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Controversial Pope Francis, whose left-wing leanings are alarming to more traditional and conservative Catholics, recently received members of the International Theological Commission (ITC) at the Vatican, where he sparked a new controversy by informing the gathered theologians that the Catholic Church is “female” and needs to be “demasculinized.”
The ITC was established by Pope Paul VI within the then-Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1969 to assist the Vatican in examining crucial doctrinal issues. It consists at any given time of 30 theologians who serve a five-year term on the Commission. Women have served on the panel since 2004, but never more than two at a time until 2014 when Pope Francis named a record five women to the ITC. In the current membership of the Commission, five again are women.
Among the Pope’s comments to the theologians was a condemnation of the scarcity of women among them. “We must progress on this!” Francis passionately declared. “Women have a different capacity for theological reflection than we men. At the next meeting of the [Council of Cardinals], we will reflect on the female dimension of the Church.”
Fair enough so far. Women often do have a different capacity for theological reflection – reading the great female mystics in history from Hildegard von Bingen to Julian of Norwich to Teresa of Avila demonstrates that – and there is room for debate in the Church about the ministerial role of women. But then the Pope went off the rails. “The Church is female,” he stated, “and if we do not understand what a woman is, what the theology of a woman is, we will never understand what the Church is.”
I humbly submit that the Pope, who is considered by Catholics to be infallible when speaking ex cathedra on matters of doctrine, is wrong on this point. While the Church is believed to be referred to in the Bible as “the bride” of Jesus Christ, this is a theological metaphor about their relationship. It does not make the Church “female,” and certainly not in the way he went on to explicate.
“One of our great sins,” Francis continued, “has been masculinizing the Church. And this is not resolved through ministerial means, that’s another thing. It is resolved through the mystical, the real way.”
It’s unclear how the Church being vitalized with a masculine energy is a sin at all, much less a “great” one, although the West generally speaking is suffused with the assumption, cultivated through decades of relentless feminist messaging, that masculinity is “toxic” and that thousands of years of so-called “patriarchy” have prevented women from stepping up and fixing the mess men have purportedly made of the world. In his comments to the ITC, Pope Francis seems to be pandering to this childish idea.
(Speaking of which, Hollywood funnyman Will Ferrell unintentionally humiliated himself with a virtue-signaling display in his opening remarks for the recent Women in Entertainment Gala. “Isn’t it just time for women to run the planet?” the Saturday Night Live alumnus asked, which predictably drew vigorous applause. “[W]e men, we’ve been running the show since, what, 10,000 B.C., something like that? And we’re not doing so good. So please, can you guys just take over, can you? I think it’s time.” In reality, women increasingly are running the planet – and how’s that been working out for us? Our own epically incompetent Vice President Kamala Harris, Germany’s Angela Merkel, New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, the three Ivy League university presidents who recently refused before Congress to take a stand against campus antisemitism, to name just a few – has their sex, broadly speaking, shown any greater capability than men for visionary leadership, for “fixing” the world? We are all, men and women, subject to the same flaws and limitations of human nature.)
Back to the Pope: he concluded by pleading with the members of the International Theological Commission, “This is a task I ask of you, please: demasculinize the Church.”
Demasculinize the Church? How is this notion different in substance from Will Ferrell’s begging for women to take over running the planet? Both men seem to see masculinity as some kind of obstacle to human flourishing and excellence, and see simply replacing men with women as the solution.
Contrary to the Pope’s apparent fear, Catholicism today – and Christianity in general – does not exactly suffer from a surfeit of masculinity. The Church already has been demasculinized, and the result is a foundational institution of Western civilization being in dangerous, accelerating decline.
The New Emangelization Project, dedicated to inspiring Catholic men to greater involvement in the faith, warns that the Church has a significant “Man Crisis”:
About 11 million adult men in the U.S. were raised Catholic but left the faith and men are under-represented in the Church versus their share of the total population (46% of parishioners are male versus 49% of the population).
[…]
Only about 1/3 of Catholic men (36%) say they attend Mass on a weekly basis. One third of Catholic men (32%) are not formally members of a parish. A large portion (42%) of Catholic men attend Mass “a few times per year” or “seldom or never.” Almost half of Catholic men do not engage in a routine of prayer; praying only “occasionally or sometimes” or “seldom or never.”
[…]
The “face” of the Church is feminine; men are underrepresented in the pews (only 37% of regular mass attendees are men). Further, a Notre Dame study shows that 70-90% of catechesis, service, bible study activities are led by women, causing the authors to suggest that “young males…assume that serious religious studies are a women’s business,” resulting in greater numbers of younger men being disengaged.
