There’s nothing funnier than American Trad Caths revealing that they’re just Presbyterians that think Baroque looks cool
Oh my fucking god all this is too fucking funny. Lucking forward to having an anti-pope in Houston, Texas. Instead of the pointy hat maybe he can wear a white cowboy hat.
I need people to stop being so funny because I can’t keep re blogging this shit
I am breaking my hiatus briefly for one specific thing because I need at least my followers to understand that the problem here, like the reason (despite all the jokes) isn't that the guy thinks Papa Frank is wrong.
Thinking the pope is full of shit, or that the current sitting pope is actually an anti-pope representative of the devil who has charmed his way into St Peter's seat, or that the current sitting pope is actually a heretic even, is a very common Catholic thing. It happens all the time. I know this isn't part of the popular image of Catholicism but in practice how actual Catholics relate to that on a personal level is varied and broad and depending on the pope you will encounter one kind of person or another announcing that this one is actually Satan's agent or whatever.
Catholics often think the wrong person is on St Peter's throne, even if they'd never quite say it in public. That just happens a lot.
So does just sort of . . . ignoring the pope. Like this specific pope, what he's said today, just sort of not paying attention to it. Yes, of course he's the head of the church but that doesn't mean we have to agree with him.
There's nothing that radical about either believing that the wrong person is pope, or that the pope is wrong. And it's not new, either: these same kind of twerps were mad about John Paul II's papacy too, and were mad that Benedict's didn't actually go as far as they wanted him to go back the other way. It would be eye-roll worthy but not particularly surprising if this guy were simply to announce that obviously Francis is the Anti-Pope or False-Pope.
That's not what happened here or why this is so incredibly mind-bogglingly fucking funny.
This guy is absolutely hysterically mockable because what he's protesting here is the right of the institution of the papacy to have absolute control over the clergy. He is saying that the pope as an institutional figure should be subject to checks and balances and "process". That the papacy should not have absolute, unquestioned and unquestionable authority over the Roman Catholic Church, as an institution.
It is very normal and quite Catholic to object to the specific person who currently occupies the role of St Peter's heir. Objecting to the person, the specific occupant, is a totally normal Catholic thing!
Being shocked and appalled at how the powers of the institution work and implying that they should not work that way? Saying "what are you saying popes can just exercise absolute authority?" like this is astonishing or somehow against the Principles of the Thing?
That is basically as anti-Catholic as you can possibly get. It is in fact. Protestant. The absolute unhindered unquestioned authority of the pope over the institution of the Church was at the core not just the Protestant Reformation but of every single major fight the Roman Church got into with the Orthodox Church(es), every fight they got into with the lay nobility, every fight they got into with any of the local national churches they would successfully subsume, this is like, possibly the most intense core of the specific Roman Catholic institution: the Pope has absolute authority over the clergy.
The provision of law that allows the Pope as head of the institution to remove this idiot bishop at his will is LITERALLY A CENTRAL TENET OF THE INSTITUTION.
Of course as has been elsewhere pointed out, he didn't actually even do that. He did go through the customary process of investigation and discipline for a bishop, which this idiot bishop defied before being removed from his office, because it turned out that there was far more wild shit up with this dude than his objection to Francis' interpretation of canon law as applied to eligibility for the sacrament of baptism.
But that the institutional figure of The Pope has the right to dismiss, remove, relocate, or otherwise preside in judgement and authority over all clergymen in the Roman Church at all times is so absolutely central to the institution of Roman Catholicism that objecting not to the fact that this specific pope did a bad thing but to the idea that The Pope is in his role as The Pope can do this thing is basically being a Protestant.
And that's fucking hysterical and also so, so stupid.