BEAU GESTE

Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Finley Peter Dunne

Editor's Note: Yeah, yeah. We know we promised to launch our serial discussion of the saltus this week. But we have a good excuse for postponing it.  On Wednesday, Time magazine announced its "Person of the Year," none other than Papa Pancho. As conscientious web journalists, Pistrina's staff strives for timeliness. So we stopped the presses, so to speak, to upload right away the following seasonal meditation on the Man of the Year.  

First off, let's make one thing perfectly clear: We're ready to believe anything negative about Jorge Bergoglio. (Except, of course, for the rector's idiotic characterization of him as ignorant and stupid.) Yes, he's an enemy of the liturgy. Sure, he's probably a crypto-Marxist. Of course, he's a Modernist through and through, and he's absolutely not a Catholic. And right you are, he's a flaming heretic. No doubt about it: His mission is to put an end to whatever little of tradition remains in the corrupt Vatican Establishment.

That said, we have to confess that if his "pontificate" lasts for, say, five years, he'll drive a stake through the lucre-loving, cold-as-stone hearts of the Mammonite cult masters of Traddielandia.

Here's why.

Bergie's a past master of the affective bias, the transformative language, and the calculated media postures introduced by Vatican II. He understands how to play to the crowd, which at his level comprises the world. In other words, he's thoroughly adept at manipulating symbols and archetypes to achieve his objectives. The malformed, sub-educated, shortsighted Traddie cult masters aren't. They have neither the brains nor the will power. They're only conniving and willful.

This truth about Bergie came home to us on the morning of Saturday, December 7, 2013, during a break at an editorial meeting, when we turned, with mouths only partially filled with the vigil's sparing frustulum, to the Wall Street Journal's opinion section. We were leafing through the 'paper looking for a piece on Papa Pancho's anti-capitalist exhortation.

There, accompanying Peggy Noonnan's column, was a color photo, filling perhaps a sixth of the page. In a tight shot, Bergoglio embraces a man afflicted with neurofibromatosis, a genetic disorder. The man's features are buried in Pancho's bosom. Visible are the man's matted hair and the grotesque tumors the disorder produces. What flesh we see is an ill-stitched quilt of hideous carbuncles. For us, benumbed by revulsion, horror, and pity, the graphic pic was almost too much to stomach at breakfast time. We wanted to turn the page. Yet to a man we kept on looking, staring as though it were a rare renaissance woodcut from some early medical textbook.

Jorge Bergoglio, in profile, looks serene. No theatrical mugging to telegraph sympathy. No pursed lips or exaggerated rictus of feigned compassion aimed at the massive audience he realized was peering in at the pair of them from the other side of the lens. In that photo, and in others like it, he calmly beholds this disfigured child of God, a soul sorely tried here on earth, and cradles him as a father would an infirm, weeping son.

To the churched and the unchurched, to the maudlin and the cynical, to Bergie's fans and his ardent detractors like us, it is a shining image of the Gospel, full of pathos yet -- owing to Bergoglio's steady, unaffected gaze -- miraculously unsentimental.

Now, as we said, we'll believe anything bad about this so-called pope. We're sure the ol' Bergomeister knew the TV cameras were rolling and would capture this PR triumph. He probably planned the photo op. It wouldn't have been hard.

When we were in Rome this fall, we think we saw the poor wretch several times as we strolled up the straight and broad Via della Conciliazione on our way to St. Peter's or to the Vatican museums or to our favorite hole-in-the-wall arancini joint in the Borgo. He was just one of the many professional cripples and bums who inconveniently block the way of self-absorbed tourists. Each time we spied him, he was kneeling on the dirty sidewalk, face to the concrete, his hands -- sun-browned, filthy, gnarled -- raised above greasy wisps of blackish hair and cupped in expectation of alms.

Wincing and holding our breath, one time only, we gingerly dropped degli spiccioli -- some small change --onto his cracked, soiled palms. Then we tripped away, trusting our miserly charity and unsettling sympathy would charm away the memory of a ghastly sight on a bright, Roman autumn day. On our return hours later, we strategically crossed to the other side of the via, on the pretext of visiting the Carmelite church of Santa Maria in Traspontina, but really because we were resentful he was still there -- and  because we hadn't the courage to eye him again.

