Attack of the metaphors!
It’s Story Time: Francis offers Ideology-Laden Poetry in Message for World Communications Day
It seems there isn’t a day in the year when the Argentinian actor Jorge Bergoglio — currently playing “Pope Francis” in what must be dubbed the never-ending story of The Two Antipopes — doesn’t have something to say.
Today was no exception. January 24 being so-called World Social Communications Day, Mr. Bergoglio felt compelled to release yet another one of his priceless messages to the world. Since Catholic theology isn’t his forte, he loaded it up once again with countless metaphors, quoting Sacred Scripture here and there to give it a Catholic spiritual veneer.
Before we dive into the Jesuit’s latest “papal” wisdom, let us recall his message for the same occasion two years ago. There the focus was on “fake news”, and in his usual audacity he ironically used the opportunity to abandon the traditional understanding of truth from agreement between the mind and reality and moved to a utilitarian-pragmatic concept, as follows:
To discern the truth, we need to discern everything that encourages communion and promotes goodness from whatever instead tends to isolate, divide, and oppose. Truth, therefore, is not really grasped when it is imposed from without as something impersonal, but only when it flows from free relationships between persons, from listening to one another. Nor can we ever stop seeking the truth, because falsehood can always creep in, even when we state things that are true. An impeccable argument can indeed rest on undeniable facts, but if it is used to hurt another and to discredit that person in the eyes of others, however correct it may appear, it is not truthful. We can recognize the truth of statements from their fruits: whether they provoke quarrels, foment division, encourage resignation; or, on the other hand, they promote informed and mature reflection leading to constructive dialogue and fruitful results.
(Antipope Francis, Message for 52nd World Communications Day, Vatican.va, Jan. 24, 2018)
At the time, we blasted the Jesuit apostate for this in a scathing commentary, to which we are happy to link once again:
With such a false and subversive definition of truth as that given by Bergoglio, it is clear that any subsequent message by him about communication will be drivel at best.
With the message released today, the “Pope” did not fail to meet corresponding expectations. Let’s have a look at some excerpts:
I would like to devote this year’s Message to the theme of storytelling, because I believe that, so as not to lose our bearings, we need to make our own the truth contained in good stories. Stories that build up, not tear down; stories that help us rediscover our roots and the strength needed to move forward together. Amid the cacophony of voices and messages that surround us, we need a human story that can speak of ourselves and of the beauty all around us. A narrative that can regard our world and its happenings with a tender gaze. A narrative that can tell us that we are part of a living and interconnected tapestry. A narrative that can reveal the interweaving of the threads which connect us to one another.
(“Pope’s Message for World Day of Social Communication: Full Text”, Vatican News, Jan. 24, 2020)
When the opening paragraph already contains heaps of metaphors and Bergoglian buzzwords, you know it’s going to be a rough read: “roots”, “move forward”, “narrative”, “tender gaze”, “tapestry”, and an “interweaving of the threads which connect us to one another” all portend that it’s not going to get better.
Under the subheading of “weaving stories”, the pretend-pope then proclaims:
We are not just the only beings who need clothing to cover our vulnerability (cf. Gen 3: 21); we are also the only ones who need to be “clothed” with stories to protect our lives. We weave not only clothing, but also stories: indeed, the human capacity to “weave” (Latin texere) gives us not only the word textile but also text. The stories of different ages all have a common “loom”: the thread of their narrative involves “heroes”, including everyday heroes, who in following a dream confront difficult situations and combat evil, driven by a force that makes them courageous, the force of love. By immersing ourselves in stories, we can find reasons to heroically face the challenges of life.
Human beings are storytellers because we are engaged in a process of constant growth, discovering ourselves and becoming enriched in the tapestry of the days of our life. Yet since the very beginning, our story has been threatened: evil snakes its way through history.
Didn’t you know that we “clothe” ourselves with stories in order to “protect our lives”? We don’t, of course, but Bergoglio needed to find a way to combine stories with clothing since the word “text” is etymologically related to “textile”. He needed to give it a spiritual touch as well, so… what to do? Easy! Find a Scripture passage that talks about clothing and then relate it to telling stories; and the key to accomplishing this feat is the use of a metaphor. So, voilà! There is your “clothing ourselves with stories to protect our lives” image!
