Why Pope Francis Is Losing

Alas, he has come back...

I have just written about the rather unprecedented (I think; the German clergy is certainly not new to provocations) initiative of the German clergy, who are more or less collectively, and under the protection of a couple of hundred “experts”, attacking the sacrament of holy orders.

The aggressive attitude and the appeal to a number of “experts” – as if Right and Wrong depended on numbers – remind one of the so-called “Dutch Schism”, also carried out with the help of gatherings, votes on motions, and the like.

Whilst the German Zeitgeist-prostitutes (I insist on this term, because it's the most fitting I can find, and think its use in connection with the German clergy should be greatly increased) are for now not at the level of open defiance of Catholic values the Dutch managed to stage (remaining unchallenged for around fifteen years and unpunished afterwards, one must add) they are certainly not very far away; and in fact, to maintain that open defiance should not be a taboo anymore is, in a sense, defiance already in act.

What consequences can, therefore, be drawn by the growing aggressiveness of the German clergy, now fully devoted to Mammon – the Kirchensteuer – in preference to God – Catholic values -? In my eyes, we can draw the following ones:

Already the fact that the exercise (defined as “four-day meeting”, but clearly the dry run of an open revolt) took place shows how much the Papal authority is suffering. No one fears the Pope, least of all the Germans who are the most powerful contributors to the Church finances. With Bergoglio, they knew they had someone they would not have to be worried about. They are now starting to demand the price of their support. The mere fact that the “meeting” took place is a humiliation for the Holy Father; a humiliation which he has richly deserved merely by allowing that such a gathering, and with such an agenda, be thinkable, let alone executed.

In addition, we must consider the “meeting” cannot and will not remain at the present, already extremely grave level of dissent. It is in the nature of such “revolutionary” movements than every cry for reform be outdone for a louder cry for harder reform. When the point is reached where taboos can be individually questioned, who is to say which taboos shall not be questioned?

The situation in Germany is slowing becoming worse than in Austria, because whilst in Austria the likes of Cardinal “how much I like fags”- Schoenborn at least pretends to want to preserve some kind of orthodoxy, in Germany the top ranks of the Clergy have put themselves, as the Germans love to say, “at the top of the movement”, openly encouraging and formerly promoting dissent within the Church.

Unless Pope Francis wakes up – and I use these words on purpose, in the hope that he is merely sleeping the sleep of the parish priest unaware of what happens around him – he will be remembered as a worse accessory of the demolition troops than Paul VI, whom Francis himself dares to call “great”. I have waited a couple of days before commenting on this, in the hope the Pope would move. Alas…

What I fear we must brace ourselves for is a Papacy marked by semi-autonomous provinces, each one lead by a clique of prostituted clergy making their own policy to please the masses, and abandoning themselves to horrible abuses in the sure knowledge the Pontiff – who is even ashamed of the title – will limit himself to this or that admonition and this or that exhortation, but in the substance will simply ... sleep.

Pope Francis is clearly losing control of the Church, and the horrible question is whether he wants it in the first place. What we see as a humiliation for the Pope, he may simply see as the fitting behaviour for… the bishop of Rome.

Mundabor