So, you see, it wouldn't have been hard for Pope Pancho to command a few Sisters of Charity to collect the beggar so he could be ready for his close-up. 

And, wow, Mr. DeMille, what a close-up it is!

Bogeyman Bergoglio the heresiarch, cunning enemy of the faith, without betraying alarm or repugnance or smugness, enfolded an unsightly --  no, let's say it to our own discredit -- appalling creature. He caressed the deformed and wounded flesh. He may have lightly kissed his forehead. He imparted the warmth of a hale, human frame to someone whom most men would regard a latter-day leper, a diseased outcast from whose slightest touch they would recoil in shivering disgust.

What a super-human act of the will! What focused purposefulness to fulfill an agenda! To herd more souls into the deadly Modernist fold, to bewitch them into believing its falsehoods, to alienate them from truth and tradition, he walked the path that only a few great saints have trodden. The whole scene might have come from some 1950's Hollywood sword-and-sandal B-movie set in Roman Judaea at the time of our Lord's ministry, except for the absent over-acting and over-wrought orchestral score.

To overcome the reflexive impulse to push the man away took real gumption. Authentic self-control. Singular self-possession. True grit.

How, we ask, can Trads defend against such an unforgettable, heart-tugging image? What can they offer as a visual response? Globe-trotting, aspirational prelates more at home at Gammarelli's than at Gethsemane? Undereducated priests hawking half-baked, scandalously cruel "theological opinions" about the Terri Schiavo tragedy? Loud-mouth bluffers in shimmering pontificals panhandling for more and more money for more ill-constructed Quonset huts in disguise?

Traddie cult masters are either busy kicking the faithful out of their chapels for attending an "una-cum" Mass, or they're breathlessly updating the bill-paying laity on their excellent adventures in fine dining and spa hopping. They spend their time planning for and practicing elaborate but largely unattended ceremonies or hatching tacky fund-raising schemes. Their preference is to comfort the well-heeled who suffer from "affluenza."

These Trad-World amateurs can't even camouflage their motives in order to achieve their ends. That's why after almost four decades they have so little to show. They haven't the steely discipline of Papa Pancho to lay aside for a higher purpose their jealousies, pet peeves, pathetic neediness, backbiting, and divisiveness. They can barely abide each other let alone suffer the gruesomely afflicted to come unto them.

That one, almost certainly stage-managed, Galilean-inspired gesture of Papa Pancho is worth a thousand ill-written, error-filled articles by half-educated phonies with no real Latin. It's worth a hundred thousand hellfire-and-brimstone homilies condemning Catholics to eternal perdition for attending the "wrong" chapel. That stunning image will rake in more cash and corral more followers than multiple lifetimes of cult-master cajolery and menace.

Chief among those bewitched by Bergie's publicity coup will be the younger Traddie generation. The kids are sick unto death at the cult masters' behavior. In their minds' eye, they will imagine that Provincial- Superior Bergoglio would have put an end to the SGG School principal's tenure after the 2008-2009 scandal erupted. Novice-Master Bergoglio would have dismissed irascible Scut the Prefect for driving guiltless, traumatized young seminarians out into the dead of night over the silly rector's wet cat. Archbishop Bergoglio would never have required a parishioner to leave his church because he took a job with a competitor of a big donor: he wouldn't whine about the bread taken from his mouth; he'd worry about feeding his sheep. And lastly, Trained-Scientist and Real-Seminary-Theology-Professor Bergoglio would never have been so misinformed as to claim that a feeding tube constituted extraordinary means to preserve life and imposed a grave burden on society.

The young will rush out of the cult as soon as they're emancipated from money-wastin', Kool-Aid-guzzlin' ma and pa. 

It's Advent. Don't let Bergie win. Resolve to starve the beast this Christmas, and send your cult masters packing. Replace 'em with caring, certainly valid priests and bishops.