“About Pope Francis” is the current column, now on the Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine. An excerpt:

In the wake of America’s week-long, Pope Francis bacchanalia, a few column titles suggest themselves:

“Benedict, What Have You Wrought?”

“The Global Village Idiot.”

“Lady Di of The Papacy.”

The last hints at the trendy, pop-philosophies that animate Pope Francis’ Lady Di-like belief system. The intellectual equivalent of these papal shopworn shibboleths you’ll find in a Chinese, fortune-cookie wrapper.

Ultimately, the editor will decide which of these unflattering headings best describes the man whom one devout Catholic—libertarian jurist Andrew Napolitano—called a false prophet for overturning Catholic canon law without consulting his Bishops. Yet another reason Pope Francis is drawn to an authoritarian president who rules by presidential veto.

Intellectually, Pope Francis is no match for his predecessors.

With his 1998 encyclical, the Polish pope—how the Polish people suffered under the communists whose creed Pope Francis is inadvertently dignifying—sounded a lone voice for both “Faith and Reason” in the postmodern religious wilderness.

Who other than Pope John Paul spoke with such unhectoring clarity about the errors of relativism in modern thought? Certainly not Jorge Bergolio, who is too simple to consider such abstractions.

The anti-intellectualism evinced in the Holy See’s 2015 environmental encyclical made this pope’s “close advisers,” in all their “ill-tempered diction,” the butt of ridicule over the pages of the Catholic Crisis magazine:

From the empirical side, to prevent the disdain of more informed scientists generations from now, papal teaching must be safeguarded from attempts to exploit it as an endorsement of one hypothesis over another concerning anthropogenic causes of climate change. It is not incumbent upon a Catholic to believe, like Rex Mottram in “Brideshead Revisited,” that a pope can perfectly predict the weather. …

In the same badly written potboiler, the pope took a swipe at the richest nations, blaming them for despoiling the earth. In truth, however, the developed world has advanced the technologies (and attendant ethics) that are helping to clean up the atmosphere, the waterways, the oceans and many a landmass. It is the developing and underdeveloped nations—China and India, for one—that despoil the earth and devastate its creatures. So polluted are the waterways in former communist countries that rivers are known to catch fire. Watch. …

… Read the rest.“About Pope Francis” is now on the Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine.