Dr. K’s Weekly Roundup, April 25, 2025

Classics • Stop the Hagiography • The Best & the Worst Reaction • How to Look at Evil • The Conclave & the New Pope • Prayers • Other Topics

Greetings and a blessed Easter to one and all!

The Roman Church in her liturgy treats every day of the Easter octave exactly as she does Easter Sunday: the Gloria and Creed are said daily; the Roman Canon features the special Communicantes and Hanc igitur, and, my favorite of all, the Paschal Preface, in which all week we magnify God with highest praise “on this day”; the Mass ends “Ite missa est, alleluia, alleluia.” Our minds are placed again and again on the ultimate cause of our hope, our joy, our confidence. We should think about this a lot as we navigate very choppy waters in the hull of the Barque of Peter, making our way through the storm to the heaven-haven of peace.

Before moving into the main topics of the day, I’d like to introduce you to a new series that was just launched, the Os Justi Theological Classics. At a time of turmoil, nothing could be better or more important than rooting ourselves more deeply in the Catholic tradition. Here’s a 3-minute video telling you about the first three volumes — Newman on the Blessed Virgin Mary, St. Vincent of Lérins on novelty and tradition, and Guardini on sacred signs:

Bucking the trend

Not surprisingly, my special post on Tuesday, “The End of a Pontificate from Hades,” broke nearly all records for Tradition & Sanity, with 20K views on the Substack so far, and another 17K listens over on YouTube. The most common reaction was some version of: “Thank you for speaking the truth at a time when so many are heaping praises, rewriting history, and even shouting santo subito.”

I will admit, it is quite frightening to see the extent of the mendacity, the hyperbole, the hagiography, and the frequently haughty dismissal of the work done over the course of the pontificate by traditionalist scholars and commentators. No matter. We have done our homework, we have published our careful research, our sound critiques, our thorough exposés, our book-length studies. The evidence is out there, and while truth often gets crushed under foot in the short term, in the long term it is often vindicated. I believe we will see the same thing as time passes and the Bergoglio pontificate is evaluated more soberly and dispassionately.

I understand the desire to say positive things about Pope Francis. No man is purely evil; not even the devil is that. We’re not Manichaeans. Nevertheless, it’s as if the Catholic media has lost its mind, praising with a fire-hose. Realism, people!

This, from a reader (with personal identifying features removed):

Most shocking, National Right to Life is lamenting his passing and claiming that Pope Francis was a strong advocate for life. And our own [local state] Right to Life is echoing the same theme, yet almost every priest in my archdiocese would not warn their flock that voting for Amendment #, which would legalize abortion in our state constitution, was sinful: they feared repercussions from the Archbishop, who had close ties to Cupich and Pope Francis. As a result, Amendment # passed, and abortion was legalized in [state].

That is the kind of evil people actually suffered due to who was at the helm. It’s not so much about whether the late pope said some true things. Sure he did. But he constantly undermined them by other contrary or confusing statements, and even more by his actions, appointments, priorities, mockeries, and subterfuges.

A great temptation for Catholicism in modern times has been to allow itself to be reduced to an intellectual assent to a series of propositions. Those who have fallen into this disincarnational error are likely to be the same who evaluate a pope on the basis of cherry-picked statements, which are also disincarnated from the realities on the ground.

If a tyrant had died, would we all be obliged to speak well of him? To sing his praises? Or to remain stone silent with respect? No. Absolutely not. Nor would any person in his right mind think so.

Many of us saw Francis as a tyrant. The evidence in support of such a serious charge was already substantial back in 2018, when Marcantonio Colonna's The Dictator Pope came out from Regnery (author's real name: H.J.A. Sire, whose Phoenix from the Ashes is the best history of the modern Church). As Sire admitted in a 2023 article at 1P5, the subsequent years both vindicated and luxuriously amplified his original claims.

My impression again and again over the past 12 years is that many have chosen to live in denial, refusing to look at the evidence that has been painstakingly gathered, again and again, by those who care about the Catholic Church, her governance, her orthodoxy, her tradition, and the souls of her faithful. And today, one sees this refusal hardening into a fantastical hagiography divorced from the harsh reality.

This attitude of “see no evil, hear no evil,” be it born of malformed piety or hyperpapalism or laziness, is not some kind of invincible ignorance. It is very definitely vincible. And that has serious spiritual consequences, which may become eternal consequences. That is why I and others do not cease to cry out with a thousand social media tongues.

Thankfully, traditionalists are not alone. In the past few days, a substantial number of sharply critical analyses appeared; certain “conservative” authors proved they have much more in common with traditionalists than they ever let on while Francis was alive. Not everyone has drunk or is drinking the Kool Aid, thanks be to God.

Today, my roundup will consist mostly in reviewing the best material I read on the late pope. There are many articles I will not be mentioning here, either because they were superficial, or basically repeated what another and better article said. If I mention something here, it’s because I believe it had merit, insight, and good expression.

