The People’s Church

By Timothy J Cullen

" Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, Vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit."

1 (St.

Alcuin of York) We are informed by the results of a recent (Sept. 2017) poll conducted among a thousand persons by Saint Leo University Polling Institute that Pope Francis has an "overall approval among Americans Catholics… at 87.9 percentup from 82.6 this past March",

2 calling to mind—albeit on a smaller scale—the now-infamous cliché "Fifty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong".

3 France, it may be worth noting, named the recently deceased (20 Aug 2017) US comedian Jerry Lewis a Chevalier, Ordre national de la Légion d’honneur in 1984.4 Pope Francis is often called by the sobriquet "The People’s Pope", a designation bestowed upon him by Time magazine when it named him "Person of the Year" in 2013, joining Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul II as the only popes to be so designated.

Other designees have been primarily politicians, among whom were twotime winners Joseph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Barack Obama. The designation is applied to those who have greatly influenced the course of world events in a given year.

Among The People’s Pope’s newest initiatives is the late-September "twoyear global campaign, ‘Share the Journey,’ meant to promote a great welcome of migrants and refugees."

While there may be those who have no interest in "sharing the journey", welcoming migrants or indeed wondering just why exactly the Catholic Church should be "promoting" a divisive political agenda within the scope of Catholicism, it would appear that the polled professed Catholics do not: "The pope also managed to lose a bit of support for his work on immigration, dipping from a 54.4 percent approval in March to 53.8 percent in the September poll. However, the poll also showed a 19.7 percent disapproval of his work on immigration, a decrease from 21.1 in March."

7 One wonders what the percentages are among Catholics as a whole. One has little difficulty in seeing Francis as the "People’s Pope", given his predilection for pontificating on presently popular "social" causes such as environmentalism, migrants, economic inequality, "gender rights" and so on; it is a bit more difficult to see him as the Vicar of Christ as previous

1. ‘And do not listen to those who keep saying, ‘The voice of the people is the voice of God.’ because the tumult of the crowd is always close to madness.’ 2. https://cruxnow.com/church-in-the-usa/2017/09/29/newpoll- finds-pope-francis-still-enjoys-widespread-popularityu- s/ 3. https://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/4/ messages/1199.html 4. https://infogalactic.com/info/Jerry_Lewis 5. https://infogalactic.com/info/Time_Person_of_the_Year 6. https://cruxnow.com/church-in-the-usa/2017/09/29/newpoll- finds-pope-francis-still-enjoys-widespread-popularityu- s/ 7. Ibid.

popes were seen, given that things Catholic concerned with the Faith are seldom addressed by the praxis8 pope as opposed to the previously-active papacy of the penitent contemplative pope tucked away in the Monastery of Mater Ecclesiae within Vatican City.

Perhaps I do the Holy Father a disservice by thinking of him as the "praxis pope", but this description from a Marxist study institute seemed to characterize the Francis approach to the papacy: "Praxis, in its simplest construal, means ‘theory plus action.’ It indicates life practice formed from both reflection and action. The self, striving to transform the world creatively according to an emerging vision based on its own values, actualizes itself as it actualizes its vision. Because individuals’ actions always affect other people, praxis is inherently political… In the Marxist sense, then, praxis is both practical and revolutionary…".

Antonio Gramsci, with whom the term "philosophy of praxis" is most closely associated, had this to say about it: "The position of the philosophy of praxis is the antithesis of the Catholic."

10 Gramsci also had this to say about Catholicism:

The relation between common sense and the upper level of philosophy is assured by "politics", just as it is politics that assures the relationship between the Catholicism of the intellectuals and that of the simple.

There are, however, fundamental differences between the two cases.

That the Church has to face up to a problem of the "simple" means precisely that there has been a split in the community of the faithful.

This split cannot be healed by raising the simple to the level of the intellectuals (the Church does not even envisage such a task, which is

8. "The process by which a theory, lesson, or skill is enacted, embodied, or realized. "Praxis" may also refer to the act of engaging, applying, exercising, realizing, or practicing ideas"; The 19th century socialist Antonio Labriola called Marxism the "philosophy of praxis". This description of Marxism would appear again in Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and the writings of the members of the Frankfurt School.": (https://infogalactic.com/info/Praxis_(process).

9. http://www.markfoster.net/struc/praxis.html (emphasis added).

10. Gramsci, Antonio, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey N.

Smith, International Publishers, NY, 1971, p. 332.

both ideologically and economically beyond its present capacities), but only by imposing an iron discipline on the intellectuals so that they do not exceed certain limits of differentiation and so render the split catastrophic and irreparable. In the past such divisions in the community of the faithful were healed by strong mass movements which led to, or were absorbed in, the creation of new religious orders centered on strong personalities (St. Dominic, St. Francis).

