He is preaching to his choir! Yesterday Pope Francis used the NY Times Sunday Op-ed Page to announce the gospel of Western Liberalism to its liberal readers. It has become a truism that each of us inhabits a bubble. Pope Francis' bubble is clearly defined: he meets (as Larry Chapp observed) with woke, millionaire NBA players to discuss BLM, but not with the "dubia" Cardinals or the esteemed Cardinal Zen. He thus protects himself from cognitive dissonance: the dubia challenge his theological clarity and orthodoxy; Zen challenges his romantic flirtation with Chinese Communism. He has self-designated himself as "Chaplain to Western Liberalism" and "Good Will Ambassador to Chinese Communism." Does this mission conflict with his role as Catholic Pope? I think so!
He starts the piece by telling how much he feels the pain of those suffering this Covid. This seems right. But I can't identify: I feel mostly annoyance...with masks, restrictions, control; and resentment...against governors and bishops who close Churches and teachers unions that close schools. But further along the pontiff will clarify that I am among the selfish, unkind ones. But as I read I wonder: when one talks about his pain for others, is that sentimental narcissism or Christlike charity? I get confused. I always get confused with Pope Francis.
Then he narrates a fascinating anecdote from his youth. As a young man he was deathly, painfully sick, but his life was saved by two nurses who disobeyed the doctors' orders to give him greater dosages of anti-biotic and pain killer. Then with studied ambiguity he praises science but encourages the freedom to disregard protocol and authority. Wow! I myself, as a student of Illich/Schumacher/Ellul, have an iconoclastic-anarchistic bent and advocate "flexibility" with regard to the empire of regulations, rules and protocol that drown us. But it is more than a little weird that the world's premier moral authority casually advocates a license for obedience that borders on antinomianism. My wife just retired as a nurse: in today's medical field USA it is almost inconceivable that a nurse would autonomously order extra pain and anti-biotic medicine: the lawsuits, the liability, the millions of dollars, the reputation! This anecdote would elicit a lively conversation in, lets say, a college ethics class: when is obedience to rules dispensable? But as a throw-away story in an op-ed piece by the world's moral authority? Strange! But stranger still is what follows.
He goes on next to give an absolute, unmodified endorsement to the global lockdowns which he says are required to save lives. He stigmatizes those who question masks and lockdowns as selfishly seeking their own personal interests. The logic: if you don't like schools and churches closing, you are selfish, you are bad, you are naughty! No sense here at all of competing values and viewpoints: freedom of religion, the psycho-social needs of children who are quarantined, the economic cost for so many businesses!
Wait a minute! I am confused! You just said we should follow conscience and disobey protocols like doctors' orders; but then you say we are bad if we want to open our gyms, schools and churches! Whatever happened to intellectual coherence?
Clearly he is chaplain to the liberal Western elite. He won't christen national armaments, but he gives absolute sanctification to their oppressive policies and shames those who disagree. The "deplorables!" It makes for a neat binary universe: masks are good; rallies are bad. Biden good; Trump bad. NBA millionaires good; Cardinal Burke bad. Walls, death penalty, global warming...all bad. But...a plague of unchastity, pornography, infidelity, and anti-virility? "Let's not be judgmental!" Well...it finally shows that Pope Francis has as much resentment and annoyance as do I...but it is directed to folks like me.
If Archbishop Vigano, his antagonist, is unhinged in a paranoia about global conspiracies and an imminent apocalypse, then Pope Francis is equally intemperate in his infatuation with elite liberalism.
And then it gets worse. He uses the pandemic as a metaphor...soft, vague, sentimental...and alleges that hunger, war, unemployment and such are also pandemics. He doesn't acknowledge the objective reality of the pandemic: a fierce biological virus that was released by an irresponsible communist regime. He shifts to the theme of selfishness and alleges (not that the communists were selfish!) that hunger, war and unemployment are rooted in selfishness: the selfishness of those who resist lockdowns and insist on freedom to worship, the selfishness of those who lack the sentiments of compassion and kindness that he is conspicuously modeling for us.
Wow! He thinks that if everyone gets to be like him...feeling the pain of the suffering...then war and hunger and Covid will quickly vanish!
What is this guy smoking? Is it just me? Or is this unadulterated romantic, sentimental moralism? This cool aid is so sweet, so saccharine, so sickening, so non-nourishing! But readers of the Times will love it! "See" they will reassure themselves "even the Pope thinks like us!"
Still, he is our Pope. He is our father, albeit a dysfunctional father. This is a dark time for our Church! For our society! We just need to pray...for Pope Francis. And for ourselves. For the Biden administration and the Supreme Court and the Congress...for the salvation of Donald and Melania. What else can I say?
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