Just as it is incumbent upon every son to defend his mother and father from spurious insults, it is every Catholic’s duty to defend Holy Mother Church and her visible head on Earth, the Holy Father.
In that regard, an ongoing project of this blog has been refuting the steady stream of calumnies against Pope Francis.
Because people who should know better – i.e., those who rightly call “Fake news!” on hit pieces aimed at Donald Trump – keep suffering bouts of Gell-Mann Amnesia, a comprehensive approach was needed.
Enter YouTuber Frank Aurelio and theology student extraordinaire Pinesap. This past Friday, they streamed a robust point-by-point refutation of every anti-Francis zombie meme.
If you still think the Holy Father is a heretic, illegitimate, or “Teh worse Pope evar!!!1!!” or if you want silver bullet arguments to refute such slander, watch this:
Tl; dw: Every single one of the supposedly disqualifying quotes or actions allegedly made by Pope Francis was taken out of context, based on a mistranslation, or based on conflating “heresy” with “comments that disagree with my personal political takes.”
What everyone needs to realize is that religion is not politics, and imposing the American “Red Team vs Blue Team” frame on the Church is a category error. It will not help anyone understand anything.
Look, I get it. The Death Cult’s narrative is so all-encompassing, it’s easy to get sucked into the 24-hour news cycle.
But you can break free. And have fun while you’re at it.
Let my #1 best seller show you how:
My problem with Francis isn’t that he says things that get taken out of context; the problem is that he and the Vatican do absolutely nothing to clarify the context or correct the misstatements made by the media. Instead, they leave it to bloggers and YouTubers to do it for them. Why is that?
As for Pachamama, the Pope allowed a pagan ceremony in the Vatican Gardens where people were actively and openly worshiping the statue. I’m sorry, but there is no defense for that, and no amount of spin will change that. The Catholic Church does not do ecumenism to the point of allowing idol worship at the Vatican. Or rather, the Catholic Church should not be doing that. And yet, here we are.
I am not one of those who says Francis isn’t the Pope. I will, however, put him in a category with Leo X as competing for the title of ‘Most Incompetent Pope’. Leo X presided over the Protestant Deformation and the splintering of the Church in Germany; history is repeating itself. Why hasn’t he started excommunicating and defrocking the German bishops and cardinals who are openly stating that Church teaching is wrong?
My brother in Christ, your comment may be overlooking another tenet of Catholic theology, which is to conduct disputations according to reason and charity.
Your comment opens by lamenting our Holy Father’s lack of clarity, which is a fair criticism.
But then it proceeds to accuse him of formal cooperation with idolatry. Not only that, you indicate that this accusation does not admit of contrary evidence. Both constitute serious lapses in charity, to the possible extent of rash judgment, detraction, or even calumny. So for the sake of your soul, please be mindful of these demons lurking at the door.
Of these, the accusation of complicity in idolatry is the most serious. Because it makes the accuser vulnerable to temptations of apostasy.
So with the grave stakes established, I hope you will open your heart and mind to the possibility of fraternal correction on that count.
Because in point of fact, no idolatry overseen by our Holy Father took place at the Vatican Gardens that day.
The statue was not an image of the false Incan goddess Pachamama. It was an icon of the Virgin Mary, Our Lady of the Amazon to be specific.
We know because we have the icon’s presentation to the Holy Father on video. The presenter makes the sign of the Cross and calls the icon “Our Lady of the Amazon” in Spanish.
Watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yT2i-Vkerms&t=230s
Was the statue in questionable taste? Yes. Did the Vatican fail in regard to clarity as you correctly noted above? Yes. Did idol worship take place at the Vatican? No. The video record proves it was the veneration of an icon – if an unflattering one.
Brian,
Thanks. I’ve listened to his a few of Spanish interviews and yes he has that folksy style that riles the more intellectually oriented faithful. But listening to him I haven’t eard anything objectionable. My only complaint is he can be unclear or open the laity to confusion with that folksy style.
He’s not my favourite pope and tune out the egregious criticism.
xavier
That’s my take on the Holy Father, too. As one of those ‘intellectually oriented’ people, I’d be lying if I said that he hadn’t annoyed me at times (though the fault is with me for being annoyed in the first place).
I think his ‘folksy’ style definitely appealed to those who were not ‘in the know’. I can tell because my protestant parents really liked him. My mom especially, who was not happy when my brother and I converted to Catholicism. Thankfully, she had mellowed since and I think Pope Francis really played a part in that, strangely enough.
That’s the side of the story that you won’t hear very often when you’re in the “trad world”.
While I agree that the pope is not a formal heretic, I do think it is a massive problem that it is left up to bloggers putting together hours long youtuber video combing through all available context to confirm that he’s not a formal heretic.
In any case, I suppose one could debate if he is actually the worst pope ever, and considering Benedict IX exists, probably not. I think he’s probably bottom twenty and a disaster for the Church. On this opinion, I merely hold with Dr. Feser and Cardinal Pell.
With that said, may I charitably suggest that expecting those suffering from FDS to watch a two hour rebuttal and calling it a “cure” is about as reasonable as expecting TDS sufferers to watch a two hour video put out by Scott Adams or Matt Walsh to “cure” their TDS? In other words, I don’t think this is going to function as a cure in any reasonable way.
