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BREAKING: Fr. Lombardi and Pope Francis Speak Out on Scalfarigate!

Zelig Mosaic

A montage from the 1983 Woody Allen film, Zelig1 AKA, The Proto-Forrest Gump

“The Christ that Harnack sees, looking back through nineteen centuries of Catholic darkness, is only the reflection of a Liberal Protestant face, seen at the bottom of a deep well.”

— George Tyrrell, Christianity at the Crossroads2 London and New York: Longmans, Green and Co. (1909), p. 44 [world cat link]

I worked real hard for the dear old firm,
I learned most every advertising term.
I said to the men in the dark gray suits,
“Let’s run it up the flagpole and see who salutes.”

— Allan Sherman (1963)

“God … has bestowed on me a healthy dose of unawareness. I just do what I have to do.”

— Pope Francis (7 October 2014)

+ + +

As Steve Skojec explained yesterday, the relationship between Pope Francis, Eugenio Scalfari, we Catholic sheep, and a little ol’ thing called truth, is quite the contested battlefield in Catholic Commentarydom.

Fortunately, however, we need no longer remain in doubt.

Neither the Pope himself nor the Vatican spokesman, Fr. Federico Lombardi, has left us in the dark about how reliable or significant Scalfari’s published interviews of Francis are.

Screenshot Colbert truthiness
Eugenio Scalfari: Witness to the ‘Spirit’ of Pope Francis’s Words, On An Odyssey to the Peripheries of Truthiness
According to John Allen, Jr., Fr. Lombardi has explained that “we’re seeing the emergence of a whole new genre of papal speech — informal, spontaneous and sometimes entrusted to others in terms of its final articulation.” A new genre, as Allen tells us Lombardi has suggested, “needs a ‘new hermeneutic,’ one in which we don’t attach value so much to individual words as to the overall sense.” In other words, Lombardi has concluded, “This isn’t Denzinger, and it’s not canon law.”3 The Religion-Formerly-Known-As-Catholicism was not available for comment.

Not one to be upstaged, Pope Francis himself has also weighed in on the place his non-homiletical homilies (viz., his irrepressible press interviews and his trademark off-the-cuff off-the-wallisms) in the larger picture of his papacy:

Look, I wrote an encyclical, … it was a big job, and an Apostolic Exhortation, [and] I’m permanently making statements, giving homilies; that’s teaching. That’s what I think, not what the media say that I think. Check it out, it’s very clear.

Like it or not, then, according to Francis himself, it behooves faithful Catholics to heed his frequent “statements” (as distinct from his “homilies”) with the same respect as we heed his homilies, exhortations, and encyclicals—and vice versa.

Like it or not, according to Francis himself, “permanently making statements”—even to the likes of Scalfari—is part of his “teaching.”

Why, then, does Fr. Lombardi insist on undermining the pope’s public statement-making-magisterium by levying charges against Scalfari?

comunión misa mass francis francisco cuba this isnt denzinger

Check It Out, Y’all, It’s Very Clear

Sensing an even deeper pastoral thirst in the flock, Pope Francis expanded further on how we must parse his Very Clear Magisterium Of Statements.

In the disco-ballish light of the recent Synodal Language Event, our Jesuit-in-Chief explains that we must avoid “falling into a facile repetition of what is obvious or has already been said,” a warning which Scalfari has clearly heeded by transcending “a facile repetition” of what was said during his interviews with Francis.

Likewise, the Pope has warned:

[Being Synodal™ is] about trying to open up broader horizons, rising above conspiracy theories and blinkered viewpoints, so as to defend and spread the freedom of the children of God, and to transmit the beauty of Christian Newness, at times encrusted in a language which is archaic or simply incomprehensible.

Who knows better than Scalfari how to indulge in the freedom that his Christian baptism provides by transmitting the beauty of Bergoglian Novelty, without leaving it encrusted in transcribed archaic, incomprehensible, much less Pharisaically objectively precise, language?

As Francis warns us, if we desire, as he does, to engage in “dialogue that is open and free of preconceptions, and which reopens the doors to a responsible and fruitful encounter,” we must rise above blinkered conspiracy theories that would tar Scalfari as an enemy of the truth.

After all, as Fr. Lombardi has humbly reminded us, if the Pope felt his thought had been “gravely misrepresented,” he would have said so.

He hasn’t, though.

So…?