The Best

Fr. Perricone

Eric Sammons’s article was a fine succinct overview, but Fr. John Perricone’s “May Pope Francis Rest in Peace. And May Peace Return to Mother Church.” absolutely takes the prize:

Pope Francis indeed kept his promise of “creating a mess.” With that “mess” arrived the demise of peace in the Church. Factionalism ensued. Heightened tensions erupted. Not a few Catholics embraced eccentric notions of sedevacantism. But one of the greatest tragedies of this period is the silence. Silence from the shepherds. Suffering Catholics looked toward them for guidance and received only bromides and anodyne preachments. They either evaded the issue of the tumult altogether or intoned “all is well,” a refrain they have perfected. Their shameful silence left Christ’s “little ones” to roam helplessly, falling through the fissures caused by the doctrinal turmoil. Will history treat these mute prelates as it did the bishops in Henry’s 16th-century England, or 1930’s Germany?

While many Catholics felt themselves adrift in a sea of disorientation, the grace of God endured. Impressive numbers of admirable Catholics permitted the free-fall to steel their Faith. With heroic perseverance, they remained loyal to the immutable teachings of Mother Church and her timeless practices of piety. Futures generations will applaud these heroic souls and write testaments praising them. They were faithful when infidelity was the coin of the realm.

So much packed into this piece.

Joseph Shaw

The statement from Dr. Shaw as President of the International Una Voce Federation was perfect in tone and content:

The latter years of the pontificate that has just ended have been difficult, not in the sense that we faced challenges to the Faith and attacks on the ancient liturgy — that is something we take for granted — but because the work of Una Voce/Latin Mass Society associations around the world has been impeded by the policy of the Holy Father himself. This itself is something our predecessors were used to, but we had just enough time under the Summorum Pontificum regime, from 2007 to 2021, to begin to get used to a different situation, and it was a shock to be plunged back into an official state of disapprobation and discouragement.

This has been a test for our organisations and our movement. Would we abandon the struggle? Would we give way to bitterness? Would we, as Job’s wife suggested to him, ‘curse God and die’ (Job 2:9)?

Well, we still exist, and in many ways our organisations are stronger than before. Neither our lay supporters nor our priest friends have not lost their interest in or commitment to the ancient Mass.

My prayer, now as before, is not that all difficulties be removed: such a thing is not to be had in this life. It is that we be permitted to play our part in building up the Kingdom of God, in union with our bishops, in a world where the Traditional Mass is more than ever an object both of fascination and of spiritual consolation to those far from Christ.

Let us pray that the next pope, whoever he may be, sees the Traditional Mass as an opportunity, and not for some political reason a threat. Then, with our support, beautiful things will happen.

Shaw also published a piece at First Things, “Francis, Pope of Ambiguity”:

Pope Francis’s favored rhetorical weapon, in contrast with those predecessors, was not persuasion but ambiguity, in a succession of documents and statements that were extremely difficult for anyone to understand.

His condemnation of the death penalty stopped just short of saying clearly that it was intrinsically evil. His statements on divorce and same-sex unions stopped just short of saying that these were willed by God. His restriction of the Traditional Mass did not quite say that liturgical diversity undermined the unity of the Church. His various underlings’ responses to the question of female ordination never quite crossed the line into saying that women deacons were impossible.

In each case, many people, reading the texts, would say that those conclusions were implied, but this was a rhetorical implication, not a logical one: the distinction that allowed Boris Johnson to say that describing a claim as an “inverted pyramid of piffle” was not the same as saying that it was factually untrue.

I know why Joseph writes this, but I’m not sure the pope was all that ambiguous. It’s true he seldom said outright the particular conclusion, but all the premises were set forth for it.

Fr. Matthew Solomon

“De mortuis nisi bonum”:

It must be noted how effortlessly the world has captured this pontificate and cast it in its own image and likeness. The secular world wants to remember Francis for only the things of which it approves. And even then, only aspects of which they find acceptable. The headlines read: “Francis the Great Reformer,” The Great Liberator” and “The Earthquake the Catholic Church Sorely Needed.” He stood fast in defence of climate change, immigration and female empowerment; and stood steadfastly against right-wing populism, clericalism and social injustice. They list his ‘achievements’ as though he were ‘their man’. And not the Pope. There must be nothing more satisfying than eulogising your enemy… “I am come not to bury, but to praise.”...

The world can’t stand anything negative as it enjoys its morning latte. Especially when a bit of negativity might do some actual good. All our negativity must be reserved for truly solemn occasions: like the death of a penguin or a melting iceberg.

Nathan Pinkowski

“Pope Francis’s Managerial Revolution”:

Upon his election in 2013, some expected Pope Francis to undo the excesses of the imperial papacy, the model of centralized church governance associated with proclamation of papal infallibility at Vatican I. But even as Francis promised to prioritize horizontal governance, he leaned into the vertical exercise of power, “just doing things” in ways that would have stunned his predecessor Pius IX. He did so, however, in a novel way. The Francis papacy saw the rise and triumph of the managerial model within the Church. Francis wasn’t the first pope to make sweeping assertions of his juridical powers, but he was the first pope to give the Vatican a human-resources department. That change is part and parcel of a decisive and dangerous shift, which will prove hard to roll back....

