Defiler of the Faith

Donald Trump has done something I never expected him to do.  He offended American Catholics - the majority of whom have supported him at the polls - and somehow got progressives - among whom one would find many with anti-Catholic attitudes - to sympathize with them.  And he did it by doing someone he did that I once thought was too low even for him.

He posted an AI image of himself as the pope.

The blasphemous image was so offensive to Catholics that what Ira Levin, Roman Polanski, Madonna, Sinead O'Connor, Dan Brown and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence failed to do - offend Catholics to the point where those outside the faith would be equally appalled (indeed, many non-Catholics applauded O'Connor for tearing up a picture of Pope John Paul II on live TV and identifying him as the "evil" referred to in Bob Marley's "War") -  Trump managed to do with a text-free picture worth more than a thousand words.

Someone somewhere online suggested that, if our lapsed Presbyterian "President" were to be elected pope, he should take the name Adolf the Turd.

As for the upcoming conclave, which begins Wednesday, my hope is that the Church will choose someone who will continue Pope Francis' reforms and his efforts to offer a more benevolent Church devoted to devotion to Christian principles such as charity and social justice.  That is exactly the sort of pontiff that the Church ought to select in the face of the demonic cruelty that Trump is trying to impose not just on the United States but upon the world.

My biggest fear is that a doctrinaire conservative like Pope Pius XII, whom my father was raised Catholic under and whose reign he spent his entire childhood and adolescence under, and thus received so much psychological damage from as a result, will succeed Francis and appoint another right-winger like Cardinal Dolan as archbishop of New York, which is the closest the U.S. Church has to a national patriarch, or a "primate."  But the only way  I can see that happening is if the cardinals choose someone more out of strategy than out of faith.  Cardinal Pacelli became Pope Pius XII in March 1939 largely because he had been the Vatican Secretary of State and was seen as someone who could deal diplomatically not just with Benito Mussolini in Italy (who would invade Albania just a month earlier) but also with Adolf Hitler, who in March 1939 annexed Czechoslovakia, forced heavily Catholic Lithuania to cede its seaport city of Klaipeda (once the German city of Memel) to the Reich, and began threatening heavily Catholic Poland to agree to German annexation of the Free City of Danzig and a strip of land across the Polish Corridor along the Baltic to connect the German exclave of East Prussia with the rest of the Reich.  Pius had become pope in a Vatican effort to play games of state and diplomacy to deal with the devil.  What the Church got was a pope who cracked the whip of authority and kept the faithful in line long after the Axis Powers were defeated in the Second World War. 

If we get another pope in the Piusian mold, the Church may not be finished, but it will deserve every derision it gets from progressives who fear and loathe the Vatican for its patriarchy and misogyny but excuse Islam despite the fact that it has the same flaws.  Of course, the whole hypocrisy of progressive relativists who go after the Church of Rome but turn a blind eye to the reactionary attitudes of mullahs who regularly make a pilgrimage to Mecca should have been exposed long ago. 

I once respected Bill Maher for his anti-Catholic views, actually, because he is is an atheist who bashes all religions and has also been virulently critical of Islam, and he's been consistent in his defense of Western civilization over the politically and religiously restrictive Middle Eastern culture that progressives excuse out of some twisted, anti-Western solidarity with non-Western and Third World perspectives that remain stuck in the Dark Ages.  Now, of course, Maher praises Trump, who threatens to bring us back to the Dark Ages, while conservative Catholic and evangelical figures applaud his medieval agenda.  And then there is actor Ben Affleck, who once excoriated Bill Maher to his face on Maher's HBO show or being an Islamophobe yet did not challenge him for his anti-Catholic views. 

Bill Maher . . .  Ben Affleck . . . I wouldn't buy a used car from either of them.