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I’m Shocked, Shocked to Find That There is Orthodoxy Going On In This Papacy: Pope Francis Derangement Syndrome Vol. XI

I’m Shocked, Shocked to Find That There is Orthodoxy Going On In This Papacy: Pope Francis Derangement Syndrome Vol. XI

Last updated on: April 4, 2018 at 9:32 pm by Scott Eric Alt

I’m Shocked, Shocked to Find That There is Orthodoxy Going On In This Papacy: Pope Francis Derangement Syndrome Vol. XI 2018-04-04T21:32:05-04:00 Scott Eric Alt

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Pope Francis Derangement Syndrome, in the secular media, has reached a critical mass where more and more poor souls are reporting themselves shocked, shocked to find that the pope is Catholic. Such gasps would trickle in before, but now they seem to be more frequent. Just this weekend there were two meltdowns in the liberal press: the first at MarketWatch, over the shocking discovery that the pope is not in favor of contraception; the second at the Daily Screech, over the shocking discovery that the pope is not in favor of gender theory. I mean, how could such things be? And you really have to marvel when one of these scribblers turns out to be a theology professor at a university that is, so it tells us, Catholic. I understand that there are dissidents at Notre Dame—we all know that!—but that any of them should gape their jaws to learn that the pope is Catholic is a matter of profound wonder to me. Perhaps it shouldn’t be, but it is.

The World Must Be Peopled

I begin at MarketWatch, where Paul Farrell writes to tell us that “Pope Francis really is a capitalist.” Well, this will be news to Rush Limbaugh and Adam Pshaw (he spells it “Shaw”). But Mr. Farrell is not cowed by such names. “Forget his anticapitalist, anticonsumerism rhetoric,” he says with a scornful wave of the hand. The pope is a capitalist! and the reason he knows this is because the pope speaks out against artificial birth control. Watch how Mr. Farrell makes this singular and astonishing leap:

Unless he reverses Catholicism’s outdated and destructive dogma on population control, Francis is destined to help capitalists take absolute control of the global economy and do more damage to Planet Earth’s climate than the “poison of consumerism.”

[Oh? What could do more damage than consumerism? Be patient, for Mr. Farrell is about to tell us. Watch this.]

Yes, thanks to Pope Francis and his dogma on population control, marriage[,] and contraception, capitalists have a steady supply of [Here it is.] new consumers [!] fueling their growth.

Let me translate this for you. In the morose and jaded minds of the neo-Malthusians, human beings are no more than a burden and a tax on existing resources. Mr. Farrell looks at a baby and sees a leech. He is free of any delusion that human persons can also be producers and creators—that they can give as well as take. But when the pope speaks of the value of human life, does he do so in quite so crass a way? We must go and find out, since Mr. Farrell does not tell us; he does not quote Francis even one time. As it turns out, the pope spoke on this very subject on February 12, at his General Audience.

Children are not a problem of reproductive biology, or one of many ways to realize oneself, let alone their parent’s possession. Children are a gift. Do you understand? Children are a gift! …

One loves a son or daughter because he or she is one’s child, not because he or she is beautiful, healthy or good; not because he or she thinks like me or incarnates my desires. A child’s life is intended … for his or her own good, for the good of the family, of society, of all humanity. …

How often do I meet mothers in the square who show me their belly and ask my blessing. These children are loved before they come into the world. This is gratuitousness. This is love. They are loved before they are born, like the love of God, who always loves us first. …

A society of children who do not honor their parents is a society without honor. When one doesn’t honor one’s parents one loses one’s honor. It is a society destined to be filled with greedy and insensitive young people. … [Now here’s the key part.] A society that is greedy when it comes to having children, that doesn’t love to be surrounded by children, that considers them above all to be a bother, a burden, and a risk, is a depressed society.

What we find in all of this is that the pope by no means looks upon human life as though it were a means to an end. He does not say that more people means more profit for fat cats. No such crude idea crosses his mind. Mr. Farrell just superimposes it upon the pope’s opposition to artificial birth control. That tells us more about Mr. Farrell (and none of it good) than it does about Pope Francis. For Francis, children are an inherent gift. We must treasure them for their own sake, and because they come from God. “These children are loved,” he says, “before they come into the world.” Before they consume one thing, before they put one penny in the pocket of a rich man, God loves them. He loves them for no other reason than that they are; I love my child because she is my child; I made her, and she is a gift.

If Mr. Farrell were right about the pope, you would expect to find him saying that children are stacks of cash from heaven, to be treasured because greed is good, and the more children you have, the more greed can come into the world, and the more things can be bought and sold and used, and the more riches will fall into the waiting laps of the Kochs, and the more coins will cling in the coffers of the Catholic Church. But he does not say that; in fact, he turns it around on Mr. Farrell. Greed is not having children. Greed is wringing your hands about what a risk babies are: Why, they might take stuff away from the rest of us! How selfish! says the pope.

