Please Unfriend Him

Cheers for Father Larry Richards, who wrote on his Facebook page in October:

If you are one of those who will not love and respect our Holy Father because he does not think like you please unfriend yourself from my page. I do not want to continue to read the slander of people who call themselves Catholic and spit on the Chair of Peter. As the saints have said ‘Where there is Peter there is the Church.’ You do not have to agree with Pope Francis but you must love and respect him. I will die to defend him.

He wrote more recently in his parish bulletin:

Catholics must imitate Jesus and Francis and “love people back to Him, and when they know that they are loved by Him – and us – then they will respond in love and then obey him out of love,” he wrote.

“Before God gives the Ten Commandments, he first sets them free from their slavery,” he wrote. Likewise, “Before we tell people all the rules that they must follow we need to first tell them about the love of God.”

He is not alone, according to a story on CatholicVote, which also mentions Cardinal Burke and Michael Voris (see this item about him). And Opus Dei priest Father John Wauck, once the speechwriter to Governor Casey of Pennsylvania.

My personal favorite papal defense came in the Rolling Stone cover story about Pope Francis by Robert Binelli. The reporter desperately searched for angry conservatives. “I figured if any group would express a distinct lack of enthusiasm about their new Jesuit pope, it would be Opus Dei,” he says. Oops.

He describes Father John Wauck in Rome as “a trim, cheery 50-year-old” who “displays a Midwestern eagerness to please” and “does not seem all that conservative for a member of Opus Dei – at one point, he asks excitedly if I’ve read Eminent Hipsters, the new memoir by Donald Fagen of Steely Dan.” He throws all the supposedly divisive Pope Francis quotes at Wauck, and Wauck endorses each one.