For centuries, the Roman Catholic Church has been a beacon leading its faithful toward a path of righteousness and repentance and a church that reveres its leader as the embodiment of holiness. Pope Francis’ most recent actions, however, point toward his desire to move the church closer to man than to God. As a devout Catholic, I wish that weren’t the case, but sadly, it is.
A “rubber-stamped” synod reveals the pope’s true intentions. He wants more voices determining the church’s future. (There should be just one voice: God’s.) Under the guise of “inclusion,” the pontiff has pushed a not-so-secret agenda to establish a new doctrine that moves the church away from the traditional family, away from valuing life, and away from God.
Tearing down morality in the name of “progress” has helped to raise up the woke, the entitled, the hateful, and the divisive. The pope isn’t helping matters.
The Vatican’s recent announcement that it would let priests bless what the church has long called “unnatural unions” is a shift from just two years ago when it defined any form of blessing such unions as “illicit.”
I submit that all people are created by God and worthy of His love, but the issue here is the pope’s bent-knee approach to social issues, where he bows to the minority and fosters divisiveness by favoring one group over another.
There’s a divide within the faith — and the pope has taken to picking and choosing who receives his blessings from a woke-approved list of “marginalized” groups. By choosing who to bless, Pope Francis creates a hierarchy of value dependent on which group a person falls in — one group of people is more blessed, important, or valued than the other.
I’m sorry, but every person is a gift from God. We are all blessed, and every life is valuable. The whole thing reeks of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
The leader of the church should be leading people to God. Instead, through his policies, the pope is leading us away from God toward conformity to man. He’s essentially saying it’s OK to hate people in certain groups — those outside the ones he’s “blessed.”
Pope Francis, by his example, is picking and choosing who to bless and who to hate.
As fallible human beings, we tend to elevate and bless people with whom we agree. When we apply the word “blessed” to others with whom we disagree, however, only then does it become a problem.
For example, in 2020, I used the word “blessed” at a Rose Garden event to describe our country under President Trump. The Holy Spirit put that word on my lips when I said, “We are truly blessed to have a leader, like President Trump, who is a builder …” I was attacked viciously for that, all because I used “blessed” and “Donald Trump” in the same sentence.
That’s division caused by a hierarchy of human value.
The pope’s credibility is also seriously put into question when he calls Joe Biden a “good Catholic” and rolls out the Vatican red carpet for him even though Biden has a history of supporting the right to terminate life. Conversely, when President Trump visited the Vatican, he was received coldly. Yet Trump has a history of valuing life.
The Catholic Church has survived scandals brought on by the abhorrent behavior of the pedophiles within its walls, scandals that continue to plague the church. Yet Pope Francis, rather than use that as an impetus to return the church to its roots, is instead employing Catholics to engage in a new theology, a new direction that doesn’t necessarily need to correspond to the Christian face of God.
Last year, Pope Francis called upon the church to adapt its theology to the changing times, to “the conditions in which men and women live daily in different geographical, social, and cultural environments.” It’s what some have called the church’s “new direction.”
Because people are changing, the pope says the church should change with them. In other words, the church should conform itself to the people. This is decidedly anti-Catholic. It should be the other way around.
God‘s righteousness doesn’t change. The foundations of faith don’t change. Christ’s death and resurrection didn’t change. And God’s standard for what constitutes righteous behavior hasn’t changed. We, as representatives of the Church, are now supposed to say, “Your behavior might be sinful, but the times have changed, so we’re good?”
I disagree. God’s truth never changes regardless of what man does.
As it appears to me, the Catholic Church is heading away from God. Ironically, I find former President Trump to be more of a spiritual leader than Pope Francis is today. Trump‘s leadership as president regarding spiritual matters certainly was more on point.
Trump was the first sitting president in history to address the annual March for Life. He formed the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which protected religious freedom and kept taxpayer money from being used to discriminate against religion. Trump was the first president to meet with the United Nations to call for an end to religious persecution. He signed an executive order to promote free speech and religious liberty during the National Day of Prayer. Perhaps most importantly, he appointed Supreme Court justices who value life.
Most of these actions would be counter to Pope Francis’ “new direction.”
Trump, who was called “blessed“ by the Holy Spirit that day in the Rose Garden in 2020, is much more spiritual than people give him credit for, and he sees what I see — that America has fallen victim to a sort of insane moral anarchy.
Tearing down morality in the name of “progress” has helped to raise up the woke, the entitled, the hateful, and the divisive. The pope isn’t helping matters.
Holiness is absolute. It is also healing and unifying. Now, more than ever, we have two distinct choices: love, build, and unite, or hate, divide, and destroy. We must love our neighbor as we love ourselves.
The Catholic Church and my faith are the center of my life, so I pray Pope Francis ends his focus on selfish individualism and instead focuses on holiness and salvation, for that will ultimately lead us back to God.