Embrace the clarity, I guess.

pope francis inside uniform polyhedron_clipped_rev_1

Check it out: There’s room for all of us on the Papal Polyhedron

As our Bishop in Rome has clarified, “the Synod experience”™ helps us “realise that the true defenders of doctrine are not those who uphold its letter, but its spirit.

This is where Scalfari really shines.

For who else than Scalfari, as indicated by the Pope’s repeated and personally unrepudiated self-entrustment to that old atheist, who else than Scalfari can uphold the spirit of Francis’s words, if not their every jot and tittle?  Who better than Scalfari can create fresh language events for Pope Francis to spread his legs and assess how the sheep are smelling this week?

Amidst this flurry of Vatican paraprosdokian intrigue, it’s hard to keep up, but most likely in Francis’s mind, it all boils down to this:

If a successful Italian journalist constructs his reports from memory, and is sought out by the Pope for as many as five personal interviews, and has good will, who are we to judge him?

Who, indeed, are Scalfari’s bloghack critics to judge him?

He’s got the Pope’s ear, while they’ve got a nifty SEO app to show you over egg nog this Christmas season.

Unlike those throwers-of-dead-stones in the Catholic blogsophere, true charity extends as much to Scalfari as it does to Francis. If a pope is Modernist and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge him?

Pope Francis is teaching Catholic Commentarydom that it needs to transcend its obsession with the letter of what he has said, and instead drink from the polyhedral font of the spirit of his words.

To invoke Albert Schweitzer, with whom the image of looking down a well is often (though erroneously) associated, we should regard The Rashomon Papacy as ultimately being a conflict of visions about the papacy, and about the Church as a whole: In one corner, the Hermeneutic of Continuity in Ingenuity 4 AKA, The Pseudo-Franciscus Lombardiensis School, and, in the other, the Hermeneutic of Continuous Creativity 5 AKA, The Psuedo-Franciscus Scalfariensis School—though, I admit, it’s hard to tell them apart after a while.6 What difference, at this point, does it make? Either way, the trick is to keep talkingto keep adapting. For the Church that Pope Francis sees, looking back through nineteen centuries of Catholic dogmatism, is only the reflection of a Liberal Jesuit face, seen at the bottom of a deep well.

It’s not like any of this this is is Denzinger, after all.

No.

All we need to know is that Pope Francis is whatever we need him to be for us.

He just has to do what he has to do.

rashomon human to lie

“He who does not sin is not human”

Footnotes

Footnotes
1 AKA, The Proto-Forrest Gump
2 London and New York: Longmans, Green and Co. (1909), p. 44 [world cat link]
3 The Religion-Formerly-Known-As-Catholicism was not available for comment.
4 AKA, The Pseudo-Franciscus Lombardiensis School
5 AKA, The Psuedo-Franciscus Scalfariensis School
6 What difference, at this point, does it make?

32 thoughts on “BREAKING: Fr. Lombardi and Pope Francis Speak Out on Scalfarigate!”

  1. Elliott- delightful! Thanks very much!

    There was a nonhomeletic (contrangellus?) recently, which touched on things about God’s powerlessness. I haven’t seen it broadly addressed anywhere (perhaps I’m inadequately systematic or perhaps you own all the trademarks so only you can write about these subjects.) I feel like that’s connected with this exegesis of the hermeneutic you address here.

    Reply
    • http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2015/10/29/pope_god_can_only_love_and_not_condemn/1182923

      The gift is God’s love, a God who can’t sever himself from us. That is the impotence of God. We say: ‘God is all powerful, He can do everything!’ Except for one thing: Sever Himself from us! In the gospel, that image of Jesus who weeps over Jerusalem, helps us understand something about that love. Jesus wept! He wept over Jerusalem and that weeping is all about God’s impotence: his inability to not love (us) and not sever himself from us.

      It gets better, slightly, but is very Jesuitical in using an alarming paradox to get attention.

      Reply
      • By
        trying to seriously parse the theology behind this, one is just
        falling for the rhetorical trick. He’s not trying to advance a
        metaphysically cogent account
        of salvation; he’s stumping. He’s a Peronist; everything is political;
        he’s always stumping. Throwing out theological gobbledygook is how he
        derails orthodox critics, seeing as those of us who take theology
        seriously can’t resist trying to “make sense” of it. He could give two
        *bleep* about “fundamental theology”.