Both Catholic and secular managerialism are at once radical and trivial. Grand exhortations and symbolic gestures never seemed to really lead anywhere. Unable to point to a “Francis effect” bringing Catholic back to the pews, many of Francis’s apologists fell back to praising Francis for “a willingness to open questions for debate.” Talking and listening sound bold, but it’s hardly an agenda for real reform. In politics, the cost of this substitution of “listening” for reform is stagnation. In theology, the cost of this approach is incoherence. Under Francis, the faithful learned that they were better off just ignoring what Rome said, rather than trying to make sense of it. That’s what one does to survive a troubled time, but it’s hardly a recipe for ecclesial harmony. Faced with a fragmented church in which Catholics trust their personal judgement and tribe more than their shepherds, future administrators will be tempted to use managerial vagueness for the simple task of keeping the peace and avoiding conflict.

Some sharp insights here. The author’s main flaw, which he shares with most writers, is a failure to appreciate that Amoris Laetitia is not “ambiguous” but in fact clearly enunciates the premises from which several heresies can be deduced, as a number of public statements have argued at length over the years.

Roberto de Mattei

De Mattei’s analysis contains a number of good insights, as usual. I’ll just quote one the following:

Pope Francis replaced sacral symbolism with a mediatic symbolism, made up of images, words and meetings.... Some say that in doing so Pope Francis “humanised” the papacy, but in reality he trivialised it and made it worldly. It is the institution of the papacy, not the person of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, that was debased by these and countless other actions, which secularised the language and signs that the Church has always used to express the divine mystery…. The most revolutionary aspect of his pontificate remains the succession of words and actions that transformed the public perception of the Primacy of Peter, rendering it worldly and weakened.

Ross Douthat

A keen-sighted commentary, as one would expect from Ross: “Francis and the End of the Imperial Papacy.” Excerpt:

Just by creating that novel form of conflict, in which Catholics who had been accustomed to being on the same side as the Vatican found themselves suddenly crosswise from papal authority, Francis helped to demystify his office’s authority and undermine its most imposing claims.

That’s because the conservatives whose convictions he unsettled were the last believers in the imperial papacy, the custodians of infallibility’s mystique. And by stirring more of them to doubt and disobedience, he kicked away the last major prop supporting a strong papacy and left the office of St. Peter in the same position as most other 21st-century institutions: graced with power but lacking credibility, floated on charisma without underlying legitimacy, with its actions understood in terms of rewards for friends and punishments for enemies.

Two rebellions, in particular, illustrate this shift. The first is the continuing resistance to the pope’s attempt to suppress, in the name of Catholic unity and the spirit of the Second Vatican Council, the faith’s traditional Latin Mass. After Vatican II in the late 1960s, when Pope Paul VI remade the church’s liturgy, he commanded enough deference that he was able to swiftly consign the Mass that every Catholic in the world had grown up with to the modern equivalent of catacombs — to church basements, hotel rooms, and schismatic chapels.

Whereas when Francis attempted a similar suppression, reversing the permissions granted by Benedict, only his most loyal bishops really went along, and the main effect was to stir resistance and complaint, garner new media attention for the old Latin Mass, and increase traditionalism’s cachet among younger Catholics.

Matthew Walther

“Pope Francis, R.I.P.”:

The chief obstacle [in Francis’s mind] — indeed the only one — was, paradoxically, the Church Herself. For too long She had appeared to the faithful only under Her ancient (and regrettable) aspect as lawgiver and judge, even as tyrant. Law would not save Her. The graven images would have to be torn down and the stone tablets themselves laid under wrap. The faithful themselves knew this better than anyone, but they groaned beneath the yoke of an inflexible clergy — Wojtyła’s new men, the generation of candlesticks on the altar and stoles in the box, and Ratzinger’s toffs in their Gammarelli socks. The necessary self-effacement would come not from these “rigorists” and “doctors of the law”...

The ongoing Synod of Synodality (a name that suggests origins in the Alice books or Monty Python), with its meretricious graphics and Davos-style sloganeering, is in many ways the embodiment of everything Francis had warned about in his first address....

Whatever the future of the traditional Mass (who does not fear that it will become subject to a Mexico City Policy-style cycle of reversals under future popes?), it is clear that, like hopes for spiritual revival and much-needed administrative reforms, desire for a peaceful end to the so-called “liturgy wars” have proven ill-founded.

John Stephenson

A Missouri Synod Lutheran pastor and quondam professor, I find his commentary valuable. Excerpts from “No Journalistic Hat Trick from Little Old Me…”:

I cannot refrain from noting that the late Pope (whether or not he legitimately held that office is not for me to judge, though I have on occasion described myself through the contradictio in adjecto of a ‘Lutheran sedevacantist’!), has left his Church in a more perilous situation than has any Pope since the time, around 1550, that the Counter Reformation began to push back against the incursions of the Protestant Reformation....

Francis’ ever intensifying vendetta against the historic Mass tellingly displayed his intense dislike of persons and things truly describable as Roman Catholic.... The list is simply endless and after spending a number of years obliging Logia’s Brent Kuhman by providing printable copy on Francis’s latest excess, for the past couple of years I have given up the effort of trying to keep up with this Bishop of Rome’s flagrant contradictions of what has been held and practiced semper, ubique, et ab omnibus. Small wonder the world has reacted to the shocking yet unsurprising news of 21 April 2025 with unbridled adulation, with Diluter of the Faith King Charles III in the vanguard of the torrent of gushing tributes....

While the resumption of eucharistic communion amongst divided Christians is further away than ever, our sympathy should go out to our hideously abused separated brothers and sisters in the RCC, and our prayers should rise to Heaven in their behalf....

