviants, the abuse of the Church’s law, the teaching of heresy, etc.

 

Who knows if Francis was a heretic, but it’s clear that he was heretical. The distinction being that the former would have required him to be publicly accused of heresy and for him in response to have held obstinately to his heresies. Given that he customarily refused to meet with those who raised objections to his teaching or manner of governing, we were not given the opportunity to witness any obstinate attachment to heresy.

 

But in any case, the record is not good. If such sins can be committed and the perpetrator still immediately enjoys the beatific vision upon his death, then the message to the faithful is clear: either these sins were not even as grave as our ancient faith would have led us to believe, or they are not sins at all.

 

Perhaps people will not be led to such erroneous conclusions, but then the remaining alternative is that, despite the Church’s age-old teaching to the contrary, Purgatory does not really exist. If such sins can be committed without any need for purgation from the guilt entailed by them, then Purgatory must not be in fact necessary. Thus, again, if the faith is to remain intact among the faithful, Leo’s habit of declaring Francis’s heavenly status is far from desirable.

 

Such declarations by Leo, moreover, discourage the faithful of the Church from exercising charity. Whatever our view of Francis, he was a baptised member of the Church and thus a brother in Christ who may now stand very much in need of our prayers.

However: St Thomas Aquinas, in Summa Theologica, states that we should not pray for "unbelievers, heretics, schismatics or apostates". Not all souls can be aided by our prayer.  "we ought not to pray for unbelievers and unrepentant sinners, because such prayer would not profit them" (Summa Theologica, Supplement, q. 71, a. 5. Prayer presupposes a communion in faith. Those who die wilfully separating themselves from the Church are not disposed to receive the spiritual fruits of our prayers.

For if his sins are as grave as the ancient faith would lead us to believe, even if he made a perfect act of contrition prior to his death and made a good confession, his soul will remain in Purgatory for a very, very long time. Those who wish to participate in God’s mercy upon Francis’s soul, and therefore to say prayers and do acts of penance for his benefit, may be dissuaded from doing so by the reigning pope’s repeated statements.

Or by the teaching of St Thomas Aquinas, the "Angelic Doctor". 

 

But there is another reason why Leo is, in fact, playing with fire. It has not gone unnoticed among many of the Church’s faithful that, of late, canonisations have been co-opted as an instrument in what has for decades been the dominant ecclesiastical regime. Instrumentalising such holy things, besides being sacrilegious, is a very foolish thing to do. Ultimately, it does not serve to strengthen the regime, as intended, but only to undermine that which is instrumentalised.

 

It should not surprise us, then, that many theologians have begun to question the infallibility of canonisations. Increasingly, theologians have argued that the conditions of canonisation posed by Thomas Aquinas are either no longer in place or have been dramatically warped.

 

And the modern practice of popes to waive the remaining ordinarily required canonisation conditions due to personal whim or preference has not helped the situation.The instrumentalization of canonizations has, thus, only weakened devotion to the saints and damaged the credibility of the Church’s judgment in such matters.

 

Increasingly, it is felt among the practising faithful that canonisations have little to do with the Church’s response to an organically emerging devotion to a particular deceased holy person, and everything to do with whatever consolidates the dominant ecclesiastical regime, helping to impose and enforce its ideological commitments.

 

A case in point is that of Saint Philomena. Few saints have enjoyed such popular veneration in modern times. Soon after her remains were discovered in the catacombs in 1802, many amazing things began to surround the growing interest in who she was and what her role in the early Church could have been.

 

Miraculous healings, weeping statues, and the visions of ecstatic seers all contributed to the massive cultus that erupted, with everyone from the reigning pope to the poor parish priest of Ars, John Vianney, spreading devotion to this early martyr who had refused to breach her vow of chastity even for an Emperor.

 

But then, under Pope Paul VI, her name was removed from liturgical calendars. Devotion to this powerful intercessor was incompatible, it seems, with the new rationalistic and naturalistic regime that Pope Paul introduced. That the faithful had such a deep and sincere devotion to Philomena – a sign, according to Church tradition, that the sensus fidelium was manifesting itself – meant nothing to the new experts whom Pope Paul had raised up to lofty offices from which to experiment upon the Lord’s faithful.

 

Proof, indeed, that canonizations seem to have little to do with the Church’s response to an organically emerging devotion is offered by the subsequent canonisation by Pope Francis of Pope Paul VI.

 

 

Pope Paul VI

The fact is, almost no one likes Pope Paul VI. He was a sulky, bourgeois social climber with a snobbish liking for connoisseurs and academics, who presided over the most destructive period in the Church’s history, leading to a great exodus from the pews and the universal collapse of priestly vocations.

 

Really, again, no one likes him: traditionally minded Catholics never forgave him for suppressing the ancient liturgy and gutting the Church of her ancient traditions, and progressively minded Catholics never forgave him for giving the thumbs down to contraceptives.

 

The only people who didn’t really mind him – yet certainly did not pray to him or venerate him – were the ecclesiastical neo-conservatives. But their position as a faction in the post-conciliar Church was made practically impossible by the reign of Pope Francis, given that it then became just too difficult and embarrassing to keep arguing that the post-conciliar papacy was in perfect continuity with the pre-conciliar papacy.

 

The canonisation of Paul VI happened for one reason only, and that was to send a message to the faithful that if they think Vatican II was a disaster then, well, tough luck, because “there’s no going back.”

 

But that message only works if the Church’s faithful take these modern canonisations seriously, and of course increasingly they do not, precisely for this very reason: they lose their power with their misuse. Canonisations are now widely understood as just another weapon in the armoury of an ecclesiastical regime whose ambition it is to mix the Church’s roles with an affirmation of secular, atheistic modernity.

 

If the Church continues to struggle for survival under such a regime, that regime’s ultimate collapse will make the Church’s presence almost undetectable in the world. Consequently, there’s no way out of the new, anti-traditional Church except that of repudiating the whole modern experiment and once more taking up the mission, under the ministerial care of the Paraclete, to make disciples of all nations, thereby rescuing them from the unconverted world which is, I wish to emphasise, the principality of Satan.

 

Since Cardinal Prevost ascended to the Chair of Peter, there have been some promising signs that have given me and other traditional Catholics reasons for hope. But he must stop the nonsense.

 

He should stop saying that Francis is in Heaven. It is possible that Francis’s soul is neither in Heaven nor Purgatory. It is possible that Francis’s soul is in Purgatory, in which case, if you feel so inspired to do so, it would be laudable to pray for him.

Except for the fact of St Thomas Aquinas' teaching.

 

It is time to stop these games now and to reconcile the Church with her tradition, and that will require a lot more honesty about who the bad guys were, and are, to this day.

 

It is almost unthinkable – if the tradition of the Church on matters of idolatry, abuse of law, corruption of holy offices, etc. etc., is taken seriously – that Francis is now in Heaven. Saying that he is there is quite obviously done for ideological reasons, to resurrect the mythology of post-conciliar continuity that duped so many Catholics for so long, and has so profoundly contributed to the mass apostasy of the faithful over the past half-century or so.

 

It is time to stop these games now and to reconcile the Church with her tradition, and that will require a lot more honesty about who the bad guys were, and are, to this day. https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2025/05/26/where-is-pope-francis/?

 

Ascension Fresco, Rome

 

O Lord, ascended into Heaven, have mercy on us