Conservative Review: thumbs down on Francis

National Review launches a remarkable series of attacks against the Holy Father.

In a recent Commonweal article, Massimo Faggioli, describing the increasingly vociferous and organized conservative Catholic resistance to Pope Francis, noted that "[i]ts intellectual organ is First Things".  But it seems that National Review is more than giving First Things a run for its money.

NR's current cover story, by senior writer Michael Brendan Dougherty, is entitled "The Case Against Pope Francis".  It's a forthright denunciation of Francis and his allies in the church.  Francis comes under particular criticism both for his doctrinal reforms and for surrounding himself with scandal-besmirched supporters.  A passage:

Under Francis the Church now teaches that sometimes God’s commandments are simply impossible to follow, that it would be cruel to urge someone to obey them, and that it would be foolish to tell people that God will generously grant them help in actually obeying them. Cardinal Kasper had occasionally defended this understanding by saying that following the Church’s teaching on marriage required “heroism” in certain circumstances, but that “heroism is not for the average Christian.” Francis was widely reported to speculate privately that perhaps half of all Christian marriages are invalid because modern man is so morally deformed he cannot be expected to understand what a marriage is. This is a kind of B-school Christianity, for moral mediocrities. It is a place where God’s love stops short of transforming your life. It’s a mercy where, in the name of in­clusion, the Church blesses the sins that break up families and create orphans. 

Ultimately the vision Francis has promoted presents a God who is not merciful but indulgent, even lazy, and indifferent. It is God as a Baby Boomer parent. He expects less of you, and you can expect less of Him. In this new religion, where our faults become semi-virtues, salvation itself is changed. Instead of a free gift from God, it becomes a debt owed to us. Christ is not moved by an act of love to sacrifice himself as a propitiation for sinners. Instead, he dies on the cross because our human dignity, revealed in our semi-virtues, obliges him to do so.

National Review has now followed up that attack piece with an NR Symposium entitled "The Crisis of the Catholic Church under Pope Francis", drawing together brief articles by five authors on Francis. 

You might suppose that the crisis in the Catholic church at the moment is the sex-abuse crisis, but that is not where NR's guns are aimed; in fact, that crisis rates barely a mention from the symposium.  Rather, it seems the crisis is Francis himself.  Thus CC Pecknold, searching for reasons to hope amid the discouraging landscape painted by Dougherty, notes that "Not one pope has been so bad that saints have not been made by God during his reign."  Daniel J Mahoney intemperately dismisses Francis's US episcopal appointments: "They are, at best, half-Catholics, or no Catholics at all."  Nicholas Frankovich blames Francis on liturgical reform: "The new missal deemphasized the understanding of Mass as a ritual sacrifice. The complementary fashion in new church architecture was to remove the tabernacle from its central position corresponding to that of the Holy of Holies in the Jerusalem Temple. The practice of taking communion in the hand then diminished a little further the awe that the real presence of Christ should inspire in the faithful ...".  Anne Hendershott detects a Communist revolutionary in pastor's clothing: "These are perilous times for Catholics, as the “people’s Church” continues to gain ascendancy in attempting to usher in a new socialist society — a Marxist heaven on earth — and the salvific mission of the Church is lost."

The tone throughout is markedly disrespectful toward Francis.  Only Kathryn Jean Lopez manages to evade the onset of despair or rage: "The best of Francis has been some of the best of the Jesuits, specifically their founder, Saint Ignatius Loyola, and his insistence on rigorous examination of conscience and his Spiritual Exercises and his rules for discerning when the Spirit of God is at work in you — and for distinguishing the difference between that and the spirit of Satan."