Taking the Long View: On Not Lionizing or Demonizing Leo, and the Crying Need for Dehyperpapalization

Michie · Monday at 7:24 AM

As a Church, we have become so preoccupied with the pope that our entire scale of values and priorities has become skewed

As promised, I will indeed resume today the Weekly Roundup that has been neglected for a couple of weeks, due to other more pressing topics. However, before we get there, I’d like to devote some careful attention to what I see as a major problem and its likely solution(s).

What is the focus of our faith?

Ironically, since my conclusion will be that we (and I) need to devote less of our (and my) time and attention to every word, act, and omission of the pope in Rome, this post will be very considerably focused on the pope. However, it must be so, in order to argue the point, so that we can be, as it were, freed of a burden.

This burden, of course, is not the papacy as such. I love the pope. I love the papacy. And, so far, after a week (!), I love Leo XIV. This is not really a question for me and never has been. Even in all the years when I was critiquing Pope Francis for his manifold and egregious departures from wisdom, prudence, tradition, law, and the divine commandments (just to give a partial list), I never once wavered in my confidence that Christ the Eternal Rock had established a rock on earth that would never cease until the end of time, and that, in a dark age like the present, when error has seeped in everywhere, from the least pew to the highest throne, He would at very least prevent this earthly rock from defining error or destroying the Church; moreover, that the Lord would intervene by raising up saints, and would someday raise up a saint in the papal chair who could redeem the lost years, as some of the Counter-Reformation popes redeemed the lost years of the late Middle Ages.

Continued below.