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| That Satan! He's out there I tell you! |
Is Pope Francis losing his marbles?
Fleshing out his claim last month, that Satan is behind all the revelations of the activities of his paedophile priests, an increasingly paranoid-sounding Pope Francis has now ordered Catholics to say special magic spells to enlist the help of angels and frighten Satan off.
Presumably, that hadn't occurred to God as he sits watching his favourite church implode and disintegrate into mutually blaming factions while none of them take any responsibility for the scandals.
On the 11th of September, according to Catholic News, he told a morning Mass at Domus Sanctae Marthae:
[T]he great accuser, has been let loose and he's got it in for the bishops. True, there are, we are all sinners, we bishops... [He] seeks to reveal sins, which people can see, in order to scandalize the people... [He] roams the world seeking how to blame. The strength of the bishop against the great accuser is prayer -- his own and Jesus', the humility to feel chosen and staying close to the people of God without heading toward an aristocratic life.
On 29th September, he returned to this theme in a message with:
[The Church must be] saved from the attacks of the malign one, the great accuser and at the same time be made ever more aware of its guilt, its mistakes, and abuses committed in the present and the past. We should not think of the devil as a myth, a representation, a symbol, a figure of speech or an idea. This mistake would lead us to let down our guard, to grow careless and end up more vulnerable.
So paranoid has Francis become that he ordered all Catholics to say the rosary every day during October and to conclude it with a special prayer to enlist the help of Archangel Michael in frightening Satan away. The special prayer is:
St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou, O Prince of heavenly hosts, by the power of God, thrust into hell Satan, and all evil spirits, who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls.
It's amazing what things these magic spells can do!
But the problem Pope Francis and his imploding church faces is that these abuses have happened. They are historical. The revelations are telling us about the past. Whatever these magic spells are supposed to achieve, they are not going to undo that which has been done, and which in many cases will be found on investigation to be a matter of record, albeit records locked away in church archives and now under subpoena, making it a criminal offence to tamper with them or to continue to conceal them.
There again, it's now becoming clear that Pope Francis himself sees the problem not in terms of the victims and the effect these abuses had and continue to have on them; not even in terms of preventing it happening again, but in terms of the abuses becoming public knowledge and the harm that will do to the Catholic Church. Francis is blaming Satan not for the abusive priests but for helping us discover their activities.
This, of course, is exactly the same thinking that led bishops and cardinals now resigning and being defrocked in a sop to public opinion, to try to cover up the abuses and shuffle abusing priests off away from their accusers to new diocese and parishes where their predatory habits were unknown to their unsuspecting parishioners or even those in any supervisory role over them.
The aim was to quash the scandal, not prevent more abuses. And this is exactly what Pope Francis is now enlisting angels and invoking special magic spells for. He wants the revelations to cease. He doesn't want the victims identified and compensated and their welfare needs addressed. He wants the coverups to continue.
Pope Francis sees it as a work of great evil that the abuses of his priests be exposed and, presumably, God's work to keep the abuses under wraps.
But, there may be a slightly different interpretation on the Pope's words and the immediate cause of his apparent paranoia - more to do with his own 'great accuser', Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the Vatican’s former ambassador to Washington. Viganò has accused Pope Francis of knowing of the sexual abuses of young seminarians and minors by the disgraced Cardinal McCarrick, but not doing anything about it. According to Viganò, Francis himself compared him to the 'great accuser' and appeared to see him as Satan in disguise.
Is Pope Francis now convinced that the Horned Beast is coming to get him in the diminutive form of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò?
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