FIVE POINTS TO RATE YOUR POPE LEO'S INTERVIEW WITH CRUX BY UK'S "THE CATHOLIC HERALD"! WE HAVE A NEW SUPREME PONTIFF WHO IS A 10!

The Catholic Herald of the UK has a commentary on Pope Leo's Crux interview. You can read it HERE.

Here are FIVE POINTED money bytes from their commentary:

Pope Leo has given an interview to Crux, and revealed his mind. But the exercise to read his mind needs a little code-breaking.

The news is good. It’s more than good. It’s excellent: the Pope is a Catholic. 

Traditional Latin Mass  

1.  Synodality could mean so many things. Pope Francis allowed it to be used as a platform to justify changing the teaching of the Church. Pope Leo is going to use it to allow the Church to be reminded of the teaching and the need of the Church.

What will happen if “we sit down and talk about" the Latin Mass? The Church will articulate the position that was always true BF (Before Francis). The bishops whom Francis consulted will be able to tell the truth about what they really said. The evidence that the TLM is the antidote to the loss of enchantment will get a hearing. The few diehard Novus Ordo fanatics will be shown to be the tiny minority of late modernity pensioners, stuck in a kind of time-warp shaped by John Lennon and E.E. Cummings. 

Women 

2.  There are parts of the world that never really promoted the permanent deaconate, and that itself became a question: Why would we talk about ordaining women to the diaconate if the diaconate itself is not yet properly understood and properly developed and promoted within the Church?

The Pope added: “I also wonder, in terms of a comment I made at one of the press conferences I participated in in the synod, in terms of what has oftentimes been identified as clericalism in the present structures of the Church. Would we simply be wanting to invite women to become clericalised, and what has that really solved?”

The defusing of the feminist assault is achieved with the simple innocence of asking a prior question: “How do we avoid more clericalism?”

 LGBTQ++++++++++++++++++

3. He has thought carefully and strategically about this. What he does each time it to dismantle the secular platform that the heterodox question has had built for it.

Here, he turns to the strategy of St Paul in Ephesians 3. Christians don’t have adjective. There is no such thing as a “gay” Christian. Just a baptised Christian who hands their sexuality over to Christ to mend, heal and direct it.

How does he implement this in the conversation. First, the unattributed anecdote which firms up one’s own position.

“I recall something that a cardinal from the eastern part of the world said to me before I was Pope, about ‘the western world is fixated, obsessed with sexuality’. A person’s identity, for some people, is all about sexual identity, and for many people in other parts of the world, that’s not a primary issue in terms of how we should deal with one another.  

“What I’m trying to say is what Francis said very clearly when he would say, ‘todos, todos, todos’. Everyone’s invited in.”

But whereas Pope Francis offered no caveat, no conditionality – hence his words were certainly heard to be the unconditional welcome of therapeutically driven relativism – Pope Leo slips in a little religious language which has the effect of reversing the meaning of what Pope Francis said.

“But I don’t invite a person in because they are or are not of any specific identity,” Pope Leo says. “I invite a person in because they are a son or daughter of God.”

You don’t come in defining yourself as a gay, bisexual or trans person and requiring everyone to accept you as you present yourself. You come in as a created person in need of redemption. If being the son or daughter of God means anything, it means the transformation of secular categorisations in the pursuit of holiness. 

 Fiducia Supplicans

4.  And then in another puncturing of the progressive campaign, which is as elegant as it is swift, he once more reverses what Pope Francis intended by giving priority to the teaching of the Church instead of undermining it with ambiguity. He prioritises marriage and then goes on to consider gay blessings.

“In Northern Europe they are already publishing rituals of blessing ‘people who love one another’, is the way they express it, which goes specifically against the document that Pope Francis approved, Fiducia Supplicans, which basically says, of course we can bless all people, but it doesn’t look for a way of ritualising some kind of blessing because that’s not what the Church teaches."

When “what the Church teaches” is given the prior interpretative leverage it ought always to have had, the dragon of ambiguity is slain. 

Conclusion: Prayer & Mystery! 

5. He ends with a plea to talk about the Latin Mass as a door to prayer and mystery, not as a political tool. Breaking the code, it was the progressives who made it political. The devotees of the Latin Mass wanted prayer and mystery.

The arguments, he surmises, were “not helpful for people who were looking for a deeper experience of prayer, of contact with the mystery of faith that they seemed to find in the celebration of the Tridentine Mass”.

Pope Leo does not need to reverse the work of his predecessor. He will let a synodality that invokes the Magisterium do that.