Understand this:

To love the pope is to will him every good and no evil.

This is what it means for a Catholic to love anyone.

We love Pope Francis in this way; we will him every good and no evil.

Do we admire him? Absolutely not! Do we esteem him. No! Is he dear to us? Not in the least.

He is, canonically, our pope — but few of us would predicate of him the two consecutive words historically associated with the Vicar of Jesus Christ on Earth: “Holy Father.” He has consistently demonstrated himself to be neither.

Holiness is not vindictive, arrogant, despotic, and vengeful.

A Father does not abuse his children, favoring some, punishing others, giving shelter to those who please him while leaving those who do not please him out in the cold, generously feeding his favored ones, while starving the ill-favored in the hope that they will soon perish.

Such a man, whatever he may be, is neither holy nor a father in any accepted understanding of either word.

A holy man does not do these things.

A father does not do these things.

Ergo, a “Holy Father” does not do these things.

But Francis does.

Consider his treatment of virtually every Catholic, whether cleric, episcopal, or lay, who adheres to the Traditional Latin Mass that has been loved and practiced for the entire 2000-year history of the Church — until it was brutally quashed by an edict from Francis in his motu proprio “Traditiones Custodes” on 16 July 2021, callously depriving them of their most cherished patrimony as Catholics in continuity with every Catholic for the past … not 20 years, not even 200 years, but 2000 years! … and with the simple stroke of a pen wielded by an authoritarian hand that tolerates no opposition and crushes all dissent.

This is Francis (“the humble”) who famously encourages all others to “walk in spiritual accompaniment”¹ and “to listen to and hear one another” ²  — as long, apparently, as they walk, lockstep, with him and agree with him in all matters spiritual, social, socio-sexual, environmental, economic, and even political.

In living memory no other pope has been so remorselessly, so openly punitive toward those he deems to be impediments to his radically progressive agenda to remake the Church in his own image, an image presciently sculpted in the background by Fazzini in the Modernist Pope Paul VI Audience Hall; an image of things distorted and ultimately hideous.

Cross Francis and your career is over, your position is lost, your vocation itself is in peril and your very livelihood will likely be suspended; you will never be granted an audience with him, no matter how high your ecclesiastical rank (think Cardinal Zen of China whom Francis has refused to see as he pursues his own Ostpolitik with Communist China). Francis is nothing if not vindictive. Were the Vatican a crime syndicate (it is not …. is it?)  Frankie would be a real “Capo” … less any pretensions to refinement.

Consider this: bishops have lost their dioceses. Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas is the most notable to come to mind in America.

Priests by the scores have been “cancelled” (too many to enumerate. See Coalition for Canceled Priests) — they have had their faculties for celebrating the Mass and the Sacraments revoked, and their means for living removed.

One Cardinal and critic of Francis (Raymond Burke) was punished twice: first, by being removed by Francis as Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, the court of final appeal at the Vatican: and then, not satisfied, Francis then went on to take away his living quarters in Rome and still not satisfied, stopped his stipend for living! I did say “Capo,” yes? Un bell'uomo, sì? ³

So, what are we, as Catholics, to make of Francis?

It is a question I struggle with daily. There are, I think two categories that we are contending with in addressing this question. Much like a Venn Diagram ⁴ there are areas where they overlap and become particularly problematic, and I think that this is intentional on the part of Francis as a means of obfuscating issues that would, of themselves, be clearly distinguishable and susceptible to clear interpretation.

I believe that Francis wishes to avoid precision because precision makes no allowance for ambiguity: it redounds to unmistakable clarity which then calls for a necessary resolution. It is particularly within that ill-defined penumbra on the margins of issues where Francis feels that his arguments may at least provisionally survive as minor or temporary premises, at least long enough to carry forth what is essentially an enthymeme or sorites to what he realizes is an an illegitimate conclusion. But it is the conclusion, nevertheless, that he strives for, that he wishes to achieve at any cost. We must understand that it is a matter of arriving at the conclusion that is important to Francis, regardless of the means or the legitimacy of the conclusion. In this sense, his logic, if you will, is not an extension, but merely an expression of his will. Friedrich Nietzsche would understand this at once as an expression of his famous axiom, “der Wille zur Macht,” or the “the Will to Power.”

An Abusive Father

Still, even as an abusive father, we love Francis as we ought.

It is the way Christ commanded us to love others; even, given the present environment in the highest echelons of the Vatican, those who hate us; those who vigorously persecute us; those who very clearly have no good will toward us.

