PopeFrancis – ILANA MERCER

Pope Francis: Lady Di Of The Papacy

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 02 Oct 2015 18:20:16 +0000

In the wake of America’s week-long, Pope Francis bacchanalia, a few column titles suggest themselves:

“Benedict, What Have You Wrought?”

“The Global Village Idiot.”

“Lady Di of The Papacy.”

The last hints at the trendy, pop-philosophies that animate Pope Francis’ Lady Di-like belief system. The intellectual equivalent of these papal shopworn shibboleths you’ll find in a Chinese, fortune-cookie wrapper.

Ultimately, the editor will decide which of these unflattering headings best describes the man whom one devout Catholic—libertarian jurist Andrew Napolitano—called a false prophet for overturning Catholic canon law without consulting his Bishops. Yet another reason Pope Francis is drawn to an authoritarian president who rules by presidential veto.

Intellectually, Pope Francis is no match for his predecessors. With his 1998 encyclical, the Polish pope—how the Polish people suffered under the communists whose creed Pope Francis is inadvertently dignifying—sounded a lone voice for both “Faith and Reason” in the postmodern religious wilderness.

Who other than Pope John Paul spoke with such unhectoring clarity about the errors of relativism in modern thought? Certainly not Jorge Bergolio, who is too simple to consider such abstractions.

The anti-intellectualism evinced in the Holy See’s 2015 environmental encyclical made this pope’s “close advisers,” in all their “ill-tempered diction,” the butt of ridicule over the pages of the Catholic Crisis magazine:

From the empirical side, to prevent the disdain of more informed scientists generations from now, papal teaching must be safeguarded from attempts to exploit it as an endorsement of one hypothesis over another concerning anthropogenic causes of climate change. It is not incumbent upon a Catholic to believe, like Rex Mottram in “Brideshead Revisited,” that a pope can perfectly predict the weather. …

In the same badly written potboiler, the pope took a swipe at the richest nations, blaming them for despoiling the earth.

In truth, however, the developed world has advanced the technologies (and attendant ethics) that are helping to clean up the atmosphere, the waterways, the oceans and many a landmass.

It is the developing and underdeveloped nations—China and India, for one—that despoil the earth and devastate its creatures. So polluted are the waterways in former communist countries that rivers are known to catch fire. Watch.

Not in the UK, US, Canada or Germany does the earth look like an “immense pile of filth,” to use his Holiness’s hyperbole. Although this is indeed the case on land tracts upon which angry, entitled migrants tread.

Familiarize yourself with “The Impact of Immigration Policy on Wild Life and on the Arizona Borderlands,” Mr. Pope.

Indeed, why not advocate the Golden Rule imperative where it’s most needed?

“Let us remember the Golden Rule,” preached the pope: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (Mt 7:12).”

The young, aggressive, Arab males currently flooding many of Europe’s bucolic communities do not appear to apply Pope Francis’ Golden Rule to their benevolent hosts. Look at these images from the Hungarian-Austrian front deluged by the people the pontiff has deified.

Conspicuously missing from Pope Francis’ sermon to the joint session of Congress was the Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ. Instead, the pope elected to tout war president Abraham Lincoln. Remarked Lincoln scholar Thomas DiLorenzo: “Honest” Abe “waged total war for four years on his own countrymen, causing as many as 850,000 deaths.” Yet to Pope Francis, Lincoln was “the guardian of liberty.”

Pope Benedict XVI was—still is—a great intellect. The Times Literary Supplement wrote this about Joseph Ratzinger’s “unflagging [intellectual] energy.”

For a man in his eighties to write a serious multi-volume work on Jesus (he promises a third installment on the infancy narrative) is remarkable enough. When the author happens to be the chief pastor of over a billion Catholics, it is truly extraordinary.

Befitting a scholar, Pope Emeritus Benedict had closely examined the possibility of Islamic reformation. After decades of primary source exegesis, Benedict concluded the following:

In Christian and Jewish texts, “God has worked through His creatures.” Consequently, these texts are not just the word of God, but the words of men inspired by Him. Isaiah, Mark and others of the “divinely appointed” are fully authorized and adequately inspired to interpret and revise the scriptures.