Mr. Farrell is all wrought up in a morose knot because he fears that overpopulation will kill all the world’s resources. He’s a philosopher of doom.

Pope Francis really is a capitalist helping other capitalists get richer and richer; he’s helping the dynamic duo of capitalism and its evil twin consumerism bore deeper into the world’s collective conscience, brainwashing seven billion humans. His dogma is helping global population steadily increase to 10 billion by 2050. He’s avoiding food experts who warn that the world can’t feed 10 billion in a limited world of ever scarcer resources. And his actions enhance rather than eliminate the “root cause of all the world’s ills.”

The “root cause of all the world’s ills”—overpopulation? more people than can be fed? This explains ISIS? Am I really to believe that ISIS is going on a murder spree in order to get rid of all the extra people who are eating up all the food? Jihadi John missed a meal and has to whack off a head? Is that the idea?

No. To tell the truth, I am lost at this point. Mr. Farrell can’t seem to decide whether a bunch of new babies means that there will be a bunch of consumers making fat cats fatter, or whether it means that there will be nothing left to consume because all the resources will dry up. I also don’t understand how it can be that the pope’s refusal to give his approval to contraception is the cause of all this overpopulation if, as we’re always told, 99% of Catholics just disregard the teaching anyway. That’s strange.

But the real problem with his article is that Mr. Farrell utterly disregards studies that show that the real problem is underpopulation, not overpopulation. Even the liberal Slate has picked up on this news, in an article written by Jeff Wise in 2013. For although the human population recently reached 7 billion, Mr. Wise mentions one important fact conveniently missing from all doom and panic.

It took humankind 13 years to add its 7 billionth. That’s longer than the 12 years it took to add the 6 billionth—the first time in human history that interval had grown. … In other words, the rate of global population growth has slowed. And it’s expected to keep slowing. Indeed, according to experts’ best estimates, the total population of Earth will stop growing within the lifespan of people alive today. And then it will fall.

We don’t seem to hear anything about this from the neo-Malthusians. As Mr. Wise explains in his article, 2.1 live births per woman are necessary just to maintain a population equilibrium. But in Germany, the birthrate is 1.36, in Spain 1.48, in Italy 1.4. And even in poor nations, the birthrate has drastically fallen: Since 1960, it has sunk in Mexico from 7.3 to 2.4, in India from 6 to 2.5, and in Brazil from 6.15 to 1.9. The pope himself noted, with alarm, the declining birth rate in Italy. And not long after, the UK Telegraph reported that the birth rate in that country is at its lowest since 1861. “Italy,” we are told, “is a dying country.” But you will search in vain through Mr. Farrell’s article for any mention of that.

In fact, according to Mr. Wise, the real danger is not that resources will go extinct but that the human race will.

According to a 2008 IIASA report, if the world stabilizes at a total fertility rate of 1.5—where Europe is today—then by 2200 the global population will fall to half of what it is today. By 2300, it’ll barely scratch 1 billion. (The authors of the report tell me that in the years since the initial publication, some details have changed—Europe’s population is falling faster than was previously anticipated, while Africa’s birthrate is declining more slowly—but the overall outlook is the same.) Extend the trend line, and within a few dozen generations you’re talking about a global population small enough to fit in a nursing home.

That is why we must reverse the trend. That is why the Church, and the pope, are right about contraception. The world must be peopled, because life is of God and it is good for its own sake. Mr. Farrell does not make the effort to understand what the Church says; he simply flails his arms in a panic about all those leeches on society and then is shocked to find out that the Church is still the Church. What lies behind all this finger-pointing at bogeymen, as the pope tells us, is greed and selfishness. We want the joy of sex without the burden of its normal consequences; but the end of that will be no joy at all, because there will be no life to be joyful about.

http://youtu.be/RzVLQTovv_g

It Started Long Ago in the Garden of Eden

Then, in the Daily Screech, Dr. Candida Moss of Notre Dame and Dr. Joel Baden of Yale Divinity School were shocked (the very title of the article, probably written by an editor for the Screech, declaims that it is “shocking”) to learn that the pope compared gender theory to Hitler Youth indoctrination. Yeah, that Francis. So unpredictable what he’s going to say in these interviews. Dr. Moss & Dr. Baden seem to be confusing two separate papal interviews, since they say that the news only “emerged last week” that the pope had drawn a comparison to both the Hitler Youth and nuclear destruction; but these were separate comparisons, and he made the one to the Hitler Youth during the flight from Manila to Rome last month. That news has been around since at least as early as January 20. The nuclear comparison, which is the one Dr. Moss & Dr. Baden quote in the Screech, was from a different, and earlier, interview that will soon be published in a book called This Economy Kills. We’re just now getting previews of what will be in it.

