Opinion: ‘This Pontificate Is Worse Than the Falklands War’: What One Hears in Buenos Aires, by George Neumayr

By George Neumayr, American Spectator, September 1, 2019

At a boozy evening of angry Argentine Catholics, one man hilariously blurted out in response to one of my questions, “This pontificate is worse than the Falklands War,” a reference to Argentina’s humiliating defeat at the hands of Margaret Thatcher.

As I walked around Buenos Aires for two weeks, I saw some Argentine pride in Jorge Bergoglio, but not much. Even the Pope Francis sections at gift shops seemed curiously muted — the presentation of Francis-related items appeared small and almost pro forma. The stops on the “Bergoglio tour” don’t look very well maintained. Near the home of his birthplace, for example, graffiti is scrawled. No one has bothered to erase it.

Far from reviving Catholicism in Buenos Aires, this pontificate has deflated it. “Immediately after his election church attendance seemed to go up a little bit,” said one Argentine Catholic. “But now it has gone down. Parishes which once had perpetual Eucharistic adoration no longer have it. The situation in Buenos Aires has gone from bad to worse.” Another Argentine Catholic tells me, “I stopped going to daily Mass because the quality of it has become such a joke.”

Indeed, many of the Catholic institutions in Buenos Aires seem either ghost-townish or in the hands of open heretics. (The Vatican nunciature looked like an abandoned haunted house.) I walked into an archdiocesan bookstore in the heart of Buenos Aires only to see placed in its most prominent display case fawning books about Hans Küng, one of the most heretical theologians of the 20th century. ….

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