Archbishop Chaput calls Pope Francis a pig. Pope Francis Derangement Syndrome, Vol. XXX.

haput, writ­ing at First Things, is all wrought up by the thought that Pope Fran­cis has suround­ed him­self with toad­ies and there­fore can’t han­dle con­struc­tive crit­i­cism from his loy­al ser­vant Ray­mond Arroyo. He would impress upon our minds a “lit­tle wis­dom” from St. Bernard of Clair­vaux. Bernard wrote:

The most griev­ous dan­ger for any pope lies in the fact that, encom­passed as he is by flat­ter­ers, he nev­er hears the truth about his own per­son and ends by not wish­ing to hear it.

Well, okay, I sup­pose. Cha­put does not men­tion a lit­tle wis­dom from St. Cather­ine of Siena:

[D]ivine obe­di­ence nev­er pre­vents us from obe­di­ence to the Holy Father. Nay, the more per­fect the one, the more per­fect is the oth­er. And we ought always to be sub­ject to his com­mands and obe­di­ent unto death. How­ev­er indis­creet obe­di­ence to him might seem, and how­ev­er it should deprive us of men­tal peace and con­so­la­tion, we ought to obey; and I con­sid­er that to do the oppo­site is a great imper­fec­tion, and deceit of the dev­il.

Or a lit­tle wis­dom from St. John Hen­ry New­man:

We must nev­er oppose his [the pope’s] will, or dis­pute his word, or crit­i­cise his pol­i­cy, or shrink from his side. There are kings of the earth who have despot­ic author­i­ty, which their sub­jects obey indeed but dis­own in their hearts; but we must nev­er mur­mur at that absolute rule which the Sov­er­eign Pon­tiff has over us, because it is giv­en to him by Christ, and, in obey­ing him, we are obey­ing his Lord.

PRETTY LIES?

But leav­ing aside which saint has the right wis­dom on this point (and be patient, dear read­er; I’ll get to the part about the pig), what is Cha­put’s evi­dence that Bernard’s prophe­cy has come true and Pope Fran­cis is sur­round­ed by flat­ter­ers?

As it turns out, not much. He names one journalist—Austen Ivereigh—who has defend­ed the pope’s oppro­bri­um on EWTN.

That’s it. Just Mr. Iver­eigh.

Obvi­ous­ly the pope is King Lear.

Cha­put express­es shock that Mr. Iver­eigh would say that EWTN has “turn[ed] a large por­tion of the peo­ple of God against Rome and its cur­rent occu­pant.” He does­n’t attempt to explain how Iver­eigh is wrong; no, he is shocked and cha­grined by the mere sug­ges­tion. How could this be? Why, Cha­put says, EWTN was found­ed by Moth­er Angel­i­ca! (You’d think Moth­er Angel­i­ca was the Immac­u­late Con­cep­tion.) It’s fund­ed by “small dona­tions from ordi­nary, faith­ful Catholic indi­vid­u­als and fam­i­lies”! (Just a bunch of $5 checks from poor Catholic grand­moth­ers on a fixed income, noth­ing else.) It’s not like EWTN is Com­cast or Face­book or, hor­ror of hor­rors, George Soros’s Open Soci­ety! If it were Soros, I could believe the peo­ple of God were being turned against the pope. But not EWTN!

Cha­put nev­er explains why he has this bias; he nev­er attempts to val­i­date it; he sim­ply presents it as self-evi­dent. For Iver­eigh to even sug­gest otherwise—where’s my faint­ing couch?—shows that he must be a mere syco­phan­tic flat­ter­er. There’s no oth­er expla­na­tion.

But no. This the kind of rea­son­ing (if one may use the term) that reveals more about Cha­put than it does about Iver­eigh: He assumes the malfea­sance of Soros and the saint­li­ness of EWTN as givens and does not even con­sid­er the ratio­nale some­one like Iver­eigh might have for dis­put­ing it. Let alone any, you know, evi­dence. Cha­put acts as though Iver­eigh just made this up one after­noon when a dead­line was loom­ing.

