It would be
funny if it wasn’t so tragic — and, frankly, silly. With increasing regularity, headlines about
Pope Francis appear that seem calculated to shock Catholics and non-Catholics,
believers and non-believers alike.
FRANCIS FRENZY FULMINATES FAITHFUL!
PAPAL PRONOUNCEMENTS PROMOTE PONTIFICAL PERVERSION! VATICAN VEILS VILE VEHEMANCE!”
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| "Use your head, Amigos. I didn't say it." |
What’s
remarkable about the whole thing, frankly, is how old this sort of “news”
is. It’s all happened before. As they say in the prophecy biz, Non novum sub soles — “Nothing new under
the sun.”
Take the case
of Pope Leo XIII, for example. Today, of
course, Everybody Loves Leo. It’s a
shame that the Catholic Church already had one Leo the Great, because good old
Cardinal Pecci, who took the name Leo on his election in 1878 after the death
of Mean Ol’ Pio Nono, was the first modern pope and the guy who, like, totally
transformed the papacy, and should have been called “Pope Leo the Greatest.”
. . . which is
probably why so many people during Leo’s pontificate hated his guts. And every other part of him. Right?
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| "They did the same thing to me, Dude." |
Both Leo and
Francis came as surprises. Not a few
people back in 1878 thought that Pius IX was the last pope. With the loss of the Papal States that had
provided a solid foundation (more or less) for the institution for well over a
thousand years, it looked like the end.
Pius had managed to hold out against the inevitable on inertia alone,
and had waited out nearly two decades hiding in the Vatican in anticipation of
the ax finally falling.
By the way,
these are not facts, but opinions that were widely held back then.
Leo was the
ideal candidate to preside over the dissolution of the papacy. Elderly and frail, some of the cardinals
electing him didn’t expect him to live long enough to be installed. A virtual nobody, having spent decades buried
in the obscure diocese of Perugia, his diplomatic career cut short early on,
nobody thought he had what it took to bring the Church into the nineteenth
century and prepare it for the twentieth.
Right. That’s why he has to date the third longest
pontificate in history, and led the Catholic Church to a global revival. Which (of course) generated all kinds of near-psychotic
hatred from Catholics as well as a level of respect from non-Catholics not seen
for centuries.
Yes, apart from
some dyed in the wool Catholic haters and baiters (William Traynor of the American
Protective Association, anyone?), the most violent opposition to Leo XIII came
from within the very Church he headed.
“Liberals” and “conservatives” only stopped going after each other when
they found something Leo had done that enraged them . . . like everything.
Take, for
example, the effort to adapt old institutions to changing modern conditions. The liberals, who started calling themselves
“modernists,” wanted to do new things in new ways. Change for the sake of change was their
mantra.
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| "I said the State is a 'Mortall God.' Worship it." |
And the
conservatives? They started calling
themselves traditionalists. They wanted
to freeze the Church in the Middle Ages and do old things in old ways. The problem there, of course, is that while
this is not the mistake of the modernists of having man without God, locking
things into the past pretty much gives you God without man.
And the
orthodox? You know, the people who try
to do old things, but in new ways in order to accommodate to the modern world
without giving up anything of substance?
The ones to whom Leo addressed his encyclicals? They tended to do all right, at least, if
they didn’t start listening to those who wanted to subordinate the Church to
the State or the State to the Church, the modernist/liberals and the
traditionalist conservatives, respectively.
So what has
this got to do with Pope Francis?
Plenty. And we’ll get to that
tomorrow.
#30#