TradCatKnight: Now Francis is calling traditional priests effeminate?

But what does the Pope achieve with some of his stories? This question came again to mind while listening to the daily homily at the Domus Sanctae Martae on Friday, December 9.

In the homily, Pope Francis tells a story repeating the words “rigid” and “worldly” from his Little Book of Insults.

The story goes like this:

Outrage! A young priest – under 25 – with a cape and a hat in a shop for clerical dress.

Who are the two people in question: One is an old, working, normal man who loves Jesus and speaks to the Pope; the other is a young, maybe newly ordained, rigid, worldly priest on a shopping trip. The enemy or Feindbild (“image of the enemy”) is clear: an effeminate young man, probably handsome, busy with worldly affairs like a dandy from an Oscar Wilde novel. Undoubtedly, he must have come into Rome for a shopping trip as a break and indulges in an aesthetic pleasure that only the dolce vita of Rome has to offer. He is rich (velvet!), careless, mundane, superficial, lazy, and vain …

On the other hand, we have the old monsignor. Seemingly he has stable work in Rome, he is old, good, pious, and wise. He checks in with the Pope out of allegiance and obedience and has just a “normal” conversation with the Successor of Peter, talking about his last visit to the prison and how to include refugees into his parish.

Is that really what we are dealing with in the Church – and more importantly in her relation to the in the world – today?

Reality looks very different: young priests who chose to wear traditional dress (which is what the story suggests) do so as a battle uniform. That is right: they are at war. They are at war with a society that hates anything traditional, anything old for that matter – the old is the enemy. They are at war with their secular friends who ridicule them for wearing that “priestly dress.” They are at war with liberal Catholics who want to make the Church serve the world – a true worldliness – in her morality, her structure, and her teaching. They are at war with a fashion industry which chooses either immorality or decadence, mostly both, as a principle for fashion today. They are at war with the flocks of priests who wear jeans and shirts. Why do they to choose to be at war? Because Christ was at war. He was at war with enemies of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Had Christ not owned a cape so precious that even well-paid Roman soldiers did not want to cut it in half? Read more »