Here are my preliminary thoughts on Pope Francis:
1. He has a reputation for being more down to earth than
many Catholic prelates. That’s an improvement.
But at best that means he’s a humble man in an arrogant job.
An emperor can be a personally modest man, but he’s still the emperor. The
papacy is fundamentally hubristic.
2. There’s a lot of talk about how he will be an advocate
for the poor. But is that just a euphemism for the boilerplate “social justice”
message we’re used to hearing from Catholic prelates like the USCCB? The
message that helped get Barack Obama elected and reelected? Baptized
distributive justice, a la John Rawls?
3. There’s also a lot of talk about his Christocentric,
gospel-oriented piety. But Catholic piety isn’t Christocentric. Catholic piety
is centered on the seven sacraments, the Rosary, cult of the saints, as well as
the personality-cult of the papacy itself.
It also depends on how you define the work of Christ. Roman
Catholicism defines the work of Christ very differently than the NT.
4. As a Latin American prelate, he may well use the papacy
to launch a new counter-reformation against evangelical mission in Latin
America.
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