Deemphasize devotion to the Virgin Mary and you get your New World Religion.
In the kabuki theater of hypocrisy, the current Pontiff in Rome, Francis, has turned his attention to conservative U.S. Catholics, accusing them and some bishops of “backwardness,” saying that they have replaced faith with… ideology.
The use of the word’ ideology’ by this, the most ideological of popes, is nothing less than confusing and contradictory.
In his book, “The Political Pope,” George Neumayr maps out how Francis has long alienated conservatives and delighted liberals with his harsh ideological views.
Consider for a moment how a conservative Catholic would want atheists and Muslims to convert to Christianity (or Catholicism).
Ah yes, but not Francis.
“It is true that the idea of conquest is inherent in the soul of Islam. However, it is also possible to interpret the objective in Matthew’s Gospel, where Jesus sends his disciples to all nations, in terms of the same conquest,” Francis told the French newspaper, La Croix in 2016.
Unlike any other pope in the history of the Roman Church, Francis commended the reading of the Qur’an when he stated, “Those that are Christian, with the Bible, and those that are Muslim, with the Quran. The faith that your parents instilled in you will always help you move on.”
Even more shocking is when this most ideological of popes stated:
“Our respect for true followers of Islam should lead us to avoid hateful generalizations, for authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Quran are opposed to every form of violence.”
Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch called this statement wrong and misleading “because it gives the Christians who are being persecuted by Muslims in Nigeria, in Egypt, in Syria, in Iraq and elsewhere no support.”
Francis’ views on Islam go to the heart of what makes him the most ideologically-driven pope in history.
Novus Ordo Watch, the website that “unmasks the modernist Vatican II Church,” recently reported that the Archbishop of Londrina, Brazil — appointed by Francis in 2017 — gave communion to a Muslim Sheik.
“…Make no mistake about it,” the Thomas More Law Center posited,
“not only is the Catholic Church the greatest defender against Islam throughout history, but the popes of the Catholic Church are the greatest leaders in bringing Christians of all denominations together to fight against the Islamists of each age and, when followed, to bring Christians to victory over the Muslims. That is also to say that what you see happening today with Pope Francis is not only anomaly but in direct contradiction—even against the very teachings—of the popes over the last 1400 years.”
Neumayr’s book makes it clear that Francis’ idea of evangelization is not about spreading the Gospel of Christ, but about “convincing Christians to embrace social justice.”
“Pope Francis,” writes Catholic-to-Orthodox convert Rod Dreher, “makes me realize that the good, if incomplete, work that John Paul II and Benedict XVI did to restore the Church after the violence of the [liberal] revolution stands to be undone. The ‘spirit of Pope Francis’ will replace the ‘spirit of Vatican II’ as the rationalization people will use to ignore the difficult teachings of the faith.”
Even avowed atheists like Bill Maher are noticing that there’s something ‘atheistic leaning’ about the current pontiff.
“I think the pope is an atheist,” Maher stated elatedly, explaining that Francis talks mainly about political liberalism rather than Catholic theology, and that this fact put him in mind of all the Catholic priests he’s met who are really not believers but atheists.
A Catholic priest friend once confided in me that a large number of his clergy friends have told him that they “really don’t believe in all the old stuff anymore,” meaning the Real Presence, the Mass, the power to forgive sins, miracles, the reality of hell or even the concept of an afterlife.
Perhaps these disbelieving priests are only partially to blame considering that their role model, Francis, also questions traditional concepts of hell.
Francis’ “novelties about hell,” [Neumayr’s phrase], compares roughly to those innocuous social media/Facebook posts announcing that it is “so-and-so’s” heavenly birthday.
It’s never a Purgatorial birthday or a Dante’s Inferno birthday, mind you, but always a ‘heavenly’ one, where everybody—Charles Manson, Joseph Stalin, Richard Speck and even Adolf Hitler—goes to heaven.