Not so in Islam. According to Father Fessio’s rendition of Benedict’s scholarly, spiritual inquiry, “The problem with Islam is far more fundamental. As the Islamic tradition has it, the Koran is not Mohammed’s words; it is God’s eternal word, seen as sent from Heaven, never to be adapted or altered.”

For warning the West that Islam may be “a closed and irrational system,” impervious to reform, Benedict was forced to apologize, in 2006, because Muslims threatened their version of the Golden Rule: riots.

With his brilliant mind and beatific smile, Pope Benedict XVI was the whole holy package. Now his successor, Pope Bumping, is dismissing Benedict’s finding about the theological imprimatur behind Muslim violence, and telling the faithful that “no religion is immune from forms of individual delusion or ideological extremism.”

In a word, be on the lookout for radical Christians and Jews.

As did the simpleton pope preach about the necessity to “harness the spirit of enterprise” for “the creation and distribution of wealth,” through legislators, whom the pope likened, mindlessly, to Moses, in their direct access to God:

You are the face of its people, their representatives. You are called to defend and preserve the dignity of your fellow citizens in the tireless and demanding pursuit of the common good, for this is the chief aim of all politics. …

Allow a Jew (albeit a bit of a closet Catholic) to quote from the encyclical written by Corinne and Robert Sauer (chosen people both, in my book) of the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies:

The Hebrew word for charity—Tzedakah—comes from the word justice: Tzedek.

To comply with both, a Jew must give ten percent of his income to help the poor. Charity, however, “is a moral principle, not a legal one.” There is nothing in this injunction that implies “a need for a public policy of involuntary taxation and … monetary handouts for the unemployed.”

Voluntary charity, moreover, “should not be confused with income redistribution. Income redistribution aims at reducing income inequalities because income disparities are seen as unfair or immoral. … This is not the Jewish view. … The poor have no legal right to the rich’s property—distribution, and eradication of income disparities is impossible and not the goal in Judaism.”

More egregious, the pontiff (much like America’s representatives) knows nothing about the American constitutional scheme. America’s elected representatives are sworn not to “satisfy common needs,” as this pig-ignorant pope put it, but to uphold a limited set of negative, individual rights—those to life, liberty and property.

Even President Barack Obama, a socialist leveler if ever there was one, has recognized that “the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties.”

Obama once confessed, in frustration, that the obstacles the Constitution poses to “redistributive justice” have compelled community organizers like him to pursue extra-constitutional change.

Clearly, this pope has confused Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s general will with the American Founders’ philosophy of individualism, republicanism and dispersed, limited authority.

Rousseau’s work was recited by Robespierre, leader of the Reign of Terror, during the French Revolution, as he beheaded innocents—17,000 of them—in the name of the nebulous common good touted by this Jacobin pope.

The Idea of America was not to centrally control man’s work and his fellow-feeling. The statism preached by the scold from the Vatican is anathema to the philosophy of our Founders, who rejected a state-directed common good.

“By pursuing his own interest,” wrote moral philosopher Adam Smith in “The Wealth of Nations” imbibed by the framers—”[man] frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.”

Take that back to Rome, Pope Francis.

©ILANA Mercer
WND, Quarterly Review, Praag.org, The Libertarian Alliance,
The Unz Review & Target Liberty
October 2, 2015

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Will The ‘Pussy Riot’ Sisterhood Storm The Sistine Chapel?

Ilana Mercer — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 06:33:55 +0000

NO TO A “SUPERPOWER POPE.” Mercifully, the new pope is not the Archbishop of New York, Cardinal Timothy Dolan. Shortly after Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected as the 266th pope, Cardinal Dolan demonstrated why my prayers had been answered. The American had been bypassed.