        No, what he’s doing here is trying,
        as always, to preempt his ideological targets/foes. If God doesn’t
        condemn, then how can the Church, seeeeee???? This is just him using a
        lot of beautiful words to undermine the Church’s share in Christ’s royal
        authority. It’s not about the love of God so much as about his ever
        burning hatred for Canon law and right order.

        Reader’s Digest Version: He’s a Modern South American Jesuit, don’t LISTEN to him; just watch him.

        Reply
        • I agree that in his homily, his most important claim is that God Does Not Condemn… therefore we should not, either. He condemns condemning. So it’s illogical, but a common tool of the Left to disarm their opponents by shaming them.

          He’s not trying to advance a metaphysically cogent account of salvation; he’s stumping.

          I would say he’s stumping for an account of salvation that is Christ died once for all sins always. “Freedom of Christians”. We see Peronism in his willingness to seize the levers of power, in the Church, of condemnation, in pursuit of his personal goal to include the excluded from salvation: those who don’t know that the Church has lied for two thousand years, and all are saved.

          Reply
        • I now greatly look forward to the pope’s explanation of the poly-practical multivalency available in spelling “SJ” correctly in English.

          Derrida on the Tiber.

          Reply
      • That is the core of satanism, to the extent that I am familiar with it: God is weak, Satan is strong. Nietche, but even more base. This is, to my ear, a florid satanism.

        Reply
  2. Perhaps what is needed are the tools of the Deconstructionists of yesteryear. We all can deconstruct Vatican teachings and reconstruct them to whatever pleases us.

    Reply
  3. I guess PF is like Kramer (Seinfeld). “I do what I do what I do.”
    Gotta love the Newness (TM), otherwise known as Novelty.

    Reply
  4. You have to wonder these days how many cardinals each morning look into the bathroom mirror, remember what the pope said just yesterday, and mutter under their breath, “What a complete idiot you were!”

    Reply
  5. “[Being Synodal™ is] about trying to open up broader horizons, rising above conspiracy theories and blinkered viewpoints, so as to defend and spread the freedom of the children of God, and to transmit the beauty of Christian Newness, at times encrusted in a language which is archaic or simply incomprehensible.”

    Sorry Holy Father, Pope Pius XII is not impressed:

    “14. In theology some want to reduce to a minimum the meaning of dogmas; and to free dogma itself from terminology long established in the Church and from philosophical concepts held by Catholic teachers, to bring about a return in the explanation of Catholic doctrine to the way of speaking used in Holy Scripture and by the Fathers of the Church. They cherish the hope that when dogma is stripped of the elements which they hold to be extrinsic to divine revelation, it will compare advantageously with the dogmatic opinions of those who are separated from the unity of the Church and that in this way they will gradually arrive at a mutual assimilation of Catholic dogma with the tenets of the dissidents.

    15. Moreover, they assert that when Catholic doctrine has been reduced to this condition, a way will be found to satisfy modern needs, that will permit of dogma being expressed also by the concepts of modern philosophy, whether of immanentism or idealism or existentialism or any other system. Some more audacious affirm that his can and must be done, because they hold that the mysteries of faith are never expressed by truly adequate concepts but only by approximate and ever changeable notions, in which the truth is to some extent expressed, but is necessarily distorted. Wherefore they do not consider it absurd, but altogether necessary, that theology should substitute new concepts in place of the old ones in keeping with the various philosophies which in the course of time it uses as its instruments, so that it should give human expression to divine truths in various ways which are even somewhat opposed, but still equivalent, as they say. They add that the history of dogmas consists in the reporting of the various forms in which revealed truth has been clothed, forms that have succeeded one another in accordance with the different teachings and opinions that have arisen over the course of the centuries.”

    -Humani Generis-

    Reply
    • I had a theology professor, a priest, tell me that saying the Nicene Creed and giving outward assent is a nebulous proposition since no one can really know what the words really mean.

      Faith is different from words. Father’s point was, don’t confuse the two.

      Reply
  6. great piece.

    you guys need to get dr. dialogue sj to start writing here as well. his tweets are on fire for the LAWD.

    Reply
  7. These last 60 years are simply the Hermeneutic of Continuity in Deceitfulness, Subterfuge, and Doublespeak. Only an insane person would try to square any of what has transpired with Catholicism.