After the papal interview on the flight from Manila to Rome, it seemed that all anyone wanted to talk about was bunny rabbits, but America Magazine had the full transcript as early as January 19, and anyone who took the time to read it would find that the pope compared gender theory to Hitler Youth indoctrination.

Ideological colonization: I’ll give just one example that I saw myself. Twenty years ago, in 1995, a minister of education asked for a large loan to build schools for the poor. They gave it to her on the condition that in the schools there would be a book for the children of a certain level. It was a school book, a book prepared well, didactically, in which gender theory was taught.

This woman needed the money, but that was the condition. Clever woman, she said yes and did it again and again, and it went ahead, and that’s how it was achieved. This is ideological colonization: They introduce to the people an idea that has nothing to do with the nation; yes, with groups of people, but not with the nation. And they colonize the people with an idea that changes, or wants to change, a mentality or a structure.

During the synod, the African bishops complained about this, which was the same story, certain loans in exchange for certain conditions—I say only these things that I have seen.

Why do I say ideological colonization? Because they take, they really take the need of a people to seize an opportunity to enter and grow strong—with the children. But it is not new: The same was done by the dictatorships of the last century. They entered with their own doctrine … think of the Hitler Youth.

Now, what the pope is describing here is one way in which indoctrination happens: Some ideology, foreign to a culture, becomes condition of the education of the young. He compares that to what the Nazis did in Germany and what the Fascists did in Italy. In the pope’s view, this is how people colonize the mind of another. Dr. Moss & Dr. Baden do not tell us why such words are shocking; perhaps we are meant to think that any time anyone makes any comparison to Hitler, it is shocking, especially it is some idea we are attached to. Any time anyone says, “Hitler did that,” our mouths smash against the floor, as though by reflex. Perhaps doctors shouldn’t use those hammers to hit the knee any more; they should just say, “That’s like Hitler.”

But the real point of the article seems to be for Dr. Moss & Dr. Baden to use the pope’s words as an excuse to clear their minds of some grievances they have with Church teaching.

First, they contest the idea that male and female are “binaries.” On the contrary, they say: Gender is a “spectrum.”

Gender theorists [who I guess have a sort of imperial majesty to proclaim on such matters for the rest of us yokels] argue that the way people identify themselves is the result of social and cultural constructions of gender. This has important ramifications for how we think about biology and sexuality.

But do you see where the slippage is here? Dr. Moss & Dr. Baden speak of “the way people identify themselves” and “how we think about … sexuality” as though thought can stand in the place of reality. The gender theorists may be very right that “people identify themselves” across a spectrum, and that cultural factors influence such things, but where do we learn that reality is nothing more than what people subjectively think? Dr. Moss & Dr. Baden do not say.

Here is the comparison the pope made between gender theory and nuclear weapons:

Let’s think of the nuclear arms, of the possibility to annihilate in a few instants a very high number of human beings. Let’s think also of genetic manipulation, of the manipulation of life, or of the gender theory, that does not recognize the order of creation.

Right. This is true. In the beginning he made them male and female—Jesus said that—so gender theory is destructive of one’s very identity, so much so that it might as well be an ideological nuclear bomb. But Dr. Moss & Dr. Baden do not like that idea at all, and they like it even less that the pope invoked “the order of creation” in order to support it. Dissidents always find that they need to deny first principles. Thus Dr. Moss & Dr. Baden tell us that, in the first chapters of Genesis, “the confluence of tradition, biblical text, and gender runs into some difficulty.”

The first problem they have with the Creation story is that “it has given rise to millennia of female subordination.” Well, there may be a bit of truth in that, though they do not give us any examples of what they have in mind, so it’s hard to know how much of it is based on a misunderstanding of both Genesis 2 and 1 Timothy 2. It’s also hard to know how much of what they describe as “subordination” is in fact something else, quite different from the idea that a woman is less than a man, or that he has mere autocratic authority over her.

Dr. Moss & Dr. Baden do take issue with the Catholic notion of complimentarity, but the problem there is that complementarity has nothing to do with women being somehow inferior to men. Complementarity, as explained by Pope Francis, says that, in marriage, men and women, being as they are different, each complete what the other lacks. In the pope’s own words, “It refers to situations where one of two things adds to, completes, or fulfills a lack in the other.” A husband completes what is lacking in his wife, but it works the other way too: The wife completes what is lacking in her husband. “Complementarity” and “subordination” are opposites. God, it is true, did not create Eve independently of Adam; but Adam was also incomplete without Eve. Dr. Moss & Dr. Baden understand neither the Creation story, nor what the Church means by “complementarity.”

