Papal Indulgence and the “Style of God”
Future Church historians, looking back at our time, will encounter multiple mysteries. They won’t be puzzled by the essential mysteries of the Faith such as the Incarnation and Real Presence, which are always with us. But they will scratch their heads at the many unnecessarily confusing, ill-informed, and divisive ramblings of the current occupant of the chair of St. Peter. Which we may piously hope will only survive as historical curiosities.
The latest in this sad series is his December handwritten letter to Sister Jeannine Gramick of New Ways Ministry, which just came to light, on top of an earlier letter praising that group, which has been condemned by previous popes and multiple American bishops for its unapologetic and unambiguous promotion of homosexuality.
Francis is notorious for psychoanalysis-at-a-distance – witness his repeated claims, based on nothing more, it seems, than some past experience in his own life, that all those “rigid” seminarians and young people in love with the Latin Mass – and “traditional” Catholicism more generally – have some hidden psychological problem and may be mired in something even worse – perhaps even the sin of a lack of charity.
Just as a simple matter of truth, it’s a bad idea to generalize about a large group of people of varying backgrounds and interests, distributed over scores of different nations and cultures around the world. It’s the kind of overgeneralization that you used to learn to avoid by the time you were a college sophomore.
