Heresy is the exaggeration of some aspect of our faith and the denial of countervailing realities and so violation of the integrity of Catholicism in its symphonic, mysterious complexity and depth. What we have received over the last decade in this pontificate is a mercy that is corrupt and degraded because it is bereft of judgment, repentance, justice, wrath, truth, and the war with evil. In the last few weeks:
1. Pope Francis is reported to have advocated unconditional absolution on two occasions, recently to seminarians in Barcelona and a few months ago to rectors of seminaries. He stated that the right to absolution, even of the unrepentant, is absolute and that a priest may never deny absolution. This is a clear contradiction of Catholic practice: contrition is required for absolution. It is inherent to the rite: the penitent always makes an act of contrition. The initial proclamation of the Gospel by Jesus was a call to conversion: "Repent! The Kingdom of God is at hand!" The priest in confession is first judge: that this is sin and that the sinner is contrite. Only after that judgement does he dispense mercy. I understand that it is extremely rare for one to come to confession without some contrition. Nevertheless, contrition is intrinsic to the form of the sacrament. Imagine a married man confesses the sin of adultery; says he enjoys it, has no contrition and intends to continue it; but demands absolution so he can receive at his child's first communion without the additional sin of sacrilege! Were the priest to grant unconditional absolution, a la Francis, he would collaborate in and enable both the adultery and the blasphemy; the priest is obliged to refuse absolution. The comments of Pope Francis (as reported) are heretical, sacrilegious, and a perfect expression of cheap, decadent mercy.
2. Fr. Marko Rupnik S.J., a celebrity-artist-priest, is accused of sexual violations with adult women going back decades. Recently he received the automatic excommunication for having absolved, in confession, a woman with whom he sinned sexually. That excommunication was almost immediately lifted as he repented. Note: he repented. That means he acknowledged the sin. This is not a mere sin of the flesh. He has a long history of abuse of his position of authority, of sexual sin, of violation of his vows. But the violation of the sacrament of confession is one of inconceivable gravity: a sacrilege against the sacrament, against the woman, against his own ordination and vow of celibacy. Meanwhile, in 2022 he preached the Lenten meditation for priests working in the Curia including the Pope himself, he created the logo for the 2022 World Meeting of Families, he met privately with Pope Francis, and continues his glamorous life as a clerical, artist celebrity. This is not an exceptional case: Pope Francis has sheltered three or four high profile priest predators that we know of. And this is from the crusader against clerical privilege! This is more than cheap mercy: it is scandalous and sacrilegious!
3. In an interview last week, the Pope spoke of his conversation with Cardinal Zen, the 91-year-old saintly, heroic prelate who is being prosecuted by the Chinese Communists. He is the world's premier opponent of the Communist take-over of the Catholic Church. He goes every day into a prison as a chaplain. He vigorously opposes the Vatican's concordat with the Chinese Communist government. He may be our greatest living saint and hero. The Pope laughed patronizingly: "Of course he is charming. All the Chinese are charming." He then went on to diminish the prosecution by likening it to a traffic ticket. His dismissive tone is deplorable. More substantial however is that this shows his indulgent, really delusional attitude to the Chinese Communist Party into whose diabolical hands he has surrendered the suffering Catholics of China. "All Chinese are charming." He actually said this. Does he find Xi charming? How about the genocide of the Uyghurs? How about the crackdown in Hong Kong? How about the threatened invasion of Taiwan? About the ambitions to world domination? How about the millions of forced abortions with the 0ne-baby policy? What about the Covid-cover-up? All of this is charming? This is more than cheap mercy, it is if not dementia a form of moral pathology.
This theme of cheap mercy runs through his entire pontificate. The redefinition of capital punishment as no longer a prudential judgement involving protection, deterrence and retribution. The simplistic, broad-brush disparagement of national boundaries. The relaxation of sexual mores upholding chastity and conjugal fidelity that culminated in the destruction of the John Paul Institute of the Family in Rome. And more.
My Encounter with Divine Mercy
In 1980, John Paul released his encyclical Dives in Misericordia. He brought God's Mercy into the heart of the Catholic faith. I was deeply impressed in reading it. Shortly after that our family suffered a tragedy: death by suicide of my wife's brother Al. He was a superb person. A dear friend to me. An unspeakably sad funeral. But the outpouring of compassion and mercy from hundreds of people...friends, family, Church...was even more overwhelming. I had only one thought, a thought that has directed my life ever since: If all of these are so merciful, how much more must our merciful God receive warmly into his Kingdom this good man that suffered so!