You never read on those same social media posts: “Pray for my grandmother who died 39 days ago,” a sentiment that at least leaves the final verdict to God — and that at least infers that prayers may work on grandmother’s behalf to get her to that “place” we all aspire to reach but that has now become so cheap and accessible, meaning something you don’t have to work to achieve but rather something handed to all of us equally, as if going there was rubber stamped as part of an equity program devised by the Biden administration.
But this isn’t what scripture says; it’s not what the Church teachers say, and it’s certainly not what the testimonies of many saints and mystics have revealed.
And it is not, if we were to count the many messages in both approved (and alleged) visitations of the Virgin Mary, what the Mother of God seems to be saying when she says things like,
“Pray, pray a great deal and make many sacrifices, for many souls go to hell because they have no one to make sacrifices and to pray for them,” (Fatima, August 1917).
Hell has fallen out of fashion because it has come to be associated with firebrand evangelicals and with who ‘regular’ people call fanatics who obsess with religion “inappropriately.”
Hell has become, as Jean-Paul Sartre proclaimed, “other people.”
If one looks at Catholicism today, one can say with certainty that the most fervent Catholics are those Catholics in the conservative ideological camp.
These also tend to be Catholics with a special devotion to the Virgin Mary and her multiple apparitions and manifestations at Lourdes, La Salette, Fatima, Garabandal, and Akita, Japan.
These manifestations also come with messages that clearly contradict the rhetoric of Pope Francis.
The messages talk about hell in an unambiguous way.
The Fatima message, for instance, contains a clause stating that most people who go to hell go there because of the sins of the flesh, the opposite of what Francis recently suggested while visiting his Jesuit friends in Portugal, where he commented that too much attention is paid to “sins below the waist.”
The pope saying one thing, the Queen of Heaven saying another — how’s that for an existential morass.
And yet this clearly suggests that if Francis wants his fantasy of a Synodal Church to come true, he must first do all he can to devalue, demote, or somehow make less important any message from the Virgin Mary that contradicts his globalist ‘enlightened’ theology.
The way to do this is by casting aspersions on Marian apparitions by any means possible, especially by emphasizing that personal revelations travel a sketchy path from heaven to earth, filtering as they do through the biases or lack of reporting abilities of the receiver—think of a secret being whispered down the lane and how it twists into a pretzel of lies by the time it reaches the last human ear.
The cry for less emphasis on Mariology has been heard in Catholic liberal circles since the 1960s when the Jesuit magazine, America, began running articles on Vatican II and on the need to “tone down” on what the preacher to the (Francis) papal household, Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, terms Mariology’s “non-stop factory of new titles, new devotions, often in polemic against Protestants…”
By placing less of an emphasis on Mariology, and then having that devaluation take hold among the faithful — that’s when the new theology of Francis will take off.
But that knot is not giving way; instead, devotion to the Virgin Mary in much of the Catholic world is solidifying into something tighter and greater than Francis. And it’s all coming from the laity.
Francis may scribble away in ‘Amoris Laetitia’ that, “The way of the Church is not to condemn anyone forever,” but nearly every Church-approved Virgin Mary message stands in direct contradiction to this thought.
All of which brings me back to my priest friend who told me that he does not believe in the visions of Fatima because of the horrible visions of hell the Virgin allowed the three Shepard children to witness.
That horrific vision apparently so terrified the children that they let out screams. Mercifully, the glimpse into that inferno was short, but even its shortness was too long for my friend.
“There’s no way the Mother of God would ever do this to children,” my friend commented. “It’s cruel. “
Here we have a good priest — who is a fan of Francis, I might add — saying that Fatima is suspect and perhaps demonic, something not to be believed.
All Marian apparitions are, at their core, conservative. All speak of sin and repentance, of bishops and priests falling away from the faith, of churches being sacked, of apostasy and theological confusion.
This is why Francis and his minions will eventually lose the war, and why in the end, the heart known as ‘Immaculate’ will triumph.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/francis-war-on-marian-apparitions/