Francis and the
Collapse
of the
Ecumenical Project
A Grim Reflection on the
Legacy of a Steward
Francis will die — although we do not wish his death,
nor the death of any man — but it is … withal, the temporal
end of every man, pontiff, or layman, commoner or king.
Reflecting on this as Francis will soon celebrate his 88th birthday
in December of this year, we are
moved to observe something very simple about his stewardship
over the House that the Lord has entrusted to him.
For 10 years now,
Francis has attempted to “renovate” a House that was not his, but
only placed in his care as a steward. The majestic facades the incense-imbued
silence within dimly lit through the stained-glass light of a late
afternoon, the soaring spires that proclaimed the great Triumph
of the Cross abroad for all to see ... these were not
his to depredate: they belonged to God … and to His simple
servants who raised them to His glory through the coppers they gave
and through the rough, calloused, hands that engraved every niche
in stone by dint of a devotion every bit as indestructible
as the tip of the chisel the stone yielded to.
Some of these Francis
and his bishops simply tore down; others they emptied by “consolidating”
them with other Catholic parishes who were equally bleeding parishioners
and who sold them to Muslims whose adherents grew as exponentially
as ours diminished. Some were sold to Hispanic Evangelical
Protestants, others to developers who gutted them and turned them
into trendy condominiums. And still others are left simply abandoned
and ruined.
This
was part of the “growth” spurred by the innovations of Vatican
II that was supposed to bring the Church into the World but
brought, instead, the World into the Church.
And the faithful fled,
seeing little difference between the two.
Renovation
A far more destructive
“renovation” is much closer to the heart of Francis, however … than
the mere obliteration of what was symbolically holy in the external
presentation of the Church.
And it concerns the
very heart of the Church: its Mass and its Liturgy.
These were the two
greatest impediments to the holy grail of Vatican II:
Ecumenism. And inextricably bound up with them were the
Sacred Deposit of Faith, and Sacred Tradition. They
had been quietly but indelibly preserved in Latin despite nearly
70 years of experimentation in the Vernacular Mass that somehow
had promised, but could not deliver upon, a supposed “organic
evolution” of worship into something ecumenically acceptable
to all men in all religions.
Perhaps the New
Order of the Mass, the “Novus Ordo” constructed almost
exclusively by two men alone: the Freemason Anabile Bugnini
and Bishop Luca Brandolini could still lend itself as the
vehicle to “a universal worship of God” under the auspices
of Ecumenism: each religion to its own god to be worshipped as the
one, true god … within Catholicism itself ! …..
but not in Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, or Hinduism, each of whom keep
their respective gods without conflating them with any
other god, especially the formerly Catholic God. To use
Francis’s dismissive term for Traditional Catholics,“indietrists,”
or backward-ists, are much too caught up in trifles like
logic to enter emotionally into the “spirit” of Ecumenism
where, apparently, the Law of Non-Contradiction is
not admissible …. and contradictory affirmations are compulsory.
In Francis’s
New church, All are Welcome ... Except the Children ...
Without question … and without surprise … the New Order of Mass, the Novus
Ordo Mass of Paul VI has proven itself to be extremely versatile
and spontaneously creative, possessing nothing of that loathsome
“ridigity” so detested by Francis in the “Old Latin Mass.”
We’ve all witnessed
this spontaneity, this tossing off of the shackles of customary
ritual in nearly every Mass; …. so much so, in fact, that we never
quite know what to expect at a Mass the next town over if a Catholic
Church still remains there.
It could be
a “Charismatic Mass” that could compete with, or even surpass
in excess, any uninhibited Protestant Revival Meeting. It could
be a “Healing Mass,” or a “Children’s Mass,” or even a “Liturgical
Dance Mass” (pardon me if I shudder). It may not even be in your
language.
So many
Masses we now have! …. except Latin Masses.
“All are welcome!”
in Francis’s new church; all except Latin rite Catholics
... the unwelcome step-children of Vatican II, the only children
not allowed to “walk in accompaniment”
with Francis & Friends; a “privilege” reserved to “other” “kinds
of” Catholics, non-Catholics, and atheists alike.
