How the press sees Catholicism

Last updated on: December 16, 2015 at 8:12 am by Dave Griffey

How the press sees Catholicism 2015-12-16T08:12:00-04:00 Dave Griffey

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The media loves Pope Francis. I mean it. They may take or leave John Lennon. Kennedy might still be OK. Martin Luther King, Jr. still has his holiday. But they are absolutely mad about Pope Francis. This is obviously because they see Pope Francis as being liberal, modern liberal, and ready to push the Church in the direction of the modern, post-Christian progressive movement.

This movement, of course, is a heresy. If Arianism was one of the greatest heresies according to orthodox belief, then the modern Left is all that squared. After all, Arianism still placed Christ as the greatest of created beings. He simply was not divine. The modern left reduces him to a philandering son of a first century whore. At best. If he existed at all. Just like all other religions, ours is merely a collection of myths, lies, fairy tales and legends.

With that, eternity is more or less irrelevant. We probably all go to some happy place. Or become worm food. Either/or, the salvation of humanity lies in moon colonies and intergalactic space travel. On an individual level, it’s more or less relegated to behind the stove, much less the back burner. Really. When was the last time anything in the modern, secular left even came close to acting like the hereafter held any importance at all?

As a result, the here and now becomes the sum total of everything that matters. And as my boys appraise it, the modern Left promises a world in which I am affirmed and celebrated, I get everything I want, with whoever I want, as often as I want. And I shouldn’t’ have to struggle for it and if anything goes wrong, it’s everyone else’s fault. Oh, and no stuffy noses or bruised elbows.

To that end, free sexual indulgences without consequences is the bread and peace, meat and circuses of the modern left. It is the carrot that it dangles before a population increasingly droning on like so many extras eloped from the set of the Walking Dead. And in its continued assault on reality, the issue of homosexual normality has become the crux. Not only does it fulfill the ultimate promises of unlimited sexual pleasures (without gay sex, you can’t easily indulge in group sex), but it is the wedge between any traditional religious understandings of morality and modern understandings.

And given that Pope Francis has repeatedly reserved his passions and anger for those things despised by the Left, while setting aside the sins of the Left as being those minor issues with which we can respectfully and lovingly disagree, it’s not hard to see why the Left loves the man.

After all, he could change Church teaching. Catholics say it could never happen. But it has happened. The Catholic Church today would be a foreign world if you dropped a 11th century Catholic in a modern parish. And not just because of electricity and fashion. The Pope, with the vested power of the doctrine of Infallibility, could conceivably change things. The insistence that no pope could ever do so is, itself, a belief. Even without invoking ex cathedra, he can certainly tell the Church how to do things differently with almost anything outside of dogmatic utterances. Hence the Death Penalty. After 2000 years changed, with no real clear explanation for why. Not one that makes sense anyway.

But if Pope Francis doesn’t change Church teaching, he’s done enough. As far as the press is concerned, and the majority of liberal Catholics who are loving it as well, he has made it clear that those sins associated with the Left are off the table. Sure, in some old, dusty canon law book on a shelf somewhere, it is still wrong. But does it even matter?

I think this as I read through a piece by the Detroit Free Press. Note the tone. Note the basic assumptions. It’s clear that changes are on the horizon; that it no longer even matters much to be living in what, technically, the Church would consider to be mortal sin. If mortal sin exists anywhere in the Church of Francis, it is on Wall Street or in the halls of Western Democracies. Mortal sin in a Church that increasingly embraces the universalism of post-Christian liberalism doesn’t mean much anyway. And the couple highlighted, as well as the author of the piece, know it.

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