PRIMITIVE tribes in centuries past sometimes traded highly valuable possessions for mere trinkets. Europeans bought lustrous mink and beaver furs from the Indians for the price of glass beads and Africans sold men, women and children for barrels of rum.

Something analogous was going on the other day when ‘Pope’ Francis invited Buddhist monks to pray over him at the Vatican.

Here, the Emperor of the New World Religion traded, as he so often has, the unspeakable grandeur of Catholicism — which he flatly rejects — for mere trinkets.

When I compare Buddhist prayers to shards of glass and barrels of intoxicating liquors imported from foreign lands, I don’t deny that Buddhism contains beauty and truth. The Buddhist understanding of detachment from earthly things and the primacy of the spiritual are glimpses of the divine. It is not surprising that seekers in the wilderness of the modern world are attracted to them. But as a whole — and theology, like water, must be drunk in its entirety — Buddhist philosophy is falsehood, deception and perdition. Buddhism is mutilated Catholicism, a weak and ultimately unsatisfying imposter. Buddhist monks are at best well-meaning imitators of the asceticism of St. Benedict and St Francis.

I once had a friend who was a Darwinist, dogmatically and fervently so. Later in life, he apparently grasped the spiritual void in his supposedly scientific beliefs, but he didn’t abandon Darwinism and its superstitions. He added Buddhism to them. Every day, he placed his fanny on a cushion on the floor and worshiped nothingness. This embrace of the absolute had the appearance of humility. But how proud it was! After all, it wasn’t that his scientific friends would reject him for being “religious.” Buddhism is cool and acceptable among the fashionably scientific, those who want to sip from the cup of the divine, partly because it asks so little. Its sparkling shards of glass and refreshing, intoxicating highs will not impose or discomfort. The darkness of sin is overlooked.

I’ve always wondered — what do Buddhists do if an earthquake or something similar happens? I mean, you can’t meditate at that critical moment, can you? But you can’t pray either. Buddhists have traded God for nothingness. They have abandoned true conversation with the divine. How terribly lonely that must be, especially in an emergency. What will they do when with a glorious onrush Christ appears on his throne of cherubim and seraphim? Will they close their eyes and meditate? All Buddhist countries are dying. There is no compelling reason to reproduce when nothingness reigns.

I once met an older couple, born and raised as Catholics before the Revolution, who spoke glowingly of their son’s travels to the East to further his studies in “mindfulness.” They were similar in their gullibility to the Lenni Lenape or the Yoruba when they gaped with fascination at the exotic trinkets of the White Man.

Francis, himself the hobbling emperor of a false utopian dream, seeks Buddhist prayers, as if there is such a thing. His act has the appearance of charity and open-heartedness. But it is cold, calculating and even mercenary. He has always been more the salesman than the shepherd. The Buddhists of the world will not be drawn any closer to the heights of truth by Francis’s odd sales pitch. They will be confirmed in their multiple errors and absolute madness. They have been abandoned in the wilderness by the supposed Vicar of Christ without food or drink. Francis, ever uncharitable to stray souls, encounters them in the desert and, as if vast gifts and life-giving nourishment were not readily at his disposal, passes them by.

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