Holy Sprit: Once Forgotten Now Denied

The anti-Francis pundits have now offered their initial two (some less) cents worth of commentary on the Holy Father’s recent Apostolic Exhortation, Beloved Amazon.  They are to be found on both the far right, (the Pope is a liberal), and the far left, (the Pope is a conservative), sides of the Church’s center aisle.

As expected, the head of the Women’s Ordination Conference,  Kate McElwee, claims Pope Francis “betrayed the women of the Amazon and elsewhere”.  Admitting women to the deaconate, she asserts, “would be the first, most basic step towards righting the wrong of institutional sexism”.  It is no mystery to anyone as to what they believe the second step would be even though Pope John Paul II, in his Apostolic Letter, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, called the faithful to hold ‘definitively’ his declaration, considered infallible, that “the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women”.

Miriam Duignan, of the Wijngaards Institute for Catholic Research, a British-based progressive Catholic think (women should be Priests) tank, accused Pope Francis of “dereliction of duty” for not taking the opportunity to “challenge discrimination” by using his power to  “make changes”.

To the right, everyone from Westen, to Skojec, to Marshall, to Pope, (as in Charles, not Francis), has taken their turn at dissecting every dot and tittle of the new magisterial teaching and concluded, with shocked amazement (perhaps ‘disappointment’) that not even one word of heresy could be found in the entire document!

One thing was clear, the document could not have been more clear  –

– except to Raymond Arroyo and his renegade band of self-appointed papal heretic bounty hunters. Combing through Querida Amazonia, they handed down the verdict that the document “lacked clarity”.

So while the one side (female priestess advocates) accused the Pope of not listening to the promptings of the Holy Spirit, the other side (married priests = scrapping celibacy) circumvented both the Vicar of Christ and the Holy Spirit and gave the ‘orthodoxy credit’ to “the prayers of all the faithful” that prevented the Pope from teaching heresy.

Aware of his critics, Pope Francis put it in a nutshell when he said some people say he “didn’t listen to the Spirit… so they’re not mad at the Spirit; they’re mad at me” as if they assume the Holy Spirit agreed with them and not him.

In conclusion, it would seem that the same Holy Spirit who apparently messed up really hugely by not preventing the College of Cardinals from electing Jorge Mario Bergoglio to the Office of Vicar of Christ, is now accused of trying to compensate for His mistake by preventing the same Vicar of Christ from teaching heresy. The Holy Spirit listened to the prayers of the ‘faithful’ and not to the prayers of the Pope. Apparently. (insert rolled eyes image)