All Francis Friday

Just Like a Sporting Event for the Elite:  The Eponymous Flower reports in "The Agape of the Courtiers" the news that Francis' PR lady, Francesca Chaouqui, sold tickets for 18,000 euros for rooftop seats at the canonizations of JPII and John XXIII.  These privileged folks received communion from clear plastic cups, (aren't those bad for the environment?) delivered to their perch above the crowds by none other than Lucio Angel Vallejo Balda, secretary of the Prefecture for the Economic Affairs of the Holy See and a member of the Pontifical Special Commission for the Reform of the Economic and Financial Affairs of the Holy See (COSEA).  Of course, Francis was supposedly outraged when he found out, even though he is the one who put these two in their positions, a familiar pattern.

Like some white-cassocked Chancellor Palpatine maneuvering through the corridors of power, Francis’ reorganization of the Conciliar Church into an evil empire proceeds apace. Do not overlook this Wall Street Journal story on account of the apparent dryness of the subject. Francis intends to transfer oversight of the Vatican finances to a trio of nouveaux curial committees and a lay auditor. The stated purpose of this move is to bring the Vatican into line with the modern business fad of best practices and risk compliance. For those readers who are happily uninvolved with Corporate America, best practices and risk compliance can best be described as the mechanization of human labor and the theories of Karl Marx applied at the corporate level.

As in everything else that is inverted in the Novus Ordo Sect, instead of the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate's punishment being lifted "soon", as Francis stated recently, the Vatican extends its crackdown to the Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate.  Novus Ordo Watch examines the evidence in "Vatican Persecution:  Now it's the Sisters of the Immaculate's Turn," and compares the order's treatment with the silence on the continuous scandal caused by Suor Cristina.  In "Crypto-Modernist Congregation for Religious Suspects Nuns of Being Catholic," The Remnant's Chris Jackson reels in the back story on Focolare-friendly Cardinal Joao Braz de Aviz, of the Congregation of Religious, who put the Franciscan Sisters under Apostolic Visitation.

Francis is prepping for his big encyclical on the environment, it seems, as he is now making a Biblical case for addressing climate change.  He is issuing “dire warnings” about Christians’ responsibility to address climate change, as described in this Think Progress article.  Perhaps his pandering to the transnational Left is a day late and a dollar short on this one, since there hasn’t been any appreciable climate change in 20 years; but it is most likely that climate was never really the point. Francis even managed to work in some heresy of the grossest naturalistic sort: “But when we exploit Creation [capitalization in the original] we destroy the sign of God’s love for us…” Setting aside the fact that exploiting “Creation” itself seems like an ontological impossibility for mere creatures, isn't Christ the sign of God’s love for us?

What are the goals of Francis' trip to the Middle East?  National Catholic Reporter ticks off four in this article.  Converting the Jews or Muslims is not one of them.  In fact, he is taking his bosom friend, Rabbi Skorka, and his Muslim best bud, Omar Abboud, along with him.  The Israeli weekly paper Haaretz reports that Francis’ upcoming visit to the Holy Land will be the most pointless in living memory. The pontiff plans to spend a mere 27 hours in the country before departing again. But Jewish extremists are taking the visit very seriously. Anti-Christian graffiti has already been found scrawled at the Notre Dame Center in East Jerusalem, and Francis will need to be guarded by 8000 cops.