David Wanat calls the pope’s critics to task.

At his blog If I Might Inter­ject. High­lights:

When peo­ple talk about the Catholic Church becom­ing more faith­ful, they gen­er­al­ly think of a Church that expels the lib­er­als and leaves us with a more con­ser­v­a­tive Church that was doc­tri­nal­ly pure—according to the pref­er­ences of the indi­vid­ual imag­in­ing it. …

But what makes this trou­ble­some is I’m not talk­ing about rad­i­cal tra­di­tion­al­ists here. I’m talk­ing about peo­ple who spent years or even decades defend­ing the Church sud­den­ly treat­ing Pope Fran­cis as if he were a bur­den to endure and saw them­selves as need­ing to defend the faith in spite of him.

… I do not believe a per­son can with­hold loy­al­ty and respect to the Pope in small mat­ters with­out even­tu­al­ly becom­ing dis­loy­al and dis­re­spect­ful in great mat­ters. Our Lord warns us in Luke 16:10 … “The per­son who is trust­wor­thy in very small mat­ters is also trust­wor­thy in great ones; and the per­son who is dis­hon­est in very small mat­ters is also dis­hon­est in great ones.” If we can’t trust a per­son to be respect­ful and loy­al to the Pope in small mat­ters, how can we trust him to be faith­ful in large mat­ters? …

This is the dan­ger: If one is so con­fi­dent that they know bet­ter than the Pope, they even­tu­al­ly will decide that they can only obey him when they agree with him.

It is excel­lent. Read the whole thing here.