Crux Articulates Pope Francis is Leading Faithful Catholics to be Less Faithful

When it comes to the practices of our religion, the secular press often describes faithfulness on a scale of "left to right". It's an error of using political language to credential whether a Catholic teaches and practices as the Deposit of Faith instructs or they teach others to contradict Church teaching.


APOSTATE                                    HERETIC                                    THE DEPOSIT OF FAITH

Left<-------------------------------------center----------------------------------------------->Right
Liberal                                                                                                                        Conservative
Progressive                                                                                                                 Traditionalist



When the secular press makes judgments, a person who would be 'on the left' would repudiate or renounce Church teaching in its totality, by Catholic definition, an apostate.

A person in 'the center' of faithfulness to doctrine would repudiate and mislead other Catholics into rejecting some teachings but accepts 50% of Church teaching.


A person on 'the right' of the secular tool to measure faithfulness accepts and teaches faithfulness to the Deposit of Faith in its totality.

John Allen has written an article  and another one here that seems to maroon Pope Francis on the isle of his agenda: To lead Catholics away from the Deposit of Faith.

Be sure to check out the photo of the Pope with the halo around his head.

Here are various citations from the articles:

To put the point differently, Francis himself appears convinced there’s a mystical subtext to the kind of pope he’s become.

On the subject of whether Francis is a liberal or a conservative, the usual take in the media is that he’s a progressive and thus lukewarm at best, openly hostile at worst, to more conservative forces in the Church.

Francis ticked off several temptations that the Church must avoid if it’s to resolve its challenges successfully. It must not succumb to a “hostile rigidity,” a fussy legalism devoid of compassion and subtlety. At the same time, it must also reject what he called a “destructive do-goodism” and a “false mercy,” a touchy-feely morality incapable of calling sin by its name. The Church must not impose “impossible burdens” on people,

Ultimately, the 2014 synod of bishops signaled Pope Francis’s ambition to lead the Catholic Church to the political center,

The core argument of this book is that Francis is a man on a mission. He wants to be a change agent, a historic reformer who reorients the Catholic Church decisively across multiple fronts.

There are three main thrusts to his reforming zeal. First, Francis aims to steer Catholicism back to the political and ecclesiastical center, following a period in which it appeared to drift ever more steadily to the right during the twilight of the papacy of John Paul II and the eight years of Benedict XVI. Hard-line bishops who prospered during that stretch, such as American Cardinal Raymond Burke, have had their wings clipped.

Yet in Catholicism, the official teaching is often less important than how it’s applied in real-world circumstances, and that’s the level at which the true “Francis effect” is being felt.

Second, Francis wants Catholics to “get out of the sacristy and into the streets.”

As part of that reform agenda, Francis has proposed a sweeping decentralization in Catholicism by transferring power from Rome to local churches around the world.

Right. Because when you have a see of priests and bishops who are living with their lovers, cruising highway stops to find some afternoon delight, leading the flock to clapping fornication, drinking, threatening and bully--leading them us all to be less faithful and removing a structure that would hold them accountable is exactly what the doctor ordered.

It's what the Globe calls a genuine miracle.