What Do You Say When Your Father Dies? What About If He Was a Traitor? Pope Francis, RIP

Pope Francis is dead. We Catholics are taught to see the pope as our spiritual father on Earth (“Il Papa“), the Vicar of Christ, with a religious authority analogous to that Moses wielded over the Israelites. So for that reason, many are mourning his passing today, which seems like the filially pious thing to do. Whatever their flaws, we grieve our fathers when they die.

I imagine that FBI agent Robert Hanssen’s three sons mourned him when he died in prison two years ago, serving a life term for betraying the United States to the Soviet Union. According to the FBI website:

On January 12, 1976, Robert Philip Hanssen swore an oath to enforce the law and protect the nation as a newly minted FBI special agent. Instead, he ultimately became the most damaging spy in Bureau history.

On February 18, 2001, Hanssen was arrested and charged with committing espionage on behalf of Russia and the former Soviet Union. Hanssen–using the alias “Ramon Garcia” with his Russian handlers–had provided highly classified national security information to the Russians in exchange for more than $1.4 million in cash, bank funds, and diamonds.

The damage Hanson did was almost incalculable, as the Miller Center reports:

Hanssen had delivered to the intelligence service of the Soviet Union, the KGB, some of our nation’s most important intelligence secrets, such as US strategies in the event of a nuclear war, developments in US military weapon technologies, and the identities of Soviets who were spying for the United States. As a result of his disclosures, the Soviets executed at least three of these spies who had worked for the FBI or the CIA.

What If He’d Gotten Away with it?

But what if Hanssen’s story had turned out differently? What if he’d gone to his grave undetected, with his links to foreign intelligence services still intact, and proteges in place all through the FBI still handing secrets to our foreign enemies in Beijing and Teheran? If you were one of Hanssen’s patriotic, devoutly Catholic sons, and you knew about his hidden crimes, how would you feel standing at the solemn FBI memorial service held in his honor? When people Hanssen had recruited, whom you suspected of treason, stood up to praise his patriotism, what would you be tempted to step up and say?

Or would loyalty to a father compel you to keep silent, even nod in feigned agreement?

That’s the dilemma that faces candid, faithful believers with the death of Pope Francis, whose legacy Jules Gomes has already scrutinized here at The Stream.

The Day of Wrath

As Catholics, we pray for any soul who goes to meet his Maker — including Robert Hanssen — as we hope folks will pray for us. We remember that we too will face the Day of Wrath, as depicted in this mighty medieval hym from the Latin funeral Mass (which Francis has mostly forbidden):

The great book shall be unfurled,
Whereby God shall judge the world;
What was distant shall be near,
What was hidden shall be clear.
To what shelter shall I fly?
To what guardian shall I cry?
Oh, in that destroying hour,
Source of goodness, Source of power,
Show thou, of thine own free grace,
Help unto a helpless race.

Insofar as all the above is true, it is right and just for Catholics to mourn the pope and pray for his soul. We shouldn’t be singing along to little ditties like “Thank You Very Much,” from the musical classic, Scrooge.

But must we pretend that we will miss him? Or that it would be anything but a catastrophe if the cardinals Francis handpicked — many of them proteges of the child-molesting leftist Machiavelli Theodore McCarrick — were to elect another pope with Francis’s theology and politics? Indeed, if the next pope follows Francis even further into surrendering before the secular world and refashioning the Gospel to accommodate sexual perversion and woke politics, it would discredit the authority of the papacy itself.

Must We Mouth Empty Words of Praise?

Must we spin webs of words about Francis’s “compassion” and “humility” that even his supporters don’t really believe? His carefully staged humility photo ops were markedly at odds with his rigorous grasp on power, and his persecution of traditional Catholics who dared to question his doctrinal deviations from Catholic tradition and Scripture: convents seized, religious orders dissolved, bishops fired, cardinals stripped of office.

Francis has largely forbidden the traditional liturgy of the Church around the world, even though it has been the center of religious revival among young Catholics, fostering large faithful families and many religious vocations. Francis has seen the green shoots springing up in the Church, and sprayed them with weed killer.

Francis allied with Communist China against Donald Trump’s America — using McCarrick as his secret envoy — selling out the underground church to the Communist Party, which the Vatican now permits to choose China’s bishops. Francis sent his right-hand man, Bishop Marcelo Sorondo, to a meeting of the people who harvest organs from China’s political prisoners … not to chastise, but to praise them.

Francis enshrined a pagan idol, Pachamama, at St. Peter’s Basilica.

Francis demanded that Catholics take the untested, abortion-derived COVID vaccine, even issuing a Vatican coin to celebrate it. He ordered bishops to deny Catholics conscience exemptions so they’d be stripped of their religious liberties by the secular state.

Francis publicly embraced unrepentant abortionists and hosted population-control fanatics at the Vatican. He overturned the 6,000-year biblical teaching on capital punishment, and let his Vatican teach that deporting any immigrant is an intrinsic evil akin to slavery. But his Vatican just approved transgender surgery.

Again from the Day of Wrath:

Though I plead not at thy throne
Aught that I for thee have done,
Do not thou unmindful be,
Of what thou hast borne for me:
Of the wandering, of the scorn,
Of the scourge, and of the thorn.
Jesus, hast thou borne the pain,
And hath all been borne in vain?
Shall thy vengeance smite the head
For whose ransom thou hast bled?

Are we religiously obligated to pretend that Jose Bergoglio, Pope Francis, faithfully executed his duties as Bishop of Rome? Must we cling to the changes he foisted on the Church, adhere to the new gospel he taught, pretend that his persecutions of faithful Catholics and alliances with Marxists were somehow acceptable? Must we mouth pieties suggesting that his political interventions were wise, prudent, or even reconcilable with the Bible and Natural Law?

Tell It to the Victims

Is it our job to falsely claim that Francis frankly addressed clerical sex abuse? The facts say otherwise. Francis protected abusive priests, and told a young man molested by one of those priests that God (not the cleric who seduced him at a formative age) had “made him gay.” Francis intervened to stop the U.S. bishops from disciplining members of their conference who covered up for sex abuse. He also stepped in to restore to the priesthood Fr. Marko Rupnik, accused by some dozen nuns of sexually abusing them in blasphemous rituals. At Francis’s behest, Rupnik’s primitive art still adorns important churches around the world and appears in Vatican publications and websites.

To paper over all the above abuses of power with blather about Francis’s “compassion” and “pastoral concern” is an active injustice against his victims and a crime against Christ’s church. Like one of Robert Hanssen’s sons, the best I can muster at Francis’s death is another passage from the same forbidden prayer:

Thou, whose dying blessing gave
Glory to a guilty slave:
Thou, who from the crew unclean
Didst release the Magdalene:
Shall not mercy vast and free,
Evermore be found in thee?

Amen.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.

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