Charity is me giving Francis’ detractors the benefit of the doubt that they’re not too rash to perform their due diligence.
Heresy is a serious charge requiring lengthy canonical and theological processes to prove. Canon law also binds faithful Catholics to show our hierarchs due reverence, even when offering filial correction.
Absolving oneself of that obligation unilaterally – even if, let’s say, a Pope was in error – and publicly declaring him a heretic, would risk the mortal sin of detraction and at least material heresy.
The video’s length might be a mitigating factor if many of the same folks who shared similar-length Trump defenses weren’t overrepresented in its target audience.
Absolving oneself of that obligation unilaterally – even if, let’s say, a Pope was in error – and publicly declaring him a heretic, would risk the mortal sin of detraction and at least material heresy.
Indeed and I agree. People will tie themselves into knots to call the Pope a heretic. One person I had a conversation with accused him of being guilty of just about every heresy possible ending in “ism”, then said that he wasn’t calling the pope a heretic because…well he avoided using the actual word heretic I suppose.
When I called him out on it the response was “Relax I thought you didn’t like Francis either”. Well, no, I don’t think he’s a good pope, but there’s a world of difference between “not a good pope” and “heretic I have the authority to publicly accuse of heresy.”
Having referenced things such as the above in this space before, I’m willing to give it a go.
God asks only fidelity, not necessarily success.
No, Pope Francis is not perfect (alas). But it’s really strange to see people who call themselves “traditional Catholics” tripping over themselves to criticize him.
The common error that keeps coming up with those types is they conflate politics and religion. Or they treat politics as a religion.
One of the strangest things I’ve seen in this regard is witnessing traditional Catholics lament about how those who believe the teachings of the Church will suffer when Francis and his successors will surely change Church dogma. My thought was “what happened to the teaching of Papal Infallibility?”
Now Papal Infallibility of course does not mean that the pope is perfect or even close to it; a pope can literally endorse heresy and not violate Papal Infallibility if this is not done as an official act of teaching. But a pope CANNOT change the dogma of the Church; if a bad pope tried to do so he would literally be stopped by the Holy Spirit.
So speculating about the Pope changing dogma is a bit like speculating about the Eucharist not being the Body and Blood of Christ or priests not being able to pardon sins. Certainly such things are possible in the sense that they aren’t inherently logically contradictory, but for them to be true Catholicism must be false. So it’s bizarre to see traditional Catholics engaging in such speculation.
For a while now I’ve been encouraging Catholics to prepare themselves spiritually for an apparent ex-cathedra statement that seems to contradict a former solemn teaching. Heavy emphasis on “apparent” and “seems to.”
Because we know for a moral certainty founded on the promises of Jesus Christ that His Church will never bind all the faithful to grave error on a matter of faith and morals.
On this count, as well as accusing the Pope of idolatry, Michael Lofton is correct that Francis’ most extreme detractors are dipping their toes in apostasy already.
I felt a precursor of that with the death penalty revision in the Catechism in 2018. Once I had a chance to see what it actually said, I felt much better.
Excellent example. Flagging Francis’ death penalty statement as an ex cathedra contradiction is a popular meme with the extremely online crowd. But under due scrutiny, it’s clear the Holy Father was addressing a matter of prudential judgment, not de fide doctrine.
That said, it does suggest a possible pattern for a more serious apparent contradiction in years to come. What you could have is a future Pope condemning the death penalty, or approving women’s ordination, or blessing gay unions, etc., under false color of a solemn doctrinal definition.
But that Pope’s statement will be lacking a clear invocation of Peter’s teaching authority or omit the intention to bind all of the faithful. Or it will turn out – perhaps decades later – that the definition was forged or coerced.
Because in the end, truth cannot contradict Truth.
The worst criticism I can levy against His Holiness is that he is responsible for promoting both Cupich and McElroy (who was only a bishop for 7 years) to cardinal. While it may be the case that Francis is orthodox, I cannot extend that same level of charity to either Cupich or McElroy. It’s gotten to the point where Bishop Paprocki ostensibly labeled McElroy a heretic based on his position on reception of the Eucharist.
The fact is that the majority of the traditionalist bishops and cardinals were appointed by either JP2 or BXVI.
That is a fair, well-researched, and charitable criticism. And happily, canon law not only allows the laity to make our concerns known to the hierarchy, it provides guidelines for doing so.
In that spirit, I would advise the faithful in Cupich’s and McElroy’s dioceses to write them, respectfully voicing filial corrections.
I suspect that part of the issue is being the first Pope to rule in the Social Media Age (early Twitter overlapped with the tail end of Benedict XVI’s Papacy, but Social Media was smaller back then and the various controversies levelled at him have been thoroughly forgotten by now). But now, nearly everything the Pope says or does is available for all the world to see. The sad part is that we often only pay attention when something “controversial” comes up. How many people actually pay attention to Pope Francis’ views as a whole, rather than lasering in on specific details? I certainly can’t claim to do so. Maybe we’d all be a bit less on edge if we did. ScrupAnon advises people with scrupulosity to avoid social media as a matter of course, because the theological wars that rage there and the constant feed of provocative stories practically guarantee increased anxiety and stress. It occurs to me that perhaps that advice could benefit us all, not just the over-scrupulous.
For the first 1900 years of Christianity, 99.99% of Christians had no idea what the Holy Father was up to, and they were better off for it.