The Pope Francis Haters

[rug]

by Michael Sean Winters | Jul. 17, 2014

Fr. Dwight Longenecker has done the Church a great service in publishing an article at Patheos in which he advises those conservative Catholics who do not like Pope Francis on how they can best cope with this pontificate.

The service Fr. Longenecker provides, however, is not the one he seems to have intended. His aim was to provide a rationalization for the discontented. In fact, his article is a window into the world of a certain type of U.S. conservative Catholic, we might call them the “Tea Party Catholics,” the 15% in polls who do not approve of Pope Francis, and the conversations they are having. Regrettably, I suspect those who disapprove of Pope Francis constitute a larger share of the clergy and the episcopate than the laity. When bishops temporize in public, as we have seen for example in Bishop Robert Morlino’s ill-advised interviews, or in comments from Cardinal Raymond Burke, you can bet that those same prelates, in private, are hearing, or saying, the kinds of things Fr. Longenecker records in this remarkable piece. And, before he got booted off the Congregation for Bishops, Cardinal Burke was able to place many like-minded prelates in some prominent sees.

Longenecker writes:

Some have given up on Pope Francis. Others say he is “the false prophet” who will accompany the anti Christ in the end times. Others don’t like his dress sense, grumble about his media gaffes and some think they are all intentional and that he is a very shrewd Jesuit who wants to undermine the Catholic faith.

Clearly, Father is not speaking to the same Catholics I speak with, although I did hear a bishop speculate on the fact that “we can’t dismiss the possibility that there could be another anti-pope.” I like the way Fr. Longenecker, following a model set forth previously by Archbishop Chaput, and by the Wizard of Oz before that, places these concerns in the mouths of others, nonetheless giving them oxygen by reporting them. The idea that Pope Francis “is a very shrewd Jesuit who wants to undermine the Catholic faith” really did not need to be reported in order to continue with the article, did it? And, the observation reads like something you would find in an early eighteenth century Jansenist tract, an analogy that bears further reflection because of the Jansenist tendencies of the anti-Francis brigade.

http://ncronline.org/blogs/distinctly-catholic/pope-francis-haters

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/standingonmyhead/2014/07/ten-things-to-remember-if-pope-francis-upsets-you.html

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1. I think there's nothing new here

For a lot of the "Tea Party Catholics" both John Paul II and Benedict XVI were either barely conservative enough for them or even not conservative enough for their tastes. Most of them stayed in the larger Catholic church but there are plenty of splinter groups - such as SSPX - who are full of people who hate everything that has happened in the church after the 1960s. One of Benedict's biggest blunders was kissing up to the SSPX and trying to bring them back in to the fold while ignoring the hemorrhaging of people out of the church.

Also there are people on this Earth who complain no matter what. The Cardinals could have elected Raymond Burke and the tea party Catholics would still complain.