May 2016
Francis and Women
THE EDITOR
Our Lady's month seems a good time for a brief reflection on our current pontiff's attitude to women, born and unborn.
His real attitude, I mean. The one flagged by the PC posturing and pandering to feminists. Endless, shameless, vacuous... the photo-opportunities are intended to evoke a pontifical champion of 'equality,' 'inclusiveness,' and all that. The feet-washing on Holy Thursday is a prime example. Not content to feminise the tradition in-house, the papal theatrics also incorporate tootsies of non-Catholic women, and drag queens to boot.
Quite apart from subverting Our Lord's intention to underline priesthood-as-fatherhood, papolators might ask themselves a few pertinent questions, such as:
How, precisely, do women benefit from an illicit practice foisted on the universal Church by a maverick Archbishop from Buenos Aires? Is the formalising of such episcopal disobedience a likely source and foundation for advancing truth, holiness and salvation for the fairer sex (or anyone else)? How does Our Lady's humility and obedience (not to say her absence from the original washing of feet) fit with this perversity? Far from proving himself an 'inclusive' and 'humble' servant of women, could it be that Francis has actually sold them out to the feminist non serviam?
Similar queries arise apropos his repeated failures to speak up when spectacular occasions present themselves to defend and champion women against all that would demean them. In our November 2015 number we noted the historic opportunity passed up during his American visit. At a moment when the abortion industry was reeling before rare public exposure of its unspeakable crimes, Francis preferred to lecture Congress about capital punishment. A cowardly cop out, it betrayed women everywhere, but especially those American females still in the womb, untold numbers of whom might have lived had he cared enough to shout their cause from the rooftops instead.
Likewise, when it was later revealed that during his visit he had met privately with Kim Davis,(1) a Protestant woman who had done jail time for refusing to issue marriage licenses to sodomites and lesbians, Francis again retreated to his Quiet Zone. While Christian politicians were supporting Davis (presidential candidate Ted Cruz describing her treatment as "judicial tyranny"), Francis went missing in action. Faced with liberal outrage over the meeting, he allowed his Vatican spin doctors to twist the truth of the encounter, distance him from her views, and leave her courageous Christian witness to be mocked and buried under an avalanche of mainstream media vitriol and social media bile.
Surely, to underline his robust (albeit spasmodic) defence of Christian conscientious objection, the Holy Father should have showcased his moment with Mrs Davis. Especially as he thanked her for her "courage." Instead, five days elapsed before she was permitted to announce it had taken place, only for the Pope's spokesman Fr Lombardi to insist there was a "sense of regret" about the meeting! Yet there was not the least papal regret about another private reception a day earlier — with an active sodomite. Indeed, that meeting was publicised without a Vatican peep.
A gloating liberal press reported that Yayo Grassi, a longtime friend "who has been in a same-sex relationship for 19 years ... brought his partner, Iwan Bagus, ... to the Vatican Embassy [in Washington] on September 23 for a brief visit with the Pope. A video of the meeting shows Grassi and Francis greeting each other with a warm hug. ... Grassi said the Pope has long known that he is gay, but has never condemned his sexuality or his same-sex relationship. In the video, Francis says he recalls meeting Grassi's boyfriend in Rome. 'He has never been judgmental,' Grassi said. 'He has never said anything negative'." (CNN, 3/10/15)
During a private audience in Rome on 24 January 2015, Francis had also happily posed with a woman-masquerading-as-a-man, and her female 'fiancée.' A gift to the gender-benders, that photo was published in Spanish daily El Mundo just before the October "Family" Synod. How convenient.
The Bergoglian pontificate is now defined by this duplicity and public disengagement. Having abandoned Kim Davis to the anti-Christian mob, consider the subsequent affront to Italian women.
Last February, still on his knees before the worldlings, this time during an interview with major Italian daily Corriere Della Serra, Francis praised Italy’s leading proponent of abortion — Emma Bonino — as one of the nation’s "forgotten greats." Comparing her to famous Catholic figures such as Konrad Adenauer and Robert Schuman, he said she offered the best advice to Italy on learning about Africa, waving away her murderous history as an irrelevance. She may not be pro-life, he said, "but never mind. We have to look at people, at what they do." Yet he knows full well what Ms Bonino does; what she has done for decades, to Italian mothers and their unborn children.
The most prominent supporter of abortion in Italy, Bonino worked with an infamous killing centre which boasted over 10,000 abortions. There are even photos of her performing illegal abortions using a homemade device operated by a bicycle pump!
Italian pro-life and family leaders dutifully decried his appalling praise of this evil creature. The incredulity and disgust of Msgr. Ignacio Barreiro, former head of HLI in Rome, was representative. "How can the pope praise a woman that is best known in Italy for practising illegal abortion and promoting abortion?" he asked.
