Pope Francis Conservative Quotes

And conservatives and moderates alike could respect his keen pastoral sense and his personal frugality – a Prince of the Church who had given up a grand archbishop’s palace for a simple apartment in his episcopal office-block, who cooked his own meals and eschewed a chauffeur-driven limousine in favour of taking the subway and the bus. He was also a man of deep prayer.

The Guardian’s Paul Vallely has given a decent account of how Cardinal George Pell, appointed by Francis, began a review of the bank’s operations. Pell had successfully overhauled the Church’s finances in Sydney and Melbourne. The Australian son of a former heavyweight boxer, Pell is a political and doctrinal conservative who speaks aggressively and does not believe in man-made climate change. He is a cult hero among conservative Catholics. You can imagine what the Lavender Mafia think of him. Vallely notes grudgingly that, “For all his conservatism, Pell had for years been a vocal critic of the Roman Catholic bureaucracy and its corruption.” Pell moved quickly, and made enemies. A straight dealer to the point of unbearable bluntness, especially in the delicately perfumed and gold-embroidered world of the Holy See, Pell probably didn’t anticipate getting tripped up by dirty tactics: in this case, stories leaked to the media about—you guessed it—clerical abuse. The press reports were coincidentally timed, arriving just as Pell’s reforms of the bank began to take hold. It was alleged that Pell was soft on child abuse, thanks to offhand comments he had made years before, in typically ribald and direct Australian fashion. It was suggested that he may himself have some questions to answer about covering up abuse. Then the allegations widened, to direct accusations of historic sex abuse, at which point Pell had to put his work at the bank on hold. Now Pell is back in Australia, trying to clear his name, and his reforms are stalling, just as the intriguers intended. This is how efforts to clean up the Roman Catholic Church usually end.

In matters of theology and the complex arena of Church politics, journalists do what they do in any situation where the facts are too exhausting and time-consuming to uncover: they go with the guy the conservatives hate, which in this case means siding with McCarrick and Francis. As Ben Shapiro points out, “The media have rushed to Francis’s defense…Because Francis is widely perceived to share leftist sensibilities regarding issues like climate change,

Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, had conservatives frothing at the mouth when he suggested that a few acts of terrorism now and again were basically part and parcel of living in a big cosmopolitan city. I don’t think he meant to make excuses for the terrorists’ actions—though, since he is a man who merrily attends gender-segregated events to suck up to Muslims with regressive social attitudes, who knows? What I think he was getting at was that these occasional horrors were a price worth paying for multiculturalism.

This is one of the greatest challenges of our time: to convert ourselves to a type of development that knows how to respect creation.

Pope Demotes U.S. Cardinal Critical of His Reform Agenda By JIM YARDLEY ROME — Pope Francis on Saturday sidelined a powerful American cardinal who has emerged as an unabashed conservative critic of the reform agenda and the leadership style that the Argentine pontiff has brought to the Roman Catholic Church. In an expected move, Cardinal Raymond L. Burke was officially removed as head of the Vatican’s highest judicial authority, known as the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura. He was demoted to the ceremonial position of chaplain for the Knights of Malta, a charity group.

Francis because it has not had the key to him: he is Juan Perón in ecclesiastical translation.

Rhetoric uses syllogisms and other suasions to bring about a change of heart and of mind.

We once enjoyed fairly high rhetoric in America, most notably in our politics, but few today will have images of the Roman Senate brought to mind when they read of the goings on in the United States Senate.

It’s unfortunate in that it’s only a step away from mere name-calling,

Sometimes, where there’s smoke, there’s only smoke.)

pope has little use for established procedures, precedents, even legal structures within the Church.

papal tyrant the like of whom has not been seen for many centuries.

for the most part we can say that the disputes are about him yet don’t involve him. He has shown a singular capacity to plant seeds that others nurture into disputes. (That is one complaint about him: his imprecisions invite others to reach conflicting interpretations of papal statements.)

There’s a beautiful expression in The Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi: “Know that courtesy is one of the attributes of God…and courtesy is the sister of charity, which extinguishes hatred and conserves love.” If the world in which we live is violent and arrogant, this means that much more courtesy is needed: starting with the family, starting with ourselves.