Candid discussion is urgently needed within the fellowship of the RCC on how the papacy, the so-called munus Petrinum, might be carried out in order to preserve (even to restore) the challenged internal unity of the largest component within earthly Christendom. An unadulterated regurgitation of what has gone before manifested in the stepping of Francis II onto the balcony of St Peter’s would be a surefire recipe for bitter schism.

John Byron Kuhner

John has written one of the most eloquent laments I’ve ever read about the situation for Catholics today: “The Roman Catholic Church in 2025.” Many here will surely be able to relate:

The experience of Catholicism today does not resemble the descriptions of previous generations. Catholics used to describe the faith as immutable. Some celebrated the comfort of changelessness, the sense that here was something truly eternal; haters lamented the blockheaded institutional obstinacy. Now the experience is transience, not intransigence. Half the parishes are gone, the greatest transience of all. The rest swing like pendula between liberal and conservative.

The parish my mom attended had a pastor who liked all the liberal trappings: ad-lib consecration, applause during Mass, goofball sermons with lots of laughs, the usual. Then came a conservative pastor who changed the whole style of the parish: strict use of the Roman canon, no female lectors, no altar girls, more statues of saints and more money spent on altar decorations. Then he left, and the liberal touches came back.

The pattern repeats everywhere: a conservative pastor takes over a parish and fills it with icons; a liberal pastor comes in and sells the stuff to achieve a modern, streamlined look. One pastor spends good money to rip out the altar rail, the next pastor spends good money to put one in. One pastor brings in a Latin Mass, the next bans it. One turns to the altar, the other faces the people. If you are flexible, you accept that it all changes; if you are sentimental, you lament it; if your loyalty is to a particular theology or particular style, you find yourself a new parish.

With Benedict XVI, parochial bipolarism gained intensity. Benedict’s opening up the Traditional Latin Mass to general use in Summorum Pontificum did not obligate anyone to celebrate it, but it did empower individual pastors to come in and create “traddy” parishes out of liberal ones, regardless of what the parishioners thought. This was problem enough. Then came Pope Francis. Traditionis Custodes encouraged bishops to get in on the fun of jerking parishes and even whole dioceses from one extreme to another. The archdiocese of Detroit had until recently more TLMs than perhaps any diocese in the world. Then Pope Francis appointed a new bishop, and almost all were banned overnight.

How can any religion last, behaving like this? Is it a religion? Is it serious? Can it be taken seriously?

Yes — but only if you know already what the religion is supposed to be, look for it, and settle for nothing else. What a bizarre position for any believer to be placed in.

Michael Warren Davis

Davis reflects on what Francis’s teaching on the papacy might meant to the Orthodox. While I disagree with a lot of what he says, I do think he’s right about this:

In the past, Catholics argued that we need the Pope in order to discern and uphold the Church’s authentic traditions. Since the Second Vatican Council, however, Catholics have increasingly felt the need to defend tradition against the popes. Thinkers such as Schneider and Kwasniewski have since begun to defend both the “knowability” and the authority of Tradition in a way that is not dependent upon the current pontiff. This, too, is a promising development from the Orthodox perspective.

My biggest disagreement with MWD is that Pope Francis, so far from being the pope who most improved relations with the East, has made reconciliation vastly more difficult than ever with his ceaseless attack on tradition (especially liturgical tradition) and his authoritarian exercise of the primacy. If I were Orthodox, I’d be looking at that and saying “Stay as far away from me as possible!”

Carl R. Trueman

I find it telling that even major Protestant figures condemn Francis for his obvious lack of Catholicism. Here is Carl R. Trueman at First Things, in “Pope Francis, My Worst Protestant Nightmare”:

As a confessional Protestant, there is perhaps one decision Francis made that I should approve: restricting the Latin Mass. The need for vernacular liturgy was a standard part of Reformation Protestant policy. But even here there was a problem. The Protestant Reformers’ liturgical changes were driven by a specific theology of the word and its connection to salvation and sacraments. Catholicism’s theology of the sacraments is different and does not require liturgy in the vernacular. The pope’s move therefore lacked any obvious doctrinal motivation. One can only speculate as to his motives, but it appeared to be a liberal assault on traditional Catholicism. Francis was thus my own worst Protestant nightmare: an authoritarian Roman pope driving a liberal Protestant agenda, a leader who embodied the worst of all possible Christian worlds.

“A leader who embodied the worst of all possible Christian worlds.” Let that phrase sink in for a moment.

(Subsequent articles at First Things seem to indicate that they are getting significant blowback for publishing an initial bold salvo of negative opinions, and are rushing to publish more conventional “takes.”)

A Catholic Convert’s Perspective

In a Substack post called “After Francis: Better the devil you know?,” an anonymous author writes:

I entered the Church during what has been referred to by some as the 'reign of error' under Pope Francis.... The Pope I encountered as the visible head of the Church on earth bore little resemblance to the saints, theologians, and champions of the Faith who had inspired me through their writings and examples. Those men and women had sparked in me a hunger for truth, a longing for the sacred, and a love for the Church’s timeless teachings. Pope Francis, by contrast, seemed to represent an entirely different spirit—one marked by ambiguity, accommodation, and, at times, outright heterodox contradiction and seeming heresy.

Telling it like it is. Often we need people coming from the outside to do that for us. Cradle Catholics can be the most wool-in-the-head sheep.

