Many faithful Catholics continue to be perplexed by many of Pope Francis’s controversial actions and appointments. His most recent moves have done nothing to assuage their fears that he seems determined to make the Catholic Church the spiritual arm of the progressive left.
It is pertinent to point out that the Open Society Foundations and its aligned groups have funded efforts to legalize abortion in Ireland, Poland, Mexico and other traditionally Catholic countries. The Soros network has also funded efforts to change the political priorities of American Catholics and to pass strongly pro-abortion legislation, such as a Michigan ballot measure to declare abortion a constitutional right.
Alex Soros, 37, told The Wall Street Journal last month he is “more political” than his father and that he plans to have a larger focus on U.S. domestic politics with abortion rights are among his top causes.
If that weren’t enough to cause concern, Pope Francis named Argentine Archbishop Victor Manuel “Tucho” Fernandez to be the next chief of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s doctrinal office. This is no doubt the most important appointment Francis has made yet in his papacy. As the veteran and respected Vatican journalist John L. Allen writes:
If anything, the bond between Francis and Fernández, both Argentines, runs even deeper than that which linked the Polish John Paul and the German Ratzinger.
The connection goes back at least to 2007, when the future pontiff was still Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires and Fernández was a professor at the Catholic university in the Argentine capital. He acted as Bergoglio’s peritus, or theological advisor, during the conference of Latin American bishops in Aparecida, Brazil, which produced a document that proved to be a blueprint for Francis’s papacy.
A primary contributor to Francis’s 2013 apostolic exhortation Evangelii gaudium, Fernández has been an informal advisor and sounding board for Francis on every important doctrinal question he’s faced. Textual analysis in 2016, when Francis issued his controversial document Amoris Laetita opening the door to reception of communion by civilly divorced and remarried Catholics, showed striking similarities with articles Fernández had written on the same subject in 2005 and 2006.
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Just to make sure that no one missed the watershed nature of the moment, Pope Francis took the virtually unprecedented move of publishing an almost 800-word letter to Fernández in tandem with the announcement of his appointment, highlighting his expectations.
Francis told Fernández to avoid the use of “immoral methods” in defending the faith, without quite defining what he considered those methods to be.
“They were times where, more than promoting theological knowledge, possible doctrinal errors were persecuted,” Francis wrote. “What I expect of you is undoubtedly something very different.”
On the contrary, Francis said, Fernández’s role “has as its main purpose to safeguard the teaching that comes from the faith ‘to give reasons for our hope, but not as an enemy who critiques and condemns’.”
In essence, the choice of Fernández is a “legacy” appointment, in the sense that his clear mission is to institutionalize Francis’s vision in the church’s intellectual life, beginning in the Vatican itself – to make it more difficult, as Fernández himself once said in a 2015 interview, “to turn back” under a new pope.
There can be little doubt left that by this appointment, Pope Francis intends to take the Catholic Church in a much more liberal direction. Fernandez, who will take up his role as Catholicism’s top doctrine chief in September, is known for his strong liberalism. He’s also known as the author of this book:
You don’t notice, inattentive. Your lips murder. Your eyes don’t notice, distracted, the wandering eyes that are preoccupied before the divine flesh of your mouth. And you pensively miss with that open mouth, while behind you remain the raving lunatics.
Come on down, my dear, before you awaken suddenly someone desperate with a terrible hickey.
How was God so cruel as to give you that mouth… There is no one who resists me, bitch, hide it
(Víctor M. Fernández).
Yep – Apparently Pope Francis could find no one better to head the doctrinal office of the Catholic Church.
Pope Francis has also named twenty-one new cardinals, announcing his intention to confirm them as members of the College of Cardinals in September. Eighteen are eligible to vote in the next conclave, which will choose his successor. This means Francis has further stacked the College with men who are presumably in his theological mold.
“We don’t want to convert the young people to Christ or to the Catholic Church or anything like that at all,” .. continued. “We want it to be normal for a young Catholic Christian to say and bear witness to who he is or for a young Muslim, Jew, or of another religion to also have no problem saying who he is and bearing witness to it, and for a young person who has no religion to feel welcome and to perhaps not feel strange for thinking in a different way.”
While this is of course would be an excellent stance for a secular body to take to maintain and promote the civic peace, it does not bode well for a religion that was given the Great Commission by the Son of God Himself.
But it seems that for the new version of the Catholic Church celebrating diversity matters more than truth — perhaps even more than salvation.
Say what you will about the new cardinal but at least you cannot say he’s being dishonest. You cannot say either that he is in some way contradicting the pontiff either. Let us not forget that in 2019, Pope Francis signed, along with a prominent imam, a document in Abu Dhabi that proclaimed, “The pluralism and the diversity of religions, color, sex, race and language are willed by God in his wisdom, through which he created human beings.”
This of course is a direct contradiction of scripture not to mention also of authoritative Catholic teaching.
You can now perhaps begin to understand why even our own archbishop and his woke acolytes have gone headlong with the DiversityTM brigade and made it their own cause to denigrate if not castigate faithful priests who refuse to go along the broad road and through the wide gate.
They want to be in the Vatican’s good books. They want to be noticed and perhaps advance – just as Archbishop Fernadez and Bishop Aguilar have done.
