Pope Francis, since his election as supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church in March 2013, has always kept both his supporters and critics alike guessing by his flying-by-the-seat-of-the-pants pastoral style. While doctrinally the Catholic theology he teaches is consistent with what occupants of the Cathedra Petri have taught, well, all the way back to St. Peter, his pastoral style as the shepherd of the flock of one billion-plus Catholics worldwide, is one-of-a-kind.
Pope Francis, of course, rocketed into the media stratosphere on July 28, 2013, little more than four months after being elected pope, when returning on his first foreign papal trip from Rio de Janeiro on the Alitalia flight to Rome July 28, at the end of his seven days in Brazil, wandered back to the press compartment in the rear of the plane and took questions from 21 reporters travelling aboard the papal aircraft for 81 minutes with nothing off the record. Francis stood for the entire time, answering in Italian and Spanish without notes and never refusing to take a question. The Pope’s answer to the last question became the worldwide take-away quote: “If a gay person is in eager search of God, who am I to judge them?” While Pope Francis’ answer shot around the world – for the most part without benefit of being prefaced by the question or contextually situated – it didn’t break any new Catholic theological ground or offer up a new heresy. What it did represent was a change in tone.
He also has a penchant for giving interviews to prominent atheist journalists, talking about and with atheists, picking up the phone to cold-call folks he wants to talk to, and meeting with Protestant evangelicals, with a special fondness it seems for Pentecostals and other charismatics.
And Pope Francis also misses going out for pizza. In an interview earlier this year, to mark the second anniversary of his election to the papacy March 13, with Valentina Alazraki, the veteran Vatican correspondent for Mexico’s Noticieros Televisa at Casa Santa Marta, the Vatican hotel where he has lived since his election as pope, he said the only thing he really misses about his old life pre-March 13, 2013 is the ability “to go out to a pizzeria and eat a pizza,” adding that even as Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Buenos Aires he was free to roam the streets, particularly to visit parishes.
Almost half the population of Buenos Aires can rightfully claim Italian heritage, so it is little surprise the Argentinian capital is so well-known for its Napoletana pizza. “The only thing I would like is to go out one day, without being recognized, and go to a pizzeria for a pizza,” Pope Francis said, comparing his life now to how it was when he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires. “In Buenos Aires I was a rover. I moved between parishes and certainly this habit has changed. It has been hard work to change. But you get used to it,” Pope Francis told Alazraki.
But #coolpope also talks about the devil and dystopia. A lot. In his Monday homily at a mass at Casa Santa Marta on Nov. 18, 2013, Pope Francis, made reference to the 1907 apocalyptic and dystopian novel Lord of the World by Robert Hugh Benson, son of the Archbishop of Canterbury Edward White Benson and himself a former Anglican clergyman, who converted to Roman Catholicism in 1903 and was ordained a priest in 1904, in which he writes of an imagined future where, in the words of Father Robert Barron, rector of University of Saint Mary of the Lake, also known as Mundelein Seminary, in Chicago, “Europe and America are dominated by a rationalist regime bent on making life as technologically convenient and politically harmonious as possible.” Sound familiar?
Of course for all those who think Pope Francis is #coolpope, there are no shortage of those who think he is Petrus Romanus (Peter the Roman). In that eschatological end times vision of unfolding history, U.S. President Barack Obama often cast as the “Antichrist” and Pope Francis the “False Prophet.” This is the kind of thing you are not likely to hear discussed in polite company, except maybe in a dismissive fashion or to be held up to scorn and ridicule. Yet millions of people around the world believe in just such a scenario.
Within hours of Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI announcing his resignation Feb. 11, 2013, becoming the first pope to resign in almost 600 years (the last having been Pope Gregory XII, who resigned at the request of the Council of Constance on July 4, 1415 to help end the Great Western Schism) some folks were talking excitedly about “Petrus Romanus” (Peter the Roman) who would be history’s last pope, according to the Prophecy of St. Malachy or Prophecy of the Popes from 1139.
