What does this say of God?  What does it say of the last 265 popes who preceded Francis? That they have all been obstinate and each of them idolaters? From what he says, Francis alone is the one, true, enlightened pope to whom God, after 2000 years, finally deigned to reveal what he himself describes as “the fullness of truth” about matters pastoral, theological, and doctrinal — which had either eluded all his predecessors, or from whom God chose to conceal the real truth until the inauguration of Francis as the penultimate culmination of the papacy.

It is much like the arguments that Catholics have ever brought against Protestants since Martin Luther: would a supremely good and loving God conceal the “real” truth about authentic Christian doctrine and revelation (and all that is essential to salvation) for 1400 years until the arrival of Luther? For 1400 years the Christian world, then, had lived in ignorance, darkness, and idolatry. Is that our conception of a supremely good and loving God — that He deceived all those prior to Luther — and more to the present point, prior to Francis? These two (in many ways reciprocal personalities) consider themselves God’s unique emissaries to whom, for the first time since Saint Peter, God has finally revealed the real truth.

It is a variation of another contemporary and chilling mantra: “There is only one God, and Francis (after Luther) is His prophet.” All before him were either deceived by God, or are liars and idolaters. Given this apparently monumental ego we are forced to ask, who is the real “idol” and who the “idolater”? The answer to each appears to be the same: Francis. Francis as the idol, and Francis as the idolater adulating himself as God’s chosen revealer of the truth — which had been withheld from all saints and sinners ... until Francis came to Rome. His widely lauded (and widely publicized) “humility” appears to only be exceeded by his own grandiose self-assessment as the intrepid articulator of the new “more compassionate”, “less judgmental”, “all-inclusive” Church — in which the only sin is the “obstinate” adherence to what the Church has taught as indefeasibly true for 2000 years. After all, where there is no judgment there is no sin — which is to say, if nothing is evil, everything is good; if every “life-style” is understood as “contributing its own unique value” (however abhorrent) to the Church, then the “Church” becomes tautologous with the “World” and effectively indistinguishable from it. The Corpus Christi becomes the Corpus Mundi (the Body of Christ becomes the Body of the World").

It turns out that “old wineskin” — for 200 years understood to be Judaism — is the historic Catholic Church. (I deliberately refrain from calling it “traditional”,  a concept which has been defamed and relegated to a nonsensical connotation of “old” and “outdated” in liberal circles both within the Church and outside of Her) That is to say, for Francis it is the Church itself prior to Francis that is the old wineskin. The old wineskin, the “old” Church, preceded him. The “new” is in the making of Francis’s image: the “being-surprised-by-God-Church”.

Should we have to resort to “discerning the will of God” in situations where His express will is already known as it is revealed in the four Gospels and the Epistles? Do we really have to “discern” the will of God concerning adultery, homosexuality, the worthy reception of the Holy Eucharist — all of them presently issues only because Francis had made them so by his deliberate ambiguity where there is nothing ambiguous about them in Scripture or Church teaching?
 

Are you prepared to be “Surprised” by God”?

Or should we more realistically say, “Surprised by Francis”? He has a very clear, progressive, and repressive liberal agenda that is at odds with millennia of Church teaching which he attempts to make irrelevant, outdated, and out-of-touch, to feed an apparently narcissistic hunger for adulation from men by attempting to accommodate Church teaching to the corrupt and scandalous demands of the world. Will he go so far as to abrogate some of it, perhaps even much of it (although, canonically, he cannot) in his effort to establish a détente with the world and other religions? We do not know, but the indicators are ominous for the Church as She has stood for 2000 years.