Christianity, which has always been burdened by the perception that it is a feminized religion – is today in desperate need of exactly the opposite of what Pope Francis called for: it urgently needs courageous, bold, manly leadership to steer the faith away from its ongoing capitulation to our neo-pagan pop culture, away from the degrading influence of “prosperity gospel” hucksters and hipster pastors in skinny jeans, and away from subversion by gender ideologues who are determined to “queer” the faith and replace God the Father with “God is Trans.”
Francis’ feminist position comes as no surprise. After all, he is the Progressive, globalist, open-borders pope who berates Western countries to overcome their “fear” of “foreigners” and take in ever more “refugees” from cultures incompatible with Western values; he denounces capitalism, nationalism, and populism while promoting the big-government Green economy scam; he has taken measures to restrict celebration of the traditional Latin Mass; he insists on whitewashing jihad and has even been praised as a “defender of Islam” by the Grand Imam of Al Azhar University; and he has opened the door for greater acceptance of the LGBTQ agenda. Now he calls for his own already-flaccid Church to emasculate itself, driving Christianity even further into cultural obsolescence, especially in contrast to the perceived hypermasculinity of Islam, which is the world’s fastest-growing religion at least in part because it offers men an alternative that affirms, albeit to a misogynistic extreme, their masculine nature.
Francis’ call to “demasculinize” the Church is, at best, a foolish and irresponsible position for a Pope to take at this critical point in its decline; at worst, it is a deliberate subversion of the spiritual institution that powered our glorious civilization, an institution rendered increasingly impotent in a post-Christian West.
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior
The Chair is empty. Sede Vacanta.
So is his head.
In order to carry out the woke Pope’s wishes, he can castrate himself as an example, then criss-cross with a rainbow robe.
Francis is Petrus Romanus the last pope and the one who will aid the Antichrist
Francis is not the last Pope. He is preparing the way for the last Pope: the Petra Romana, a woman, a Popessa!
I know nothing of the Antichrist or other Christian eschatology, but I fear that the black flag of Islam will fly over the Vatican and this pope will be the one to raise it. Perhaps it’s past time he retired.
He did castrate himself when joining the communist party some years ago.
His balls are bricked up in the wall of Moscow’s Lenin’s mausoleum.
My thoughts exactly.
“ISN’T IT IRONIC that Leftist Vampires, who always cringe at the mere sight of a Crucifix, love this pOPE?” SC
Too true, Steve. Of course, we know the leftie libs will cheer on anyone who supports their antiChristian and sexual perversions. They just want to normalize EVERYTHING so they can proceed with a clear conscience, but of course they’ll never ever have a clear conscience. They know the life of rejecting God is wrong snd abhorrent.
Maybe that already happened!
The current pattern in the world is for major leaders to work tirelessly for the Leftist agenda and against their own constituents.
It sure looks that way.
In contrast is Dennis Prager. I am sure it would feel sacrilege for him to notice that it is not Moses he so much resembles in the OT, but Adonis, YAWEH, He literally oozes of masculinity like Yahweh possesses all the masculinity of the Bronze Age values where he first introduces himself from a forgotten past. Prager is a bear if a man like that too, more of a teddy bear by the fireside at this point, but the fire is still there, the drive to the fight against evil. And his own love for women is mirrored in Yahweh’s own unrequited lust for Jerusalem. Really, it his most endearing feature. The passion is the same.
For Christians, it is Jesus of course. But when Nietzsche talks of how one cannot believe in God without desiring to become God, it is the Yahweh from the Bronze Age that shines in the religious of the Tribe of Judah, even now.
The light of Yahweh shines like a shield of brass in front of the Lion of Judah. The treachery of the Benjamites respects no limits or parameters in the honour of their sisters. The rules of hell will suffice when in the sewers of hell that Dinah was dragged through.
That is what Dennis Prager is like.
Pope Francis not so much.
To value women means to protect women and their values of the hearth and home. That is the best of life. To be the best in life is a woman’s birthright, softness her privilege. Femininity does not belong to men.
It disrespects women for men not to be masculine, to not be filled with the passion and drive and desire and honour and loyalty that is our birthright from the Father..
Saint Commie is such a “woke” Pope he seems like a caricature of a left-wing loon. It’s like the Council of Cardinals want the Church to be a joke. The grinning moron is to the left of every issue there is and never says anything intelligent. It’s like he actually tries to make the Church an obsolete object of scorn. What is he so happy about? Does he sniff his own farts like Alzheimer Joe Beijing Biden and grin at the flavor? The guy acts like he’s mentally retarded and wants the world to laugh at him.
