What Do You Do With a Problem Like Pope Francis?

I grew up in the Catholic church of the early 1970s. The church was still trying to find its footing in those first post-Vatican II years that had ushered in a complete overhaul of the faith. Centuries of tradition had been thrown overboard in the blink of an eye. Modernism was in full swing, and ecumenism was the buzzword of the age. The church had finally gotten with the times. No more medieval mumbling in Latin by a priest who had his back turned to the congregation. Now the priest would face the people and carry on a conversation with them in their own language.

I never knew the pre-Vatican II church. I was the first person in my family born into the new church. The grandparents who adopted and raised me were converts. The old ways were still in effect when they joined. For me, I didn’t get a taste of those old ways until I attended a Latin Mass many years later. My first impression was that I didn’t like it. Why couldn’t I hear the priest? Why was he turned away from us? How am I supposed to know when to stand, sit, and kneel? What did anyone get out of this?

It would take me many more years after that to fully realize that the problem wasn’t the Latin Mass. It was that the Catholic church had changed so much after the Vatican II reforms that it made centuries of tradition before it incomprehensible to people like me who weren’t old enough to have been exposed to the old Mass.

There was such an obsession with being ecumenical in those days that anything that carried the slightest whiff of Catholicism was downplayed, excused away, or ignored, lest we alienate our Christian fellow-travelers. Communion rails were ripped out. Gregorian chant and pipe organs gave way to contemporary hymns led by a cantor on an acoustic guitar. New church buildings shunned the inspiring stained glass and towering arches that turned our thoughts heavenward in favor of stark contemporary architecture, complete with the dreaded felt banners hanging behind the altar, which itself was now more of a table for a communal feast than the sacred place where a bloodless sacrifice to God had traditionally taken place.

I remember churches that stuffed their statues into storage closets. I also remember that a nun gave me a rosary as a confirmation present — and I had no idea what to do with it, because no one had ever taught me how to say a rosary. In the pre-Vatican II church, there were too many old ladies praying their beads and not paying attention to the Mass, so the story went, and the proposed solution was to discourage private Catholic devotions while increasing lay participation in the Mass. You were going to say the altar boys’ responses to the priest, in your own language, whether you wanted to or not.

This was the way forward, the faithful were told. It was a bold new day. Years of backwards stodginess and clericalism were being washed away. The church was contemporized, modernized, and liberated.
The problem with all of this is that, in its desire to be loved by and play nice with modern society, the Catholic church could no longer provide any compelling reason why anyone should actually be Catholic, as opposed to anything else — or even nothing at all. I found it telling, when I inevitably went shopping for a new church home, that the vernacular Novus Ordo Mass was essentially indistinguishable from an Episcopal service, or any service at a liturgical Lutheran church. So, again, what reason was there to pick one over the other if they were all basically interchangeable?

In short, nobody had ever told me why I should stay. So I didn’t. And it took me a couple of decades to find my way back.

Fast-forward to today, and we find the church led by one of the vanishing generation of Vatican II revolutionaries. I actually liked Jorge Bergoglio when he first became Pope Francis. I appreciated his pastoral approach to the papacy, meeting people where they were with care and compassion. But I was also younger and more naive in those days, and as much as I was attracted to the all those idealistic hippie notions of peace and love that were thick in the air when the church changed course in the Sixties and Seventies, I wasn’t yet mature enough to appreciate that peace and love aren’t an end-all and be-all to every problem in the real world. We could do with a kinder, gentler planet. Don’t get me wrong. But sometimes you also need some tough love. You need to be able to be firm and take a stand. You need to have the courage to say this is right and that is wrong.

Just look at Jesus. He wasn’t an anything-goes hippie, much as religious liberals often want to paint him that way. He never told people that whatever felt good was what they should do. He was serious about his faith. He just said that people were looking for the Kingdom of God in the wrong places and the wrong ways. He came with a wake-up call. He said that if you really wanted to know God, then you should pick up your cross and follow his example. You came to God through him, and only through him, because he was the perfection of the union between God and man. You can understand this literally or metaphorically, and it comes out basically the same. The point is that you commit yourself to a discipline of following him wherever he leads you, secure in the trust that he won’t lead you astray.

The problem is that this idea promotes a religious exclusivism that rubs the anything-goes crowd the wrong way. Francis is unquestionably an aging member of that crowd, a fading echo of that era of hippie idealism. And that’s why he so often says ridiculous things that rankle the faithful, while sending his defenders scrambling to “popesplain” that he didn’t really say what we all know he said. And if you don’t understand what he meant, then that’s on you, not on him.

