Recent weeks have seen a spike in cases of FDS, or Francis derangement syndrome. For those who are new here, that’s an affliction similar to the hysteria that still drives spiteful Leftoids to believe the worst spook stories about Trump.
The same sort of mania that has millions of Dems convinced that Trump peed on Obama’s bed, conspired with Russia on Facebook to rob Hillary of the White House, and instigated a bloody insurrection has a much smaller but less excusable group shrieking that Pope Francis is the antichrist.
Granted, he’s pastorally inconsistent, theologically sloppy, and legislatively vague. And yes, he’s made fallible statements that are in tension – sometimes seriously so – with weightier magisterial teaching. So did his sainted predecessor John Paul the Great.
The curious thing about FDS sufferers is that, since most of them hail from Conservative circles, they should know what the mainstream media’s role is. In case you’re a just-arrived space alien, that role is to spout a constant stream of lies in service to the ruling Death Cult.
In fact, what passes as our press lies so much, the default assumption should be that anything they say is 180 degrees from the truth. If three years of successive, discredited Current Things hasn’t shown that, nothing will.
But in a strange twist of confirmation bias, FDS victims who know to apply the above standard to reporting on experimental medical treatments and land wars in Asia swallow all the muck the MSM rakes about Francis uncritically.
Case in point: an extremely online Orthobro, or Orthobro-adjacent Twitter account, just dredged up this anti-Francis hit piece from two years ago.
For those who don’t remember, which will be most of you, the hatchet job in question revolved around a bombastic documentary that was alleged to show the Pope’s support for sodomite civil unions. I remember because I wrote about it at the time, revealing that not only was the story a nothingburger, it was a shady piece of deliberate agitprop.
Which the NBC piece that Captain FDS cited admitted.
The guidance issued by the secretariat of state doesn’t address the issue of the cut quote or that it came from the Televisa interview. It says only that it was from a 2019 interview and that the comments used in the documentary spliced together parts of two different responses in a way that removed crucial context.
“More than a year ago, during an interview, Pope Francis answered two different questions at two different times that, in the aforementioned documentary, were edited and published as a single answer without proper contextualization, which has led to confusion,” said the guidance posted by Coppola.
There is a simple, precise, technical term for that kind of behavior on the film maker’s part …
Lying
In the Televisa interview, Francis made clear he was explaining his position about the unique case in Buenos Aires 10 years ago, as opposed to Rubera’s situation or gay marriage as a whole.
In the Televisa interview, Francis also insisted that he always maintained Catholic doctrine and said there was an “incongruity” for the Catholic Church as far as “homosexual marriage” is concerned.
The documentary eliminated that context.
But at leas the documentary director had some skill. Starting two consecutive paragraphs with the exact same prepositional phrase is just poor writing.
The Televisa footage is available online, and includes an awkward cut right after Francis spoke about the “incongruity” of homosexual marriage. Presumably, that is where he segued into his position as archbishop in favoring extending legal protections to gay couples.
Note how the text of the article gives context that walks back its own subtitle: The Vatican said Pope Francis’ remarks were taken out of context but still confirmed the pontiff’s belief that gay couples should enjoy legal protections.
Francis’ decade-old compromise concerned his role as Archbishop of Buenos Aires amid the state’s push to legalize butt marriage. His “belief that gay couples should enjoy legal protections” does not extend to recognizing same-sex marriages or state-sanctioned child grooming.
Francis’ comments about gays having the right to be in a family referred to parents with gay children, and the need for them to not kick their children out or discriminate against them, the Vatican guidance said.
Nor have his teachings as Pope endorsed civil unions for gay couples.
Yet the media cultists just couldn’t keep themselves from making this catty parting shot:
The Vatican guidance insists that Francis wasn’t contradicting church doctrine. But it doesn’t explain how his support for extending Argentine legal protections to gay couples in 2010 could be squared with the 2003 document from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which says “the principles of respect and non-discrimination cannot be invoked to support legal recognition of homosexual unions.”
I happen to know how Francis’ position from 2010 squares with the 2003 CDF document, because I read the document and reported on it two years ago.
If it is not possible to repeal such a law completely, the Catholic politician, recalling the indications contained in the Encyclical Letter Evangelium vitae, “could licitly support proposals aimed at limiting the harm done by such a law and at lessening its negative consequences at the level of general opinion and public morality”, on condition that his “absolute personal opposition” to such laws was clear and well known and that the danger of scandal was avoided.
Personal opposition doesn’t get much more absolute than …
The family is threatened by growing efforts on the part of some to redefine the very institution of marriage. These realities are increasingly under attack from powerful forces which threaten to disfigure God’s plan for creation.
Bonus: The director whose smear piece is being cited by online Russian Orthodox accounts also made this 2015 film lionizing the US-backed color revolution that installed the current government of the Ukraine.
Strange bedfellows: what FDS and Monkeypox have in common.
Don’t trust film makers and reporters that hate you.