The fact Pope Francis was formerly Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, archbishop of Buenos Aires in Argentina, and the name Peter appears nowhere in his former or current appellations, hasn’t much fazed Petrus Romanus true believers, who happily point out the first Pope to take the name Francis did so after St. Francis of Assisi, an Italian whose original name was Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone, but nicknamed Francesco (“the Frenchman”) by his father. Pietro in Italian translates to Peter in English. Is this “Francesco di Pietro (Peter) di Bernardone, literally, ‘Peter the Roman,’” as Tom Horn and Cris Putnam, co-authors of the 2012 book Petrus Romanus: The Final Pope is Here, have argued? While their research was prodigious, in a sense, the result falls pretty far short of anything approaching coherent scholarship in any true academic sense. The strategy much of the time seems to be to dig up what you can and if you throw enough of these scattered historical documents against the wall of the “Romanists” something will stick.
You don’t have to be anti-Catholic, pro-Catholic, neutral or even much of a scholar to know the historical record has lots of less than flattering documents when it comes to the Catholic Church, many of them quite authentic. Marshaling such disparate sources into a coherent and convincing argument to support something approaching a thesis is something else again. Horn and Putnam are also stuck with the problem of time. Inconveniently for them, Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI resigned in February 2013 – just after their book was published – rather than slightly earlier in 2012 – before Petrus Romanus was printed – which would have fit on their timeline a bit better. The longer out in time Pope Francis’ pontificate runs, the farther removed it is from their graphic images of Rome burning.
While Horn and Putnam are careful not to fall into the trap personally of being “date setters,” which can cause one’s reputation to evaporate quite literally in a second if you’re wrong, they’re not above conveniently quoting other writers to make those kind of points at times, such as the ersatz Ronald L. Conte Jr., a self-described “Roman Catholic lay theologian and Bible translator” who publishes something called Catholic Planet. Conte, as Horn and Putnam noted in 2012, predicted that by “July 2013, Rome is destroyed when it is struck by a nuclear missile.” Conte also predicted, again parroted by Horn and Putnam, that after Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI, the next pope would be Nigerian Cardinal Francis Arinze and that he would take the name Pius XIII. Wrong and wrong again. As prognosticators on the papacy, Horn and Putnam are no better than Conte. Their 2012 Top 10 list in Petrus Romanus to succeed Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI included Arinze; followed by Italian Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who was dumped as secretary of state by Pope Francis in October 2013, seven months after he took office.
Rounding out their list in descending order for “Final Pope” were Ghanaian Cardinal Peter Turkson; Italian Cardinal Angelo Scola; Italian Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi; Argentinian Cardinal Leonardo Sandri; Italian cardinal Ennio Antonelli; French Cardinal Jean-Louis Pierre Tauran; Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schönborn; and Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet. While they did have an Argentinian cardinal on their list, unfortunately for Horn and Putnam it wasn’t Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio.
Maelmhaedhoc O’Morgair, born in Armagh in 1094, later to be known as St. Malachy, was canonized as a Roman Catholic saint on July 6, 1199 by Pope Clement III, and was the former archbishop of the Irish Archdiocese of Armagh and Diocese of Connor, and while in Rome in 1139 reportedly experienced what is considered by the Catholic Church to be an unapproved private revelation – if the incident even happened – in the form of an apparition of the 112 popes following Pope Celestine II, who died March 8, 1144. Malachy was said to have recorded his Prophecy of St. Malachy or Prophecy of the Popes (and antipopes) as a sequence of 112 cryptic Latin oracles or mottoes ending with the 112th and final Pope, Petrus Romanus, who in Malachy’s vision, is said to be on the Throne of the Apostle as history’s 112th and last pope. “In the final persecution of the Holy Roman Church, there will sit, Peter the Roman, who will pasture his sheep in many tribulations, and when these things are finished, the city of seven hills will be destroyed, and the dreadful judge will judge his people. The End.”
