Borat Meets A Clown

In Kazakhstan there is a world meeting of “leaders” of “traditional religions”.

It sounds so good, doesn’t it? “Traditional”, like a tiramisù recipe. “Religion”, meaning everybody is very pious. “Meeting”, which makes everything oh so inclusive.

These exercises are all very misleading. I mean, they might make sense if you are, say, a Buddhist (and are, therefore, misled), but they certainly don’t make any sense for a Christian.

All these soi-disant “people of god” engage in self-delusion, when not outright self-celebration. They want to look as if they were, as a whole, part of the “right” category of people. Again, this is an unChristian perspective.

There is only one Church.

There is only one Truth.

There is only one Saviour.

When this is understood, all the rest falls into line. Let me spell it for you: all other religions are false religions, and all Christians who are not Catholics are wrong in a variable degree of objective wrongness and subjective culpability.

There, see how simple it is? When things are seen from the right perspective, this Kazakh meeting becomes a meeting of wrong people wanting to keep souls away from their Saviour, or from His Church. It cannot be any differently, because truth does not change with the latitude, or the climate, or the “spirit of the time”.

The spirit of the time put the “meeting” ahead of Christ. The exercise obviously flattens everything toward a minimum common denominator: we, “traditional” “religious” “leaders”, believe in something.

What is lost in all this is exactly what is most important of all: Christ.

I like chocolate ice cream. You like vanilla. The guy over there prefers strawberry, and the fourth one nougat. Let’s have a meeting!

Now, all this would be sufficiently scandalous if one Christian organisation (say: a small, ridiculous, dying outfit like some Quacker or Methodist sect, provided they still exist) decided to signal virtue and take part in such an exercise. But it becomes, undoubtedly, the devil’s work if even the One True Church, represented by the Successor of Peter, takes part in it and contributes to this utter de-Christianised “let’s sing kumbaya together” exercise. Choosing to focus on what “unites us” is exactly to choose to ignore what divides us; and what divides us is, exactly, Christ.

For Francis to choose that his knee is not well enough for the Ukraine (no criticism from me here), but is good enough to fly the other side of the planet to preach, in fact if not in words, religious indifferentism, is quite in line with both the church-destroying thinking of V II and the church-hating stance of the Clown Pope.

A clown pope Who flies to Kazakhstan and makes, in the real world, the fictional Borat look very good.