Cha­put con­tin­ues:

To be fair, Ivereigh’s arti­cle sim­ply elab­o­rates on com­ments that Pope Fran­cis made recent­ly to Jesuits in Slo­va­kia. Pope Fran­cis didn’t name the offend­ing media orga­ni­za­tion, but as jour­nal­ists quick­ly con­firmed, he meant EWTN. It’s sur­pris­ing to hear any pope be so pub­licly and per­son­al­ly sen­si­tive to per­ceived [“per­ceived”?] ill will from a few com­men­ta­tors at a mod­est [!] net­work (by sec­u­lar stan­dards) based on anoth­er con­ti­nent.

It’s quaint how Cha­put calls EWTN “mod­est,” as though it’s still 1981 and Moth­er film­ing in the garage. Have forty years real­ly passed and EWTN grown like a blob over Catholic media? Dear me, how time flies.

Cha­put is great­ly mis­un­der­es­ti­mat­ing the influ­ence EWTN has. EWTN is “based on anoth­er con­ti­nent” than The Vat­i­can, yes, but its pro­gram­ming is avail­able world­wide; the Church is a glob­al Church (it’s not just holed up in a small cor­ner in Italy); and the rel­a­tive small­ness of EWTN (as com­pared to, say, the New York Times) is irrel­e­vant since EWTN has an influ­ence on a loud, mal­con­tent fac­tion of Catholics that no sec­u­lar news orga­ni­za­tion could pos­si­bly match, except for maybe Fox News. (And lest Cha­put for­get, Ray­mond Arroyo reg­u­lar­ly ped­dles his anti-Pope Fran­cis schtick on Lau­ra Ingra­ham’s pro­gram.) EWTN and the Nation­al Catholic Reg­is­ter also have a huge influ­ence on oth­er Catholic media across the world, and so Cha­put’s pre­tense that it’s no more harm­less than a her­mit kneel­ing on a prie dieu is not very con­vinc­ing.

Next, Cha­put drags Mas­si­mo Fag­gi­oli into the dis­cus­sion and grants him “courtier sta­tus” on the basis of a book he wrote, not about Pope Fran­cis, but about Pres­i­dent Biden. He does­n’t explain how that’s rel­e­vant, nor does he men­tion any of Fag­gi­oli’s defens­es of Pope Fran­cis, which is odd. They’re not exact­ly hard to find. Has Cha­put fall­en asleep at this point and drift­ed into one of those dreams where one char­ac­ter morphs into anoth­er, so that he enter­tains a delu­sion that Pope Fran­cis is Pres­i­dent Biden?

The Democ­rats have “sacra­men­tal­ized abor­tion”! Cha­put com­plains.

(They haven’t, but nev­er mind. Pope Fran­cis is not a Demo­c­rat and is against abor­tion, last I checked. But maybe in Cha­put’s dream, Pope Fran­cis, who has mor­phed into Joe Biden, is com­plain­ing about EWTN at a Planned Par­ent­hood fundrais­er. Why is Fag­gi­oli’s book about Joe Biden rel­e­vant in an essay on Pope Fran­cis? Who knows? Only Cha­put can inform us.)

Next, Cha­put turns his gim­let eye on Ital­ian jour­nal­ist Anto­nio Spadaro. Cha­put is upset about an arti­cle Spadaro wrote that has, if pos­si­ble, even less to do with Pope Fran­cis than Fag­gi­oli’s book about Biden. One gets the feel­ing that Cha­put has lost focus and is just lash­ing out at what­ev­er hap­pens to be close by, like the Old Man in The Simp­sons. He woke up from his dream in which Pope Fran­cis had become Joe Biden, rubbed his eyes, won­dered what should come next in his essay for First Things, saw a ran­dom Spadaro arti­cle sit­ting on his desk, and said to him­self, “Okay, might as well talk about that.”

