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 Francis 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 pope Francis.

It is very 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, twin personalities, consider themselves God’s unique emissaries to whom, for the first time since Saint Peter … Christ 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.

Let us be very clear about this: 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 objectively abhorrent) to the Church, …. then the “Church” becomes simply another noun, another word, for the “World” …. and effectively indistinguishable from it. The Corpus Christi becomes the Corpus Mundi  that is, the Church long understood as the Body of Christ effectively becomes the body of the World, just another iteration of it, a duplicate for which we have no need … in which she has no purpose apart from it.

How, we ask, are we to reconcile this nouveau and all-inclusive Church envisioned by Francis …. and which dangerously accords with the world — with what Christ tells us concerning our relationship to the world: and I quote:

“If you had been of the world, the world would love its own: but because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.” (St. John 15.19) 

How are we to understand this all-inclusiveness which is the charter of the contemporary world — with a very clear admonishment to the contrary:

"Love not the world, nor the things which are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” (1 Saint John 2.15). 

Despite Francis’s effort to reconcile the two, they are ontologically distinct and diametrically opposed. The proof? Christ on the Cross.

What are we, then, to say of the “Old Wine Skin” and the “New” Church? …. that is to say, of the Church before the devastation of Vatican II and what John Paul II called the “Church of the New Advent” in his 1972 Encyclical Redemptor Hominis, subsequent to it?

It turns out that the “old wineskin” — which for 200 years had been understood to be Judaism — is now the historic Catholic Church!

I deliberately refrain from calling it “traditional;” a concept which has long 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.”

It is a Church in which faithfulness to the teachings of Christ, Sacred Scripture, and the 2000-year old Church is now understood as … “obstinacy!” What is more, it is “idolatry” according to Francis’s homily on January 18, 2016 at the Casa Santa Marta:

“Christians who obstinately maintain ‘it’s always been done this way,’ this is the path, this is the street—they sin: the sin of divination. It’s as if they went about by guessing: ‘What has been said and what doesn’t change is what’s important; what I hear—from myself and my closed heart — more than the Word of the Lord.’ Obstinacy is also the sin of idolatry: the Christian who is obstinate sins! The sin of idolatry. ‘And what is the way, Father?’ “Open the heart to the Holy Spirit, discern what is the will of God.”

Are we, then, I ask …. clueless, and have we been so … for two millennia? Do we not know the will of God already? Did not Christ Himself reveal it to us? Was this not the purpose of His Incarnation, together with His salvific suffering and death on the Cross?

If He did not reveal to us His will, which is one with the will of the Father, then Holy Scripture is fraudulent.   Do we not know the Commandments? The Sermon on the Mount? The New Testament?  Even the Old?

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 in 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 really prepared to be “Surprised by God,” as Francis implies?

Or should we more realistically say …. and with ample precedent … “surprised by Francis?” He has a very clear, progressive, and if we are honest, a repressive liberal agenda that is at odds with millennia of Church teaching which he attempts to make irrelevant, outdated, and out-of-touch, in an effort to feed an apparently narcissistic hunger for adulation from a pontiff and cardinals — by attempting to accommodate Church teaching to the corrupt and scandalous demands of the world?

Will they go so far as to enervate … to efface and blot out these sacred things in an 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.

That Francis has so much as entertained and even encouraged discussion about long-settled issues concerning homosexuality, adultery, divorce, and the Eucharist as the signal bond of unity in the Church, is a scandal of epic proportions to the faithful and is cause of incalculable confusion in the Church.