Of Course We Deserve Francis!

This is why we deserve Francis.

 

I read around of the one or other blogger who said he did not do anything to deserve Francis. He said worse and, in my eyes, unintentionally blasphemed. But I would like to dwell on the first point.

To say that one did not deserve Francis is akin to say that one did not crucify Christ. We all crucified Christ. We all deserve Francis.

Catholicism is diachronous. We pay for the sins of our fathers, and we carry in us their own sinfulness. We, as Catholics, carry in us both the guilt of Adam and Eve and the guilt of Vatican II.

History shows us that God allows the Church to go through corrupted times. It was so in the IX and X Century, or in the times of the Great Heresies. It is so now.

Let us take a peasant in Central Europe around 975. What had he done to deserve the astonishing merry-go-round of largely corrupted Popes that occurred in his age? Well, first of all, probably a lot. Secondly, it is not about him, and even the most virtuous peasant of his vicinity did carry the guilt of the corruption of his first ancestors.

Some might say that the peasant in 975 could go on with his life blissfully unaware of all the turmoil in Rome, whilst we have to endure echoes of Francis every day. But it works both ways. The peasant did not know much of the turmoil, and this was to his advantage. But we (collectively speaking) have at our disposal the Internet, and with it a knowledge of what the Church should be far more advanced than the one of that peasant. What do we do, collectively, to restore sanity? Not much, as abundantly showed by your own Parish church, where every Sunday atrocious songs are singed in astonishing out of tune voices, by tattooed people wearing flips-flops, treating the Church like a kindergarten, and deciding what they believe or do not believe of what the Church teaches even as they stand up and say the Creed. All this, in the noisy surrounding of a protestantised Mass that clearly falls short in honouring God truly present in the Tabernacle; something, by the way, which many of them likely not even believe.

V II is the reflection of the arrogance of our times, but it is also nourished by that arrogance. The same arrogance, incidentally, which leads people to say that they do not deserve Francis.

Oh, I deserve Francis! I deserve Francis big time!! Firstly, because I am a wretched sinner. Secondly, because I have, in my life, thought for a long time that I could, also, make my own religion, and the mitigating circumstances of atrocious Catholic formation and parents not interested in religion do not fully excuse my fundamental mistake. Thirdly, because the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the sons. Fourthly (and most importantly) because it is completely logical that God would punish the arrogance of Vatican II by sending Popes like Francis and, I am afraid, his successors. 

Play heretic games, win heretic prizes.

In a sense, the statement that one has not done anything to deserve Francis (made by a person who is, very likely, a good Catholic and, most probably, better than me) is a good portrait of exactly the arrogance of this generation, of the strain of rebellion the post-V II Catholics have in their blood. We think we can decide what kind of Pope we have deserved. We even think that a God that sends us Francis, to use the words of that blogger as I remember them, “sucks” (if it wasn’t that, if was something to that effect). See? The rebellion is just there, in black and white.

God has allowed Francis to become Pope for the same reason why he always allows evil to happen: that good may come out of it.

In this case the good appears evident both individually and collectively; individually, so that we are led to do penance, and pray more, for the restoration of sanity. Collectively, so that we understand that Francis is the unavoidable by-product of Vatican II, and the rebellion that V II made official will lead to worse and worse consequences as the decades go by, until sanity is restored again.