Mark Shea says Elton John’s Admiration for Francis shows he is “revisiting what the Gospel has to say”
The other day we reported on Elton John’s admiration for “Pope” Francis, Jorge Bergoglio. In a fundraising event to fight AIDS, the British sodomite said he wants the putative Pope to be declared a “saint now”, and that he considers him his “hero.” While anyone who isn’t yet completely brain-dead would, in the context of who Elton John is and what has transpired so far with regard to “Pope” Francis, see this for yet another confirmation of what utter shame and disaster Bergoglio has brought on the name “Catholic”, the one American blogger who can always be counted on to come down on the wrong side of an issue (with very few exceptions), Mark Shea, sees this as proof that Elton John is opening himself up to the Gospel!
On his infamous Catholic and Enjoying It blog, the Protestant-to-Novus-Ordo convert Shea writes:
He [Elton John] joins a growing list of people (who represent millions more), hitherto disaffected from the Church, who find they trust and admire him and are revisiting what the gospel has to say because of him.
Meanwhile, it is the mark of the madness of our age that the Greatest Catholics of All Time [Shea’s moniker for traditionalists of all stripes —NOW] see this as an indictment of the Pope and not as an opportunity to evangelize.
When I made the remark on FB [Facebook] that the admiration of an Elton John for the pope represents an evangelistic opportunity, not a problem, for the Church, a depressing percentage of Catholics responded in ways best summed up by one reader: “Evangelism is Protestant, not Catholic.”
Everything that is wrong with the Church today is summed up in those words. Everything.
(Mark Shea, “Elton John greatly admires Pope Francis”, Catholic and Enjoying It, Oct. 31, 2014)
Now obviously, the statement that “Evangelism is Protestant, not Catholic” is absolutely idiotic and totally antithetical to Catholicism. In condeming this, Shea is quite correct, but one will naturally always be able to find one person on the internet who, though considering himself a Catholic, nevertheless speaks nonsense. This is not exactly new, and Shea himself is a perfect example of this. But the irony is that it is precisely “Pope” Francis, Mark Shea’s hero and now also Elton John’s, who opposes evangelism, seeing it as “spiritual harassment” and denouncing it as “proselytism”, never preaching Jesus Christ to the unconverted, even going so far as hiding his pectoral cross in the presence of his Jewish buddies and confirming Muslims in their unbelief by telling them to adhere faithfully to the Koran and lauding Ramadan as being capable of producing “abundant spiritual fruit”. He does this, of course, while paying lipservice to the Gospel, telling people in sermons to “preach the Gospel always”, yet himself eschewing every opportunity to do so. Bergoglio has replaced the Gospel with a soup-kitchen humanitarianism bearing a cross — and even that cross has to go if the soup is being handed to Jewish people. (For a list of examples of this and other contradictions coming from the two-faced Jorge Bergoglio, click here.)
What Mr. Shea doesn’t understand — or refuses to acknowledge — is that Elton John is praising Francis not because the Argentinian Jesuit is such a wonderful Catholic but precisely because he isn’t. He extols him not because Francis practices the Gospel so well but because he doesn’t. Elton John is essentially saying, “Finally, there’s a man like me on the Chair of Peter, a man after my own heart. Finally, the church is starting to come around to my way of thinking! This deserves recognition! Long live Francis!”
This, Mr. Shea, is why real Catholics rightly see Elton’s admiration of Francis as a further confirmation of the disaster that is Jorge Bergoglio and his anti-Catholic, impious, heretical Revolution. By way of analogy, this is like Judas praising St. Peter for his betrayal of Christ — not exactly an indication that Judas is getting closer to truth and holiness, even if he is “attracted by an Apostle”.
Shea’s brilliant analysis continues:
Our task is not to keep out the riff raff and repel boarders. It is to go out into the highways and byways and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame so that the wedding feast will be full.
Yes, yes, Mr. Shea, this is quite true, but there is one minor detail which, though you mention it later on, you nevertheless fail to grasp the import of: The wedding feast can only lawfully be attended by those who have on a wedding garment, the garment of sanctifying grace (see Mt 22:11-13). While we must go out into the streets to bring people in so as to clothe them in the wedding garment, this isn’t what Francis is doing. What he’s doing is going out to the “riffraff”, inviting them in, and then complimenting them on their beautiful clothes and assuring them that no wedding garment is needed but that this whole wedding garment business is, instead, only a sign of “narrow-minded rules” that leave out of account the “love of Jesus.” He’s made the wedding celebration into a brothel, where everyone is welcome except those with the wedding garment, where those who do wear it and take care to keep it unsullied are being castigated for insisting on having to wear it. That’s what’s going on here, Mr. Shea — and we have nearly twenty months of “Pope Francis”, and years of “Cardinal” Bergoglio in Buenos Aires, to prove it.
Let’s look at a little more of what Shea writes on this:
Will those attracted to Francis’ beautiful witness and obvious holiness [sic!!] need to repent of things? Of course. Don’t we all? But here’s the thing (and the point Francis tried to make last year in his America interview): You don’t start a life of discipleship with a set of moral precepts. You start it by an encounter with a person. The *real* magnetic force in Francis’ life is Jesus Christ. It is for us to introduce a person like Elton John (or whoever) to Jesus so that they can begin to grapple with his astonishing person. The changes in lifestyle *flow* from that encounter. They do not *precede* that encounter. If you march up to somebody and start demanding that they reorder their entire life because Sez You, you will have no success. If they have an encounter with Jesus, realize who he is and what he has done for them and the universe-shattering implications of that: they are the ones who conclude “I have to re-order my entire life.”