He couldn’t do a worse job as Pope Dope if he had Crack Hunter Biden as his personal Consigliere.
THat rainbow flag is the white flag of surrender ; ITS ALL OVER
If you think the rainbow flag is bad, wait till he flies the black flag of Islam.
And say, how come the perverts got all the colors of the rainbow and we normies can’t even put on a sweater without worrying that the color(s) represent something we most certainly are not?
Whoever down voted me takes it up the ass like a martyr.
How does that dick feel in your butt? Comfy?
More proof this Pope is a total Phony the Vatican blew it big time with this Imposter
The “Gay Mafia” of the Catholic Church has triumphed under Red Francis and his homosexual Marxists.
I have some questions to ask: 50 years into the feminist revolution, are the lives of the average woman better and more fulfilling than they were in 1960? Is life more easy? Are their children better off? Can more families afford the same lifestyle that they could in 196)? I suggest that the answer to all of these questions is “no.”
They blame the “rightwing” for that.
If you believe that the answer to your questions is “no”, you’re right. This woman lost precious hours and years with her children because she had to work, lest her husband disapprove of her lifestyle choice. We have one daughter-in-law who has chosen to make home and children her career, and I heartily approve of her choice.
“Christianity, which has always been burdened by the perception that it is a feminized religion . . . ”
Really? Who had that perception? I thought the typical critique is that it is a patriarchal religion that worships a male God and relegates women to a secondary status of domesticity and obedience to male authority.
The typical modern leftwing critique is that Christianity is an oppressive patriarchy, but there’s much more to the historical perception of Christianity than that. I started to make a long-winded reply, but there’s a pretty good summary of the issue at
www.artofmanliness.com/character/knowledge-of-men/the-feminization-of-christianity/
The pagans of Classical Antiquity felt that both Judaism and Christianity were effeminate religions, perhaps because both gave women so much status and so many rights. This Orthodox Jewish lady feels that she has all the rights she needs in her religion, and some privileges that her brothers lack.
Even more alarming than the under-representation of men in the pews is that a majority of Americans who identify as Catholic support same-sex marriage and legalized abortion.
A recent Pew poll shows that an alarming number, of Americans, who identify as evangelical, do not have Biblical world view.
Foretold: 2 Thessalonians 2: 3.
True, Stephen, and it has bled over into many Protestant churches, as well.
Ah yes, the “As-A-Catholics” like Biden and Pelosi. They’re as bad as “As-A-Jews” or “As-A-Protestant” types.
Francis is a poor excuse for a pope. I think we still don’t know the full story of why Pope Benedict stepped down.
Soros et al., planted Francis. Benedict was in his way.
I’m not a catholic but my father was, however he left when I was a toddler., feel free to ignore this.
In the UK the catholic priests were found to have abused little boys terribly and the church refused to do anything about it.
Is this because they are all allegedly celibate? Does this create men who want to abuse little boys? Were they abused?
Adding women to the equation might well help reduce the number of boys who are abused, adding the rest of the sexually predator population is not going to help.
Rates of pedophelia and homosexual attraction to teenage boys amongst priests mirror the rates of such deviancy in the greater population.. Feminist society on the other hand, with the goal of eradicating sexual differences, are now involved in sexual mutilation of even children in order to bring about that goal.
Feminism takes the church out of the frying pan and into the fire.
No, pedophiles and pederasts chose the Priesthood because they could prey on kids that way.
It’s none of my business as I am not a Catholic, but perhaps if priests were allowed or even encouraged to marry there would be a lot less hanky-panky going on. When I was growing up my brothers and I had the Russian Orthodox priest’s three sons as classmates. I’ve never heard of any scandals in that church, unless perhaps a priest got a divorce once.
Being “married to Christ” sounds gay to me and if Priests were allowed to get some, maybe less Altar Boys would get molested.
Women priests, why not men who identify as women? This pope doesn’t have different opinions, he is an evil man. The pope can speak ex cathedra, he could publicly repent of his sins.
2 Thessalonians 2:3-4
King James Version
3 Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition;
4 Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God.
If men knew their Bibles they would be following the only head of the church:,,Jesus Christ
Probably the most profound statement I’ve read today: “If men knew their bibles they would be following the only head of the church: Jesus Christ.”
Nothing would be more pleasant than for an enraged islamic prick hang that pedophile with his rainbow flag.
HAS THIS FOOLISH POPE EVEN READ THE BIBLE?????
