Do you have the same feeling that I have? It’s a sense of impending disaster like seeing a train about to ram a fuel truck. SloMo. kaBLAM.
Francis issued a letter to the US Bishops which was clearly aimed against the Trump administration, its policy on “deportation”, and at VP Vance who invoked the term “ordo amoris”.
HERE is a link to the letter at the Vatican website.
Quite a bit of commentary is flowing. I have done some reading about what ordo amoris is really all about. Did Vance get it right or did Francis? Francis, in his letter, suggests… no, categorically states (citing only himself in a footnote)… that “ordo amoris” must be interpreted through the lens of the Parable of the Good Samaritan. That raises the question: Why? In one commentary I read the parable invoked was the Parable of the Friend in the Night (Luke 11:5-8) which involves the sacred duty of hospitality.
The use of one does not exclude the application of the other.
I’m going to get into other things, below, but I can’t help but make a couple of observations about Francis’ invocation of the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt, namely:
2. … [Jesus] did not live apart from the difficult experience of being expelled from his own land because of an imminent risk to his life, and from the experience of having to take refuge in a society and a culture foreign to his own. The Son of God, in becoming man, also chose to live the drama of immigration. I like to recall, among other things, the words with which Pope Pius XII began his Apostolic Constitution on the Care of Migrants, which is considered the “Magna Carta” of the Church’s thinking on migration: …
[…]
As I read this, with great respect to the sentiment and to Pius XII, it occurs to me that there are differences between what we see in the Holy Family and what we see today in the movement of peoples, especially at the US southern border.
- St. Joseph obeyed the civil law by responding to the census.
- The Holy Family did not leave the jurisdiction of the Romans. Egypt was a province of the Empire.
- In travelling to Egypt the road was a trade route secured by Legio II “Cyrenaica”, not by human trafficking cartels. They didn’t have to sneak into Egypt.
- St. Joseph worked for a living and did not receive government hand outs, hotels and free cellphones.
- St. Joseph, so far as we know, didn’t have a criminal record, wasn’t a fugitive from justice or a violent gang member with multiple convictions.
- Nor was Mary.
- “Jesus lived the drama of immigration” – really “emigration”, no?
- Jesus also lived the drama of going home.
Also, correct me if I am wrong, but isn’t what the Trump administration doing, even by the Church’s own teaching, “repatriation” and not “deportation”? If I remember correctly, when the Church (Gaudium et spes?) speaks of causing people to move from one place to another, it’s about the ejection of people from their proper, chosen place. That’s “deportation”. Sending people out of a country they do not belong to back to where they came from is not “deportation”, it is “repatriation”. Am I wrong?
Changing gears…
R. Reno at First Things has a couple of interesting comments lately. A couple days ago, 10 February, he penned a piece which brings to two themes of border control and altar rails together. HERE That got my attention! A comment or two from that (my emphasis)…
[…]
A similar shift is afoot in the Church, and for the same reason. The open Church gets colonized by the world. Its leaders talk like therapists and multicultural bureaucrats. The sacred is swamped by the banal. A growing number of churchgoers, especially the young, want something different, something confident and separate from the world. As Cardinal Cupich in Chicago has discovered, to his dismay, they want to kneel at altar rails.
Tell me your views on altar rails, and I can predict where you stand with regard to the increasingly grave political and cultural phenomenon of mass migration. If you think the restoration of altar rails represents a betrayal of Vatican II, I’m confident that you regard any attempt to enforce borders as anti-Christian xenophobia.
[…]
There’s more provocation over there. It also gets me onto the next track.
Yesterday, 11 February, he’s back at it. “Pope Francis’s Apocalyptic Dream” (my emphasis):
Pope Francis published his suicide note. It took the form of a letter to the American Catholic bishops. In so many words, the Holy Father urged his brother bishops to intervene in American politics and oppose the Trump administration’s efforts to enforce our country’s immigration laws. Along the way, Pope Francis also took a jab at Vice President JD Vance, correcting him (along with St. Thomas Aquinas). No, we are not to love our parents, spouses, and children more than others. The true order of love, ordo amoris, starts with the vulnerable and outcast. We must seek “a fraternity open to all.”
[…]
And, still riffing on the borders and altar rails issue:
[…]
The practical upshot of the Holy Father’s letter is nothing other than the globalist, open borders position, glibly theologized. This, Francis implies, is the only position permitted for true Christians who honor Christ’s universal love.
