Francis: A model of clarity and consistency (In a bad way)
As his sermon for the Easter Vigil
makes plain, not even the Resurrection of Our Lord from the dead is
capable of unmooring Francis’ thoughts from the temporal concerns of
almighty mankind.
Commenting upon “Mary Magdalene and the other Mary” who went to
Jesus’ tomb only to discover that He is risen, Francis saw fit to rattle
off an all-too-familiar laundry list of social injustices:
“In their faces we can see reflected all
those who, walking the streets of our cities, feel the pain of dire
poverty, the sorrow born of exploitation and human trafficking. We can
also see the faces of those who are greeted with contempt because they
are immigrants, deprived of country, house and family. We see faces
whose eyes bespeak loneliness and abandonment, because their hands are
creased with wrinkles. Their faces mirror the faces of women, mothers,
who weep as they see the lives of their children crushed by massive
corruption that strips them of their rights and shatters their dreams.”
Poverty, exploitation, human trafficking, immigration, loneliness, abandonment, corruption… Nowhere reflected in his sermon was even a modicum of concern for the supernatural ends for which man was created; much less any sense of the true significance of the Lord’s resurrection.
Francis went on to say:
“By daily acts of selfishness that crucify and then bury
people’s hopes. By paralyzing and barren bureaucracies that stand in
the way of change. In their grief, those two women reflect the faces of
all those who, walking the streets of our cities, behold human dignity crucified.” [Emphasis added.]
How very clever; stealing words from the language of our Lord’s
Passion for use as metaphorical expressions that seek to recast the
meaning of Easter into the planks of a political platform; as if the
Sacrifice of Christ is ordered toward nothing more than the elimination
of social inequality.I, for one, find this repulsive.
It sickens me in a way similar to those occasions when Barack Obama would cite Sacred Scripture; striking the image of a man treading on foreign soil, pretending to be a citizen, but only as a means to an end.
That is not to say that Francis is altogether unconcerned with Church related matters.
On the contrary, he is deeply concerned about such things; albeit in the manner of a politician.
And so he took the occasion of the Easter vigil to campaign against the opposition party:
“When the High Priest and the religious
leaders, in collusion with the Romans, believed that they could
calculate everything, that the final word had been spoken and that it
was up to them to apply it, God suddenly breaks in, upsets all the rules
and offers new possibilities.”
Can there be any doubt that Francis was speaking not of the Pharisees
of old, but rather of those in our day who take the Divine Law, the
immutable doctrines of the Faith and the bi-millennial practice of the
Church seriously; i.e., rigid Catholics like us who believe that “the
final word” has indeed been spoken in precisely those matters that the
false “god of surprises” (aka Jorge Bergoglio) seeks to upset in Amoris Laetitia?Truly, with every passing day it seems that the mountain of evidence attesting to the utter lack of Catholic faith in this man somehow manages to grow larger.
As the title to this post suggests, Francis is nothing if not clear and consistent.
Louie Verricchio "Antipope Francis: A Blessing In Disguise?"