Symposium in Catholic World Report

Carl Olson asked nine individuals to reflect briefly on Pope Francis. Six out of nine were worth reading; these are the ones I’ll quote below. The other three were ho-hum: one of them gushes with an ultramontane piety strangely disconnected from the world around him; another punts by focusing on the narrow question of Christian ecology; and one decides to talk about De Lubac.

Larry Chapp

Actions speak louder than words. What the actions of Pope Francis indicate to me is a pope who wanted to change the Church in controversial ways, but to do so in a manner that did not rip the Church apart. Therefore, what he could not accomplish via papal fiat without creating a schism, he decided to pursue via a kind of ecclesial drift, but a drift that was engineered to go in the desired direction.... His pastoral strategy was a recipe for institutional suicide. And that is something, perhaps, that is worse than heresy.

David Deane

Pope Francis, from the very beginning, seemed like a dated figure. The problems he identified in the Church were often ghosts from another era. His solutions felt like they belonged not to the second decade of the 21st century, but to the final quarter of the 20th.... Francis attacked a starched, arrogant, joyless Church...not the one I knew.... Among the burdens [he carried from 60 years ago] was a desire to push the Church “forward” into a vision that, in truth, had already arrived in the 1980s: a Church stripped of liturgical richness that it deemed pompous and pretentious; a theology not critical of modernity but formed by it, adopting its assumptions.

John Grondelski

Is the Church’s role to make people feel better in their accommodation of the Zeitgeist? Because, during this recent pontificate, the forces of secularism (abetted by Flemish and German episcopal cheerleaders) have advanced with apparent approval.... Bergoglio was elected to pursue necessary reforms in the Church. After a dozen years, those genuine reforms appear further away than ever, while the Barque of Peter has instead been rocked by unnecessary instability, but calling it “reform”.... The Francis pontificate bequeathed the Church a dozen years of ambiguity, contradiction, and confusion.... When one combines such practical kneecapping of ecclesiastical tradition with the Church’s compromised voice for failing decisively to lance the boil of sexual scandals, it seems one must conclude that Francis’s papacy has left the Church’s teaching voice significantly weakened and impaired.

Michael Heinlein

Francis ultimately was unsuccessful in building the bridges he ought to have built and supported [as pontifex maximus]. Ultimately, Francis leaves behind a more fractured and polarized Church. His legacy is muddied by an inability to adequately defend the Faith against modern errors nor to provide the requisite clarity amid emerging moral and doctrinal questions. It’s a legacy of inconsistency, unclarity, and sometimes even divisive double-speak. It’s a legacy of ignoring serious voices with weighty concerns, among them some of his own cardinals, and giving private audiences to dissenters and global elites. It’s a legacy that fueled in the Church an ideological divide he often deplored. It’s a legacy of irregular and sloppy governance. It’s a legacy heralded by many for perceived tenderness and inclusivity while it saw traditionalist Catholics abandoned, making them an enemy within.

Jayd Henricks

It seems on balance the pontificate fulfilled Bergoglio’s vision to make a mess of things, and so it is my judgment this was a failed pontificate.... The unexpected hallmark of his papacy is the notion of synodality, something that has yet to be defined in any precise way. We have been told it must be lived, not defined. Yet it’s clear that it has been used to advance heterodox positions, and it has marginalized those who are most faithful to the teachings of the Church. If there is an immediate legacy of synodality, it is one of division and confusion.... What we are left with in the wake of the Francis papacy is a Church more confused and more divided than at any time since the immediate aftermath of Humanae Vitae.

Amy Welborn

Even Christian religious faith in general has come to center on personal experience rather than objective truth over the past couple of centuries, the past and tradition of all types devalued as useless or even harmful to the spiritual needs of modern man.... The most significant way that Pope Francis represented his generation that had come of age during and right after the Second Vatican Council [is] not his particular disdain for the Traditional Latin Mass or his Häring-shaded moral pronouncements, but in the insistent location of the action of the Holy Spirit in an experience or a “reality” to the practical exclusion of much that has gone before, and even more seriously, a determination that what has gone before is of no value and even an obstacle to encountering God in the present. In short, the hermeneutic of discontinuity, right there.

Robert Greving

In “The Pope of Ironies,” Greving writes:

Many words could describe the Francis pontificate; to me, the best is ironic. Coming from Argentina, Jorge Bergoglio was considered the ultimate outsider who would bring another wave of aggiornamento to the Church; but instead, he appeared closed inside the stale ideas of liberalism. He criticized those he saw as “wanting to go back,” yet that was exactly the criticism many of us had of him. He was sympathetic to every religious tradition except that of his own Faith.

He frequently denounced clericalism, but he acted as though participation in the Church was to be measured by the clerical role. He disliked cassocks, birettas, and the title of “monsignor,” but he made sure you knew who the pope was. He cited himself for authority, and if “dubias” were raised, they were met with silence....

One take on his election was that he was a man who could “bring the Church together,” yet he handed the Church in China over to the Communists, and the German Church has slid into de facto schism. His promotion of “cultural” liturgies has multiplied divisions.... Francis’ Synod on Synodality makes the Church a cultural carousel, the “Open Tent” looking like bed sheets flapping in the wind.