Out of the papal conclave and into the limelight charged the vainglorious Dolan (who, it has to be said, harbored hopes of becoming pope). He then suctioned himself to the television cameras, American style. No other cardinal elector granted interviews on emerging from the Sistine Chapel; they were enjoined to secrecy. Not the American cardinals. According to the Associated Press, these prolix self-promoters held daily press briefings near the Vatican to a room packed with reporters and television crews.

This was vulgarity, not transparency.

Not for nothing was the vow of silence once considered a test of character and spirituality in Christianity and in other faiths. This universal value has been inverted by American pop culture and pop religion. In the US, a deeply private person is considered defective; a blabbermouth who does and says anything on camera is canonized.

Dolan, by CBS’s telling, “broadcasts a weekly radio show,” and “was hardly silent during the cardinals’ self-imposed hush order.” For his vulgar electioneering, the Archbishop of New York was dubbed by Kean University historian Christopher Bellitto “The Ed Koch of Catholicism.” Having gigged with liberal comedian Stephen Colbert, Dolan’s showman credentials are “better” than Koch’s.

American public life is such that even our pick for pope (Cardinal Timothy Dolan) struts his stuff like a “Jersey Shore” reality star.

The two-day long conclave gave us a glimpse of the sublime. The elevated atmosphere was sustained by the crowds in St. Peter’s Square. Dolan shattered the majesty and solemnity of that event at a press conference where he alone was in-attendance. There, Dolan disgorged the obligatory niceties about Pope Francis I. Cardinal Bergoglio was an “inspired choice.” May he persevere for years to come (“Ad Multos Annos”). Then, like most Americans in public life, the man nicknamed “America’s pope,” “a happy warrior” and “the bear-hug bishop,” brought the discussion back to … himself. Out of the blue, Cardinal Dolan announced to the world that his “niece Kelly” had given birth.

How inappropriate.

To the girls at CNN—Anderson Cooper, Wolf Blitzer and their dominatrices—vulgarity equals “charisma.” “Isn’t Dolan wonderful?” they gushed. Despite his pesky attachment to Catholic doctrine—in demeanor, Dolan was clearly everything the dignified and modest Mitt Romney was not.

At CNN, the new Vicar of Christ quickly became the first Latino-American pontiff and was bestowed with the ultimate honorific. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Italian parents, the cable-news crazies hailed Pope Francis I as their first “non-European pope.”

Let us give thanks that the world was spared the self-promoting sins of a “superpower pope” and his entourage.

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IS ON THE RACK. That is the meme sounded by all big media covering the conclave. This the brilliant Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI knew all too well.

After “asbestos, tobacco, guns and lead paint, the next jackpot for tort lawyers was … sex,” explained Daniel Lyons of Forbes Magazine. In 2003, Lyons hashed out all there is to say about the $5 billion sexual-abuse shakedown to which the Catholic Church has been subjected. Many of these class-action claims are bogus, backed by the discredited excavation of false memories.

Sexual abuse litigation is big business, a racket facilitated by courts that are conduits to theft. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI knew that the Church was on the rack; that the victim movement had found a way to bleed the Church dry and rob it of its moral authority. Prescient man that he is, Benedict XVI likely quit because he realized that the Church was no longer a haven from the toxic tides of populism and liberalism, and that he was powerless to halt this momentum.

Although the breakdown of boundaries in society is at the root of the rot around us, the Roman Church will not be permitted to survive in the only way it was intended to function since antiquity: as a hierarchical organization.

As the clamoring demos believe, they are every bit as smart as men like Benedict. The faithful, moreover, no longer see themselves as members of a community of believers, but as members of gay, lesbian, feminist, black, brown and plain angry clans. Unless the Church recognizes and recompenses their brand of identity politics—the masses will bring it down.

Right on cue—and by baring their breasts, of course—”ladies” demonstrated at the outskirts of St. Peter’s Basilica why the ordination of women should be out of the question.

In the fullness of time, however, the Pussy Riot sisterhood will storm the Sistine Chapel to ride roughshod over the Church and its wise old men. The question is: How long of a reprieve does the Church of Rome have?

Image via ArtNet.

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