Consider, for example, Fiducia Supplicans, Francis’ decree that priests could bless people in “irregular relationships.” It was obvious to sensible people of the faith that this document was clearing the way for ecclesiastical validation of things that oppose church teaching. The media, predictably, spun the decree as opening the door to the Catholic blessing of same-sex unions, but it was more than that. It essentially allowed for blessings of all manner of relationship situations that the church doesn’t approve of, whether that be a divorced Catholic who got remarried without an annulment, Catholics who married outside the church without a later convalidation before a priest, or even just two unmarried people living together. Francis and the popepslainers were quick to say, “Oh, we’re blessing the people in the union, not the union itself,” but of course that’s a distinction without a difference — not to mention that priests could already bless individual people before the document was written. So what was the point of the document, if not to implicitly condone the unions that the people being blessed were in?

This is typical Francis: Saying one thing, leaving everybody confused as to the meaning, and then leaving his handlers and allies to clean up the mess. But more than that, when Francis takes actions like this — and this is far from the only one — the cumulative effect is one that systematically weakens the tenets of the faith while pretending that nothing’s wrong and nothing has changed. And if you criticize him, you’re the problem. In fact, you’re probably one of those “rigid traditionalists” that Francis constantly berates.

And this is how we got to the point where Francis told a group of kids in Singapore this past week that “all religions are a way to arrive at God.” Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, Christian — they’re all just different languages to arrive at the same place.

As usual, the popesplainers had to go into overdrive, this time trying to gaslight people into believing that Francis actually didn’t engage in an act of indifferentism — the heretical idea that one religion is no better than, or even no different from, another. As if to drive the point home, Francis went to Albania a few days later and proclaimed to another youth group that religious diversity is a “gift from God.” Apparently, jihadist fanatics who want to behead you for not prostrating to Allah are just misunderstood. Their religion is a gift. And your religion is no better than theirs.

Of course, we could take a charitable stance and assume that Francis meant to express himself in accord with the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Paragraph 843 of the CCC states that the church “recognizes in other religions” the search for the God who “wants all men to be saved” and therefore “considers all goodness and truth found in these religions as ‘a preparation for the Gospel.’”

But that’s not what he said. It’s also not what he said later in Albania. He said, in essence, that it doesn’t matter which religion you pick, since they all end up at the same place anyway. That’s an outrageous thing for the leader of the world’s largest Christian body to say. It tells the world that the founder of your own faith doesn’t really matter. Jesus is a nice guy and all, but if you want to be a Hindu, that’s fine too. Makes you wonder if the pope really is Catholic — or even Christian at all.

More than that, it’s not even an accurate statement. All religions by definition can’t be “a way to arrive at God,” since not all religions are centered on the concept of a deity. Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and Jainism come immediately to mind. Nor are all religions monotheistic: Hinduism has thousands of gods.

But even worse than that is the way his statement relativizes the inherent worth and goodness of all religious traditions. Here we find the anything-goes hippie ideal rearing its head again. But it’s a simple and incontrovertible fact that some religions, just like some cultures, are better than others, and it’s OK to take a stand and say that. Saying, for example, that Mesoamerican religions that glorified human sacrifice are just as good as any other religion is no different from saying that a culture that oppresses women and engages in religious violence is just as good as a civilized culture that promotes equality and liberty.

Nor is it even accurate to suggest that you have to go up a metaphorical mountain in search of the divine. If anything distinguishes Christianity from other religions, it’s the idea that God came down to us and met us where we are. He entered into our reality and became one of us, suffering on our behalf to mend the rift between heaven and earth. Did Muhammad do that? Did the Buddha? No. Francis’ words suggest that he doesn’t even believe this most basic and essential tenet of Christianity to be true. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have said what he said. And not only did his words betray the faith, but they delivered a hard and merciless slap in the face to every martyr of the past 2,000 years who submitted to torture and death rather than recant his or her faith.

Now, most people would stop short of saying Francis is a heretic. I have my own opinion on the matter. I will say that I don’t think he’s a good pope. The church will survive him, just as it has survived other bad popes. But that doesn’t change the fact that he really irritates me. And the reason he bugs me so much is that he’s just like the people who were running the church when I was growing up in the Seventies — the ones who said, in all but words, that it didn’t matter what religion I belonged to, or why I should even be Catholic, or religious at all. He was one of the anything-goes crowd who was so anxious to throw off tradition in its embrace of ecumenism that it didn’t give anyone any compelling reason to stick around. All these years later, Novus Ordo churches are graying and thinning out, and we face a severe shortage of priests, while polls show that among those who remain in the church, many if not most don’t really adhere to the teachings anyway. These are the fruits of ecumenism. This is what the reforms of Vatican II gave us. This is what modernism has wrought. This is the legacy of Francis and those who share his mindset. Instead of standing as a bulwark against society when it needed a corrective, the church became so eager to be relevant and accepted that it ended up standing for nothing.

