Pope fails to place the trivial obsessions of rich white nationalist American sociopaths at the Center of All Things

Catholic ecclesiology being, y’know, Catholic is all about trying to welcome, as Revelation puts it, “every tribe and tongue and people and nation” (Re 5:9). Not that Catholics have always abided by that (as victims of persecution can tell you). But the catholicity aspect of the Faith is baked-in nonetheless and when Catholics sin against their “theological genetics” by excluding and ostracizing, they constant feel pushback from the Tradition. Not for nothing are there all the jokes about “Catholic guilt”.

One of the fascinating things the “prolife” MAGA Cult of Death is increasingly doing, now that their utter betrayal in what they once called the #1 Moral Issue of Our Time is now plain as day, is shifting the goalposts away from pretending to care about the unborn to new tactics. As they are shown endlessly cheering for cruelty, racism, nihlist power, oppression, and death for those they hate (such as pregnant women miscarrying amid the GOP razor wire of Rio Grande) while cynically wielding the unborn as human shields, the Cult are increasingly abandoning all the sanctity of human life talk in favor of the first love of the MAGA cult: scapegoating “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood of our country” as their orange messiah puts itt.

The malleability with which those who talk about the “sanctity of human life” in the MAGA cult can shift the targets of scapegoating is impressive. So, for instance, after 9/11, the natural and easy scapegoats for the proto-MAGAs were Muslims. And there was a brief period during the Bush years when conservative Deep Thinkers were passionately concerned with something called “Demographic Winter”. During that long-ago phase, we were warned that Christians were failing to breed in sufficient numbers in the US and that Muslims were multiplying like rabbits and would soon swamp us. If Americans valued their Christian heritage and culture, then it was vital for them to get going and procreate or there would soon muezzins issuing the call to prayer from every church and capitol dome in the country. Be afraid! Be very afraid!

Fast forward a few years to the rise of the MAGA cult. The prayers of the handwringers about Christian Demographic Winter were heard, and America was finding that millions of hard-working Christians, steeped in family values and eager to practice their faith were coming here. Yet the MAGA Cult was still filled with fear and loathing of the Great Replacement. Why? Because as John Zmirak wrote in CRISIS, “Amnesty Equals Abortion”. His thesis was simplicity itself: the issue was not so much that the new arrivals were not Christian as they were brown. Give them succour and help and they and their verminous offspring would vote Democrat. And as all Truly True Christians knew, we must Vote GOP or the Baby Gets It. (Never mind that abortion was brought to its lowest rates under Obama/Biden and spiked 8% under Trump.)

So the brown Christian refugee became the new scapegoat. Or rather, a new scapegoat. Because the Cult thrives on the multiplication of scapegoats. Again and again, when you confront the Cult on their gross hypocrisy concerning the sanctity of human life as they cheer for a man who mocks the disabled and calls those they hate “animals” and “vermin who poison the blood of our country”, they simply change the subject to every class of human being they want to heap fear and loathing upon. “What about the Chinese? What about the gays? What about the trans people? What about the Muslims? What about the Mexicans?” MAGA antichrist religion, bereft of ideas or virtue, instinctively looks for some class of people about whom it can say, “If you welcome them with love, then you hate God.” It’s their constant go-to strategy.

That is what the “Pachamama” controversy was about a few years ago. Brown Amazonian Catholics seeking nothing more than pastoral care and access to the sacraments came to Rome and the Holy Father welcomed them as what they were, brother and sister Catholics and children of God through Christ Jesus. But white bigots spat on them and the Holy Father and declared them “pagans” because of the Reactionary obsession with trivial aesthetic questions, despite the fact that these innocent Catholics were being burned out of their homes and land by Bolsonaro and despite the fact that they were, in fact, Catholics.

Francis refuses to place the trivial obsessions of rich white nationalist American sociopaths at the Center of All Things and instead seems to think that a) God is at the center, b) that the other 99% percent of the Church not only matters but (where it is poor) matters more than a handful of pampered babies suckling at the teats of FOX and EWTN. It’s almost as though he does not play the “Jesus was speaking metaphorically in some way that lets us totally ignore him” game when he reads the words:

“Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
“Blessed are you that hunger now, for you shall be satisfied.
“Blessed are you that weep now, for you shall laugh.
“Blessed are you when men hate you, and when they exclude you and revile you, and cast out your name as evil, on account of the Son of man! Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for so their fathers did to the prophets.
“But woe to you that are rich, for you have received your consolation.
“Woe to you that are full now, for you shall hunger.
“Woe to you that laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep.
“Woe to you, when all men speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets.” (Luke 6:20-26)

What the Cult reflexively calls “class warfare” in its willed ignorance as it slanders the “Red Pope”, people who understand the Tradition call the Sermon on the Plain from the mouth of Jesus Christ.

He too was badly slandered by rich pious people convinced that God was their personal mascot, there to protect their power, money, and privilege from the demands of justice.