Lefty Francis Hangover

Lefty Francis Hangover January 28, 2015

After bingeing on the hallucinatory drug that made them imagine the pope was just just about to make pot a sacrament, officiate at Michael Sam’s wedding, sprinkle holy water on Rome’s Planned Parenthood clinic, canonize Karl Marx, and call the Third Vatican Council to declare all religions/philosophies/lifestyle choices “cool”, the Left is suddenly awakening to the fact that the only people who ever believed their banana oil were a) themselves and b) panic-stricken right wing Francis-haters.

So, with a mixture of bafflement and growing rage, pundits are rubbing their eyes and announcing “Pope Francis might not be as awesome as we thought he was“.  That is, he turns out to be Catholic and not, as Bill Maher concluded with the keen insight of a mole in broad daylight, an atheist.  He thinks blasphemy is wrong, which has stunned Maher into surprised fury since, in Maher’s mental world, the Manichaean choice is between blasphemy and murder.  He opposes abortion and contraception and gay “marriage”.  He’s not going to be ordaining women.  He’s, y’know, the pope, and therefore Catholic.

Such a hangover was perfectly predictable.  It’s something any disciple of Jesus should expect.  The gospel answers to deep longings in the human heart.  But it also makes hard demands.  Jesus’ pattern was that people followed him when they saw signs like multiplication of loaves and fishes.  But when Jesus then said “It’s not about free food forever, but about what that sign *means*” it left people with a choice: stick with him when he doesn’t fulfill your hopes for a messiah who tells you how awesome you are or say, “This is a hard saying!  Who can hear it?” and ditch him for the next celebrity you choose to anoint.  He forces us to face the fact that he is the Messiah we need, not the Messiah we want.  And those who cannot face that fact typically become, either passively or actively, his enemies.  Let us pray for the grace to not take that road, because we all need it.

Francis is, above all, a disciple of Jesus.  If you don’t get that, you don’t get him.  He will never fit our political categories, left or right. I suspect he’s going to wind up reviled for the name of Jesus by our fickle race.  And I suspect he is a saint of the Church.  God bless and protect him once the left joins with the right to attack him.


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