Christopher A. Ferrara
(Translated by C. Flemming)
Este artículo es mi visión sobre el impacto que ha tenido el escándalo causado por la reciente conferencia de prensa en el avión que transportaba a Francisco de Manila a Roma. El titular, absolutamente predecible, rezaba: "El Papa Francisco: los Católicos No Tienen que Criar como Conejos." Que se abstengan los objetores de molestarme a mí o a este periódico, hablando de una "mala traducción" o de "todo el contexto" de las palabras del Papa, o con minucias como que "el Papa no dijo criar cono conejos, sino ser como conejos". He visto la entrevista entera en italiano, la he comparado con la transcripción proporcionada por la revista America, y puedo confirmar que el Papa dijo lo que dijo, y que su "contexto" no sólo no disminuye, sino que empeora el escándalo que ha causado, una vez más por hablar de manera improvisada.
This article is my take on the impact of the latest scandal caused by the latest papal press conference at the back of an airplane: the one during the flight from Manila to Rome, reported around the world under the eminently predictable headline: “Pope Francis: Catholics Don’t Have to Breed Like Rabbits.” Objectors need not pester me or this newspaper with complaints about “bad translation” or the “whole context” of the Pope’s remarks, nor with such quibbles as “the Pope said be like rabbits, not breed like rabbits.” I have watched the entire interview in Italian and compared it with the transcript provided by America magazine and can confirm that the Pope said what he is reported to have said and that its “context” does not diminish but rather only exacerbates the scandal he has caused—yet again—by speaking off-the-cuff.
That is, the scandal caused by Francis telling us what he really thinks, which is supposed to be the great benefit of his insistence on “speaking from the heart” rather than relying on prepared texts like his overly inhibited predecessor.
Bergoglianism now veers into madness. The same Pope who saw fit to use a press conference to condemn as a reckless tempter of God a Catholic mother of eight has just received in a private audience at his residence a woman attempting to become a man through a sex-change operation and her purported “fiancée.” (One account refers to a “wife,” but the “marriage” apparently is awaiting completion of “Diego’s” “gender-reassignment” procedures.)
The Rise of Know-Nothing “Catholic” Journalism
As events make clearer by the day, Pope Francis is attempting to do at the level of the universal Church what he did as rector of the Jesuits in Argentina: impose his idiosyncratic Latin American vision of the Faith, combining dogma-free popular piety with radical progressivism—the latter undermining the former as we see with the mass defections from the Church in Argentina and throughout Latin America.
Only this explains a Pope who tells the common people to be on guard against the deceptions of the Devil at the same time he affirms atheists, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, divorced and “remarried” Catholics and even hypothetical “gay persons” who “seek God” in their respective spiritual conditions as if there were neither a Devil to deceive them nor a Hell to punish sin. Only this explains how one and the same Pope can declare in a homily that “every Christian is called in every circumstance to live a life that is coherent with the faith he or she professes” while arguing that public adulterers should be allowed to be godparents and that their admission to Holy Communion, without renouncing their adulterous relations, is a subject worthy of serious discussion in the Church—exactly contrary to the explicit teaching of John Paul II in a landmark encyclical on marriage and family only 33 years ago.
The title Man of the Year, bestowed by the mass media on a gender-neutral “Person of the Year,” reflects the impact a public figure has had on world events during the year preceding. Thus it was quite understandable, even predictable, that Time, the world’s leading news magazine, and The Advocate, the world’s most prominent homosexualist publication, would both name Pope Francis “Person of the Year” for 2013.
Back in November, Pope Francis issued an Apostolic Letter concerning the Year of Consecrated Life he had called for, which began on November 30. At this point in the Bergoglian pontificate it should come as no surprise that this Apostolic Letter on consecrated life says nothing of any substance about consecrated life, but that it does advance the ideology of Bergoglianism, whose essence, as set forth in Evangelii Gaudium, is derogation of “structures which give us a false sense of security… rules which make us harsh judges… habits which make us feel safe” in favor of “the promptings of the Holy Spirit who helps us together to read the signs of the times…” (Evangelii Gaudium, nn. 14, 49). In other words, a form of illuminism quite alien to the Catholic notion of ecclesiastical tradition as the incommutable, organically developed and handed-down embodiment of apostolic tradition—in fact, the real result of the “promptings of the Holy Spirit” throughout the history of the Church.
The same interview was also posted on the Vatican website as one of the Pope’s speeches, removed from the site, posted again in multiple language versions and then removed again. Defying all efforts by neo-Catholic apologists to explain away the many appalling statements Scalfari attributed to Francis, the Pope has had the interview republished definitively in book form by the Vatican publishing house, along with other interviews and conversations with journalists, Scalfari included.
For the sake of maintaining the neo-Catholic position in defense of the ever-expanding post-conciliar regime of novelty, John Paul must decrease so that Francis may increase.
In The Great Façade (2002)—soon to be republished in a second edition with new chapters covering the past twelve years of the “regime of novelty”—I refuted the accusation of neo-Catholic polemicists that traditionalists are improperly “pitting one Pope against another” when they note the obvious: that the Popes since Vatican II have been saying and doing things every one of their predecessors, including even John XXIII, would have considered unthinkable.
In the neo-Catholic view of our situation this plain fact is inadmissible, for whatever the Pope or his delegates in the Holy See pronounce or approve is, for them, ispso facto consistent with both apostolic and ecclesiastical tradition.
Here is what’s in store for the “conservative Novus Ordo” parish in the midst of what the media are now hailing as “the Francis Revolution.” It is a sermon by Father Jay Scott Newman, pastor of Saint Mary’s Church in Greenville, SC, considered among the most conservative Novus Ordo parishes in the South. (See October 12, 2014 sermon)
Father Newman (beginning at 12:00) declares that “the same-sex couple, in asking for marriage from our courts, are seeking to make the gift of self to another, a gift that gives meaning to our lives” and that they are “climbing the ladder of love” because they are making a “gift of self, however imperfectly.” He recommends that as “missionaries” we ask same-sex couples “to climb higher” on this “ladder of love.” To which rung, exactly?