No, this is not an Onion parody of the post-Vatican II “Church of dialogue,” whose absurdities are almost incapable of parodic enlargement. This is an actual news story: Pope Francis is arranging a “soccer match for peace” in the Middle East.
Fox News Latino reports the ridiculous news: “Combining his love of world peace with his love of soccer, Pope Francis plans to host a celebrity soccer match this September to promote a diplomatic resolution to the ongoing crisis in the Gaza Strip.” The exhibition match will be held in Rome’s Olympic Stadium, the same venue where babbling “charismatics” “prayed over the Pope” as he humbly knelt before them (although he will not humbly genuflect before the God he himself has just made present on the altar during Mass, even though his Master of Ceremonies and all the altar servers do so).
The match will feature F.C. Barcelona’s Lionel Messi “and the legendary – and contentious – Diego Maradona…” The Pope “personally called his two fellow countrymen to invite them to the event ‘to play for the peace between Israel and Palestine.’” So, Francis is even helping to put together the teams in a sort of papal turn at Fantasy Soccer.
With the world exploding in violence and Christians being imprisoned and butchered in Iraq by Muslim fanatics—whose existence the Pope refuses to mention—Francis offers the world another publicity stunt, probably with the assistance of his “PR wizard,” Greg Burke.
After the “prayer for peace” publicity stunt in the Vatican gardens, war immediately erupted in the Middle East. What will happen after the “soccer match for peace”? The Italian traditionalist Alessandro Gnocchi offers an appropriately bitter ironic comment on this latest nonsense (translation mine):
[T]he new super-religion does not spare anything or anyone. I had no more doubts about the state of the Catholic Church, but I never imagined that they would have launched a program for the destruction of football, one of the few serious activities left in our world.
But Pope Bergoglio has arrived even there. And not by chance. The new super-religion of which he is the standard-bearer does not have a ritual…. [H]ence the stroke of genius to use football, with its rules, language and universal gestures. One could not find a more effective vehicle….
On the road of the auto-demolition of the Church, this match will be worth more than all the interreligious encounters and ecumenical chatter. It is a tactic that has always worked, especially when one is instrumentalizing the concept and the desire for peace.
What can one say? In the midst of this new intensification of the post-conciliar crisis in the Church we are witnessing her humiliation by something entirely new, even in the midst of a sea of ruinous novelties: the heresy of banality.
The “Church of dialogue” is in the process of rendering itself utterly irrelevant in the world—and this without a single change in the true Church’s official doctrine. Never has the Catholic Church witnessed such a mystery of iniquity, before which even the Arian heresy that once threatened to destroy her pales in comparison.