    Reply
  8. Thanks Elliot very well done. So now we know how a master manipulator works. Pope Francis should receive the Edward Bernays award for deception. And all of this calls to mind that the devil is the father of lies. Nothing new here folks, move on.

    Reply
  9. If anyone has ever wondered what it would be like to ingest Flakka but is too fearful of its unpredictable consequences, just read all of the speeches by Our Pope and Our Cross and one will have an idea of what effect Flakka has on one’s intellect.

    Now, uncountable are the men (Hello Mr. Voris) who will tell you that this piece by brother Elliott and the responses this excellent piece will generate is what is wrong with Traditionalists and their behavior and it is they who are dragging down the church.

    Please, back to your bathetic bong.

    Our Pope and Our Cross is the one who is running the One True Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church off the rails and into the quicksand and he is an unending embarrassment to the One True Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church and the ones who have the authority to do something abut it – The Cardinals – are too craven to act and, undoubtedly, they will not act to remove Franciscus because that would be a “scandal” and so the scandal that is this Papacy is allowed to continue even as its absurdities increase in intensity and frequency.

    To Voris and others – WE ARE THE VICTIMS AND FRANCISCUS IS THE PERP SO EITHER PUT UP A DEFENSE OF THE FAITH AGAINST FRANCISCUS OR PIPE DOWN.

    The Pope is supposed to be the sign of stability and doctrinal security and because he is precisely the opposite, Franciscus is an antiChrist.

    Reply
    • The Pope is the best thing to happen to the church for our time. If you were around during Constantine’s reign, you are one of those who would not have readmitted those Catholics who denied the faith under torture to Holy Communion. We have a whole generation of Catholics who are divorced due to many things. Poor Catechism of the 60s , 70s and 80s, the incredible attack on morality that surrounds us like no generation ever had to experience in the past, Priests who married people without there being active in their church attendance and belief, etc. etc. Many of those baptized Catholics seek to come back. now they may be married again and have children with their new spouses. why shouldn’t the church open its arms to receive them? the church is largely to blame for their fall. If we exclude them we are excluding the next generation because many of these people will join the Lutherans or even worst.
      Let the pope be pope and the Holy Spirit be his guide as has always been the case. This pope offers hope to millions who have been put out by people who judge according to their own failings. So easy to judge when your own marriage is good and you were raised in a good Catholic home. Not all were or are so fortunate. for many Baptism was the only time they were brought to church and their first communion and their confirmation.
      You want to save the church? how about offering to pick up the children of your non practicing catholic neighbor and bring them to catechism class and church? then we save the next generation. In other words act on your convictions in a positive way rather than throw rocks at a Pope driven by the love and compassion he has for his flock.

      Reply
      • We’re all Donatists now? Is that it?

        The problem with your analogy is that while the traditores really did betray the faith, the Donatists didn’t believe it was possible for their sin to be forgiven. They didn’t believe that God’s mercy could happen even after repentance.

        People like you’ll find here don’t suffer from such uncompromising “rigidity.” We believe that today’s traitors of the faith can absolutely be forgiven: they just have to actually be sorry and change their lives first – including the pope.

        Reply
      • Your analogy to Catholics at the time of the Novatianist and by extension the later Donatist heresies fails utterly for the same reason Kasper’s plan fails, viz. if does not take into account the necessity for repentance, true repentance, before absolution can be granted. Those readmitted during those times first confessed their sin and asked for forgiveness; they promised to not recidivate. What you (and Kasper) demand is to simply skip sincere repentance with firm purpose to sin no more, and for the Church to ignore that the sinner continues in an adulterous marriage, i.e. you wish to denigrate both sacraments, marriage and the Eucharist. This evil plan has even more harmful consequences, if that’s possible. It would immediately undermine the Church’s assertion that she teaches indefectibly and has so taught for 2000 years the doctrines revealed by Christ to humanity.

        I suspect from your words that you (or perhaps someone very close to you) find yourself in the predicament you outline in your second paragraph. You need to talk to a priest in Confession, a good one not willing to traduce Jesus’ teachings to “arrange matters.” And, most importantly, you need to pray hard for guidance. But always keep in mind that compassion does not mean and never has meant irrational and ultimately destructive emotionalism as you seem to indicate in your last sentence.

        Reply
  10. This is the kind of open mockery we are actually obliged to employ in protesting this open mockery of a papacy. Somehow one is driven to it, isn’t that so?

    Reply

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