Mary Ann Glendon

Again at First Things (they’ve been particularly busy with articles on Francis), Glendon, in “Pope Francis and the Vatican Deep State,” says that the internal state of affairs at the Vatican, especially its finances, will have to be a priority for the cardinals in conclave, because the Vatican is a total mess, bankrupt and full of corruption. Remember how Francis was elected to fix all that? Well…

The Worst

There were a few articles so bad that I think they are worth mentioning, just to make sure they are not too quickly forgotten.

David Mills

“Pope Francis saw a way to make the church better at being the church.” This wins the award, so far, for the most wrong-headed assessment of the last 12 years.

Sohrab Ahmari

In a piece that reads like high-level Babylon Bee, “Pope Francis, Trad Icon,” Ahmari praises Francis as a super-traditional exponent of Catholic Social Teaching whom the trads were too stupid or too stubborn to learn from, as they banged away impiously at their Holy Father. And, by the way, we all need to be obedient to the pope, etc. No distinctions, and seemingly little or no awareness of the actual theological problems in Francis’s “magisterium.”

Ahmari seems like a good fellow but he should stay out of theology unless and until he does some rigorous coursework in it, and spends a lot of time studying the history and theology of the papacy. There are books about all that, which apparently he hasn’t read. Here’s a collage of some of their covers:

Links to these:

• John Joy, Disputed Questions on Papal Infallibility

• Fr. Reginald-Marie Rivoire, Does “Traditionis Custodes” Pass the Juridical Rationality Test?

• Fr. Serafino Lanzetta, Super Hanc Petram: The Pope and the Church at a Dramatic Moment in History

• Peter Kwasniewski (ed.), Ultramontanism and Tradition: The Role of Papal Authority in the Catholic Faith

• Peter Kwasniewski (ed.), Unresolved Tensions in Papal-Episcopal Relations

How to Look at Evil

There is something incredibly sad about the Substack article that my former collaborator at 1P5, Steve Skojec, wrote with raw honesty on how the Francis papacy tormented him and consumed him until he was nothing but an empty shell (“Pope Francis is Dead, But the Damage is Done”). Steve has made up his mind that he cannot believe in the Catholic religion because, to him, the late pope dashed the Church’s claims of indefectibility and showed that God does not want to intervene in any meaningful way.

I disagree with Steve about many things (especially the aforementioned assertions), but this much is surely true: if you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you. I too have tasted the misery, bitterness, wrath, and skepticism that comes from knowing too much about Bergoglio, his network of enablers and beneficiaries, the entrenched culture of homosexual domination, and so forth. It is very, very ugly; no wonder the solution for the mainstream is to ignore it all and sing happy-clappy songs about the saintly pope of the poor.

Greek mythology can teach us a lesson. If you want to fight the Medusa, you have to look at her through a mirror, not face to face. So too, if you want to fight the evil in the Church, you have to look at it through the mirror of Christ, the beautiful and beloved Son of God, and then you will not turn to stone.

Or, as an acquaintance mentioned to me: “My horseback riding instructor once said, ‘Why are you looking at the ground? Do you want to end up there? No? Then stop looking at it and look where you want to go.’”

It’s no good pretending that the last twelve years have not been an enormous drain and strain on people’s faith, even if God has also brought good out of the evil. Some time ago, I published a piece here that may be helpful for those who are struggling as Steve has been:

I’d also recommend Robert Lazu Kmita’s “Into the Tempest: the Sleep of God and the Power of Prayer.”

The Conclave & the Next Pope

There may be some truth to what New Catholic says: that names of certain papabile are being floated to create distractions and to manipulate cardinals into selecting as a “moderate” someone who is anything but. In any case, I am absolutely uninterested in speculating (publicly) about papabile candidates. We’ve all seen the popular names listed, and there's nothing gained in trying to read the tea leaves, so to speak. Just pray, hope, and don’t worry. Even if we get another bad pope, our job — to remain faithful to Jesus Christ and His authentic teaching — will never change.

Argentinian blogger “Caminante Wanderer” has written quite an eye-opening account: “The Vatican Is Now in Utter Chaos, As Was Foreseeable.”

George Weigel’s polite thumbs down on the last pontificate turns into advice for the next:

There remains a great work of reform to be done in Rome: financially, theologically, and otherwise. Even more fundamentally, however, the next pontificate must understand what the Francis pontificate seems not to have grasped: Christian communities that maintain a clear understanding of their doctrinal and moral identity and boundaries can not only survive the acids of post-modernity; they have a chance to convert the post-modern world. By contrast, Christian communities whose self-identity becomes incoherent, whose boundaries become porous, and who mirror the culture rather than trying to convert it wither and die. For as always, the bottom-line question for the Catholic future is, “When the Son of Man returns, will he find faith on earth?” (Luke 18:8)—the “faith which was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 1:3), and none other.

Leila Marie Lawler states with her usual breath-of-fresh-air candor what so many of us are undoubtedly thinking:

As the cardinals begin to go to Rome to choose a new pope, let them choose whoever it might be with one overarching task in mind: to purge the Church of the existential threat, the viral process disguised as a deceptively benign multi-level marketing scheme imposed on her, known as Synodality.

I say “known as” but Synodality is a great unknown. However, while it cannot be defined — no one has done it, though many have squirmed or committed logorrhea while trying — it is nevertheless the synthesis of and replicative path for all the errors promulgated by Pope Francis.