Next, Dr. Moss & Dr. Baden pull out the “Bible contradicts itself” card and claim that Genesis 2—where God creates Adam first, then Eve—contradicts Genesis 1, where he creates them simultaneously. Of course, even if we were to assume that this is true, there is no particular reason why we should prefer Genesis 1 over Genesis 2, other than that’s what we want to do. But it is just not true that Genesis 1 says that God created Adam and Eve at one and the same time.

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. (Gen. 1:26-27)

Now, we do read here that God created Adam and Eve on the sixth day. But there is no reason to believe that the six days of creation were literal, 24-hour days. Nor does the text tell us that God created Adam and Eve in a single divine act. That is just not there; they read it into the words “male and female he created them.” I can say “my wife gave birth to two children” without implying that our children are twins, or that they came out of the birth canal at the same time. (For which I know she is grateful.)

Dr. Moss & Dr. Baden quote the Jewish philosopher Philo in an effort to bolster their case about Genesis 1. Philo, who was a contemporary of Jesus (he lived from ca. 25 B.C. to ca. 50 A.D.), said that the original created person was a single individual who was “neither male nor female.”

But there are two problems here. The first is that Philo did not say that Adam was this original person. Rather, what he said was that God first created a prototype who was neither male nor female, then created Adam out of the clay and Eve from Adam’s rib. Since our first parents are Adam and Eve, and not this hypothetical prototype (which Philo called the “Mind of God”), the gender theory that Dr. Moss & Dr. Baden are trying to advance runs into a bit of a genetic snag.

The second problem is that Philo is not the founder of Christianity. Christ is; and he said, “In the beginning God made them male and female” (Mark 10:6). Pope Francis understands Genesis the way Christ told us to understand it. Christ is God; I assume that means that what He said on this point has some weight. What Philo may have thought does not matter a whit. He was Jewish, but his ideas were more influenced by Hellenism and Platonism than they were rabbinic Judaism. Nor did he speak with the authority of God Himself.

Next, Dr. Moss & Dr. Baden tell us that some versions of the Septuagint translated Genesis 1:27 “male and female he created him,” as though Adam were an androgyne. This is a case where a simple check of the lexicon would help clear up matters a lot. The Hebrew word in question is אֹתָ֛ם, otam, and in every case where it is used in the Old Testament, it is the third person plural pronoun. (Well, okay, I didn’t check all 11,050 uses of the word, but I did a few minutes of spot checking, and it came up as third person plural every time.)

So how did the Septuagint get translated that way? According to Rabbi Dr. Ari Zivotofsky, of Bar-Ilan University in Israel, the reason some Jewish chazal changed otam to the singular was so that no one would misinterpret Genesis 1 to suggest that God created Adam and Eve together at one and the same time. In other words, they did not want anyone to make the error that Dr. Moss & Dr. Baden do. So the translation “him” rather than “them” hurts rather than helps their case. And it certainly proves nothing in the way of modern gender theory, which seems to be their real point in all this: They want to look at Genesis and say, The Church has it wrong but the modern gender theorists have it right. But they have to strain and strangle the text in the process.

Finally, Dr. Moss & Dr. Baden suggest—they seem to need to cling to any the least hope they can—that perhaps Francis is just trying to “placate conservative elements” in the Church and “soothe frayed nerves” that are on edge about the upcoming encyclical.

For Francis, the go-to issues for establishing his conservative bona fides are his opposition to women priests, contraception, and his scathing judgment of childless families. He may just be rehearsing traditional Catholic perspectives, but when you add to this his tendency to use negative and mildly chauvinistic imagery to describe women a pattern emerges. Even if Francis were a closet liberal, he’s a liberal who ranks women’s interests at the bottom of his list of priorities. And if we take Francis’s position on gender theory and the “natural order” seriously, then we give up certain kinds of gender equality, as well as the possibility of creating a fully welcoming environment for same-sex couples or trans-individuals.

It is some odd tic of the liberal that, when they hear orthodoxy from Pope Francis, they have to console themselves that maybe he does not really mean it. Dr. Moss & Dr. Baden seem less concerned that Francis really believes any of this stuff, and more concerned that his pretense is going to hurt the cause of “gender equality.” Francis should stop throwing bones to the wingnuts and just come out of the closet already.

This is all delusion, but therein do we see why their shock exists. Liberals see everything through the prism of their own ideological battles: They cannot conceive of any other way of thinking, don’t care to try to understand it on its own terms, don’t think the pope really means it, and so cannot accept that the Church does not and can not change. And thus, to colonize the Church, they run themselves into a wall convinced that it will not be there and they will be able to smash and lay waste to the City. When their heads get smashed instead, they cry out in shock. Then they tell themselves that, surely, the pope just put that wall up to appease and humor the conservative element; surely he will tear it down tomorrow. Then they make a mad dash at the wall again.

Expect more shock.

***

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