That was in large part why I left. I had nagging questions that no one could answer, and since no one told me why I should stay, I didn’t. It took me two decades to find my way back. I went up the proverbial mountain of relativism and indifferentism that Francis extols, taking him and others at his word that it didn’t matter what path I took to get to the top. On that journey, I found lots of things that could have, and sometimes did, inflate my own ego, justifying the notion that doing whatever you want is just fine, since your way is every bit as good and valid as anybody else’s way. But it never led to satisfaction, only more questioning and searching. This is what the people of Francis’ generation can’t seem to understand. People crave meaning. And you can’t derive much meaning from the simplistic idea that one thing is equally as good as another. You need to make distinctions. You need structure. You need to take a stand.

More than anything, I was looking for a philosophy of life to give my existence greater shape and meaning. That’s ultimately what I spent so many years looking for. And that’s what Catholicism has done for me. I came back, reluctantly at first, kicking and screaming at times. But I still found my way back — no thanks to people like Francis who would try to send me back up the Mountain of Indifference with no clear goal or purpose.

I’ve since come to realize that this is why Francis hates traditionalist Catholics so much. Traditionalists want the clarity that comes with embracing the church’s heritage and doing our best to abide by its time-tested teachings. The Vatican II generation wanted to jettison that heritage. It was too “rigid.” And when those who know their faith call him out, he feels singled out and tripped up. The traditionalists convict him by his own words and actions. They hold up a mirror, and he doesn’t like what he sees. His solution is not to ponder the reflection but to break the mirror. That’s part and parcel of what the Vatican II generation set out to do: to break things, like the iconoclasts of old, so they could sever themselves from the weight of the past and remake the church in their own image. So why would we expect any less of Francis and his ilk? Of course he’s going to say heretical things. That’s what modernists and relativists do.

Now, I’m not perfect, and I’m not saying I am. More than that, my own extensive spiritual travels around the world have given me tremendous respect for other religious beliefs. So I’m not coming into this argument with some kind of exclusivist Crusader mindset. But when Francis says crazy things like this, it makes me feel as if I seem to care far more about the faith than he does. Where he leaves the impression that he wants to undermine the faith in the pursuit of being nice to everybody, I’m just over here trying to abide by the church’s teachings in my own way, to the best of my ability. Francis and I don’t appear to speak the same language. There’s a reason the Traditional Latin Mass eventually won me over. It’s an expression of the faith that gave me something the Novus Ordo and its modernist defenders never could. It centered me. It gave me purpose. It offered my spirit something it had been looking for.

I went on an extended two-decade vacation around the world and picked up a lot of spiritual and philosophical influences along the way, and they’re a part of who I am, too. It would be foolish of me to throw those experiences away. Paragraph 843 of the CCC makes perfect sense to me, because I did encounter a good amount of spiritual goodness on my journey through the wilds. There’s much that I admire about Buddhism, Taoism, and the Advaita Vedanta expression of Hinduism. When I started working my way back home, Plato and Plotinus helped me put my faith in a philosophical framework, while Jung gave it a vital psychological dimension that it had lacked before. The Sacred Feminine is still a huge part of my spiritual life, too. I’m still a Catholic, but not in the same way I was when I was younger — and certainly not in the way that Francis envisions the faith.

Now, I admit that my spiritual journey has left me holding some views that don’t jibe with the official teachings of the church. So perhaps I shouldn’t throw stones when I encounter others who say and do things that don’t accurately reflect Catholic teaching. But here’s the thing: I’m not the one running an entire global church body and potentially leading millions of people astray. I’m just some random guy whose opinion will never sway anyone. If Francis wants to sow confusion among the faithful, it has consequences. That’s on him. I want no part of it.

Perversely, Francis would seem to want me to shout my unorthodox opinions to the world and live them out as a witness to how to church can, and apparently should, change and grow. His continuing “Synod on Synodailty” bears witness to the fact that he wants a church that “listens” to the people, even if the things the people say stand in opposition to the teachings and established tradition of the church. Frankly, I’m kind of tired of a church that focuses so much on “listening.” How about a church that takes a stand for a change? Is it so much to ask to have a church that stops accommodating and actually stands for something? The church isn’t supposed to revolve around me and what I want. Yet that’s precisely what the church has been doing for sixty years now: centering itself not on the will of God but on the whims of the people in the pews. The results have been disastrous. And Francis, by all appearances, seems to want more of it.

I have Francis Fatigue. I think a lot of Catholics do. I can’t be alone in yearning for a leader who professes orthodoxy, who doesn’t need popesplainers to constantly do damage control, and who understands that maybe this me-first experiment the church has been undertaking for more than half a century now hasn’t borne good fruit. All it does is appeal to the ego. It turns every parishioner into his own pope. There’s no humility to be found going down that road. Experience has taught me that. And that’s where Francis and I are very different people.

His modernist views don’t offer me much.

Traditional Catholicism, on the other hand, does.