Short answer (condensing all our documented facts and analyses, including Reed Armstrong's research herein): because by nature and formation he is prideful and perverse. Period. Hence his perverse disregard for faithful women: insulted by his lauding of faithless Emma Bonino, their antithesis. Hence, too, his wild provocation: effectively a prideful response to those who criticised his earlier contact with Bonino in 2015, when he called her about her cancer and invited her to the Vatican — for chitchat; not to remind her of the blood on her hands, with a view to her conversion and salvation.
Confusing and corrupting — or in his own lexicon, "messy" and "reckless" — this selling out of the faithful and the common good by refusing to engage the wicked in public battle (even and especially when they're on the back foot), while also embracing and praising them, suggests one of two things: the methodical malice of an infiltrator, or an unstable personality. His own Jesuit Father General, for one, was convinced of the latter.
Whatever the case, it all betrays an alien mentality. Consider that instead of urging women, always and everywhere, in time-honoured papal fashion, to imitate their Blessed Mother Mary as virtuous signs of cultural contradiction, Francis first mutes that salvific message, then cancels it out: not only by lionising degenerate 'Antimarys' like Bonino, but also in doing down those possessed of a truly humble, trusting Marian spirit. His repeated personal criticism of a woman who suffered to bear a large family, for instance. Or, during the same impromptu press conference en route to Rome in January 2015, his worldly nods to contraception and small ("responsible") families. In the process, Francis wounds and dismays his female flock, as passionately articulated by Patricia Medina in our March 2015 edition ("About those 'Catholic Rabbits'", pp. 69-72).
Papolators will reach for the smelling salts and Facebook (in that order) to reassure each other that the Holy Father later qualified his spurious and nasty comments above. The tragic truth, though, is that the belated attempt to spin himself out of trouble on that occasion was as disingenuous as his other damage limitation exercises; as empty as all his female-friendly soundbites. Who can forget his effusive declaration that "Women in the Church are more important than bishops and priests!". Vacuous because it is nonsensical; such hyper-praise is also hyper-hypocritical coming from a pope busy deconstructing the Catholic bulwark: the one true Faith that stands between the best interests of women and those who would revert them to their slavish pre-Christian lot.
Just released, Amoris Laetitia is the latest phase of the deconstruction. Typically, the subjective pastoral poison in this post-Synod Exhortation is diffused through a tsunami of fine words about family life and love. But putting Amoris aside for now, if the Holy Father were truly engaged on the side of women and their children, in or ex utero, where was he on 30 January 2016 when hundreds of thousands gathered in central Rome for a Family Day demonstration against a parliamentary bill to legalise sodomitic and lesbian unions? "This fight for traditional family values is strictly a moral and religious one, not a political one, and is something that any true and zealous pope of the past would have highly endorsed," noted David Martin (The Remnant, 1/2/16).
Far too busy welcoming radical feminists into the Vatican, Francis failed to endorse the rally, either in person or through a simple papal greeting. As with the massive 2013/14 pro-family marches in Paris, his "absence and palpable aloofness was very evident" in Rome, observed Antonio Socci (Libero, 31/1/16). Moreover, the rally was not mentioned either at his Saturday morning general audience, or during the Angelus the day after.
Another Italian wondered: "How are we to judge this silence, just when the Italian Government and Parliament are about to inflict a moral wound on our country?" A rhetorical question, of course, since his non-judgmental silence ever reflects his judgmental disdain for orthodox faith and morals. Indeed, Martin reports that he is "angered" that Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, head of the Italian Bishops' Conference, "has tried to drag him into the public debate about the public rally against gay-unions." So furious, in fact, that he "cancelled his meeting with the Italian Episcopal Conference previously scheduled for January 21." Martin points out the papal hypocrisy:
At the Italian Bishops' meeting in Florence in November 2015, Francis said: "I prefer a Church that is bruised, wounded and dirty from being out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being closed up and clinging in comfort to its own certainties." It seems that quite the opposite is true. Francis refuses to go into the world at street level and proclaim the light of Christ for fear of being bruised, wounded, and spat upon, and prefers to remain cozy with the bureaucrats by telling them what they want to hear. It's all about preserving his own comfort zone through common consensus.
Just as he undermined women, family, and life by lauding Bonino, in spurning the multitude fighting the imposition of a pansexual ideology (that will allow men to join their rent boys in civil unions in city halls all over Italy), Francis yet again assisted the Enemy's battalions: the devilish minority "sustained by the European Union, by the Marxist-Illuminist lobby, and by Freemasonry of various levels and grades," as LifeSiteNews put it.
Spiritually blind, very many still fail to see this papal train wreck unfolding before their eyes. There but for the grace of God go we all! But since we are blessed to perceive the clear and present papal danger, we dare not entrust the preaching of the pristine truth about Mary and woman to such a "messy" Modernist. Far better, therefore, to let a Catholic shepherd of scholarly renown do it — precisely and concisely — for him.
FOOTNOTES
(1) Contrary to much disinformation about this encounter, Mrs Davis and her husband did indeed meet with the Pope (in Washington on 24 September 2015) in a room with no one else present apart from official staff and security. - Newsmax, 2/10/15.