Low Sunday
The two essential points of meditation offered to us on this Octave of Easter are the importance of faith and mercy. In the epistle, St John insists that it is our faith that conquers the world, faith in the Son of God Incarnate who came to reconcile us with the Father. In the Gospel, we see the mercy of God in action. Our Blessed Lord commences His Risen life by giving the apostles the power to extend God’s mercy through the forgiveness of sins, and one week later, condescends to show that same mercy to the recalcitrant apostle St Thomas. This amazing act of mercy elicits from Thomas the most explicit act of faith in the New Testament: My Lord and My God! May these two thoughts of mercy and faith inspire the thoughts I share this morning.
As you know, yesterday Pope Francis was laid to rest at the Basilica of St Mary Major, and we entrust his soul to her merciful intercession. Today the whole Church looks forward anxiously to the election of the next pope which now lies in the hands of the cardinals of the Holy Roman Church. Let me insist upon the need of prayer for the soul of Pope Francis. It is true, the Catholic Church suffered intensely during the twelve years of his pontificate, but we always have a duty to honour our father in life and pray for him in death. We truly hope the pope died in God’s grace, but even if he did, he has so much to answer for that we must, out of Christian charity and filial piety, intercede on his behalf so that he may be fully purged of his sins and errors. Here in our community we have been doing so at the end of the offices of Lauds and Vespers and tomorrow we will offer a solemn requiem Mass with absolution for the deceased pontiff.
With the merciful objective of encouraging prayer for his soul, I would like to share a few personal memories and reflections on the last twelve years. Let me begin by thanking Pope Francis for two things. The first is for his consistent and unequivocal condemnation of abortion. He quite realistically insisted on more than one occasion that having abortion is like hiring a hit man to solve a problem. For such strong and courageous statements before a hostile world we should be grateful.
But more importantly, and not without a good dose of irony, I believe we owe him thanks for something else. He brought to its paroxysm the spirit of the revolution in the Catholic Church. While Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI all were Catholic men who insisted, wrongly of course, that somehow Catholicism could be married to the Revolution, Francis did not seem to fall for that. He sided with the Revolution. While under the preceding pontiffs, one could have thought that Modernist Catholicism is still Catholic, Francis made it clear that it is not. For this we should be grateful, for it is now clear that the experiment has proved itself disastrous and the only path forward is to go back.
All this developed rather slowly however. In the first year or so of his pontificate, like many others, I hoped he would truly lead the Church in proclaiming the eternal faith and in bringing the Gospel to those who were the furthest from it. His first apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium contained a number of powerful statements that seemed to infuse a new vigour into the way we should reach out to all and preach the truth to them. He did not fail to arouse a healthy enthusiasm. At the same time, in those first few months, he said two things which reached my ears like a clap of thunder on a bright summer day. The first were his ill-fated words to the young people of the world at the World Youth Day in July 2013, when he shocked everyone by saying: “What is it that I expect as a consequence of World Youth Day? I want a mess. We knew that in Rio there would be great disorder, but I want trouble in the dioceses…!” The Pope wanted a mess, and boy did he make one!
The second clap of thunder was the first in a long series of interviews – which we all came to dread – , in which among other things he said: “Those who today … long for an exaggerated doctrinal ‘security,’ those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists — they have a static and inward-directed view of things.” Right, it was now clear that there would be no doctrinal precision with this Pope, and that it was therefore futile to expect it and even more to request it. This is why I never bothered signing any of the documents that asked the Pope for clarification or attempted a filial correction. He did not care about precision, he was beyond it. What he wanted was one big mess, and that’s what he got.
The scales really fell from my eyes, however, when the Synod of Bishops on the Family (2014-2015) entirely missed its objective because the Pope engineered its hijacking and used it to contradict the teaching of the Gospel and of the Church on the necessity of the state of grace for receiving Holy Communion. The exhortation Amoris Laetitia defiantly allowed divorced and remarried couples to receive Communion after a time of so-called “discernment”, and thus with a stroke of the pen, it virtually annihilated 2000 years of constant Church teaching on the matter. And during all this time and for years thereafter, I had to put up with confrere priests coming to me and trying to solicit from me as professor of moral theology a word of agreement with the Pope, so that their little theological world could stand: whatever the Pope says or does has to be OK, no? Well no, if there is one thing this pontificate made clear – and for this too we must be grateful – , it is that the very specific conditions for papal infallibility were not laid down by the First Vatican Council without reason. Popes like everyone can be mistaken when they are not speaking ex cathedra, and that includes in official documents in which they separate themselves from Tradition.
After that, it was clear to me we would get nowhere with this pontificate. Let’s just mention a few of the more horrific moments: The Amazonian Synod, with the act of pagan worship in the Vatican Gardens as Francis looked on, then the carrying of the idol in procession and being placed on the high altar in St Peter’s Basilica. The Abu Dhabi document on human fraternity which blasphemously professed that God wills all religions just as He wills the differences of sex and race. This would become a refrain for Pope Francis. On his last major trip, he scandalised the whole world in Singapore by declaring that “all religions lead to God”. Not to mention his consistent covering for or appointing of unworthy prelates along with sidelining the good ones, and his appalling approval for the blessing of sodomitic couples. Nor may we forget his reckless words during the Covid crisis during which he not only closed Catholic Churches to the faithful, but spoke of a moral obligation to get the experimental vaccines that have since killed and injured untold numbers of people, thus undermining the religious exemption that many Catholics were counting on but were refused, because the Pope’s words squashed every effort to think straight in the chaos. It was in this context in September 2021 that I gave a homily on the vaccines which establish there was certainly no moral obligation to take them but there might very well be an obligation not to take them. I was told by many that this was the only voice here in Australia that stood up for a most fundamental human right.
