By DEXTER DUGGAN
Flying back to the Vatican on September 15 from an Eastern European trip, Pope Francis was about as blunt as could be about abortion while taking some questions from reporters on the plane, as is his habit.
According to the Vatican transcript, the Pope said, in part: “Abortion is more than a problem, abortion is murder. Abortion . . . without half a word: whoever makes an abortion, kills. Take any book on embryology, of those that students study in medical faculties. . . .
“Not a person? It’s a human life, period. And this human life must be respected,” the Pope said. “This principle is so clear, and to those who cannot understand it I would ask two questions: Is it right to kill a human life to solve a problem? Scientifically it is a human life. Second question: Is it right to rent a hitman to solve a problem?. . .
“This is why the Church is so harsh on this subject, because, if She accepts this, it is as if She accepts daily murder,” Francis said.
This was part of the considerably longer answer he gave — the longest of any of his responses on this flight — regarding the topic of abortion, Communion, and pro-abortion politicians.
Murder, killing, renting a hitman, daily murder. Very serious subjects.
Certainly people who commit even grave sins can seek repentance and be forgiven. But they must be repentant. Pastors merely are fulfilling some of their vocation when they publicly call brazen public sinners to necessary repentance. A pastor who wouldn’t do his job doesn’t deserve to have his job.
If a prominent Catholic politician were so bold as to set up a table on the town square where he openly took bribes, handed out payoffs, and gave orders to kill his opponents, the rest of his Catholic congregation justifiably would be scandalized if he kept showing up for Mass every weekend to walk down the center aisle for the Eucharist.
His gait is a bit unsteady due to his pockets loaded with bribes. And also handguns to provide to his hired assassins. Does the Church mean what it says about the Ten Commandments or not? If he can get away with this while the pastor gives him a big hug at the front door every week, why not the rest of us?
While Pope Francis was explicit about the murderous nature of abortion on September 15, he rambled around regarding Communion, apparently trying to avoid the conclusion he would have to reach if a Eucharist-hungry but faithless Catholic politician was giving daily orders to hitmen at his busy table on the town square.
The explanation for the rambling should be evident. Pope Francis, like many other politically committed left-leaning clergy, does not want to hurt left-wing politicians, no matter the cost. That is why the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops finds itself in its current predicament.
No matter how immoral the Democrat Party’s agenda increasingly grew, the USCCB thought it could avoid confrontation with its political pals. Dem leaders, seeing there was no price to pay for thumbing their nose at moral standards, kept pushing further, until so-called President Biden proudly parades down the aisle for Communion, with the blood of babies on his hands.
The Democrats’ congressional ranks used to be full of pro-lifers, but they all were purged, primaried away, or chased off to the Republican Party. Catholic Church bureaucrats weren’t a bit as distressed at this winnowing as they would have been if their left-wing political agenda was mocked.
USCCB cowardice has brought bishops to the blind alley they should have foreseen.
Was Pope Francis equally slow to condemn a politician — not even a Catholic man — who transgressed a different one of the Pope’s standards? Certainly not. When Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump spoke with wonderful intuition in 2016 about the need to build walls against unauthorized invaders, the Pope laid it on the borderline.
National Public Radio posted on February 18, 2016: “‘I’d just say that this man is not Christian if he said it in this way,’ Francis told reporters in a midflight press conference after a trip to Mexico. ‘A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian,’ Francis said, according to the Associated Press’ translation of the press conference.”
Of course Pope Francis, like many other prominent people, lives behind heavy protection. He has strong walls around the Vatican, instead of bridges and tunnels into his private rooms for unvetted trespassers. The Pope even has the Swiss Guards, not the Swiss Tender Welcomers.
As for a lonely rancher miles from neighbors in southern Arizona, why, cartel gangsters, drug runners, and sex traffickers of little girls should be free to march over his property around the clock, now that denounced bad Christian Trump has been driven from the scene as Biden the Pious tears down whatever walls his trembling arms can.
You don’t even have to be an Easter and Christmas Protestant like Trump to feel the Pope’s spurs. You can be a faithful pro-life Catholic with a tenderness for the Traditional Latin Mass, or even a cardinal like Raymond Leo Burke, to discover some scars on your side.
But as for flagrantly pro-abortion Democratic politicians marching up for Communion? They deserve caresses and sighs. However, any priest who stands up for Catholic belief is no longer a priest, he’s a politician!
