Just a spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down, in the most delightful way

I confess:  I find myself opening my browser several times a day saying to myself "Okay, Pope Francis, what's your shtick". 

Until we find out, I'm going to be just as obsessed as everyone else.

I'm going on record with my prediction.  I think he's riding into town on the ass and they're all hailing him but in the end, they'll turn on him and it will all get ugly.

Same old story.

I doubt he'll ever stray from beckoning loyalty to Church teaching.   Sometimes what these learned and holy men do not realize is, when they stray from the directives of the Church in the Liturgy, they are giving witness to disobedience in the Most Sacred Moments.   We'll get a good dose this week of how he's going to play it out his witness to obedience to our Sacred Ritual of The Holy Sacrifice.

All eyes on deck.

I also doubt he'll ever stray from the charism of delivering the sucker punch with a velvet glove.  So long as the shtick doesn't get sissified or make Church teaching ambiguous or confusing, this gal is looking forward to learning from him.

Yesterday, he took the diplomats to the shed on moral relativism, telling them it endangers to co-existence of peoples.

Recalling the love of the poor practised by his namesake, St Francis of Assisi, the Pope lamented both material poverty and the “spiritual poverty of our time, which afflicts the so-called richer countries particularly seriously. It is what my much-loved predecessor, Benedict XVI, called the ‘dictatorship of relativism’, which makes everyone his own criterion and endangers the co-existence of peoples.”

“Francis of Assisi tells us we should work to build peace,” Pope Francis said. “But there is no peace without truth! There cannot be true peace if everyone is his own criterion, if everyone can always claim exclusively his own rights, without at the same time caring for the good of others, of everyone, on the basis of the nature that unites every human being on this earth.”

A crying shame Pelosi and Biden went home, eh?

I think he threw a dig in about the islam's crusade of slaughtering Christians:

“It is not possible to build bridges between people while forgetting God,” he said. “But the converse is also true. It is not possible to establish true links with God while ignoring other people.”

Either that, or it was a subliminal message to the luminaries in the Boston Chancery?

Here's what we know from Scripture: It is impossible to preach truth and teach truth in a way that will be tolerated by the crowds who want the freedom to kill others at will or use human sexuality immorally without remorse, repentance or purpose to amend their lives.

  They will eventually kill us, no matter how nicely we say it.

Were it possible, Christ Himself would have executed such a plan.

My guess is, the Pope knows this, as he has repeatedly mentioned that it all ends on the wood of our cross.

But, there is a way to rise above it all and gather the uncatechized, the bitter, the angry, the unforgiving.

Oh, it is hard to work for God,
To rise and take His part
Upon this battlefield of earth,
And not sometimes lose heart!
He hides Himself so wondrously,
As though there were no God;
He is least seen when all the pow’rs
Of ill are most abroad.
Ah, God is other than we think,
His ways are far above,
Far beyond reason’s height, and reached
Only by childlike love.
Workman of God! O lose not heart,
But learn what God is like,
And in the darkest battlefield
Thou shalt know where to strike.
Then learn to scorn the praise of men,
And learn to lose with God;
For Jesus won the world through shame,
And beckons thee His road.
For right is right, as God is God,
And right the day must win;
To doubt would be disloyalty,
To falter were to sin.
 Frederick W Faber
 Jesus & Mary 1849

h/t to KD

n.b.  The name change on the blog is temporary.  Until the shtick manifests itself or I get over my obsession!