God's Initiative of Mercy
I believe that the most significant action of God in our world in the 20th century was this initiative of Divine Mercy through the revelations to Saint Faustina, the papacy of John Paul, and a myriad of saints like Maximilian Kolbe, Mother Theresa, Solanus Casey, Brother Andre, Dorothy Day, Adrienne Speyr, Catherine Dougherty, Edith Stein and a litany of others. Yes, this initiative is more important than the Vatican Council or all my beloved lay renewal movements or the downfall of the Soviet Empire or any combination of such political events.
The classic and contemporary devotion to Mercy (as in the Sacred Heart) is always in tension with the wrath and judgement of God against sin and evil. For example, Saint Theresa of Lisieux prayed passionately for the conversion of triple murderer Henri Pranzini whom she called "my first child." She prayed that he be spared hell. She later learned that seconds before he died, he took the crucifix from the priest and kissed the wounds of Jesus three times. Likewise, the writings of St. Faustina are full of an awareness of hell and the horror of sin.
A mercy that is not in tension with evil, wrath, judgement, repentance, truth and holiness becomes insipid, sentimental, saccharine and effete.
A Satanic Strategy
Lucifer, the greatest intellect in Creation, saw what was happening and developed a brilliant strategy. He would coopt mercy, corrupt it, and use it for his purpose of leading the gullible into sin by way of deception. And so he inspired a "paradigm shift." Rather than "hate the sin, love the sinner" he proposed "love the sinner in his sin." And so now we have the ideal of "accompanying" others into sin: enabling the abortion, affirming the "gay identity," welcoming everyone and anyone, whatever their beliefs and practices, to the Eucharist. This is a far cry from the authentic apostles of Mercy like the Little Flower, St. Faustina and St. Maximillian, who engaged fiercely with evil and suffering. We know that the Holy Spirit is guiding our hierarchy. We also know that Lucifer and his legions are working frantically on them. They have been doing a good job lately!
The Clerical Ogre of Bergoglio and His Generation
What is the psychic source of this compulsion of Pope Francis and his coterie to cheapen mercy by the dismissal of repentance, truth, wrath and holiness? I suggest it is the "clerical ogre", the clergyman as arrogant, privileged, distant, moralistic, rigid, formalistic, dogmatic, and lacking in compassion. In so much of what the Holy Father says there is the threat of this horrific figure. Clearly, in his mind, he is fighting this terrible monster. More than anything, the Pope seems to despise the clerical ogre. This would explain, for example, his dismissal of contrition from confession.
Now we do have in the Church a problem with rigidity, moralism, arrogance and the failure of charity on the part of the clergy. But it is not on the scale it seems to take in the papal imagination. I would argue that over the last decades our Church has suffered more from the opposite extremes: sentimental, soft, "nice guy," bourgeois accommodation. In other words, the Vatican is kicking a dead horse, is fighting the last war, is Don Quixote tilting at windmills.
This derangement is common, I have noticed, among his generation of priests, at least here in the USA, the "silent generation" born between 1928 and 1945. Is it that they have all been traumatized by cruel priests in confession? Possible. But I see a sociological cause as well. Their formative teen and early adult years, 1945-62, were a period of profound change in the American Church. It was a Camelot period of post-war revival, confidence, expansion, building, prosperity and exuberance. But in those years, steadily and incrementally, a new paradigm of the Church was replacing an old one. The Council itself was not an "event-out-of-nowhere." It was the culmination of powerful trends developing in the post-war years. As a child in that era, I grew up in what was basically a Vatican II Church. Already we were ecumenical as we swam at the YMCA. We had an open, positive attitude to Protestants and those of other faiths. There was awareness of the role of the laity in the Church. The liturgical and Scripture movements were all cooking with gas. There was reverence for the Jews and sorrow for the Holocaust. There was a preference for informality, democracy, liberality, inclusion.
As the new paradigm was anonymously, undramatically, but inexorably replacing the old, it was inevitable that the more extreme expressions of the now-receding model would become despised. Recall that in the 1930s Fr. Coughlin was rejected in his anti-Semitism and in the 1950s Fr. Feeney was disciplined for his narrow ecclesiology. My suggestion is that the generation of seminarians of the 1950s, just prior to the Council, were already imbibing the values of that Council and unconsciously developing an aversion for a caricature of the cranky old traditional Church. Priests now in their 90s and 80s have no use for the Latin mass; they dislike the conservatism of the younger priests; and they share this horror of the clerical ogre. They are much like Pope Francis.
We are, all of us, desperate for God's Mercy. A Mercy that is wrathful to sin, just, true, holy.
Let your Mercy be upon us as we place our trust in You!
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