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" Now this is what you get from faith with works. The Vatican in July named the Rev. Fidenzio Volpi, a Franciscan Capuchin friar, as a special commissioner to run the order with a mandate to quell the dissent that had erupted over the liturgy, improve unity within its ranks and get a handle on its finances. In the same decree appointing Volpi, Pope Francis forbade the friars from celebrating the old Latin Mass unless they got special permission, a clear rollback from Benedict&amp;#039;s 2007 decision. In the weeks that followed, traditionalists voiced outrage: four tradition-minded Italian intellectuals wrote to the Vatican accusing it of violating Pope Benedict&amp;#039;s 2007 edict by restricting the Latin Mass for the friars, saying the Holy See was imposing &amp;quot;unjust discrimination&amp;quot; against those who celebrate the ancient rite. Volpi though was undeterred: He sent their founder, the Rev. Stefano Maria Manelli, to live in a religious home while he set about turning the order around. And on Dec. 8, he took action, issuing a series of sanctions in the name of the pope that have stunned observers for their seeming severity: He closed the friars&amp;#039; seminary and sent its students to other religious universities in Rome. He suspended the activities of the friars&amp;#039; lay movement. He suspended ordinations of new priests for a year and required future priests to formally accept the teachings of the Second Vatican Council and its new liturgy or be kicked out. And he decreed that current priests must commit themselves in writing to following the existing mission of the order. I am not in favor of the papacy&amp;#039;s acting in an authoritarian manner even when I happen to agree with what it&amp;#039;s doing. (And my opinion on the Latin Mass remains that, if people want to celebrate it, and feel that it brings them closer to what they seek to gain from the liturgy, they should be free to do so. I was part of the last class of altar boys who had to learn the damn thing. We learned our Latin the way Shocking Blue learned English in order to sing &amp;quot;Venus,&amp;quot; which is to say largely phonetically.) But the last two popes have allowed &amp;quot;traditionalist&amp;quot; sects to run amok. Canonizing Jose Escriva, the founder of Opus Dei, was a terrible move on the part of John Paul II, and Benedict&amp;#039;s making nicey-nice with the ultranmontane loons of the Lefebrve sect in France was just as bad. It empowered the conservative extremes within the church, which resulted in, among other things, the theologically nutty alliance between conservative American Catholics and the Protestant splinter of the American religious right. (It also resulted in the presence of sweaty monster Bill Donahue in our national debates.) If Francis is attempting to shove the pendulum in the other direction, I wish him well. I also think chuckling in gentle mockery at Rush Limbaugh is always a good idea. &amp;quot;The Marxist ideology is wrong. But I have met many Marxists in my life who are good people, so I don&amp;#039;t feel offended,&amp;quot; Francis said. It appears that, if he retires, the pope will always have a place in the philosophy department of the University of Woolamaloo. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a20008/the-pope-gets-up-in-some-grills/>