IN THE previous entry on Pope Francis, a reader recommended this article by George Nuemayr at The American Spectator.  Nuemayr is not among those Catholic commentators dismissing the seriousness of the un-orthodox views recently expressed by the Pope. However, he believes there is hope in the possibility that he will undergo correction. He writes:

Even if given the most charitable reading, Pope Francis’s recent interview with Jesuit publications was alarming in its spirit-of-Vatican II liberalism. Catholicism is not a personality cult and so Catholics, following the example of St. Paul, don’t need to ooh and aah over unsound, non-infallible remarks, which were made incidentally to publications like America known principally for their heterodoxy.

Some future Edward Gibbon should devote a chapter or two to this grimly comic episode: a Jesuit pope chatting about the appeal of diluted orthodoxy and “pastoral” effectiveness with the least pastorally effective and most heterodox order in the Church. We can’t “obsess” over abortion, contraception, and gay marriage “all the time,” he said, telling his fellow Jesuits exactly what they wanted to hear. They don’t even talk about those issues some of the time.

In the body of Christ, the Counter-Reformation Jesuits served as the Church’s spleen. Today’s Jesuits serve it, if at all, as the little pinky. Left-wing Jesuit ninnies such as Thomas Reese and James Martin turn up on talks shows to soft-pedal Church teaching; Jesuit schools and universities produce an endless stream of pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage graduates; Jesuit seminaries either look like ghost towns or gay bars. Even the liberal Garry Wills is appalled by the order’s decadence, writing in 2002:

Entering the Jesuits used to take one into a stable world; but that is far from the experience of recent times. A thirty-five-year-old still studying theology says: “My novice master left to marry, my formation director left for a relationship with another man, et cetera. One cannot help but get the sense that we of this generation of Jesuits may be the last of the Shakers.”

It says a lot about the crisis in the Church that the first Jesuit pope in history came at the very moment the order was weakest and most corrupt. The Pope’s scolding of “small-minded” restorationists for “pastoral” incompetence is laughable in light of his own order’s disintegration: What exactly would the editors of America and the other Jesuits whose liberalism Pope Francis was flattering in the interview, know about saving souls? Just look at the U.S. Congress: it is overflowing with Jesuit graduates who have abandoned the faith and support abortion and gay rights. Oh-so-pastoral Jesuits, heal thyself.

Has Pope Francis not been paying attention for the last 50 years? The only vibrant religious orders are traditional ones; the only packed churches are traditional ones; the only seminaries producing shepherds for the flock are traditional ones. To use his analogy, at the Catholic Left’s “field hospitals,” all the patients are dead.

Pope Francis has made many commendable remarks about the Virgin Mary, Satan, and the need to go to confession, among others. And some of the criticism does seem petty: Who cares if he bunks at the Vatican hotel or putts around in a used car? That’s fine. But it is not petty, disrespectful, or un-Catholic to object to the liberal parts of his agenda. Indeed, the need for a St. Paul to correct him grows with each passing week as his pontificate emboldens the Church’s enemies and undercuts her friends and most loyal members.

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