PF took the name 'Francis' as a way of implying "I'm not like any other pope there has ever been". After this memorable if unsubtle piece of arrogance, you may think that is is strange for our Holy Father now to attack the Poverello.
Yet he has by implication done exactly that.
Fact is so often stranger than Fiction!!!
He has told us that proclaiming the Scriptures in a non-vernacular language is "like laughing at the Word of God".
It is a good thing that, some years ago now, after reading S John Henry Newman on the Suspense of the function of the Ecclesia docens, I concluded that we now must be in precisely just such a period of Suspense. I cannot see how else one can analyse PF in terms of any sort of Catholic ecclesiology.
You see, S Francis was a deacon. This means that his own particular liturgical ministry at Mass was to sing the Gospel. In PF's world of rich fantasy, whenever S Francis sang Sequentia Sancti Evangelii secundum ... he (presumably) felt the laughter welling up inside him. After singing In illo tempore ..., his mirth (we conjecture) was just too much for him. He must have sunk helpless to the ground with great sobs of tearful laughter. I hope there was a doctor in the house.
You find this scenario "improbable"? You may say that, Maddy; I couldn't possibly comment. But my aged memory does recall hearing, some six decades ago, Eduard Frankel (one of Adolph Hitler's greatest benefactions to the Oxford Honour School of Litterae Humaniores) referring to Robinson Ellis as "A man viz a remarkable instinct for ze improbable." I think he may have been referring to Ellis's words about Queen Arsinoe II's Flying Ostriches.
(I wonder if we should discern a connexion with an address PF once gave to servers, in which he recalled that, as a boy, back in the time of the Usus Authenticus of the Roman Rite, he himself loved to make a mockery of the Most Holy Eucharist by changing the words and ceremonies in order to render them risible. By implication, PF apparently urged his youthful hearers to perform similar amusing sacrileges.)
3 comments:
Dear Father - Prayers for your complete and speedy recovery continue.
Fr. J. Craig
In America, I expect the priests to say something about the pro-life movement. No, no priest does. So I'm going, this is the biggest story in America right now. This is a basic tenet of the Catholic Church. And none of the clerics say anything. Everybody's praying for the unborn. That's good. They're all praying, okay. They all are saying, you know, life is sacred. Okay. But none of them are getting involved with the politics of this. None of them on the Catholic side.
So the importance of that is that the pro-life movement doesn't have any backup. So the pro-choice movement has an entire political party, the Democrats, entire entertainment industry, entire news industry. The President, the Vice President, all promoting pro-choice. What does the pro-life side have? The one body, where millions of people are. The American Catholic Church, silent on the politics of it. Pope Francis. No. So if you know why, Father, could you please tell me because I don't know why. I mean, it's obvious that the bishops who are in charge of the individual dioceses are telling their priests, don't say anything. That has to be happening. Now, I know there are individual priests that do. But you're in a minority. So the pro-life people are believers and they are appalled at the direction America is going. We should all be working together, every single one of us American citizens, to make abortion end. To save as many unborn as we can. That's what we all should be doing. But that's not what's happening. Obviously. But the pro-life believers, the individual Americans who are pro-life, you don't have a backup. There's no back up. So to me, I sitting there at Sunday mass going, nothing? On the biggest moral issue in the country, that the Catholic Church is behind pro-life, and you don't have anything to say about it? What gives?
He'll be gone soon.
AvB.
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