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Pick Your Pope |
Question: What is Halloween?
Answer: A day when old men dress up as popes and give away all your candy.
Please, please, enough applause. The Bear is here until Management decides otherwise.
The Bear could not help but notice that the main page for the
Holy See acknowledges two popes. Two popes are "alive." Their deceased predecessors are shadowed. Of course we knew this, and the web page design doesn't really prove much, but still, seeing it brings it home. No one is disputing that there are two popes. Sure, they have different roles. Somehow. One hides and doesn't say much. The other is everywhere and cannot keep his mouth shut.
But it is undisputed that we have two, real, living, popes at the same time. Yet no one has really explained this satisfactorily. But it has to mean
something, right? The Bear means, this is kind of a big deal, isn't it?
Heather Has Two Popes?
The Bear finds it interesting that at the very time we have the most destructive Pope in history, we also happen to have another Pope. When the Bear applies his 450 gram ursine brain to this matter, it makes him go "hmm."
The Bear has refrained from saying this before, but even aside from Francis' what? Error? Evil? Dimness? Insanity? Whatever else is going on, we have, behind the smile and behind the frown, an unparalleled situation that calls into question the validity of Francis's pontificate.
Now, take this unprecedented situation, and add to it an unprecedented, disastrous pontificate of historic significance, and the Bear sniffs something really weird in the air.
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Rin Tin Tin |
The Bear is aware that others, far more educated than he, have considered the two pope problem and dismissed it as no big deal. The Bear has nonetheless drawn his own conclusions. A: Benedict is Pope. B: Therefore, he never stopped being Pope (really just a restatement of A). C: You cannot elect a Pope when there is already a Pope. D: There is no precedent for a dual papacy. E: Benedict is Pope and Jorge Bergoglio is not. Q.E.D.
"But Benedict intended to resign," you object. So? The Bear intended to make as much as Rin Tin Tin in Hollywood. "Intent" is only relevant when the act is covered by the law somehow. The Bear can intend to end his relationship as father to his children. He may ignore his children. He may never speak to them again. He may disinherit them. What he cannot do, is "intend" himself out of his biological and legal relation of fatherhood to his children. (An apt example.)
A man is shot. His wife admits to shooting him, but claims it was an accident. Now, whether she had the intent to kill her husband is an important question. To give another example, a couple may intend to get married. They are wedded before the Justice of the Peace. But, the following day, they discover he did not hold that office, but was a joker. Their intent does not matter. You cannot be legally married by a grocer.
You cannot invoke "intent" to justify an act for which "intent" is irrelevant.
Finally, how about this. "I'm still the Pope, but I'm going to arbitrarily change the nature of my duties. As Pope, I will neglect 99% of my job, but you can bet I'm somewhere out of sight, praying. Because, that's what I say is all that is required of me as Pope." The Bear believes Benedict's resignation was void
ab initio. We don't have to read the tea leaves to discover what Benedict thought he was doing. He simply had no authority to lay aside some duties of Pope, yet retain some sort of "spiritual pontificate."
Obviously, Benedict knew all this. Did he really think he could resign, yet still be Pope, of a sort? The Bear doesn't know, but it doesn't matter. One Pope at a time, please. That's the rule. If there is a clear rule of canon law that says what has happened is legal, the Bear would love to see it.
The only way Jorge Bergoglio is Pope is if Pope Benedict isn't.
Francis: When Jesuitical Scheming Ceased to be a Joke
It is difficult to say in what sense Francis may be called Catholic. Were he to live long enough to complete his program, the Bear can tell you what kind of Church we would have. Decisions on doctrine will devolve upon the national bishops' conferences. You might have gay marriage in Mexico, but not in Poland. Lutherans would take communion in Germany, but not in Italy. You might even have gay marriage in New York, and not in Peoria.
(Oh, and that Catholic aunt of yours who divorced her lousy husband, and never got remarried? A big toothy Francis laugh at her. "Sucker!")
In effect, we would have national Churches with only a symbolic connection to one another. Like crazy-quilt Orthodoxy
without the orthodoxy.
Of course, it would not be called doctrine. It would be pastoral. But in Francis' program of deception, practice drives doctrine, not the other way round.
This is key to understanding Francis. Celebrating Luther is not a nice gesture. It is a rejection of orthodox ecclesiology. It is establishing a new doctrine of a church that is just one choice among many. Francis preaches a new gospel.
Phase Two of the Luther-Bergoglio Reformation.
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Martin Luther (Actually, Lex
Luthor, who was not as bad.) |
Please read the featured post, where Blaise Pascal explains how Jesuits work. The Bear guarantees you will be astonished how a 17th century polemic might come from a good Catholic ephemeris today.
The Bear has no confidence in Pope Francis.
The Bear believes Francis is by far the worse choice between two real popes; or, in the alternative, that Francis was never pope at all. Or if he does actually hold a novel office - The Pope Who Really, Really Counts - the Bear gets sick on the scorpions Francis tries to feed him, and will not eat them. And the Bear will tear the jawbone off of anyone who keeps trying to shove them down his throat.
Let Francis go have his slobbering love affair with Lutheran High Priestess Antje Jackelen, and burn incense before his predecessor and spiritual father. Let him praise Luther for his butchered and misleading bible, in which he deliberately added "alone," to "faith," then bragged about it. Let him parrot generations of Protestant lies against the Church, like it took the Great Luther to "put the Bible in the hands of the people," as Francis said in his latest word salad interview.
Pope Buster
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Pope Buster daily releases a different cute picture of himself.
And every month a video of him performing a trick.
Here: "A Lutheran Lady Archbishop?" |
Bear calls BS on the whole sorry mess (Bear Scat, of course.) And he has a hard time working up a lot of warm feelings for Pope Benedict, who put us here in the first place. (However, now that we're here, he's looking pretty darned convenient.) The Bear's dog is next to him as he writes. Buster would be a better Pope. He would not damage anything, except perhaps some furnishings in the papal apartments, in which Bear guaran-damn-tees you he would live. And he would bite Antje Dress Up somewhere below her knees when she jetted in from Gustavus Adolphus' Muslim immigrant Hellhole.
Buster just said something. He said, to Hell with Martin Luther, to Hell with Gustavus Adolphus, and To Hell with make-belive Protestant prelatesses. The Bear didn't say that. It was Buster.
Sadly, Buster is many years from puppyhood, and his pontificate (he would show his humility by being just Pope Buster) would be short. But he would never lose so much as a period from the deposit of faith. He would give no pressers. He would leave the Church the same as it was when he took the helm.
Whatever Jorge Bergoglio is or is not, the real question is can we safely listen to him? The Bear does not think we need to complicate matters when the answer to that question could not be more obvious.