LARRY CHAP ON THE BACKWARDNESS TO 1968 POPE FRANCIS HAS UNLEASHED OR IS IT “RE-UNLEASHED”???

Larry Chap is a great writer, although some of his words and phrases can distract from his point because you have to focus on the words to understand what the heck he is saying while missing his main point, but I digress. 

But he hits the nail on the head. 

I have complained about all those people Pope Francis has appointed for the synodal way or who try to explain what the hell the synod on synod is, while never mentioning God, soteriology, the Communion of Saints or anything pious or spiritual. Their explanations are the closed circle of the horizontal church being self-referential and talking about inclusion to widen the circle, or expand the tent. But it’s horizontal and there is not verticality leading to God and eternal life in heaven. It is the old battle against Marx who said that heaven is the opiate of Christians, so progressives get rid of that in order to be Marxist. 

But Pope Francis speeches and writings, while often incoherent and easily interpreted in multiple ways, always includes a deep Jesuit spirituality focused on Jesus and our Blessed Mother. He recognizes the devil and speaks of him often and the spiritual battle which the devil initiates against individuals and the Church. 

You can read Larry Chap’s long commentary HERE. 

Here is an excerpt:

 In other words, the burning question of who controls the modern narrative of Catholicism—which is the ecclesial issue of the past sixty years—never went away, despite popes John Paul and Benedict. What we are witnessing in the current torments within the Church is a struggle over irreducible, and therefore intractable, debates rooted in irreconcilable theological first principles. What we are witnessing is nothing short of a wholesale recrudescence of old guard, post-Vatican II progressivism, now linked to ever more transgressive attempts at revision, with a special focus on moral theology in particular. In 1968 it was Humanae Vitae and contraception; today it is LGBTQ everything, but the overall project is the same: The Church must change her moral theology, with an eye toward baptizing the sexual revolution, or it will perish.

And that brings me to the current pontificate. It is, in my view, best read as an attempt to revive a version of the controlling narrative of the Council as an aggiornamento of openness to modern Liberalism and not the aggiornamento of a prophetic engagement and critique. Seen in this light, Pope Francis is a useful tool for the progressives in that bigger project, regardless of his stated faithfulness to the Tradition. He is useful so long as papal authority is required in order to undermine or even destroy episcopal authority. This explains why, in the midst of all of this hoopla over a more “synodal” and less Roman Church, we see the contradiction of an increasing centralization of power in Rome as the progressives gradually gain control of the various Vatican dicasteries.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that this is the agenda of Pope Francis. His words and official teachings show no evidence of this kind of institutional self-immolation where centralized authority is invoked in order to destroy centralized authority—or even, as in the extreme case of the German synodal way, the destruction of episcopal authority as such. What is puzzling in the extreme is that Pope Francis, despite the sound theology in his words, has empowered the progressive wing of the Church in very significant ways through his various episcopal appointments.

The prelates, priests, and theologians that Pope Francis apparently prefers and thus promotes, are cut out of the cloth of modern, performative transgression. The subjective categories of human “experience”, described in terms of a deeply psychologistic and sociologistic register, are now the privileged loci for where God’s Revelation takes place. They are often even viewed as standing in tension with, if not in outright contradiction to, the traditional loci of Incarnation, Scripture, and Tradition. It is not the traditional concept of the third person of the Holy Trinity that is being developed here, but rather a witch’s brew of Feuerbach, Freud, Kinsey, and pop psychology of the angel pin/dream catcher boutique shop variety. And this new “Church on the move” theology is the apotheosis of the modern, rootless, therapeutic self so ably described by Carl R. Trueman in The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, and as such has the double distinction of being both false andboring.