This is Bergoglio's Game

How many times have you heard people say things like: "Bergoglio is really very traditional--he talks about the devil all the time?"

Today at Catholic World Report you can read in an article about reform of the Roman Curia--yes, a joke topic if ever there was one--the following:

[Bergoglio's] constant recommendation to pastors, that they foster and encourage popular piety and private devotion among the faithful, is water in the desert.

OK, so what's "popular piety and private devotion"? For the sake of argument, let's say that a major form would be Marian piety and especially, saying the rosary. That seems to be what the author has in mind, since he cites Bergoglio's "personal simplicity and deep devotion to Our Lady."

Question: Does "deep devotion to Our Lady" preclude a determination to utterly sweep away every vestige of an objective moral order? It would seem not, based on Bergoglio's own example. After all, Amoris Laetitia to one side, we've all seen his interviews with the atheist journalist Eugenio Scalfari, Bergoglio's chosen mouthpiece to the world. In them we can read such nuggets as this:

Bergoglio: “Each of us has a vision of good and of evil. We have to encourage people to move towards what they think is Good.”

Scalfari: Your Holiness (sic), you wrote that in your letter to me. The conscience is autonomous, you said, and everyone must obey his conscience. I think that’s one of the most courageous steps taken by a Pope (sic).

Bergoglio: “And I repeat it here. Everyone has his own idea of good and evil and must choose to follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them. That would be enough to make the world a better place.”

Is anything more clear than that the cause dearest to Bergoglio's heart is ... homosexuality? Even more than divorce and remarriage? I mean, there must be a reason that all his closest associates are perverts or men of, at best, ambiguous sexuality. There must be a reason that he regularly invites perverts to his luxury hotel in the Vatican. There must be a reason that--in front of cameras--he embraces the boy-toy of his friend.

Is there anything in saying a daily rosary that would preclude that? In frequenting shrines? Per se? It would seem not.

What would preclude that? How about this: a deep intellectual committment to an objective moral order and a committment to upholding the faith handed down from the Apostles.

And that's why Bergoglio encourages piety and devotion that is essentially devoid of intellectual content while, consistently and relentlessly, denigrating doctrine and characterizing those who study the teachings of the Church as rigid, narcissistic, Pharisaical. The less intellectual committment, the easier it is for him to advance his anti-Christian agenda.

So, no, there aren't "two Bergoglios," one traditional and one "progressive." There's just one: cynical, manipulative, betraying. The periodic appeals to "popular" piety are precisely appeals to the sensibility of the Peronist pueblo--a ploy to work through those sensibilities to draw the intellectually unsophisticated pueblo into Neo-Gnostic and Modernist political action, not to conscious and informed Christian faith.