The Left, the Right, and Pope Francis

Just to clarify: I was of course not resting my entire claim about the left-liberalism of Pope Francis on the case of one persecuted Franciscan order; this would have been ridiculous. The case of the Franciscans of the Immaculate is simply such a perfect example of the double standard in the Catholic world today that it seemed a useful microcosm of the current pontificate. The Pope loves everyone, we hear endlessly and ostentatiously, and won’t “judge” anyone — except people no one in the world will dislike him for scolding, namely, conservative and traditional Catholics. The Pope says he supports a “yes Church” instead of a “no Church” — the intellectual heft of the previous pontificate is long gone — though in practice this means saying yes to every lunatic trend of the Catholic Left, while lecturing in a left-Jesuit style that part of the Catholic world that can actually still be found in the pews. I assumed there were too many cases of this (we even come across it in the text of Evangelii Gaudium itself, albeit briefly) for hyperlinks to be necessary.

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