Synodality is the logical conclusion of aggiornamento, and its engine. Synodality is the worldly worship of becoming rather than transcendent confidence in Being. Ecclesiology — how the Church sees herself — is under siege by the inchoate, blurry forces of Synodality. In this siege, the people begin to starve — but from the machinations of the enemy within.

Like Weston in C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, an agent of Hegelian progressivism, Pope Francis didn’t actually seem to care about himself; his goal was, in his own words, “to make a mess” — to perpetuate chaos, to clear the deck for the forces of history. Every destructive thing Pope Francis did during his reign — and there were many and they struck at the heart of the faith — enters the body of Christ through the distribution system, the poisonous adjutant, of Synodality.

We don’t know what Synodality is but we do know what it is not, and I will confine myself to a brief outline of what it is not. The three pillars of the Church, the bulwark of the truth (1 Tim 3:15), are Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium. Synodality serves none of these but seeks to undermine them.

I couldn’t agree more.

While I think Susan Hanssen overplays John Paul II and underplays Benedict XVI in regard to the rise of a traditional mentality among the faithful, I agree with her sentiment, in “Pope Francis and Conclave 2025: Still waiting for a Third-Millennium Pope,” that so far we have not yet had a pope of the 21st century; rather the last three have been very stuck in 20th-century problematics.

Pope Francis’ papacy often felt like a throwback to the 1970s.... Will the cardinals of the conclave look for a pope who “gets” the corner that was turned at the beginning of the millennium, a pope of the younger generation for whom 1970s progressivism is not new but pathetically outdated? The Catholic Church is not, as the 1970s progressives thought, dying under the weight of ancient tradition and liturgy; it is growing.

While I would be extremely happy and relieved if Cardinal Sarah were to be elected pope, Fr. Longenecker’s “Why We Need a Pope from Africa” is exceedingly simplistic and one-sided in its presentation of the reality of the Church in Africa. As the contributors to the recent book Is African Catholicism a “Vatican II Success Story”? demonstrate, the situation is more complex and often more distressing, with the booming preconciliar growth of the Church via conversions having now slowed down to simple demographic growth, with alarming defections to Pentecostalism and various strange sects (some of them attempting to retain pre-Vatican II elements because they are attractive!), and with “inculturations” imposed on Africans by European theologians acting under theories that could unfortunately be stigmatized as racist. If I may be pardoned the expression, the picture is not quite as black and white as Longenecker makes it out to be.

Damian Thompson writes about “The extraordinary scale of the crisis facing the next pope.” It’s a fine snapshot of the misery in Rome.

Lastly, Timothy Flanders at his new Substack The Meaning of Catholic writes about “Another Third Pornocracy Conclave: Let’s Prepare for the Worst and Hope for the Best”:

I think it is helpful and accurate to describe the current period as the “Third Pornocracy.” It’s helpful because it’s accurate, according to the historical data we have, and it’s helpful to remember that the Holy Spirit has brought us through two previous periods like this.

Prayers

Three very helpful prayers from the traditional Roman Rite: one for the soul of the deceased pope; one for the election of a new Roman Pontiff; and one for the new pope himself, when the time comes:

A very worthwhile initiative, endorsed by Bishop Schneider:

From all my heart I recommend the “Missae pro Missa initiative of Masses and prayers for the election of a holy pope”, the “Worldwide Spiritual Bouquet for the Election of a Holy Pope.” May this initiative be blessed with the miracles of God’s grace!

To participate in this spiritual bouquet for the new pope, visit here.

Articles on Other Topics

Eliminate Communion at times?

At New Liturgical Movement this week, I took as my topic Substack writer Patrick Giroux’s proposal that the issue of the indiscriminate reception of the Lord at weddings and funerals — where many attendees are not Catholics, or, if Catholics, not practicing, not in accord with Church teaching, or not in a state of grace (or all of the above), all of whom go up and receive anyway, thus committing sacrilege — should be solved by not distributing Communion at weddings and funerals. It is hard not to sympathize with this suggestion. But would it be the right thing to do? Or should we make some important distinctions? Read more in my article “Should Communion Sometimes Be Eliminated to Avoid Sacrilege?”

A Refreshing Article of Significant Implications

I urge you to read Timothy Flanders’s “Sedevacantism & the SSPX: Clerical Questions that Need Not Concern the Laity.” Flanders reflects on the limits of our knowledge, our powers, and our responsibilities, and reaffirms the freedom of the laity and the need for mutual respect. His sane thoughts on the SSPX and on sedevacantists are particularly welcome. He emphasizes that the crisis of the Church, inasmuch as it stems from and depends on clergy, is their business to resolve, while the laity must do the best they can using all the resources at their disposal. A taste:

Dogmata are the possession of all the faithful, lay and clerics, because he who knowingly denies a dogma will not be saved. We have to save our souls, so we must know the dogmata (again, either definita et non definita). It’s not the same with questiones disputatae. These things are not the domain of the laity. It’s not my job to determine the intricacies of the De Auxiliis controversy, the locus of transubstantiation with Blessed Scotus, the Nature & Grace controversy, nor the “Disputed Teachings of Vatican II” nor even the dubia of Vatican One. All of these things and more are questiones disputatae. No lay person is responsible for figuring them out in order to save his soul.