Malachy’s manuscript was supposedly deposited in what is now known as the Archivum Secretum Apostolicum Vaticanum before he returned to Ireland as the papal legate. And there the manuscript is said to have sat, forgotten and gathering dust until re-discovered more than 400 years later by Arnold Wion, a Benedictine monk, who published them in 1595 as Lignum Vitae (Tree of Life). Or not. Given the very accurate description of popes up to 1590 and lack of accuracy after that year, “modern scholars have unanimously noted, in the 37 subsequent mottoes, a radical departure from the unfailing precision and appropriateness of the previous 74, and they are agreed that the Prophecy of Malachy is a counterfeit,” wrote John J. Driscoll in the Roman Catholic theological scholarship journal American Ecclesiastical Review in June 1944.
Historians generally conclude that the alleged prophecies are a fabrication written shortly before they were published, perhaps in a failed bid to see Italian Cardinal Girolamo Simoncelli elected Pope during the second conclave of Oct. 8, 1590 to Dec. 5, 1590 where Pope Gregory XIV was eventually elected as the successor of Pope Urban VII.
Pope Francis was in Bolivia yesterday, as part of his second papal trip to South America. A crucifix sculpted in the shape of a carved wooden hammer and sickle, combining Catholic and communist symbols, was presented to him during an official gift-exchange ceremony in La Paz by Bolivian President Evo Morales and lit up the blogosphere among Catholic commentators and reignited the Petrus Romanus crowd on the other end of the continuum. Morales also draped a medallion around over the pope’s neck that bore the hammer and sickle.
“No esta bien eso,” Pope Francis is said to have responded in Spanish to Morales, which translates to “that’s not right.” However, both Vatican and Bolivian officials played down the incident, saying no offence was intended.
Bolivia’s communications minister, Marianela Paco, told Bolivian radio: “The sickle evokes the peasant, the hammer the carpenter, representing humble workers, God’s people,” adding there was “no other” motive behind the gift.
Pope Francis may have thought Morales’ overtly linking the crucifix to communism an inappropriate over-the-top grandstanding gesture, but within hours of the crucifix incident, “Pope Francis Declares Lucifer as God,” a three-minute and 15-second YouTube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcpVrtv2t-M) , published July 4 by “Souldier4Christ” was showing up on my Facebook news feed with the controversial crucifix story. The introduction of the short video spells declaration as “decleration,” happened as “happend,” exactly as “exaclty” and Corinthians as “Corinthains.” All in the first 2:15. Spelling apparently is not Soldier’s forte. Call me old fashioned, but I’m not inclined to put much store in the theology or Latin translation of those who can’t spell much less think clearly. Thanks, anyway Facebook.
Mind you, none other than Blessed Pope Paul VI himself delivered his now famous “Smoke of Satan” homily on June 29, 1972 on the ninth anniversary of his coronation, which remains perhaps the most famous and most-argued about in terms of meaning sermons the Holy Father delivered during his 15-year-plus pontificate, while the enigmatic Malachi Martin, a Jesuit priest and best-selling author suggested the Enthronement of the Fallen Archangel Lucifer occurred exactly nine years to the day earlier – on the day Blessed Pope Paul VI was coronated on June 29, 1963 – on the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, as the Availing Time arrived. But however controversial and debatable Blessed Pope Paul VI and Father Martin’s musings on Lucifer and the Vatican were and remain, no one is likely to suggest they were anything but clear thinkers who could spell correctly and that spiritual warfare is always a very real and clear and present danger for the Church.
As the Anglican writer C.S. Lewis, one of the leading Christian apologists of the 20th century, wrote in The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe, the novel for children published in October 1950,“There is no neutral ground in the universe. Every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan.” Catholic writer Robert Hugh Benson, author of the 1907 apocalyptic and dystopian novel Lord of the World, (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/spiritual-warfare/) , who has been quoted approvingly by Pope Francis, would have agreed with Lewis.
Pope Francis is now in Paraguay, the third and final country on his second tour of Latin America since becoming Pope, which ends on Monday. The eight-day tour began in Ecuador July 5.
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