This astonishingly presumptuous assertion—granted, made by an atheist and communist—fails to take into account that in the Faith, there are only the faithful and they are all equal in the eyes of God and His Church. The above-referred "antithesis" is precisely that. In the Marxist worldview, all are supposedly equal, but some are more equal than others, as George Orwell so keenly observed in Animal Farm, a thinly disguised satirical allegory of the Soviet police state that arose from the revolutionary praxis as conceived by Karl Marx. This some-are-moreequal- than-others-egalitarianism has characterized communist thought ever since: it is the communist "intellectuals" who cannot reconcile with the "simple", not those who are faithful, authentic Catholics. Compare the condescending and in many ways incoherent writings of the "intellectuals" of the Frankfurt School, the "theologians" of "liberation" and their fellow traveler the late Paulo Freire, all of whom assume a priori that it is they and only they who can presume to know what is right and just for the "people" they intend to enlist in their secular materialist alwaysjust- over-the-horizon-heaven-on-earth with authentic Catholic intellectuals who labor on behalf of all the faithful, "simple" and sophisticated alike. The Catholic intellectual takes no notice of the educational accomplishments of whomever may be seated alongside him in the pew; the commissar, however, will not be found seated alongside the simple on the bus that transports the latter to the factory. The "people" are

11. Ibid, p. 331.

not the amorphous mass that secular materialists perceive them to be, but rather individual souls as correctly perceived by the Church; a so-called "People’s Church" may be "catholic" but it is not Catholic. Contempt, veiled or otherwise, has no place in Catholicism, as Gramsci in his prison ramblings failed to understand: "This split [supposedly existing between Catholic intellectuals and the "simple"] cannot be healed by raising the simple to the level of the intellectuals… but only by imposing an iron discipline on the intellectuals so that they do not exceed certain limits of differentiation and so render the split catastrophic and irreparable." Gramsci forgets a simple truism: ignorance can be remedied, but lack of intellectual capacity cannot; this error persists today in the debased educational systems of the West. There can be no "differentiation".

The "People’s Pope" is an oxymoron: the pope is the Holy Father of the faithful, the Vicar of Christ and the Patriarch of the Roman Catholic Church, not the demagogic dictator of a formless mob known to Marxists as the lumpen-proletariat, aka the "simple".

One hopes and prays that Francis knows that, but one has serious grounds for doubt; the papacy of Francis has a "high approval rating" after all, and the temptation to play to the crowd is one from which few leaders are exempt. The pope, however, is not a political leader, nor should he attempt to act as one, outside his pastoral duty to promote what is in the best interests of his flock, which is the Catholic faithful, not "humanity" as a whole.

The "People’s Pope" makes declarations and exhibits behavior that arouse confusion, concern and perhaps call into doubt the very validity of his papacy; the papal office, in a sense, is "shared" with the "Pope Emeritus" Benedict XVI, given that the latter has not renounced the nomenclature of "Your Holiness", not doffed the white papal vestments, not removed his person from the precincts of the Vatican. Perhaps there is more to that conundrum than meets the eye. Pope Francis is the pope both de jure and de facto, but it is not difficult to understand why some— perhaps the "simple"—might have some difficulty with de facto and prefer to believe that Benedict is the true Vicar of Christ in a figurative sense.

Given a situation in which the "People’s Pope" apparently has no interest in things Catholic other than changing them to concur with his particular vision of "Doctrine", a "duopoly papacy" is less farfetched than it would first appear: God protects His Church. The "People’s Pope" seems more pied piper than pastor, while the "Pope Emeritus" holds fast to authentic Catholicism in his role as penitent and contemplative.

This, however, is fantasy. To whose words and deeds should be paid greater attention?

Continued Next Page

The People's Pope

The People's Church,

Concluded

There is Pope Francis, systematically but non-dogmatically seeking to change nearly everything that makes the Catholic Church unique. Then there is Pope Benedict XVI, alive and well but playing a role that makes it all too easy to forget that he too is a legitimately elected pope, his abdication or renunciation or whatever one chooses to call it notwithstanding. The active papacy of pastoralist Francis is an unmitigated disaster for the Faith, the Church and the faithful, although there are tragically few who would agree if polls are to be believed. What could be called the "passive papacy" of Benedict XVI, consisting mostly of prayer, it would appear, provides a very useful example for those who believe the situation in the Church is beyond human repair.

The "People’s Church" is after all a proposition, not a revelation. The Catholic Church is not a propositional church; She is revelational and therefore not open to question or debate as to Her purpose; everything that needed to be settled was settled long ago; that’s what we call Dogma and Tradition. The effort made since Vatican II to undo all that the Church has been for nearly two millennia and continue to do it in an increasingly revolutionary manner, using the strategy and tactics of revolution: a strategy of patient infiltration, corruption and intellectual pettifoggery until dogma can be circumvented and tradition cast off; tactics include deliberate verbal ambiguity, ecumenical excess, personal public papal appearances with persons previously considered persona non grata by the Church, the introduction of one novel "idea for reform" after another… It all adds up to treachery and betrayal and it will not stop until the institutional Catholic Church has been melded into a globalized "People’s Church" that is also a "People’s Mosque," "People’s Synagogue", "People’s Temple" and "People’s Coven" for the Satanists.

To paraphrase Chesterton, it will be everybody’s church while at the same time being no one’s church at all, one in which nothing sacred will be left standing.

There have arisen "doubts" on the part of a small minority of the Church hierarchy, but destruction outpaces debate and somewhere, perhaps, an indeterminate number of angels dance on the head of a pin while Francis fiddles with Doctrine without slipping into open heresy and the "People’s Church" adapts itself to the new dispensation. And somewhere within the precincts of Vatican City, with its growing shroud of the smoke of Satan, Benedict does penance and prays. ■ Continued Next Page