“When you eat of it … you will be like God” (cf. Gen 3:4): the temptation of the serpent introduces into the fabric of history a knot difficult to undo. “If you possess, you will become, you will achieve…” This is the message whispered by those who even today use storytelling for purposes of exploitation. How many stories serve to lull us, convincing us that to be happy we continually need to gain, possess and consume. We may not even realize how greedy we have become for chatter and gossip, or how much violence and falsehood we are consuming. Often on communication platforms, instead of constructive stories which serve to strengthen social ties and the cultural fabric, we find destructive and provocative stories that wear down and break the fragile threads binding us together as a society.
Here Bergoglio’s pragmatic idea of truth really comes through, which he puts, of course, at the service of globalism. Francis is gradually moving his sheeple to acceptance of secular-globalist censorship, where only approved stories are permitted and unwelcome news is censored and eventually punished as a “hate crime” that “threatens society.”
Let’s be clear: Censorship is not in itself wrong and is in fact a very Catholic concept, for the Church condemns freedom of speech as an error of Liberalism: “Experience shows, even from earliest times, that cities renowned for wealth, dominion, and glory perished as a result of this single evil, namely immoderate freedom of opinion, license of free speech, and desire for novelty. Here We must include that harmful and never sufficiently denounced freedom to publish any writings whatever and disseminate them to the people, which some dare to demand and promote with so great a clamor. We are horrified to see what monstrous doctrines and prodigious errors are disseminated far and wide in countless books, pamphlets, and other writings which, though small in weight, are very great in malice” (Pope Gregory XVI, Encyclical Mirari Vos, nn. 14-15; cf. Pope Pius IX, Syllabus of Errors, n. 79).
But Bergoglio isn’t advocating for Catholic censorship, which the post-conciliar church has effectively done away with anyway, he is slyly advocating for Modernist-globalist censorship, which aims to suppress truly Catholic thought. This is evident from the language he uses. Utilizing a warped and novel definition of truth as that which does not “provoke quarrels, foment division, encourage resignation” but instead “promote[s] informed and mature reflection leading to constructive dialogue and fruitful results”, Francis sets the stage for suppressing freedom for the only true Catholicism.
For Francis and his globalist buddies, we must never forget, real Catholicism is divisive, hateful, intolerant, triumphalist, and “not Christian.” And yet we know from Divine Revelation that truth — and therefore goodness and beauty with it — sometimes must express itself in unkindness and lead to division and difficulty:
Do not think that I came to send peace upon earth: I came not to send peace, but the sword. For I came to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man’s enemies shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me; and he that loveth son or daughter more than me, is not worthy of me.
(Mt 10:34-37)
But woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites; because you shut the kingdom of heaven against men, for you yourselves do not enter in; and those that are going in, you suffer not to enter. Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites: because you devour the houses of widows, praying long prayers. For this you shall receive the greater judgment. Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites; because you go round about the sea and the land to make one proselyte; and when he is made, you make him the child of hell twofold more than yourselves. Woe to you blind guides, that say, Whosoever shall swear by the temple, it is nothing; but he that shall swear by the gold of the temple, is a debtor. Ye foolish and blind; for whether is greater, the gold, or the temple that sanctifieth the gold? And whosoever shall swear by the altar, it is nothing; but whosoever shall swear by the gift that is upon it, is a debtor. Ye blind: for whether is greater, the gift, or the altar that sanctifieth the gift? He therefore that sweareth by the altar, sweareth by it, and by all things that are upon it: And whosoever shall swear by the temple, sweareth by it, and by him that dwelleth in it: And he that sweareth by heaven, sweareth by the throne of God, and by him that sitteth thereon. Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites; because you tithe mint, and anise, and cummin, and have left the weightier things of the law; judgment, and mercy, and faith. These things you ought to have done, and not to leave those undone. Blind guides, who strain out a gnat, and swallow a camel. Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites; because you make clean the outside of the cup and of the dish, but within you are full of rapine and uncleanness. Thou blind Pharisee, first make clean the inside of the cup and of the dish, that the outside may become clean. Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites; because you are like to whited sepulchres, which outwardly appear to men beautiful, but within are full of dead men’s bones, and of all filthiness. So you also outwardly indeed appear to men just; but inwardly you are full of hypocrisy and iniquity. Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites; that build the sepulchres of the prophets, and adorn the monuments of the just, and say: If we had been in the days of our Fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets. Wherefore you are witnesses against yourselves, that you are the sons of them that killed the prophets. Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers. You serpents, generation of vipers, how will you flee from the judgment of hell?
(Mt 23:13-33)
Had Bergoglio been around at the time our Blessed Lord was on earth, he would not have approved of such “divisive” talk “provoking quarrels” and breaking those “fragile threads binding us together as a society”!
