I am not an antipope!

Dude, it's not about the shoes...

Hey y'all,

remember that time when Pope Pius XII used to constantly say such insane and incomprehensible and kinda heretical-sounding things all the time - off the cuff-like so no one could really call him on it - and the rumours went around all the time that he wasn't really the pope and he ditched all the traditional symbols of his office like living in the Apostolic Palace and refused to wear the pope-stuff and then he appointed a public pederast to run his household and refused to bless people because they might get offended by Christianity and then his hand-picked subordinates started publicly demanding that the Church either change or ignore the words of Christ in the Gospels because nobody liked Him any more and then Pius just sat there saying nothing and didn't correct them or fire them or issue clarifications and then instead stood up on the loggia and got on TV and told everybody what great theologians they were and then he fired the guy who objected to it and then started chumming around with Hitler and Stalin and told the Jews and the people in the Gulags that that torture and starvation and extra-judicial arrests and getting beaten and murdered by the secret police were really good for them because Jesus said "Blessed are the poor" even though He really didn't and then when Pius misquoted Scripture all the time even in official documents and implicitly denied the Divinity of Christ by repeatedly denying the miracles in the Gospels and then when his cardinals and bishops started saying that if he kept on this way there would be a giant catastrophic schism in the Church and he just kept on doing it and never even responded...?

Oh, and remember that time when his predecessor Pius XI resigned in the middle of a giant clerical homosexual-abuse scandal but didn't give up the papal name or papal whites and went on calling himself Pius XI and lived in the Vatican and sometimes issued letters and stuff under his papal name and then it was revealed that a group of ultra-progressive cardinals at the Conclave had decided they needed Pacelli because they knew he would give them what they wanted and went around campaigning to get him the votes even though that would have invalidated the election?

Remember that?

Oh, and remember when the uproar and outrage caused by his behaviour resulted in him having to make a public statement that he wasn't really either an anti-pope or the Antichrist?

Yeah...

me neither.

“Maybe I have given an impression of being a little bit to the left,” the pope admitted. “But if they want me to recite the Creed, I can!”

Pope Francis said a cardinal “who is a friend” was telling him about an older Catholic lady, “a good woman, but a bit rigid,” who had questions about the description of the Antichrist in the Book of Revelation and if that was the same thing as an “anti-pope.”

“‘Why are you asking,’ the cardinal said. ‘Well, I am sure Pope Francis is the anti-pope.’

“‘Why do you say that?’

“‘Well, because he renounced the red shoes, which are so historic,'” the pope said the woman responded.

People have all sorts of reasons to think, “he’s communist or he’s not communist,” the pope said.

Actually, yeah. Yeah, I think I would like you to recite the Creed. Often. That would be a good thing for a pope to do now and then.

I think, in fact, that from now on if you just recited the Creed every time you saw a microphone in your face, that might be good.

But just give me a few minutes to step back a little. Like maybe into the next block.



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