To Give a Defense
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At The Federalist, you can find this long and rambling article by Paul Rahe. Mr. Rahe goes on for almost 2500 words, attempting to tie together a bunch of disparate events scattered over a sixty-year period in order to prove that the Lavender Mafia “controls the papacy and the Vatican overall.” I can’t refute it all in one blog article. But I want to call your attention, dear reader, to this one sentence: “Since his election, Pope Francis has done everything within his power to soften and subvert the church’s teaching concerning human sexuality.”
The pope’s so-called softening and subverting is evidence, for Mr. Rahe, of the LM’s grasp upon the Chair of St. Peter. Problem is, Mr. Rahe gives not one example of it. We’re supposed to take it at face value that the pope has softened and subverted every chance he has gotten; for, after all, that’s what puppets of the LM do. But I’m a skeptic. I go through the record and I find many, many examples of just the opposite. So an example or two from Mr. Rahe would have helped me out, but I search his article in vain. Not one example in 2500 words. Sloppy work by Mr. Rahe. Sloppy, sloppy.
I TOLD ME SO
So how does Mr. Rahe know? Well, he cites an article at Vanity Fair by one Michael Joseph Gross. “The Vatican’s Secret Life”: that’s the title. Mr. Gross “interviewed a great many clerics in Rome,” presumably all members of the Lavender Mafia, though we’re supposed to accept Mr. Rahe at his word on this. And all these clerics were “delighted with the choice of Bergoglio.”
Well, yes, that is very fishy.
And, says Mr. Rahe, the St. Gallen Group—which we are told, upon Mr. Rahe’s solemn word and his solemn word alone, is lavender through and through—promoted Cardinal Bergoglio for the papacy. We know they did because Cardinal Gottfried Daneels said so in his memoirs. And Daneels said the opening prayer at the announcement of Bergoglio’s election. So what do you have to say about that, huh?
Well, curiouser and curiouser. We’re connecting the dots and all that.
But wait, but wait, Mr. Rahe has more:
All of this—including the machinations of the St. Gallen Group and the role Daneels played—is laid out in detail by an English Catholic, who was in Rome during the early year of this papacy, and who writes under the pseudonym Marcantonio Colonna. The title is The Dictator Pope: The Inside Story of the Francis Papacy.
SILLY SILLY
Oh, dear God, Mr. Rahe is promoting The Dictator Pope? Really? I mean, sources tell me that the blog Where Peter Is, whose sole purpose is defending Pope Francis against attacks from the PFDS-besotted, took the time to bother with Phil Lawler’s nonsense, and Ross Douthat’s nonsense, but would not take the time to deal with the Dictator garbage. It’s Alex Jones-level caca; it promotes the long-discredited “Francis is a Peronist” narrative, and things like that. If you believe it, you would probably also believe there’s a lavender mafia at Area 51 and that the Beatles really wanted the White Album to be the Lavender Album but George Martin talked them out of it.
Among the top promoters of that book were the usual reactionary suspects—Fake Site News; Church Petulant; 1 Luther 5; The Remnut. The cream of the kook.
The author’s real name is H.J.A. Sire; he was suspended from the Order of Malta after writing the book, and that’s really saying something if you know anything about the Order of Malta. Let’s just say Cardinal Burke was their patron, and the word is, it suited him.
Dave Armstrong actually bothered to do some background research on Sire, and what he found is quite eye-opening.
Sire is anti-Vatican II. He says that the Council was “a betrayal of the Church’s faith.” It should be “reversed,” according to Sire. Gaudium et Spes, he says, is a “deplorable document.”
Sire backs the SSPX, which is not in communion with the Church.
Sire rejects the Novus Ordo. He even goes so far as to say that many ordinations that occurred under the Pauline rite may not be valid.
Sire rejects ecumenism. He calls it a “perversion.” He dimisses it as “indifferentism.”
So. What I gather from all this is that Sire is a kook and he is promoted by kooks. If he’s rejecting Vatican II and backing the schismatic SSPX, I immediately hold anything he has to say about the pope suspect.
IF I WERE KING I’D NEED A QUEEN
But you’d certainly think there’d be evidence if the pope were softening and subverting Church teaching on sexual ethics. And if the Lavender Mafia is behind it, you’d really expect to see this softening and subverting when it comes to LGBT issues dear to their own heart. Wouldn’t you? But do we find this, if we go searching?
