The people who read the National Review typically see a Jesuit, particularly from Latin America, as the second coming of Daniel Ortega and Hugo Chavez, so they are in need of reassurance that Pope Francis I didn’t choose his name in honor of Francis Xavier. He must have been honoring Francis of Assisi and the Franciscans. Frankly, I don’t know what this new pope thinks, but I don’t think a Franciscan would be so presumptuous to choose Francis as a name.
Okay, that’s enough inside baseball from this lapsed Episcopalian.
Let’s have some music. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.
And here I thought that Henry VIII settled this for English-speakers in the 16th-Century. (I kid) Oh well, John Paul II, we remember:
As every cell in Chile will tell
The cries of the tortured men
Remember Allende, and the days before,
Before the army came
Please remember Victor Jara,
In the Santiago Stadium,
Es verdad – those Washington Bullets againAnd in the Bay of Pigs in 1961,
Havana fought the playboy in the Cuban sun,
For Castro is a colour,
Is a redder than red,
Those Washington bullets want Castro dead
For Castro is the colour…
…That will earn you a spray of lead
Sandinista!!
I don’t expect this pope to be some left-wing pinko, but he represents the right-wing of a left-wing movement in the Church that battled John Paul II throughout his reign. The National Review folks are going to have an awfully hard time keeping a stiff upper lip.