Returning now to the Frankster’s, uh, story:
By patching together bits of unverified information, repeating banal and deceptively persuasive arguments, sending strident and hateful messages, we do not help to weave human history, but instead strip others of their dignity.
But whereas the stories employed for exploitation and power have a short lifespan, a good story can transcend the confines of space and time. Centuries later, it remains timely, for it nourishes life.
In an age when falsification is increasingly sophisticated, reaching exponential levels (as in deepfake), we need wisdom to be able to welcome and create beautiful, true and good stories. We need courage to reject false and evil stories. We need patience and discernment to rediscover stories that help us not to lose the thread amid today’s many troubles. We need stories that reveal who we truly are, also in the untold heroism of everyday life.
Boy, things sure used to be a lot simpler back in the 1950s, huh? Nowadays you have to “weave human history” with “good stories” that “nourish life”, taking care to avoid “hateful messages” made up of “banal and deceptively persuasive arguments” so as not to “strip others of their dignity”! Francis thinks that the way to do that is by weaving “stories that reveal who we truly are” — a frightening thought, considering that our Blessed Lord “knew all men” and “knew what was in man” and for that very reason “did not trust himself unto them” (John 2:24,25).
Keep in mind that Francis is addressing his message for World Social Communications Day to all people indiscriminately, not simply to regenerate man, “the new man, who according to God is created in justice and holiness of truth” (Eph 4:24). His commendation of “who we truly are” is thus a Naturalist endorsement of man as he is in his fallen nature — with all his “evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false testimonies, blasphemies” (Mt 15:19) — not man as sanctified by Christ, who “can do all these things in him who strengtheneth me” (Phil 4:13). If we want to know “who we truly are”, without the grace of God, left to ourselves, we need but look at the mess man has made of this world. And no, Batman won’t be able to fix it.
After declaring that “Sacred Scripture is a Story of stories“, with God being “both creator and narrator”, the Argentinian pseudo-pope makes Christ into “the quintessential storyteller [who] himself becomes the story”. He then assures his hapless readers that “no human stories are insignificant or paltry” and claims that because “God became story, every human story is, in a certain sense, a divine story.” And there it is again: the quasi-equation of God with man. Sometimes it is more, sometimes less overt, but somehow the Novus Ordo “popes” always end up insinuating that man is God. The adverbial phrase “in a certain sense”, easily glossed over and quickly forgotten, provides a handy disclaimer, should one ever be needed.
Bergoglio then assures the reader that “[i]n the history of every person, the Father sees again the story of his Son who came down to earth” before claiming that “[e]very human story has an irrepressible dignity.” Yeah, whatever. Perhaps one day the Jesuit apostate will let us discover the “irrepressible dignity” in the stories “woven” by Mao Tse-tung, Adolf Hitler, Ted Bundy, or Albert Fish.
Because of this immense dignity he has located in the story of every man, Francis reasons that “humanity deserves stories that are worthy of it, worthy of that dizzying and fascinating height to which Jesus elevated it.” Does anyone know what the apostate from Buenos Aires is talking about here? Does he really want to explore what humanity deserves? It is our Blessed Lord Jesus Christ who deserves all of humanity’s love, faith, obedience, loyalty, and repentance: “Bring forth therefore fruit worthy of penance” (Mt 3:8). Let that be our story!
In the last section of the seemingly never-ending story of his message for World Communication Day, Francis informs us that “[o]ur own story becomes part of every great story” — naturally! No wonder, then, that “when we weave the tapestry of our days with mercy, we are turning another page”! With God as “the great storyteller”, Bergoglio continues, “we can re-weave the fabric of life, darning its rips and tears.” And with God’s “gaze”, the false pope then wants his unhappy followers to “approach the other characters, our brothers and sisters, who are with us as actors in today’s story.”
Are you dizzy enough yet?
Before he concludes his profound message, Francis provides a little disclaimer. He notes that of course “it is not a matter of simply telling stories as such, or of advertising ourselves, but rather of remembering who and what we are in God’s eyes, bearing witness to what the Spirit writes in our hearts and revealing to everyone that his or her story contains marvellous things.”
Got it?!
Enough already. Arm yourself with traditional Catholic doctrine and spirituality, and don’t let the man who chooses the atheist Eugenio Scalfari as his narrator and uses a false definition of truth confuse you with ever more ideological, tortuous, anti-Catholic stories.
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