Emily Finley

“Reality Through a Veil of Illusion”:

I came to the conclusion that the answer to how to impart the higher reality of life—meaning Christian truth about angels, demons, the Real Presence, Heaven, Hell, the saints, the Resurrection—to my children (and to myself, for that matter) lies in liturgy, literature, song, and nature. Part of our decision to homeschool came about because we realized that religious education could not be bracketed as a side “subject” or something we dwell on merely on Sundays. Christianity must permeate everything.

This required a radical reorientation on my part, as I had been a product of this bracketed Christianity. I think that the Boomer generation was able to live off of the pre-Vatican II spirituality that still lingered on, but by the 1980s and 1990s, there were mere fumes of the traditional faith left, and these were not enough to sustain the next generations. Sunday mass and catechism class, otherwise enveloped in a culture of materialism, scientism, and sentimental humanitarianism, are not enough.

Girardian Analysis of War against TLM

Vincenzo Randazzo, “The Scapegoat in the Pit: A Girardian Reflection on the Suppression of the Latin Mass.”

The Mass, like Joseph, was cast into the pit not for its failings, but because it posed a threat to those in power. And, like Joseph, the Latin Mass is now languishing in a kind of exile, accused falsely of crimes it did not commit. I don’t claim to be the first to draw this analogy or to view the situation through the lens of René Girard’s mechanisms of scapegoating, as it seems too evident to me. But I find the comparison profoundly illuminating—and hopeful....

By scapegoating the traditional Latin Mass, the Church has not resolved its internal divisions but deepened them. The attempt to suppress the Mass has only increased its visibility and its appeal, particularly among younger Catholics who are drawn to its reverence and beauty. As Girard might predict, the act of scapegoating has failed to restore unity because it does not address the root causes of the crisis.

The artificial construct of the “Chrism Mass”

An important study appeared in two parts at NLM (Part 1 | Part 2), on the history of the blessing of oils, the creation ex nihilo of the Chrism Mass, and the horizontal retooling of it under Paul VI. A potent demonstration that the pre-55 embodies the Roman tradition, 1955 is a partial rupture, and 1969 the definitive rupture.

The term “Chrism Mass” did not appear until the reform of 1955. Until then, the Roman liturgy included only one celebration on Holy Thursday: the Mass in Coena Domini, during which the bishop proceeded to bless the oils. Ancient sources, such as the Gelasian Sacramentary, present several liturgical formularies linked to this day, but, as Hermann Schmidt has shown, these were not separate Masses, but a single ritual whole. The Gregorian Sacramentary, a century later, proposes only one form for the blessing of the oils. The Ordo Romanus I confirms this tradition of a single rite, which was maintained with notable symbolic enrichments, admirably described by William Durandes, bishop of Mende, in his Rationale, and taken up again in the Roman Pontifical of 1595, until the reform of the twentieth century.

Pius XII’s intention in the 1955 reform (Maxima Redemptionis nostrae mysteria) was to make this Mass a sacramental catechesis. By isolating the blessing of the oils from the evening Mass, the Pope wanted to emphasize that all sacramental grace flows from the Sacrifice of Christ. However, this reform, while respectful of the traditional canonical structure, paved the way for more radical developments. With the post-conciliar reform, the Chrism Mass became an ecclesiological celebration, centered no longer on sacramental grace, but on communion between the bishop, his priests, and the people....

In short, the post-conciliar reform shifts the centre of gravity of the Chrism Mass from the sacramental union of the oils with the Eucharistic sacrifice to a celebration of the ministerial Church and of presbyteral communion. The focus is no longer primarily on the origin of the sacrament - Christ the priest offering his sacrifice - but on the human structure of the Church and the pastoral life of its ministers. The Chrism Mass thus becomes the mirror of a Church that contemplates itself, rather than a Church that receives everything from its Lord at the altar.

For those keen on the liturgy, this pair of articles is not to be missed: they demonstrate once again, yet from a little-studied angle, the dramatic rupture in tradition represented by the entire reform (in fact, deformation).

Chant Lovers, Take Note!

A fantastic new resource for chanting the preconciliar Breviary:

Now, let’s hope they will create pre-55 and pre-Pius X options.

The Bible Teaches that the Church is Roman

Joshua Charles conducts a fascinating interview with Alan Fimister, author of The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man: ‘Romanitas’ as a Note of the Church.

A Book Review

At OnePeterFive, Dr. Thomas Carr reviews my recent book from Emmaus Academic, Anatomy of Transcendence: Mental Excess and Rapture in the Thought and Life of Thomas Aquinas.

What will the reader take away from wrestling through these six key studies on the corpus of the “Common Doctor,” whose writings, despite the saint’s self-effacing attribution, have become the standard for Catholic ministerial, philosophical, and theological formation? 'Anatomy of Transcendence' is a challenging read, to be sure, but the benefits of accepting the challenge are numerous. These include: a greater appreciation for the mystical and experiential elements in St. Thomas’ writings; a deeper appreciation for the difficulty in, even impossibility of, attaining full comprehension of divine things; a sharper sensitivity to the very varied expressions of mystical and ecstatic experiences in Sacred Scripture; and a more fervent love for the One about whom Aquinas had “written so well.”

Thanks for reading and may God bless you!