Dread.  From the moment the white smoke appeared, it has just been dread.  Every day I dread what he is going to say or do.  What must be remembered in all of this, and what I have been saying since day one of the Franciscan pontificate is that we MUST understand and remember that Our Lord is ANGRY.  Very, very angry.  And as St. John Eudes told is in no uncertain terms, when God is angry with His people, we get bad clergy.  Given the unprecedented sins of the once-Christian world, it should be no surprise whatsoever that we now have not just bad priests, but a bad pope.  Hey, if we had the pope we deserved we would have Pope Snoop Dogg right now, so… yeah.  Sigh.

If you have listened to the first podcast, you heard the discussion about the criticality of thinking and arguing from the foundation a TRUE PREMISE.  That is what we have to do here when unpacking Francis’ latest mess. Let’s establish some TRUE premises and compare them with the FALSE premises that people are trying to use.

False premise #1:  Pope Francis is intelligent, because only an intelligent man could ever rise through the Church and be elected pope.  (This sounds eerily familiar somehow…)
TRUE premise:  Pope Francis is not a terribly intelligent man.

We want to believe that the people who are in charge or in positions of authority are competent to wield that authority, and that the world is a perfect meritocracy.  It is not.  It is consoling to one’s self to think that there are people out there who know and understand more than we do and can thus take care of us and handle problems.  This is not always true, and as our culture rots and corrupts, the less frequently this is true.  Academia is filled with idiots, liars and abject incompetents.  The business world rewards psychopathy and elevates stupid people and the unqualified who present no real threat to the able psychopaths, and are regarded as easily controlled pawns.  Once you shake off your innate, and quite frankly FEMININE, bias toward believing that occupying a position of authority PROVES competence, it is actually quite easy to spot people who are “the real deal” and, conversely, the poseurs.  One simple metric?  Real Deals answer questions clearly and directly.  Their “yes” means yes, and their “no” means no.  Poseurs are evasive and rely heavily on slogans and buzzwords; “speaks much, says little”.  Pope Francis’ main buzzterms are “humility”, “dialogue”, “encounter” and “the poor”.  I’m not convinced that he has a thorough or even adequate understanding of even one of those terms.

False premise #2:  Pope Francis understands economics and the financial system.
TRUE premise:  Pope Francis understands little to nothing about economics and the financial system.

This cannot be overemphasized.  Taking economic advice from Pope Francis is like taking advice on deep sea oil drilling or the proper playing of the French Horn from me.  For those of you who have watched my 2.5 hour video series on YouTube about the financial system and economics, do you honestly believe that Pope Francis knows ANYTHING about any of that?  Do you think he understands the situation with regards to the banking system, the debt bubble or the massive global derivatives exposure?  And that is just barely scratching the surface of the topic.  Do you think Pope Francis even understands or has thought about what money actually is?  Let me answer that question clearly.  No.  Pope Francis’ entire economic platform is, “Give poor people more free stuff forevah.”  That’s it.

False premise #3:  Pope Francis is politically conservative or completely non-political.
TRUE premise:  Pope Francis is a Peronist-Fascist which is a particular subset of Marxism in South America that believes that the state should control the economy and redistribute wealth.

Being that he is not terribly intelligent, he does not understand or have figured out that all political agitation for state-driven, forced coercion of “redistribution of wealth” has NOTHING to do with helping the poor and EVERYTHING to do with consolidating wealth and power among a cadre of oligarchs precisely by creating and then looting a massive underclass.  Lenin called these people who actually believe that Marxism genuinely cares about the poor, “useful idiots”.  Trapped by his own misguided belief that the poor are somehow INTRINSICALLY SPIRITUALLY SUPERIOR, when he sees the inevitable results of Marxism, namely the proliferation and spread of material poverty throughout a culture, he reconciles it in his own mind by canonizing the underclass and telling himself that they are spiritually “better off” for being materially poor.  This is not a malevolent position, but it is a deeply stupid position.

False premise #4:  Pope Francis is fully versed in and fully understands and fully believes what the Church teaches and has taught for 2000 years.
TRUE premise:  Pope Francis is a Jesuit and a direct product of the post-asteroid (aka post Vatican II) era.  As such, he is woefully uneducated and contra-educated, and believes that the Church was “reborn” in approximately ARSH 1968, and that everything before ARSH 1968 is inferior and/or irrelevant. 

The main architect of the destruction of the Church in the mid-20th century was a priest named Annibale Bugnini.  Bugnini was quoted as saying, “Modern secular man is the perfect man and the everlasting man.”  This statement explains pretty much everything that has happened in the last 50 years, and why.  This mindset, of which Bergoglio, a South American Jesuit and full product of the post-conciliar Church, was utterly formed in, allows for the utter rejection of and total lack of curiosity about everything that happened before ARSH 1968.  It doesn’t matter what the Mass was like before, and it doesn’t matter what the Fathers and Saints taught before, because MANKIND ITSELF was different, and not just different but INFERIOR.  Thus everything “old” is bad, and everything “new” is good, and thus the Church must also be new, and thus different.  Nothing “old” can possibly speak to the new, superior modern man, who can now “encounter” Christ and “dialogue” with Him as an equal.  Modern man can now act as his own arbiter of truth, conceptualizing the notions of good and evil within himself, and truth, goodness and beauty are now negotiable and dynamic.  Modern man need not rely on strict, antiquated teaching, but now, in his superiority, can confidently rely on how things make him FEEL.

Pope Francis doesn’t know what the Church’s teachings on these important questions are and he has clearly not availed himself of the wisdom left to us by giants like Augustine, Aquinas, and even popes who lived through the ascendancy of Marxism itself, like Leo XIII, because he simply doesn’t particularly care what they have to say.  Why consult inferior, backward men from an inferior, backward time when you can consult yourself in all of your modern, humble, post-1968 glory?

False premise #5:  Pope Francis wrote the Apostolic Exhortation (aka the manifesto) himself.
True premise:  Pope Franics almost certainly had significant “help” in writing the document, if it wasn’t totally ghostwritten.

If there is one skillset that we all should have picked up over the last six years, it is identifying a written text that in no way matches the voice of the speaker.  Pope Francis cannot speak with any coherence or sophistocation when he speaks off the cuff.  I know people who have personally witnessed his weekday morning homilies in Rome.  They are painful, rambling, incoherent streams of consciousness filled with excruciatingly awkward pauses, verbal ticks, and lost trains of thought in MID-SENTENCE.  This is why the Vatican media does not publish the verbatim transcripts but rather “summaries”.  They CAN’T publish the verbatim transcripts because the verbatim transcripts are massively embarrassing in their inarticulateness.  Men who cannot speak generally cannot write.  Bear this in mind.  I say this not to defend, but simply as a statement of fact.

Once you start addressing things like “the manifesto” from these true premises, it becomes much easier to parse them.  It hurts terribly to see the damage that is done, but we do what we can and remain ever-zealous for the salvation of souls (beginning with one’s own – ahem), and always remember that this is just all part of God’s wrath, which we so richly, richly deserve, and of which I fear this is just the very, very beginning.

Now, I am going to Mass of the Ages to encounter Our Lord, physically present in the Eucharist, as have so many saints before us.  Please God, let me grow ever-more intransigent in my faith.