Fatima Perspectives #1281
In a video message to something called the Seventh World Congress Against the Death Penalty, Francis once again attempts to impose his will on a matter of divine revelation, replacing what God has revealed with what he thinks on the matter.
It is God who declares “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: For in the image of God made He man.” (Gen 9:6) And it is God Who, as we read in the 20th chapter of Leviticus, dictated to Moses the death penalty for human sacrifice and other grave offenses against the divine and natural law. Accordingly, as the Catechism of the Council of Trent teaches, capital punishment, “far from involving the crime of murder, is an act of paramount obedience to this commandment which prohibits murder.”
What God has revealed and even directly prescribed is not pleasing to Pope Francis, however. In the cited address he has the supreme audacity to contradict God’s explicit sanction of capital punishment and 2,000 years of Church teaching defending it, declaring once again (after having already had the John Paul II Catechism amended to reflect his opinion) that because “man has been created in the image and likeness of God… capital punishment presupposes, therefore, a grave violation of the right to life every person has.”
So, whereas God cites man’s creation in His image and likeness as the moral foundation of capital punishment, Francis cites the divine image and likeness as the basis for declaring it immoral! In support of this outrageous attempt to impose his personal opinion on the Church in defiance of what God Himself has revealed, Francis offers nothing more than the gratuitous assertion that “The Church has always defended life, and her vision of the death penalty has matured.” Matured, that is, only after Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s arrival from Buenos Aires and his election as Pope.
This nonsense would be laughable were it not for Francis’ occupancy of the Chair of St. Peter, which he has been abusing with ever greater recklessness.
Francis concludes his diatribe with an exhortation to world leaders to “take the necessary steps toward the total abolition of the death penalty.” But never, absolutely never, has he exhorted world leaders to take the necessary steps toward the total abolition of abortion, which really is a radical violation of the right to life and can never be justified under any circumstances.
What is to account for this telling disparity? The answer, as Ed Faust has so trenchantly observed, is that Francis is not so much a Pope as he is a Leftist ideologue. Thus, as Faust explains: “we have the Pope telling us now that the holy season of Lent offers us an opportunity to liberate the plants and animals from the bondage imposed upon them by our sins. The Pope does this because the Pope is a Leftist. He serves the globalist agenda…. We can be certain that so long as Francis has the papal bully pulpit, he will use it to subordinate the Faith to the rising power of globalist rule. Heaven help us, because Rome won’t.”
And Heaven will help us. That divine intervention, whenever it comes, will sweep aside the ecclesial novelties of Francis, along with those of the past half-century, as if they never were. They have no part of Tradition, and with the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary they will disappear like the cockle that “is gathered up, and burnt with fire.” (Matt 13:40).
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