And in the midst of it all, while the world applauded the so-called inclusiveness, Francis ruthlessly and consistently excluded those devoted to Tradition, even to the point of attempting to abolish the Mass of All Times. On this note, I would like to share with you a personal memory of that fateful 16 July 2021 when the notorious document came out that essentially placed Tradition in the Custody of Modernists. I remember receiving a phone call from our dear Archbishop Porteous. He kindly wanted to reassure me not to worry, and that nothing would change for our community. (I already knew that, but it was kind of him all the same…). I recall distinctly telling him that I finally understood what it means to be abandoned by one’s father… So now it was clear: All the rhetoric of reaching out to the peripheries and making an inclusive church actually meant creating another church in which all would be accepted except those who still hang on to Tradition. Even non-Catholics picked up on this, as we will be apparent in a couple of the quotes I will now share.
The first is from a confessional Protestant, Carl R. Trueman who wrote at First Things, in an article entitled “Pope Francis, My Worst Protestant Nightmare”: “As a confessional Protestant, there is perhaps one decision Francis made that I should approve: restricting the Latin Mass. The need for vernacular liturgy was a standard part of Reformation Protestant policy. But even here there was a problem. The Protestant Reformers’ liturgical changes were driven by a specific theology of the word and its connection to salvation and sacraments. Catholicism’s theology of the sacraments is different and does not require liturgy in the vernacular. The pope’s move therefore lacked any obvious doctrinal motivation. One can only speculate as to his motives, but it appeared to be a liberal assault on traditional Catholicism. Francis was thus my own worst Protestant nightmare: an authoritarian Roman pope driving a liberal Protestant agenda, a leader who embodied the worst of all possible Christian worlds.”
A Lutheran pastor, John Stephenson, writes: “I cannot refrain from noting that the late Pope … has left his Church in a more perilous situation than has any Pope since the time, around 1550, that the Counter Reformation began to push back against the incursions of the Protestant Reformation…. Francis’ ever intensifying vendetta against the historic Mass tellingly displayed his intense dislike of persons and things truly describable as Roman Catholic…. The list is simply endless and after spending a number of years … providing printable copy on Francis’s latest excess, for the past couple of years I have given up the effort of trying to keep up with this Bishop of Rome’s flagrant contradictions of what has been held and practiced semper, ubique, et ab omnibus”.
But perhaps the best assessment of all comes from Catholic priest, Fr John Perricone: “Pope Francis indeed kept his promise of ‘creating a mess.’ With that ‘mess’ arrived the demise of peace in the Church. Factionalism ensued. Heightened tensions erupted. Not a few Catholics embraced eccentric notions of sedevacantism. But one of the greatest tragedies of this period is the silence. Silence from the shepherds. Suffering Catholics looked toward them for guidance and received only bromides and anodyne preachments. They either evaded the issue of the tumult altogether or intoned ‘all is well,’ a refrain they have perfected. Their shameful silence left Christ’s ‘little ones’ to roam helplessly, falling through the fissures caused by the doctrinal turmoil. Will history treat these mute prelates as it did the bishops in Henry’s 16th-century England, or 1930’s Germany? While many Catholics felt themselves adrift in a sea of disorientation, the grace of God endured. Impressive numbers of admirable Catholics permitted the free-fall to steel their Faith. With heroic perseverance, they remained loyal to the immutable teachings of Mother Church and her timeless practices of piety. Future generations will applaud these heroic souls and write testaments praising them. They were faithful when infidelity was the coin of the realm.”
Finally, Peter Kwasniewski addressed some words of wisdom to a writer who had allowed the Francis papacy to torment and consume him until he lost his faith altogether: “If you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you. I too have tasted the misery, bitterness, wrath, and skepticism that comes from knowing too much about Bergoglio, his network of enablers and beneficiaries, the entrenched culture of homosexual domination, and so forth. It is very, very ugly; no wonder the solution for the mainstream is to ignore it all and sing happy-clappy songs about the saintly pope of the poor. Greek mythology can teach us a lesson. If you want to fight the Medusa, you have to look at her through a mirror, not face to face. So too, if you want to fight the evil in the Church, you have to look at it through the mirror of Christ, the beautiful and beloved Son of God, and then you will not turn to stone.”
And that brings me to my conclusion, one that is offered to us at this time of year: Christus vincit! Christ has won the victory, and we are just living out the struggle in our own times, for that is the only way to unite ourselves with Christ’s passion and death and be eligible for the Resurrection. As we mourn a failed and catastrophic papacy, as we pray sincerely with filial love for Francis who is now just like any other poor soul – his former glory and power gone forever – and we beg God through Mary Immaculate for the election of a truly Catholic Pope, let us pray for each other too, that we may never give in to discouragement or waver in our faith, but keep our eyes fixed on the Risen Saviour who holds us all in the palm of His almighty Hand. Amen.
