I'm amazed at how divergent people's perceptions seem to be of the state of the Church and of the Holy Father. Michael Voris is asking whether there will be any priests left in America in another fifty years, and the Holy Father said in September that "the Church has never been so well as it is today." MSNBC's Chris Hayes has ceclared Pope Francis "the best pope ever"; and Louie Verrecchio refers to "A rudderless ship."
It's almost as if the political divisions that have torn apart the country over the last decade are now being mirrored by parallel divisions within the Church.
"It's almost as if the political divisions that have torn apart the country over the last decade are now being mirrored by parallel divisions within the Church."
ReplyDeleteFrom our perspective, yes, but Bergoglio didn't/doesn't have our perspective. He lived in Argentina is whole life, rarely traveled, and barely spoke any foreign languages outside of a a little broken Italian.
He's coming from one of the most uniquely dysfunctional countries of the last 100 years. That's the only lens he has and he is applying it to everything.
Argentina has communists, it has leftists running the country, it has rich land barons monopolizing resources - in this sense it is very latin - yet it has *real* facists that still admire the nazis, it has some real, lowdown and dirty dangerous catholic sects he had to deal with (where the "pelagian" term comes from) and it has the memory of being culturally and economically a european society only 100 years ago. Yet now its had 3 different currencies in about 30 years I think... It's a very weird place.
Even in this place Bergoglio was not well liked. Now we see why. He's a good guy, but he's quite immature in the way he's taking his tiny warped lens from Argentina and trying to apply to the new world he is just now seeing. It reminds me of my first trip abroad...
He's probably going to change as he figures out how different the world is from Argentina, but that could take some time.