[…]
This paragraph sparked a memory, which I will get to. First…
[…]
Reading Pope Francis over the years has led me to believe that he harbors an apocalyptic dream for the West, one in which mass migration and ecological peril overturn the foundations of Western confidence and global hegemony. In this regard, his thinking accords with post-colonial ideologues and those at pro-Hamas rallies. The West is a den of iniquity. Its capitalism foments greed. Its enterprises have raped mother nature and polluted the biosphere. Its vainglory, especially American pride, has brought war and ruin to foreign lands. The wretched of the earth are fully within their rights to rise up, migrate, and destroy the Behemoth.
[…]
What memory, you ask?
Back in 2014, I had a long conversation with South American journalist Alejandro Bermudez of CNA. The concept of “peripheries”, is important to Francis. Bermudez spoke of the influence on Francis of thinkers such as the Uruguayan writer-theologian Alberto Methol Ferré, the Russian-American sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, and the pivotal Spanish-language poet Rubén Darío. To condense wildly, it seems that Francis may embrace a school of thought that sees a kind of “manifest destiny” for Latin America. When cultures develop a interior decay, which they always do, revitalization of the cultures comes from “peripheries”. For the larger Church, experiencing an interior decay, a periphery is Latin America. Latin America, unlike any other continent, is unified in language (by far dominated by Spanish with related Portuguese) and is/was unified in religion, Catholicism (though there is bad erosion). With these unifying factors, Latin America has a critical role to play in this view.
Francis is famous for his programmatic “¡Hagan lío!”. In the 11 Feb article by Reno, we read (my emphasis):
[…]
By all appearances, [Francis is] an accelerationist, someone who welcomes catastrophe rather than appealing to Catholic social doctrine to make nuanced judgments that might help us humanize, as best we can, the policies and actions necessary to prevent the social upheaval that attends rapid demographic change, and the disorder it will bring. The Argentine Jesuit seems to relish collapse. It will provide an opportunity to break the iron grip of homo economicus and build a new world, a “fraternity open to all.” This borderless fraternity is a true utopia, a world of no-place, a future universal society free from the grave evil of loyalty to one’s country—Donald Trump’s terrible crime against universal love.
[…]
I was tweaked by the word choice, “accelerationist”.
Cambridge says,
“someone who believes that technological change, especially relating to artificial intelligence, should happen more quickly, even if this destroys existing systems and leads to radical (= extreme or complete) social change”.
On the other hand, Britannica has an article about “accelerationism” which seems mainly to be a leftist attack on capitalism through acceleration of capitalism in order to tip it into collapse. The idea is destroy rather than slowly change from within. Why? We don’t have time! A couple of examples of accelerationism in the movies might be the Bruce Willis Die Hard 4: Live Free or Die Hard in which a cyber-terrorist attempts to bring down global everything. Another might be when in a Justice League movie, a terrorist wants to bring down the world economy by bombing the Bank of England.
Millions of people flowing over the southern border unchecked for years seems like one way to accelerate the collapse of these USA.
This is how Reno concludes.
[…]
As I said, I don’t envy America’s bishops. It’s a hard task to require the faithful to attend Mass so that they can be told that loving one’s country and its citizens is a wicked sin. That’s a recipe for ecclesiastical suicide.
Reno rem tetigit. What are Francis’ expectations for the US bishops? He put the bishops in an awkward position before, probably pushed into it by conniving mandarins (cf the cruel Traditionis custodes). What does he want US bishops to do now?
Finally, US Bishops get a lot of government money with which they want (we assume) to do good (such as corporal and spiritual works of mercy). Doing good is a great deal more expensive now because of the dissolution of religious. We lean on government money now to facilitate the work of holy men and women in religious communities. We can’t afford to pay teachers in schools a just wage and there are no sisters to teach. Hospitals, etc. In addition to religious, after Trent Confraternities of people from all walks of life cooperated to do these things. They were also focused on prayer.
Change the Church’s prayer life and you change everything.
I think you see where I am going with this.
It all comes back to that, doesn’t it.
We are our rites. Screw up our rites, you screw up everything.
It’s almost like there is a kind of hierarchy or order of … priorities? Values? What’s a good word?
If we don’t properly fulfill the virtue of Religion, other things done the line are going to be out of sorts. If we don’t properly love God first, and place no one or no thing other than God on the inmost throne of our hearts, then we won’t love others in the right way. It’s as if one thing affects another… God, family, country, neighbor, in an expanding sphere of love and responsibility. I know there is a term for this idea out there somewhere.
If I have gotten something wrong here, please let me know.
Black can mate in 4.
In February 1858, the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared 18 times to a girl of 14 named Bernadette Soubirous (Saint Bernadette – canonized in 1933) in a natural grotto at Massabielle. While Bernadette could see her, others could not. The Lady named herself during the 17th apparition.
Today is the Feast of José Sánchez del Río.
In chessy news…
In chessy news… 
