✣ Highlights from the week online
Francis: out of sync with the political times Pope Francis is becoming a “lone voice in the wilderness”, according to New York Times writer Jason Horowitz. In contrast to St John Paul II, who “provided the spiritual dimension” for the battle against communism, Francis has “fallen decidedly out of sync with the prevailing political times”, Horowitz wrote, citing the election of Donald Trump and “authoritarian” leaders in Poland, Hungary and Russia. Even in Italy, elections in March rewarded the Northern League, an anti-migrant party hostile to the Pope. Inside the Church, Francis tends to win his battles. “Outside the Church is a different story,” Horowitz wrote. “Francis has often found himself on the losing side.” Corpus Christi heads to the Roman suburbs Pope Francis has changed the Corpus Christi tradition again, reported Fr Anthony Ruff at his site Pray Tell. The procession will take place in parishes in Ostia rather than going from St John Lateran basilica to St Mary Major – a tradition begun by St John Paul II in 1982. Fr Ruff noted that Francis had made several changes to the tradition already: first, following the Blessed Sacrament on foot – rather than in a wagon that John Paul II had constructed, and when that became too arduous, arriving at St Mary Major by car. The Pope also moved the procession from Thursday to Sunday – to be in sync with Italy, Fr Ruff said, and to “make it possible for more faithful to celebrate, and also so as not to disrupt traffic on a workday”. Fr Ruff said that the procession was unknown in the early Church and is not a custom among the Orthodox, as the feast was introduced in 1264. Britain’s apathy about persecuted Christians Why doesn’t Britain care about Christians in the Middle East? That was the question raised by Giles Fraser, writing at unherd.com. In 2016, he noted, Parliament declared that ISIS’s action against Christian and Yazidi minorities had been genocide. “But what interest has come of it, what action, what policy initiative? Nothing that I can think of,” he said. He described how he was grilled on Newsnight about his use of social media during a visit to Syria – specifically, how his tweets might have been “useful” to the Assad regime. “Even after I admitted that, yes, I could have been wiser … [Evan Davis] was still extremely reluctant to move on to the core purpose of our trip: to listen to, and express solidarity with, persecuted Christians in Syria – precisely those about whom the word genocide had been used.” Fraser said negative attitudes to Christianity – seen as “the religion of the establishment, of the past”, as well as somehow fostering hostility to migrants – were to blame. “Surely, if we have decided to engage the word genocide, then it carries with it an obligation – at the very least, an obligation to find out what is going on,” he wrote. “We must not be the generation that sits back and allows Christians to be systematically murdered for their faith; we must not allow Christianity to be driven from the place of its birth.”