Spadaro’s essay is about Catholic-Evan­gel­i­cal rela­tions in the Unit­ed States. Cha­put thinks it has the sub­stance of a “col­or­ing book” and is full of “resent­ment.” He nev­er says why. Maybe he can’t think clear­ly enough to say why because he just woke up from his dream and needs cof­fee. Spadaro’s essay has noth­ing to do with Pope Fran­cis, or EWTN. So why men­tion it at all? Maybe it’s just that Spadaro makes Cha­put upset and Cha­put feels a burn­ing need to let the com­pla­cent world know that Spadaro upsets him.

IF YOU LOOK FOR TRUTHFULNESS

It’s not my pur­pose here to doc­u­ment EWT­N’s dis­sent against the pope or the influ­ence it has over a large num­ber of Catholics, because that’s already been suf­fi­cient­ly doc­u­ment­ed in many oth­er places. Cha­put does not deal with any of it because he choos­es to ignore it and feigns right­eous shock.

Months before Pope Fran­cis said any­thing about EWTN, Mike Lewis at Where Peter Is wrote this arti­cle about how EWTN had become the “voice of oppo­si­tion” to Pope Fran­cis. It turns out (if you look for truth­ful­ness and fol­low the links in the arti­cle) that EWTN is hard­ly some tiny lit­tle harm­less net­work in a shab­by garage fund­ed by a bunch of $5 checks from sweet lit­tle Catholic grand­moth­ers. And its influ­ence over Catholic dis­sent from Pope Fran­cis and Church teach­ing is far greater than Cha­put would like to pre­tend.

It has an influ­ence that, as Vat­i­can jour­nal­ist Christo­pher Lamb doc­u­ments, has con­cerned the Vat­i­can for some time. We’re not just deal­ing with a ran­dom out­burst from an aging Lear of a pope who can’t stand the thought that not every­one is a syco­phant and does­n’t under­stand that Ray­mond Arroyo is real­ly Cordelia.

Cha­put does­n’t both­er to deal with any evi­dence of EWT­N’s influ­ence over mil­lions of Catholics who are open­ly con­temp­tu­ous of the mag­is­teri­um of Pope Fran­cis. Cha­put men­tions none of it; he mere­ly scoffs at the very idea! But the evi­dence is every­where, and I have been doc­u­ment­ing it, Mark Shea has been doc­u­ment­ing it, Dawn Eden Gold­stein has been doc­u­ment­ing it, Where Peter Is has been doc­u­ment­ing it, and on and on. But Cha­put sees no evil because, imag­in­ing no evil, he clos­es his eyes.

Thus he con­cludes with this flour­ish:

No pon­tif­i­cate is well served when its pro­mot­ers show con­tempt and bel­liger­ence toward per­ceived ene­mies.

[No, the prob­lem here is con­tempt and bel­liger­ence toward the pope. Cha­put is behav­ing like the child who says, “No, you!”]

That kind of flack­ery sim­ply pro­duces more, and even more deter­mined, crit­ics who do indeed elide into ene­mies.

[Defend­ing the pope “as a son would a father” (to quote New­man) is “flack­ery,” in Cha­put’s view. Not­ed.]

One can hope that Pope Fran­cis under­stands this. In the mean­time, it’s worth stress­ing that the lat­est attacks on EWTN are both ugly and unjust, and call­ing them some­thing else is, to bor­row a thought from Mr. Iver­eigh, “just putting lip­stick on a pig.”

It’s worth not­ing here that Cha­put can con­ceive of only two stances toward the Holy Father: Either you are a syco­phant, or you tell the pope the truth about him­self and call him a pig.

But Alt! I can hear some­one protest. Cha­put did not com­pare the pope to a pig. He com­pared the pope’s crit­i­cism of EWTN to a pig.

Oh. So the pope’s not a pig, it’s just that he speaks pig. The pope oinks. Got it.

I real­ly can’t imag­ine how any­one could pos­si­bly say that Pope Fran­cis Derange­ment Syn­drome has got­ten out of hand. Cha­put’s only writ­ing this in First Things, after all, a tiny lit­tle chap­book that has no influ­ence on any­body.