Not Prepared?
Said airborne Francis as he made a paean to being “a pastor with the style of God. And God’s style is closeness, compassion, and tenderness. The whole Bible says so. . . .
“Can you tell me: if you are close, you are tender, you are compassionate with a person, would you give [the person] Communion? This is a hypothesis,” Francis said at length. “Be a pastor, the pastor knows what he has to do at all times, but as a pastor. But if he comes out of this pastoral care of the Church, he immediately becomes a politician. . . .
“With this principle I believe that a pastor can move well. The principles are of theology. Pastoral care is the theology and the Holy Spirit who is leading you to do it in the style of God,” he said.
Francis also said that “I do not know the details well” of the situation in the United States — which was what he was asked about — so he would talk about the general principle.
Strange that he had not — despite his role as head of the universal Church — given more study to this pressing question when the head of the U.S. government, declining as a world power though it is, proclaims his faith while exerting himself mightily to ensure as many abortion murders as possible both nationally and internationally, and currently prominently in Texas.
Yet this was not a question the Pope had prepared for?
The final airborne question on September 15 concerned the European Parliament having just called on member states to recognize “same-sex marriages.” The Pope’s reply showed an intriguing window into his thinking.
Not wanting to cast condemnation on homosexuals, Francis nevertheless affirmed traditional Church teaching that “marriage as a sacrament is man-woman.” He continued, “Sometimes, on what I said, there is confusion. Yes, we must, all equal, respect everyone; the Lord is good and will save everyone. Don’t say this out loud [laughs], but the Lord wants the salvation of all.”
Notice the immense change in two successive sentences: “. . . the Lord is good and will save everyone” (a complete repudiation not merely of Christian salvific teaching, or else why did the Jews need the instructions of the Ten Commandments?), and “. . . the Lord wants the salvation of all” (completely true although subject to rejection by unrepentant sinners).
Such imprecision is why the Pope can’t authoritatively revise Church teachings off the cuff aloft, even if up amid eagles’ wings. Blogger Fr. John T. Zuhlsdorf posted on September 15 about this plain plane improbability: “The Church could teach something clearly for a thousand years, but one comment on an airplane overturns everything.”
God didn’t create anyone to go to Hell, but religious tradition issues stern warnings to us to behave ourselves, which shouldn’t come as a surprise to the Pope. The infinitely compassionate Jesus Himself minced no words. Indeed, if everyone goes to Heaven, why did He ever come to be crucified?
In a May 2017 article, the evangelical Gospel Coalition website said: “Jesus doesn’t only reference hell, He describes it in great detail. He says it is a place of eternal torment (Luke 16:23), of unquenchable fire (Mark 9:43), where the worm does not die (Mark 9:48), where people will gnash their teeth in anguish and regret (Matt. 13:42), and from which there is no return, even to warn loved ones (Luke 16:19-31).
“He calls hell a place of ‘outer darkness’ (Matt. 25:30), comparing it to ‘Gehenna’ (Matt. 10:28), which was a trash dump outside the walls of Jerusalem where rubbish was burned and maggots abounded,” the article said. “Jesus talks about hell more than he talks about heaven, and describes it more vividly. There’s no denying that Jesus knew, believed, and warned about the absolute reality of hell.”
Meanwhile, Biden stands on the shoulders of other bad Catholic Democrats who blazed the way for his impiety, including his colleague the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, who died of brain cancer in August 2009.
Kennedy was accorded the traditional Catholic rituals although he never issued a public renunciation of his strong pro-abortionism, including his savage attack against Judge Robert Bork for supposedly wanting to restrict permissive abortion. Kennedy thus played a major role in 1987 in preventing Bork from attaining the Supreme Court seat that Ronald Reagan nominated him to.
Wikipedia says: “The tone of the Bork battle changed the way Washington worked — with controversial nominees or candidates now experiencing all-out war waged against them — and the ramifications of it were still being felt decades later.”
As for whether there’s eternal life, even the secularist New York Times gives us evidence of things lasting a long time, if not necessarily forever.
Reading recent Times letters to the editor, with religious “progressives” lauding Francis, seems only an extension of Catholic “progressive” periodicals way back in the 1960s that were full of hopes soon to be crushed, which they refused to comprehend even while the walls of emptying churches fell down.
Walls that collapsed? Say, borderless Biden and the Pope may want to hear more about that.
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