Pope Francis, Wayward Shepherd, by Daniel J. Mahoney

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February 7, 2020
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https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/02/24/pope-francis-wayward-shepherd/#slide-5

By Daniel J. Mahoney, National Review, February 6, 2020

DANIEL J. MAHONEY — Mr. Mahoney holds the Augustine Chair in Distinguished Scholarship at Assumption College in Worcester, Mass. He is the author, most recently, of The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity.

 

The pontiff’s erroneous path

Ithe first year or two of Pope Francis’s pontificate, conservative-minded Catholics made heroic efforts to place the perplexing ways of the new pope in continuity with the thought and deeds of his immediate predecessors. It was said that he had been a forceful critic of liberation theology, at least in its Marxist expressions, that he was a man of traditional piety, that he spoke about the machinations of the Evil One with surprising regularity, and that his style — brash, critical of established ways, anxious for dialogue with the modern world — was a refreshing way of bringing Christian orthodoxy to bear on the modern world. But there were early signs that challenged this reassuring consensus. Francis seemed suspicious of the most faithful Catholics — they were, in his estimation, rigid, obsessed with the evils of abortion and sexual sins, closed to the need for a Church open to humanitarian activism and a de-emphasis on dogma and even truth.

If Pope John Paul II stood up to Communist savagery and mendacity with a courage and integrity that helped ignite the revolutions of 1989, and if the immensely learned Pope Benedict XVI gave soft nihilism a remarkably descriptive and accurate name, “the dictatorship of relativism,” Pope Francis stood for nothing less than accommodating the world in the name of “change” and deference to the alleged “signs of the times.” As Cardinal Zen of Hong Kong once noted, Francis could see Communists as merely the victims of Latin American military dictatorship and lovers of the poor and thus more Christian than Christians in decisive respects. The gulags, and massive religious persecution, did not fit into this vision of relatively benign Communists.

As the estimable Father Raymond J. de Souza pointed out in the November 28, 2019, issue of the Catholic Herald, Pope Francis has a soft spot for leftist leaders who oppress civil society in the name of social justice and solidarity with the poor. The recently deposed Bolivian leader Evo Morales was, de Souza writes, “the Holy Father’s favorite leader in the Americas,” which “was passing strange, as [Morales] was a tyrant.” Francis met with the demagogic Morales six times in six years and considered the man to be his friend. In an act never adequately explained by the Vatican, de Souza notes, when the Argentine pope visited Bolivia in 2015 he accepted from Morales a crucifix adorned with a hammer and sickle.  …

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