Traditionalists On Francis

Various widely-reading friends have sent me lots of links to traditionalist Catholic articles on Pope Francis, which even over the last couple of weeks have gotten madder and madder (in both senses of the word), in the defense, so the writers always trumpet, of tradition and traditionalism.

In them you see the peevish suspicion of anything Francis says or does; the assertion that anyone who reads him more favorably is naive or compromised; the childishly snickering nicknames, like “Pope Chatterbox”; the hanging judge reading of his words and actions; the refusal to note all the things he’s said of which they should approve, which sometimes verges into the idea that those words are all a cover for his real ambitions; the dismissive treatment of him as an all-in member of an ecclesiastical party (the “spirit of Vatican II” party); the complicated parsing of his actions to prove that’s he a great Machiavellian; the accusations of hypocrisy, particularly that he speaks of peace and discussion and then imposes his own will brutally; accusations that he’s mentally ill or going senile; the suggestions, rarely made explicitly but meant to be taken as assertions, that he’s a conscious agent of evil; all of which sometimes issues in declarations of resistance and sometimes even in their raising the possibility that the Chair of Peter is vacant.

These traditionalists seem more concerned to be traditionalist than to be Catholic.