The liberal juggernaut … libbernaut? … is well-connected and organized. They work together.
Perhaps you saw the NYT’s piece (aka Hell’s Bible) which managed (through fake news) to make an absurd connection between Card. Burke (whom libs hate with the intensity of a type O star), and chief advisor to Pres. Trump (whom libs hate with the intensity of a type O star), former Breitbart editor Steve Bannon (whom libs hate with the intensity of a type O star). It was a tour de force of smear. The objective: link Burke and Bannon and Trump with the liberal Alt-Right bugbear. The upshot is that Burke, etc. are white supremacist, LifeSite reading rubes who watch Duck Dynasty. They are “rad-trads”, “church militant” types… real knuckle-draggers who stand in the way of the Revolution! They must be crushed, publicly humiliated, sent to camps, thrown from windows.
Then there is the surreal piece at WaPo worthy of the Red Guard of China’s Cultural Revolution entitled, “How Pope Francis can cleanse the far-right rot from the Catholic Church”. Guess who’s picture surmounts the screed. But hey! It’s only an opinion piece, right? Let’s see the first paragraph:
Pope Francis needs to take tougher action against the United States’ most influential Catholic in Rome, Cardinal Raymond “Breitbart” Burke. [There’s the Breitbart bit.] The renegade cleric is not only undermining Francis’s reformist, compassionate papacy, and gospel teaching as it applies to refugees and Muslims, but the rebel prince of the church is also using his position within the walls of the Vatican to legitimize extremist forces that want to bring down Western liberal democracy, Stephen K. Bannon-style. [There’s Bannon.] Simply put, the Vatican is facing a political war between the modernizing Pope Francis and a conservative wing that wants to reassert white Christian dominance. [There’s the white supremacy bit.]
Added to this unhinged soup of hate is also the insinuation of Nazism and Italian Facism. Staying consistent with the Red Guard libbernaut talking points, on the “rad-trad” theme, the writer gets a dig in at the late Archbp. Marcel Lefebvre.
Try a sample of this green-inked purple prose:
The options open to the pope in dealing with Burke are limited. Excommunication isn’t in the cards; Burke is not a heretic denying the Catholic faith. Nor is Burke refusing to submit to the pontiff like French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who was cast out by John Paul II after his ultra-conservative Society of Saint Pius X ordained its own bishops rather than take directions from the Vatican. [Because that’s what the libbernaut is all about now, right? Anyone who doesn’t take directions from the Vatican is bad. And they were yhuge defenders of the Vatican before 2013, right?]
However, Francis, who has full authority over his cardinals, [Papal authority is in vogue again!] could fully remove Burke from his remaining sinecure with Knights of Malta, call him in for a pastoral correction on the issue of his unacceptable political interventions, [which Burke hasn’t made] investigate Dignitatis Humanae with a view to shutting it down for its subversive politicking, [Because free thought and free speech is unacceptable to the libbernaut.] and send the rebel cardinal back home to the United States. [Only the Left is allowed to “rebel”.] As Burke tries to run an insurgency and rebukes the pope for his doctrinal “ambiguities,” with the backing of thousands of priests, Francis could seize the agenda. In time-honored papal tradition, he could write an encyclical on the burning questions of populism and nationalism, with specific reference to migrants, Muslims and Jews, so priests including Burke know they are in breach of church teaching [‘Cause the writer is all about defending the Church’s teachings, right? I wonder where she stands on abortion and contraception.] when they try to act as power brokers for the international extreme right. [Which Burke hasn’t done. But don’t let facts get in the way of a good spittle-flecked nutty.]
The stakes could hardly be higher, especially as the pope seems on a collision course with a Trump-Bannon White House that has imposed a form of a Muslim ban and disparaged him during the election campaign for daring to suggest that building a wall on the United States’ southern border was un-Christian. If the pope doesn’t put the reactionary elements such as Burke and his cronies back in their place, [Straight out of China’s cultural revolution jargon.] they could force a real schism during his papacy and leave the church open to justifiable accusations it failed to stand up to enablers of extremism and neo-fascism within its ranks.
I am reminded of the “Four Olds” campaign in the 1960’s in China during the Cultural Revolution, perhaps the most evil of all of man’s cruelty to man. Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas – DESTROY!
“Reactionaries” must be purged! Send them to the country-side to learn from the wisdom of the worker peasants!
DOWN WITH BURKE!
DOWN WITH THE FOUR OLDS!
CLEANSE THE REACTIONARIES!
BAN THE COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARIES!
About the meeting Card. Burke had.
The moderation queue is ON.
UPDATE:
Phil Lawler succinctly nailed it at Catholic Culture HERE
The three-pronged conspiracy theory is being promoted by the Pope’s most ardent defenders. (If you doubt me, sign up for the Twitter feed of Father Antonio Spadaro, and notice how often he makes or encourages cheap shots at Cardinal Burke.) From there it is picked up by secular journalists, who do not understand the Catholic controversy and are much more comfortable framing issues in political terms. The goal of the conspiracy theorists is to discredit Cardinal Burke—in this case exploiting the negative image of Bannon and using guilt-by-association to transfer that image onto the cardinal. And why discredit Cardinal Burke? Because Pope Francis cannot and/or will not answer his questions.
UPDATE:
Check out Carl Olson HERE. Quote:
I’d bet that some skinheads have been shown more respect and fairness in the pages of the Post. What, then, is her source for much of this? The New York Times piece discussed above, of course! This is the very definition of typical news nepotism, a combination of echo chamber thinking, obsession with politics and cult of personalities, and laziness. Far-right? Neo-fascist? White Christian dominance? I’d say this is hysterical, but hysterical seems mellow compared to this sort of vacuous, shrieking rot.
Also, at the top he includes a brilliant passage from Oscar Wilde about the press:
In old days men had the rack. Now they have the press. That is an improvement certainly. But still it is very bad, and wrong, and demoralising. Somebody – was it Burke? – called journalism the fourth estate. That was true at the time, no doubt. But at the present moment it really is the only estate. It has eaten up the other three. The Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say and says it. We are dominated by Journalism. In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs for ever and ever. Fortunately, in America journalism has carried its authority to the grossest and most brutal extreme. As a natural consequence it has begun to create a spirit of revolt. People are amused by it, or disgusted by it, according to their temperaments. But it is no longer the real force it was.
There is a clear and present danger to Catholic doctrine, practice, identity which has already risen over the horizon and which looms larger as the weeks pass.
When I was around the Pontifical Commission “Ecclesia Dei“, in its early days, I had the opportunity fairly frequently to chat with the Prefect of the CDF (our offices were in the same building and our Cardinal and that Cardinal were friends). Card. Ratzinger had ideas about the organic development of liturgical worship which touched on the interplay of the older form of the Roman Rite and the Novus Ordo. Even then he wrote and spoke, though not always in the more current phrase, of a “mutual enrichment” of the rites. Ratzinger held – correctly – that there was a rupture in our worship through the imposition on the Church of an artificially cobbled-up “new order” of Mass. That rupture must be healed. That will take time. He thought it would be beneficial to have wide-spread (with the Novus Ordo) celebrations of Holy Mass using also the pre-Conciliar form. The contact of the two rites would jump-start the slow, organic development of worship which had been so harmfully interrupted.
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