Like Anthony Weiner, he just can't stop.
Yesterday, I reported that the Pope's "mouthpiece," Jesuit editor Antonio Spadaro, had posted and then deleted a tweet seemingly equating Cardinal Burke with one of the minor villains in The Lord of the Rings. Unbeknownst to me, Deacon Nick Donnelly had noted this on his own Twitter feed the previous day. The silly kerfuffle was then prominently mentioned by at least three other Catholic blogs and sites - Vox Cantoris, OnePeterFive and Canon212.
It looks like Spadaro is monitoring our rigid neo-Pelagian activities. Today Donnelly noticed that Spadaro had put the deleted clip (and two others) back up, with a further snark at Burke (or one of us, or some generic enemy of Francis or whomever):
He's a Herald of WoeHe also added a jokey little comment:
Nice to see what happend when I posted just some pics (& no comments) from the movie #TheLordofthe Rings Crazy things & wired hermeneutic!As you can see, he ended it with a rosey-cheeked smiley face.
By the way, #TheLordofthe is a Twitter hashtag for people who forget to write "Rings" or mistakenly put a space before it. The hashtag page contains six tweets in the last twelve months.
Also, I assume Spadaro meant to write "weird hermeneutic" not "wired hermeneutic." Then again, you never know with Jesuits.
A friend tweeted:
I kidded him that he had just won the Understatement of the Year Award.
In one sense this is all very humorous. And, yes, I think humor is important, not in spite of, but even because of the dark days we are living through. Without humor, many of us would go crazy.
But in another sense, the spectacle is grotesque. By obstinately refusing to answer questions that the cardinals have every right to ask (and every Catholic has a right to hear the answers to), the Pope is further fanning the flames of confusion and division in the Church. It's possible an attempt might be made to "correct" a sitting pope. It's also possible the divisions in the Church itself might explode into open schism.
And in the midst of it - indeed, as his chosen response to it - one of the Pope's closest advisors is playing the Twitter troll, complete with pop culture references and putdowns.
Yesterday I referenced the "banality of evil." But banality can sometimes be colorful or even fascinating in its way. I have no doubt that future chroniclers will describe the personalities of the Court of Francis in their full glory - the kissing priest, the tweeting Jesuit, the little man with a funny name who shouted at teenage girls who dared to kneel for communion.
Hey, man, I didn't start the whole Lord of the Rings thing. But I'm going to try to end it.
There are a number of competing Wormtongues. But we all know who Saruman is.
Are the cardinals the ents?
I don't know, my hermeneutic is pretty wired.
ReplyDeleteCaffeine is almost always involved.
That or beer. Hermeneutic of shaky instability.
Were I to take a laxative it would then be the hermeneutic of incontinuity.
You won the internet with that one. I have nothing.
DeleteYou've probably seen this:
ReplyDeleteTry not to laugh too hard.
http://angelqueen.org/2016/11/18/ill-get-a-show-on-bravo/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Angelqueenorg+%28Angelqueen.org%29
Seattle kim
The use of humor against the arrogant is incredibly effective because the arrogant assume others think and feel about them as they think and feel about their own selves and when they are confronted with humor it tends to create cognitive dissonance in the intellect of the arrogant and that produces psychic pressure that must be dissipated in some way - such as calling the other pharisee, etc etc
ReplyDelete"Like Anthony Weiner, he just can't stop."....a MOST astute piece of psychoanalysis.
ReplyDeleteSpazzdaro is the teenage-girl version of Robert Mapplethorpe calling da Vinci a 'talentless bum'.
"grotesque" doesn't begin to describe the unfolding spectacle. I keep waiting for the earth to crack open in a fiery crevasse and swallow this cabal of demons whole....with francis' singed, smoking soup-plate of a zucchetto the only remaining evidence of their perfidious existence.