Practicing gays will never inherit Heaven, neither will liars, deceivers and all the UNRIGHTEOUS HEATHEN.
I THINK THIS POPE MAY BE THE FALSE PROPHET THAT JOHN TALKED ABOUT IN THE BOOK OF REVELATION.
All popes are the false prophet, they all deny the efficacy of Christ sacrifice to propitiate our sin, they require works to aid Christ in saving his people.
Yes, I think the first chapter of Romans tells everything you need to know about practicing gays.
“Demasculinize the Church”?
Haven’t the gay pedophile priests already done that?
The faggot in the Vatican seeks to make Catholicism a faggot religion. Depose the anti-Pope and bring back the likes of John Paul II. Halleluiah.
There’s no way they could bring back the likes of John Paul II. He was a truly great man with a beautiful soul; few could equal him. But given the number of Cardinals, they could certainly have looked harder for someone a lot better than what they have.
The anti-Pope wants to make pedophilia a sacrament of the church.
Not anti pope, anti Christ.
With a pope like Francis who needs a pope?
Pope is the anti Christ. All the popes say “I am the Christ”
Is Pope Francis even a Catholic? If he wants to “demasculinize the Church,” he might want to focus more attention on devotion to Mary the mother of Jesus.
It never ceases to amaze me how Judaeo-Protestant heretics, bibliolators, atheists, and satanists are forever yapping about Catholicism as if they knew anything about it. They are as ignorant of the One True Faith as they are of the Patristics.
The Catholic religion — the ONLY Religion established by Christ — has had 40-odd antipopes and that would not include Roncalli, Montini, Luciani, Wojtilya, Ratzinger, and Bergoglio …. at least not yet. The Vatican hierarchy has been infected not only with Modernists, homosexuals, and Marxists but also with Freemasons. These are the torments and chastisements which the Church today (and since vatican2) has been enduring.
Everything we are suffering today is the result of the refusal by the (alleged) Vicars to reveal the Third Secret of Fatima AND to Consecrate Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. As she indicated during her Second Secret: “If my requests are [not] heeded, Russia …. will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred; the Holy Father will have much to suffer; various nations will be annihilated.”
Based upon our histories of political irrationalities and cultural insanities, I think we are on that short list of “various nations.”
I think you’re a dogmatic fanatic.
Down vote my dick, you pedophiles.
I hope this comment is not too off-topic. I am one of those 11 million Catholic men who no longer practices. My reasons are simple: The earth is not flat, the sun does not go around it, and God is not bread. At the age of 20 or so, I came to see Catholicism as less a faith and more a foreign theocracy to which I, as an American citizen, do not owe allegience. Over the years, there was Vatican 2, the involvement of the Vatican Bank (aka SPOF) with Operation Gladio and other money laundering (google Licio Gelli), the mysterious death of Pope John Paul 1, and the embarrassing degree of pedophilia among the clergy, which was addressed by transfers and payoffs. The Vatican smacked of an institution worried more about its survival than my salvation.
It’s not my intention to offend the Christians and practicing Catholics who read here, but only to make the point that the Church has far greater problems than not enough men in church. It has, in a nutshell, problems with intregety. LGBTQ tolerance and feminization do not address them.
Dear God. May the next pope be a Christian. The best place to find him is Africa or Asia.
Thank you for this article, Mark, and your many others. These things are horrible, yet we are clearly warned throughout Scripture, so at least we know our Lord is in control and our mission is to help others come to see it, too. I find it seriously shocking that it’s all happening in my own lifetime right before my eyes. But… it certainly puts a thick undeniable layer of reality on every day life. 😊
Perhaps this wee Popey dude will soon declare that his own Guru, Lord Jesus, was a transperson, non binary or a Homosexual.
More and more people are leaving the Church and returning to God… Lenny Bruce.
The False Prophet. According to Jesus, disinformation and deception will play a major role in the World.
Matthew 24:23-24 “Then if anyone says to you, “Look, here is the Christ!” or “There!” do not believe it. For false christs and false prophets will rise and show great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible even the elect.
Deception is a frequent topic in Scripture. It began in the Garden of Eden and continues. Satan disputes and tries to displace the Word of God.
This Pope is s authentic as a 3 Dollar Bill, He belongs to Satan not Christ
The Argie Commie strikes again. A tool of Lucifer.
Enter “catholics ask trump to probe soros-obama-clinton conspiracy at vatican” in the searchbox in DuckDuckGo and Brave to find William F. Jasper’s article that was published on The New American’s website six years ago.