Francis's own
rigid insistence on the Novus Ordo Mass to the
exclusion of any Mass preceding Vatican II is, in fact, completely
understandable in light of his determination to fulfill the Ecumenical
pledge of Vatican II: not just the unification of all Christians
in spite of doctrinal, ecclesiological, and confessional differences,
but more ambitiously: the unification of all believers of
all religions and no religion in some chaotic
form of transcendental reality … perceived only by Francis and the
few.
How Ecumenism Collapsed in Upon Itself
This Ecumenical super-reality
is meant to encompass so much, so broadly, and can
only be achieved at so great a logical cost, that the Ecumenical
project itself becomes meaningless. Ecumenism as the endeavor to
bring unity out of divergence has only — and necessarily — resulted
in affirming the religious differences it implicitly denied
— an implicit denial now become explicit under Francis! Under Francis
as the most vigorous prosecutor of Vatican II we find that Ecumenism
merely reiterates and affirms the religious divisions
that it sought, not just to mitigate, but to abolish in the
beginning!
Ecumenism, we find,
has collapsed in upon itself! It has simply ended up restating
the problem … and then declared that the
problem itself was the solution! Everyone, it turns out, ecumenically
— and now “synodally” — goes his own way to God in
precisely the religion into which
he was born! Or, as Francis succinctly stated recently, “All religions
are [equal] paths to [the same] God.”
It is much like claiming
to achieve an ultimate synthesis that reconciles all contradictions,
but, oddly, cannot explain how, and so becomes unintelligible
… and therefore worthless.
All religions, then,
are good and acceptable … except Catholicism. Somehow, by
keeping to the way of its fathers in the Faith from the beginning,
Catholicism alone — among all religions — is in need of “atonement”
before the World: the Church must implore “forgiveness” from
the World; forgiveness for a host of fictional sins from
the “sin against synodality”, and the “sin against creation,” to
the post-Conciliar grievances of being “patriarchal,” “oppressive,”
“unjust to … [insert your resentment here]” and engaged in aggressive
religious and social acculturation … as well as being historically
and intolerably logical and unambiguous.
For Francis to scornfully
dismiss those who are not persuaded that his ecumenical agendum
is the principal reason behind his growing impatience with abolishing
and outlawing the Latin Mass (although he disingenuously — really,
quite dishonestly — states that it is to “preserve unity”
in the Church) is a failure in charity to acknowledge real and
legitimate issues among the faithful concerning the very unity
he pretends to seek … while actively promoting discord within it.
For Francis to claim
that he is trying to preserve unity through this autocratic move
is both shamefully and manifestly untruthful. That the Latin Mass,
together with the irreproachable theology upon which it has been
articulated, has been so thoroughly, so forcefully, repudiated by
Francis is an indication of how desperate a measure he is willing
to resort to in order to implement, or better yet, to force, an
increasingly brittle ecumenical paradigm on clergy and laity alike.
Pieces of that ecumenical puzzle that are not of Bergoglio's making
either will not fit, or refuse to fit, however much force he applies
to them.
A Happy Failure
It will be a happy
failure that Francis could not, for all his intrigue and ill-designs,
bring to an end what faithless princes and kings, heretics and apostates
through 20 centuries had been unable to achieve: the destruction,
and the utter removal from living memory, of the inextinguishable
sanctity of the Latin Mass of all the Ages.
It will be a sad epitaph
for Francis in many ways, and history will not look kindly upon
his persecution of the faithful in the very house given to them
… and entrusted to him for their safekeeping. It is all the more
sad — not that he failed to keep them, or even that
he refused to keep them — but that he sought to drive
them out. Seeking to please men, he drove out the children.
It is a tragedy of
great depth. It is also one that calls for deep, even the most profound
prayer; prayer that must extend to the hand that strikes, as well
as to the stricken.
Listening to Christ,
let us remember not so much what has
been done to us, but rather what remains for us to do. We must pray
for Francis. Christ Himself has commanded it:
“Love your enemies: do good to them that hate you: and
pray for them that persecute and calumniate you: That you
may be the children of your Father who is in heaven.” (St.
Mat. 5.44-45)