However — because we will him every good and no evil (that is to say, because we love him — and, a fortiori — love Christ all the more) we do not and will not follow so many of Francis’s “moral teachings,” for they do not accord with the Truth, which, for Catholics,  is not simply a  “logically consistent proposition”, but a Person: Jesus Christ and what He Himself taught. ⁵  Most often they touch upon things in which he has no competence and certainly no mandate: economies, politics, nation-state issues, liberal social-sexual and moral issues in which he demonstrates very clear partisan preferences, environmentalism, the evils of select economic systems, an overweening affection for “mother earth” and indigenous things, a soto-voce reproach of an unstated evil implicit in western culture in particular and civilization in general, especially vis-à-vis the motherly humus of the Amazonian model nurtured by Pachamama in Brazil.

His “spiritual” teachings are less clear. They are not always consistent with the authentic and historical teachings of the Church that we find in the Sacred Deposit of Faith and the Magisterium of the Church. Nor are they (meager as they are in comparison with his “moral teachings”) always consistent with Sacred Scripture, and this is particularly troubling.

His “moral teachings,” however, especially as they come to us through his simpering alter ego “Tucho” Fernandez are particularly pernicious inasmuch as they are intentionally invested with the authority of the office of the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith which, up to eight months ago, was an office of serious matters headed by individuals with serious intellects and profound theological credentials. That this is no longer so, is abundantly clear.

The DDF appears to have become merely another facet of Francis’s ego writ large. This is quite an accomplishment for a (proudly) humble man. But a humble man becomes a dangerous man when the currency of his humility is found to be counterfeit. When it is revealed that the carefully curated “persona” and the “real” person of whom it is a publicized fiction are no longer negotiable, predictable alliances can result.  This is where “Tucho” comes in. He is as famously bright as Francis is famously humble and this is a useful collaboration where there are things to be done in the dark, things that would redound both to the rehabilitation of Francis’s image that has become tarnished of late, and to the progression of his agenda that appears to have become stymied. Tucho, ever eager to comply, is the man for the job; a noted “creative” writer of fiction-of-sorts, especially of the type that would now avoid scrutiny and publicity in polite company, what better choice for becoming Francis’s alter-persona?

Francis will find impenetrable shadows in that man, both moral and intellectual; shadows that will play with light … while eluding it; never permitting too bright a light to penetrate a lurking darkness where evil things come to light.     
 

Making Our Choice

If we must choose between what the Church and Sacred Scripture has taught for 2000 years — and what Francis teaches, our choice as Catholics is determined right out of the gate: Scripture and two unbroken millennia of Church teaching prior to Francis and Vatican II.

Yes, both.

Why both? Because Francis declared that he himself is the only pontiff bold enough to fulfill what had been proposed by that most unfortunate Council known as Vatican II, and up to his own pontificate never fully enacted. It can broadly be summed up in one (rather long) word: Ecumenism — understood as “religion-in-general-and-no-religion-in-particular-especially-not-Catholicism-and-perhaps-no-religion-at-all. Ecumenism is generally understood as the endeavor to restore a recalcitrant “Christian unity” between the Catholic Church and nominally Christian communities that had separated themselves from the Catholic Church subsequent to disputes concerning doctrine or dogma. Most often it was both which, for various reasons, they had found unacceptable, inconvenient, or impractical to purposes at hand, resulting in virtually hundreds, if not thousands, of ecclesial bodies with contradictory, conflicting, and theologically irreconcilable beliefs, not only with the Catholic Church but between the mutually opposing denominations themselves.

The Second Vatican Council, having failed to achieve this ecumenical unity (Protestants did not return to the Catholic Church, so the Catholic Church gradually Protestantized itself to minimize the conflict in doctrine, dogma, liturgy, and worship, effectively achieving a kind of unilateral ecumenism through adopting Protestantism for all practical purposes. The next logical step in this radical “progressive” impetus was, of course, native Interreligious/Interfaith Dialogue. Following this, in a still more natural progression, is Indifferentism: all religions — however incompatible, and despite being logically and theologically contradictory and inconsistent, are nevertheless equally true ... even if the realization of several, or one, is achieved through abolishing all the others.  That this is, in the minds of rational men,  illogical, impossible, and therefore madness, is quite beside the point: it simply pleases us to maintain that this is so. We saw this repeatedly in Assisi under three pontiffs: John Paul II (twice), Benedict XVI, and, of course, Francis (twice). Not to be outdone, Francis brought Indifferentism (and blasphemy), into Vatican Gardens themselves with Pachamama.

One day, perhaps not far off, Vatican II will be remembered and understood for what it was and is: a scourge on the Church and — as every great heresy has ever been from Gnosticism to Protestantism — the calamitous defection from what is good and holy to what is ultimately banal and absurd.