Catholics worldwide are lurching toward the “learned helplessness” that lab animals slide into after getting shocked too often, till they just stare blankly and tragically through the bars of their little cages. Or parishes, as the case may be.

Deviating the Papacy Down

I wrote two weeks ago about how Pope Francis has discredited major aspects of papal authority by endorsing Rev. James Martin’s campaign for same-sex marriage. Never again will a non-infallible papal statement deserve more than respectful attention and rational scrutiny. The “Ordinary Magisterium” has become either meaningless or a tautology: whatever the Church has always and everywhere taught … until some pope pops up and contradicts it. If that has a mid-1930s, Muscovite Darkness At Noon feel to you, remember that isn’t a bug, but a feature.

But the former high school chemistry teacher from Argentina hasn’t been idle. He moved on promptly from praising James Martin’s “rainbow liturgy” ministry to yanking away the permission Pope Benedict granted for wider celebration of the Church’s ancient liturgy. The one area of the Church where large families, crowded liturgies, and priestly vocations still can be found must be sprayed with weed-killer, Francis announced. I guess such rites embarrass the wealthy, empty rainbow parishes where priests take time off from cruising Grindr to preach about “systemic racism” to elderly rich white folks.

Give God Second-Best, with a Shrug

I was interviewed by Church Militant about Francis’ own systemic aversion to beauty, dignity, and order. The great Jules Gomes reported on a French atheist philosopher outraged by Francis’ attack on the Church’s cultural heritage, and wanted my input. I said:

Pope Francis is trying to impose his personal tastes on every Catholic in the world. Sadly, those tastes are those of a provincial underachiever from a country that slipped into poverty thanks to breast-beating nationalism and thuggish economics. In other words, he has the sense of beauty you’d expect from a mid-level cultural bureaucrat in Tito’s Yugoslavia.

And the liturgy he prefers for the world is a great deal like a Yugo: stuck together with chewing gum, sputtering acrid smoke, cramped and barely functional. But his pride makes a virtue of those things, as if giving God second-best with a shrug were somehow Franciscan. Instead of just slovenly.

Should We Get the Vaccine on Our Right Hands or Our Foreheads? Asking for a Friend

A new wrinkle in the rainbow Crotchless Garment: During Pope Francis’ visit to Slovakia, only visitors who’ve accepted the COVID vaccine made from exploiting aborted babies will be admitted. I don’t know which strikes me as more morally repugnant: taking the dead baby vaccine, or attending an event of any kind where … that man is present. I guess this new condition is only right and just. You aren’t really prepared for the spiritual darkness Francis represents unless you’ve accepted Caesar’s cannibalistic sacrament.

Taking Bribes from the Organ Thieves

Three years ago I speculated that the Vatican’s secret deal with China — negotiated by the Church’s top pedophile, then-Cardinal McCarrick — was not a surrender but an alliance. I compared it to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, another secret alignment of apparent enemies against the same common foe: the “liberal” capitalist West. I cited the constant stream of agitprop statements from Rome praising Beijing and bashing Donald Trump’s America. Bishop Marcel Sorondo (the top relevant Vatican official) enjoyed a Potemkin-village tour, then effused about China’s fidelity to “Catholic Social Teaching.”

Then things got worse. We learned from a whistleblower that the Vatican is apparently receiving multi-billion-dollar annual bribes from Beijing. And Bishop Sorondo went back to China, this time to promise a papal visit to China and Vatican recognition of the Communist regime (at Taiwan’s expense). But the poetic aspect here isn’t what Sorondo said, but where he said it. The bishop in charge of Catholic Social Teaching spoke to a festive gathering of the Communist Party’s organ thieves — the very men who operate its system of stealing lungs and livers from the still-living bodies of prisoners of conscience, be they Uyghurs, Tibetans, or Christians. That pipeline, from imprisoned believer to the global black market, nets Beijing tens of millions each year, as Forbes magazine documented. 

That won’t cover the cost of the reported Vatican bribes. But every little bit helps. 

Not at the Foot of the Cross, But Back in the Temple with Judas

My friend and co-writer Jason Jones commented:

The Vatican maintains a total blackout on criticism of the most abusive regime on earth. When have we heard a word from Pope Francis, or celebrity priests like Bishop Robert Barron, on the systemic abuse of the vulnerable? I was at the recent international conference on religious freedom organized by Ambassador Brownback. Cardinal Timothy Dolan spoke.

Dolan found time to denounce the Iraq War. (Good, if a little late. Zmirak and I were warning against it in late 2002.) But not a word about China and its ferocious persecution of his brother bishops and priests, plus millions of peaceful Muslims and Buddhists.

Meanwhile, Pope Francis is quick to warn against the dangers posed by Catholics praying in Latin at the Mass of their ancestors.

Jones cited a recent stinging letter from Cardinal Joseph Zen — the heroic Chinese bishop whom Pope Francis refused to meet when Zen used the 120 hours China permitted him out of Hong Kong to visit Rome. Zen refuted the “tendentious” arguments Pope Francis cited to argue that the traditional rite’s existence endangers Church unity. Zen didn’t link Francis’ verbose attack on Tradition to his absolute dead silence on the arrest of a Chinese bishop and dozens of priests.

Flattering the Butchers of Beijing

But Jones did:

It’s profoundly telling about Pope Francis’ moral character that he singles out for attack helpless laymen in little parishes in Oklahoma or Wyoming, just trying to pray. But he lets his functionaries flatter the butchers in Beijing who run concentration camps and steal human organs, selling them for profit — along with the products of slave labor, used by Nike and Apple. To cover for his perfect alignment with the World, Francis reaches into the toolkit of Victimism, generating statements on climate change or COVID indistinguishable from secular NGOs at the United Nations, or one of George Soros’ front groups.

Pope Francis stands in solidarity with the Woke billionaires, the organ thieves, the prison camp profiteers, the wealthy Jesuits who serve as court dwarves to the LGBT lobby. He has no time for prisoners of conscience, pregnant women in crisis, or troubled lay believers who seek a refuge of ordered worship in a world that’s going mad.

In light of all the above, I feel it incumbent on me as a faithful, filial son of the pope to remind my readers that the actual big-A Antichrist would need to have an IQ above 105. He’ll need that to fool the Elect.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”