Pope Francis: Mission Accomplished

Mr Kowalski argues that Francis has accomplished his mission, the destruction of the Catholic Church as an institution but he hasn't been able to destroy the Faith.

From One Peter Five

By Raymond Kowalski, BA, JD

On May 9, 2019, I argued that the way to wreck the institutional Catholic Church would be to use the Church’s own weapons against herself, especially the power and primacy of the pope.

The Catholic Church, of course, is indefectible; but I argue now that Francis has accomplished the mission of ruining the temporal manifestation of the Church. As Archbishop Fulton Sheen had foreseen, we now have the “ape of the Church… emptied of its divine content.”

“That’s a bit dramatic,” you’re thinking. “Did Francis outlaw the Traditional Latin Mass when we weren’t looking?” To which I say, he did worse: he outlawed the reason for the Traditional Latin Mass, or any Mass for that matter.

There was no major announcement, not even another motu proprio. The final blow did not happen in Rome. It happened in Singapore.  You heard about it, but you probably did not think much about it.

On September 13, 2024, in seemingly off-the-cuff remarks to a diverse group of young people at a Catholic junior college, Francis said, “All religions are a path to arrive at God… There’s only one God and each of us has a language to arrive at God.  Some are Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, and they are different paths.”

These remarks were severely criticized by important Catholics because Francis seemed to be saying that one religion is as good as any other. This would build on the Document on Human Fraternity, which the pope signed in Abu Dhabi on February 4, 2019, declaring that “the first and most important aim of religions is to believe in God….”

Here we have the leader of 1.390 billion Catholics worldwide, the infallible pope, the successor of St. Peter, tossing off in casual conversation for all the world to hear, the idea that you do not need the Catholic Church “to arrive at God.”

Technically, that is true. In fact, you do not need any church to “arrive at God.” St. Thomas Aquinas developed five arguments by which human reason alone could “arrive at God.”

But Francis was addressing an interfaith group at a Catholic educational institution. It is not likely, then, that the ambiguous term, “arrive at God,” (which term I believe was carefully contrived) meant simply “arrive at the existence of God.” Because he mentioned four specific religions as examples of “paths” to “arrive at God,” Francis must have meant something more, like “to know God” or “to believe in God.” This would be in accord with the Abu Dhabi Declaration regarding the most important aim of all “religions.” (Note the plural.)

I contend that the story lies not in what Francis said, but in what he did not say, yet had a duty to say, as a consecrated bishop of the Catholic Church. The final ruination of the institutional Catholic Church was accomplished when Francis told those young people, “There’s only one God,” but did not elaborate.

What? It sounds so familiar. So Catholic. We say it at every Mass: “I believe in one God, the Father almighty….”

The world does not know — or much care — about the conditions necessary for infallible papal declarations. The world does not parse papal pronouncements as I am doing here. The world has an impression of the gravitas of the pope and perceives the pope’s intended message, regardless of the ambiguity of the words used and regardless of the theological context in which the message is delivered.

The message was this: God, the Father Almighty, is the same for all religions. But because Francis did not mention Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost, the other divine Persons of the triune God, as does the Catholic Creed, the message was also that Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost are not relevant to a discussion concerning “arrival at God.”

The full payload of the message is that the divinity of Jesus Christ does not matter. Therefore, His passion, death and resurrection do not matter. The Holy Eucharist does not matter. The priesthood (male or female) does not matter. The sacraments do not matter. No Mass, traditional Latin or otherwise, matters. The institutional Catholic Church does not matter; it has been emptied of its divine content.

In 2013, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor said, “Four years of Bergoglio would be enough to change things.” In 2017, former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick admitted that there was a pre-conclave plan to elect Jorge Bergoglio as the one who could “reform the Church…[and in] five years, he could put us back on target.”

Cardinal Donald Wuerl explained that, after the Second Vatican Council, Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI had gone astray; but Francis had set the Church back on the path laid out by the council. Wuerl’s assessment was that “[the Papacy] will never look like it did 25 or more years ago.”

That assessment was too narrow. As Ross Douthat showed in his book, To Change the Church, Francis is not only changing the Papacy, but changing  Catholicism itself. It has taken more than eleven years, but at last the Cornerstone also has been rejected. The mission of Francis has been accomplished.

Afterword

Archbishop Sheen was quick to point out that we were at the end of Christendom, but not at the end of Christianity. Similarly, in 1958, Father Joseph Ratzinger observed that the size of the Church had become something of a hindrance to her missionary activity. “Sooner or later,” he said, “with or contrary to the will of the Church… she will become externally a little flock.”

Our task, then, is to pray for the restoration of the institutional Church while remaining a part of the little flock, where the divinity of Jesus Christ and all that flows from it, are all that matter.