Reactionary Calls Out Recklessly, “Will No One Rid Me of this Meddlesome Pope?”

Problem: A pope who is all about evangelizing and reaching out to the estranged and disaffected does an interview with an atheist in which (like *cough* Jesus) he permits his the conversation to be reported by somebody who had neither a tape recorder nor a notebook and who reports the conversation from memory. It’s not an encyclical. It’s not a teaching document. It’s basically a snapshot that gives you a sense of how the pope conducts a conversation with an old Italian atheist. It’ll wind up as a footnote in some future biography. Not the end of the world. Not really a problem actually.

Cue the cow-havers, such as some guy named Louie Verecchio, who goes completely to pieces, rushes off to some sedevacantist site for ammo and comes back shrieking like his hair is on fire to declare the pope a heretic and drop heavy hint that God or, you know, *somebody* who obviously knows God better than the pope does needs to, you know, *do* something, you know, by whatever “merciful” means necessary, to deal with this catastrophe of a pope:

The neo-con papal apologists can take shots at the messengers all they want, but that doesn’t change the simple fact that we find ourselves in this position thanks to just one person: the pope himself, who according to his own spokesperson is pleased to move about speaking on matters of faith and morals in a manner “deliberately informal and not concerned with precision.”

This is utter and complete lunacy, acceptable only to those who have never had, or have entirely lost, their Catholic sensibilities.

Authentic Catholics cannot help but desire a Holy Father who takes very seriously his duty to preserve the sacred treasury over which he has been appointed custodian. This isn’t asking for too much; it is the bare minimum of what every Catholic should expect.

Unfortunately, in Francis, we do not have that kind of pope. Let us all pray that this will change very soon, by whatever means the merciful Lord may choose.

So. The concern is about the pope not being “concerned with precision”. And the solution? Spew language that can *very* easily be interpreted by the unstable nutjobs in Reactionaryland as a call to murder the pope. Of course, the language is fuzzy enough to retain plausible deniability–rather like “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” was patient of multiple interpretations. But you’d think that a self-described “Authentic Catholic”, allegedly passionate about “precision”, would have *some* sense of rudimentary self-awareness to at least notice *that* log in his eye before anointing himself Grand Inquisitor.