John Allen at Crux uses the term narcissism:
In the last few days, Pope Francis has faced three remarkable accusations -- one of suffering from narcissistic personality disorder, another of heresy, and a third of dropping the ball on financial reform of the Vatican. In trying to sort through it all, one towering problem is that in an environment defined by hysteria, separating legitimate criticism from the same-old, same-old is increasingly difficult.
....Among other things, Brittos cites a letter from two former Jesuit novices under the future pope, who assert that he was self-promotional about his virtues of humility and simplicity, and that he sought complete submission and loyalty from his disciples - both indicators, according to Blondet, of a narcissistic personality. He goes on to cite clinical descriptions of the disorder, which he claims also characterize Francis’s leadership style as pope...
Read the article here.
2 comments:
I have written this before, true humility for a pope like Pope Francis is to receive in a humble way the trappings of the papacy including the Mozzetta and the papal palace. A pope takes on a new name and new persona, that of Peter, but not the dead Peter, but the living Peter who stands at the splendor of the Gates of Heaven!
100% agree with you. And as I have said before, Benedict XVI humbled himself to be Pope and accept the Office's trappings. Conversely, Francis has advanced his own agenda, his own view on what the optics of his Office should be which will only serve to make miserable a successor who chooses to again embrace these trappings. It isn't humility to reject an apartment only to live in a hotel that is a short walk away, to waste resources by accepting delivery of an overly used car shipped halfway around the world simply to cross the Vatican campus and to wear dark trousers that can be seen through your ill-fitting cassock. Though he might 'say the black and do the red' when he celebrates mass, it is joyless to watch and equally joyless to observe his dower expressions and impatience with any delay doing God's work. I struggle to see any splendor of the Gates of Heaven watching him. I mostly see and sense an angry socialist and revolutionary, with a worldview inextricably cemented in the environment from which he came and locked within the era of his youth.
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