Tornado Alley (PROG)

[StephanieVanbryce]

Your Occasional Pope

By Charles P. Pierce on Friday

Oh, my goodness, some loose talk from the current occupant of the Chair Of Peter, and our embattled Sedevacantists on this side of the pond have their celices in a twist. [ http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2013/11/10/conservative-catholics-feel-left-out-the-pope-embrace/Asm8fVyQROPv2fTcIQ6iYP/story.html ]

But Ms. Kurt recently took the Pope Francis prayer card down and threw it away. "It seems he's focusing on bringing back the left that's fallen away, but what about the conservatives?" said Ms. Kurt, a hospice community educator. "Even when it was discouraging working in pro-life, you always felt like Mother Teresa was on your side and the popes were encouraging you. Now I feel kind of thrown under the bus."

And how, exactly, has the Vicar Of Christ tossed Ms. Kurt beneath the wheels? He has changed not jot nor tittle of church policies. All he has done, besides get a decent deal on a good used car, is say some things that can be reasonably be described as Not Being A Holy Dick regarding atheists and gay people, and about how leaving the youth jobless and the elderly to starve might not have been what the Gospels had in mind. And that's it. That's all of it. But the wrong people are applauding, and that means that the holy cards go into the shredder.

Steve Skojec, the vice president of a real estate firm in Virginia and a blogger who has written for several conservative Catholic websites, wrote of Francis' statements: "Are they explicitly heretical? No. Are they dangerously close? Absolutely. What kind of a Christian tells an atheist he has no intention to convert him? That alone should disturb Catholics everywhere." In an interview on Friday, Mr. Skojec said he was overwhelmed by the positive response to his blog from people who said they were thinking the same things but had not wanted to say them in public. He said he had come to suspect that Francis is a "self-styled revolutionary" who wants to change the church fundamentally. "There have been bad popes in the history of the church," Mr. Skojec said. "Popes that murdered, popes that had mistresses. I'm not saying Pope Francis is terrible, but there's no divine protection that keeps him from being the type of guy who with subtlety undermines the teachings of the church to bring about a different vision."

Can I just say that, all throughout my spiritual life, when I have sought insight into to workings of the soul, and when I have sought to plumb the mind of The Ineffable, the first place I always go is to websites run by real-estate dudes from Virginia? My Father's House has many mansions, and I can get you a deal on one with some lovely swampland in the Tidewater.

Some conservative Catholics are sharing prophecies online that foretell of tribulations for the church. In one, an Irish woman predicted that Benedict would be held hostage. Others cite the German mystic Anne Catherine Emmerich, who wrote of a "relationship between two popes," one who "lives in a palace other than before," which some now see as a reference to Benedict, who resigned as pope early this year but still lives in Vatican City. During this time there arises a "false church of darkness."

Oh, holy mother of god, not this crazy beeyotch again. Emmerich was a complete loon, and a raving anti-Semite [ http://www.adl.org/press-center/press-releases/interfaith/adl-concerned-about-vaticans-plans-to-beatify-19th-century-nun.html ] as well. (Mel Gibson used some of this nutball's "visions" to fill out the Gospel narratives when he made his little Jesus snuff film a few years back. It was the suspension vehicle in which the anti-Jewish stuff got injected into the screenplay.) I have a feeling that this is going to be a tough papacy for those people whose primary attraction to Catholicism is the authoritarian remnants of the medieval court that the Vatican once was. But, as I say always, we must remind ourselves what St. James said about faith without works, so if you're looking for where the real action might be, you might look to the fact that the pope has called for a synod on "the family" [ http://www.news.va/en/news/preparing-for-the-synod ] for next October in Rome. If Francis really is proposing a kind of new realism concerning the various ways families are constituted these days, and if he's really going to try and finesse this new realism past the bishops without obviously changing the substance of church doctrine -- which is pretty much what thousands of American priests de facto did in the confessional concerning birth control in the immediate aftermath of Paul VI's ghastly Humanae Vitae -- then this is where most of that work will get done. And if that makes him all the right enemies over here, that's just a bonus.

Print edition
[ http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/conservative-catholics-and-the-pope-111113 ]