Dr. John Lamont: "'A monster is..a phenomenon, that several centuries ago had a meaning'..Francis is a monster..love of destruction that he manifests so clearly were the motive forces"
Francis does not follow canon law, and he prefers not to use it as an instrument to enforce his will. His policy on marriage and the Eucharist contradicts canon law, but he does not deal with this contradiction by changing the law; he leaves it on the books and ignores its existence. He has consistently shielded sexual abusers from ecclesiastical and civil authorities. Of course the usual practice in the Church is for bishops and religious superiors to protect sexual criminals and conceal their crimes. But the goal of this policy is to prevent these criminals being caught. Once they are caught, the policy is to say that no-one knew anything about them. Francis’s approach is different. He protects and even promotes such men after they have been caught as well as before. This can be seen in the cases of Fr. Julio Grassi, Fr. Mauro Inzoli, Fr. Marko Rupnik, and Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta. He seems to consider that having been caught for such acts gives a priest a title to respect...
...What is the significance of Pope Francis? I think the answer to this question is suggested by Johann Chapoutot, the brilliant French scholar of Nazism. In 2018 Chapoutot and Christian Ingrao published a biography of Adolf Hitler that sought to understand Hitler’s significance. In a talk presenting the biography, Chapoutot gave this account of their thesis:
One of the most common explanations for Nazism, without explaining it in relation to one’s self, and in the end evacuating it of significance, is to say that Hitler was a madman and that all those Nazis were caught up in a sort of St. Vitus’s dance, morbid and macabre, that carried away Europe and their era in a whirlwind of suffering and horror. This is an explanation that does not explain. It is far too convenient; one can see how it provides psychological reassurance, but it is not accurate. Hitler poses a problem for us not because he is a madman, but because he is a monster. He is a monster. What is a monster? A monster is an individual that we find difficult to explain today – today, and for let us say perhaps two hundred years. A monster is a thing, a phenomenon, that several centuries ago had a meaning and made sense. Consider the etymology of ‘monster’; it comes from ‘monstrare’ in Latin, which means to indicate, to show, to give a sign of something, to be a sign of something. And in fact, in a world saturated with the divine, saturated with transcendence, saturated with magic perhaps, the monster, the one who is an extreme departure from normality, who is extreme by his evil acts for example, is the sign ofsomething; a sign of the anger of God, of the divine vengeance that is striking us. 3)
Chapoutot and Ingrao’s discussion of Hitler has merits and defects that do not concern us here. What does concern us is their explication of of the concept of a monster. This concept provides the interpretive key for an understanding of Francis and his papacy. Francis is a monster. He has been described and explained as a Peronist, a modernist heretic, a Jesuit who exhibits the worst failings that characterize members of that order. These descriptions are not wrong, but they do not get to the important truth about him. The extremity of his evil acts identifies him as outside the normal order of things, as a phenomenon that does not belong to the natural or supernatural structure of human life.
... He is also a sign of the corruption of the Catholic priesthood and episcopate. With very few exceptions, Catholic priests and bishops have either supported his destructive acts or kept quiet about them. There have been other manifestations of this corruption. The offence of criminal sexual abuse is widespread among Catholic priests and religious. The persons who are best informed about these offences are other Catholic priests and bishops. The offenders are however absolutely never denounced by their fellow clerics. These offences are kept secret as far as possible by the criminals, but Pope Francis’s crimes are public knowledge. The silence of priests and bishops in the face of his crimes reveals their baseness and treachery in an unmistakable way.
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