Well, Cardinal Bergoglio strikes me as a very odd person for the Lavender Mafia to have set its heart upon as their man for the papacy. Bergoglio, after all, was the man who called the push for same-sex marriage in Argentina “a machination of the father of lies.” I mean, my goodness, even Fake Site News reported this news. E’en they.
Jorge Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, is known to LifeSiteNews readers as a valiant defender of life and family. In terms of homosexual “marriage,” Cardinal Bergoglio fought valiantly to have the law in Argentina continue to protect the traditional family.
Well, dear heavens, why would the lavender mafia have wanted this guy? Fake Site reports: “To the clergy of the parishes, Bergoglio requested that all of them read from the pulpits a declaration defending the true definition and understanding of marriage.”
Well, maybe the lavender mafia knew that Pope Francis could be turned to the gay side of the Church after his election to the papacy. He’d be like Anakin. The problem with that is, LGBT groups have been quite unhappy with Pope Francis. In Amoris Laetitia 56 the pope criticized an “ideology of gender” which “denies the reciprocity in nature of a man and a woman.” Gender ideology, the pope said, “envisages a society without sexual differences, thereby eliminating the anthropological basis of the family.” To combat this, the pope went on in AL 285, “the young need to be helped to accept their own body as it was created. … An appreciation of our body as male or female is also necessary for our own self-awareness in an encounter with others different from ourselves.”
Oh, LGBT groups were not happy with any of that. “No joy!” cried Dignity USA. “When it comes to same-sex relationships and gender identity questions,” said Marianne Duddy-Burke, “Francis simply reiterates the long-standing teachings of the Church. There is no flexibility.”
Well, horrors, the pope is Catholic. But where is this softening and subverting that Mr. Rahe of The Federalist is so drop-dead sure we can find in the pope’s teaching? Ms. Duddy-Burke is a leader of LGBT Catholics; she finds the pope inflexible. How now?
And please explain to me. If, as Mr. Rahe insists, the pope stacked the pre-synod meetings with Lavender Mafia stooges, how is it that Amoris Laetitia came out beating up on gender ideology with great hammers of orthodoxy and Ms. Duddy-Burke found no joy? How did this happen?
And I must point out that the pope has a habit of calling gender ideology “indoctrination” and comparing it to the Hitler Youth. Remember this? (Probably not; probably you were wailing in your soup about the rabbits. But he compared gender ideology to the Hitler Youth in the same interview.) LGBT apologists at the Daily Screech were shocked, shocked.
I’m sorry, but I’ve been writing about this for five years now. I have binders full of quotes. Remember when Pope Francis was supposed to be conspiring to undermine Humanae Vitae? I do, for I wrote about it. I cited Amoris Laetitia 80:
Nonetheless, the conjugal union is ordered to procreation “by its very nature.” The child who is born “does not come from outside as something added on to the mutual love of the spouses, but springs from the very heart of that mutual giving, as its fruit and fulfillment. He or she does not appear at the end of a process, but is present from the beginning of love as an essential feature, one that cannot be denied without disfiguring that love itself. From the outset, love refuses every impulse to close in on itself; it is open to a fruitfulness that draws it beyond itself. Hence no genital act of husband and wife can refuse this meaning.
I tell you, there’s some real softening and subverting going on there.
Remember when Fake Site News and Crisis!!! said that Pope Francis accepts same-sex civil unions? I do, for I wrote about it. It was a lie. Here’s what the pope actually said:
What can we think of marriage between people of the same sex? “Matrimony” is a historical word. Always, in humanity, and not just in the Church, it was a man and a woman. It’s not possible to change it just like that. … It’s not possible to change it. It is part of nature. That’s how it is. Let us call it, then, “civil unions.” Let us not play with truths.
It’s true that behind all this we find gender ideology. In books, kids learn that it’s possible to change one’s sex. Could gender, to be a woman or to be a man, be an option and not a fact of nature? This leads to this error.
Let us call things by their names. Matrimony is between a man and a woman. This is the precise term. Let us call the same-sex union a “civil union.”
Now, the pope does not mean civil unions are good or acceptable; what he does mean is, okay, since they exist, we have to call them something, let’s just not say “marriage.” Because it’s not marriage. “Let’s not play with truths,” he says.
Boy, I tell you, that lavender mafia sure found just the guy in Pope Francis to go softening and subverting, didn’t they? They really got the papacy in their gay hands. I could go on and on with this all day; I’ve got binders full of quotes; but I’ll stop there.
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