So then, apparently, for 1,900 years Holy Mother Church converted sinners the wrong way, using futile and insensitive tactics that only repel people instead of attracting them. Right? That’s what Shea wants you to believe.
Ah yes, that “encounter” stuff… Let’s see if we all remember our Catholic history: In the eighth century, St. Boniface Winfrid, Apostle of Germany, converted a number of pagans to Catholicism by means of the following somewhat insensitive “encounter”:
To show the heathens how utterly powerless were the gods in whom they placed their confidence, Boniface felled the oak sacred to the thunder-god Thor, at Geismar, near Fritzlar. He had a chapel built out of the wood and dedicated it to the prince of the Apostles. The heathens were astonished that no thunderbolt from the hand of Thor destroyed the offender, and many were converted. The fall of this oak marked the fall of heathenism.
(Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “St. Boniface”)
Even Mark Shea will have to admit that this isn’t exactly the type of “encounter” or “witness” you’ve heard about from Paul VI, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, or Francis.
Of course there are different strategies to evangelization, as each person to be evangelized is different, and one has to take into consideration factors such as good will (that’s the most important), education, intelligence, temperament, social status and upbringing, current religious beliefs, etc. But that’s beside the point. Shea’s idea, based entirely on Vatican II theology, is that if only we are all like Francis, then people like Elton John will slowly be led to Christ and to conversion. This is not only preposterous but has also long proven itself to be unworkable — and that proof is in the pudding.
It’s the old “let’s open the windows” nonsense of “St.” John XXIII and his Modernist Second Vatican Council. When the Vatican II Church, in its very infancy, “opened itself to the world” beginning in 1962, what happened was not a conversion of the world to Catholicism but a conversion of Catholicism to the ways of the world. Not the Gospel was let loose on the world, but the world polluted and diluted the Gospel instead. And this isn’t just some “theory” or some “prediction” — this is historical fact. Just look at history. The Church of Vatican II has not produced massive conversions but massive apostasy, as documented in the book Index of Leading Catholic Indicators.
In his sermon of June 29, 1972, Antipope Paul VI complained that the “smoke of Satan” had entered his church — but somehow he couldn’t manage to trace this back to his predecessor John XXIII’s opening of the windows. How strange.
If we saw the mere smoke of Satan in 1972, at this point it’s a raging inferno. Besides Paul VI, the other individual who is singly most responsible for ensuring that the smoke would turn into a near-unquenchable conflagration is “Saint” John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla). He was very big on telling pagans how wonderful they were, not only they as human beings but also their false religions. The following two shocking articles give detailed accounts of what transpired in 1986 and 1993 when John Paul II traveled to India and Benin, respectively:
- Wojtyla Gets a Third Eye: John Paul II’s Pilgrimage to India
- Voodoo You Trust? John Paul II’s Betrayal in Benin
To comment on just one example, in Africa in 1993 John Paul II praised the satanic Voodoo cult in these words (quote found in the second article linked above):
You have a strong attachment to the traditions handed on by your ancestors. It is legitimate to be grateful to your forbears who passed on this sense of the sacred, belief in a single God who is good, a sense of celebration, esteem for the moral life and for harmony in society.
Sounds just like the kind of “encounter” Mark Shea has in mind, doesn’t it? So then, we ask: Where are the converts?Where is that flood of people abandoning the Voodoo religion and embracing Catholicism because of John Paul II’s “encounter” with them in 1993? And for every single person who did perhaps convert, how many abandoned the Faith because of Wojtyla’s scandalous praising of witchcraft and paganism? Do we really want to look at the numbers?
In India, John Paul II received the heathen Mark of Shiva, as proved beyond doubt in this video, which also includes a powerful refutation of Jimmy Akin’s attempt to spin it into something else. Wojtyla did not preach Jesus Christ to the pagans, but the “dignity of man”.
In 1985, the same John Paul II had gone to Togo, Africa, and was only too happy to explain in a General Audience following his trip, just what he had done there: “Particularly striking was the prayer meeting in the sanctuary of Our Lady of Mercy at Lake Togo, where I also prayed for the first time with animists” (General Audience, Aug. 21, 1985, n. 8; italics added).
Okay then: Where are the pagans that have converted and abandoned their paganism because of all the interreligious dialogue, the interreligious prayer, the peace initiatives, etc., since Vatican II? Where are the converts from Judaism that came as a result of Benedict XVI blaspheming Christ in a synagogue in Cologne in 2005? Where are the fruits we have been promised by the likes of Mark Shea for decades? Fruits we have seen indeed, but not the kind of fruits that Shea is still trying to convince people will eventually follow.
By the way, Elton John is by far not the only celebrity of the pagan left endorsing Francis. There’s another one who has said he is quite “impressed” with the Jesuit “Pope”: Barack Obama. According to Mark Shea’s reasoning, this shows that Obama is drawing closer to Catholicism and he is now more ready to be evangelized than before. Gee, look at all these “converts” Francis is making! A few more years of Bergoglio and his new-found “mercy”, and the whole world will be Catholic!
Get a different job, Mark Shea — one that has nothing to do with religion.
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