As reported in the London, England-based Catholic Herald:

Two elite private Jesuit schools in Australia have cautiously endorsed same-sex marriage, citing the teaching of Pope Francis.

In a message to parents, staff and students, St Ignatius’s College in Sydney and Xavier College in Melbourne, while not explicitly endorsing a “yes” vote, urged parents to reflect on Pope Francis’s teaching on love, mercy and non-judgmentalism.

And why not? The young have spoken:

As Australia prepares for a referendum on the issue, the Sydney Morning Herald reports Fr Chris Middleton, rector of Xavier College, said young people overwhelmingly backed same-sex marriage.

“In my experience, there is almost total unanimity amongst the young in favour of same-sex marriage, and arguments against it have almost no impact on them,” Fr Middleton wrote.

“They are driven by a strong emotional commitment to equality, and this is surely something to respect and admire. They are idealistic in the value they ascribe to love, the primary gospel value.”

Or it’s the Francis Effect.

As for graying and gaying, the phrase is from a book for which I declined to be interviewed some years back, Passionate Uncertainty: Inside the American Jesuits, by Peter McDonough and Eugene C. Bianchi, and elsewhere.

I declined because I had my own book — inside me, germinating — Company Man: My Jesuit Life, 1950-1968,  which came forth ten years later — in which I cited the McDonough-Bianchi book as attributing rise in numbers of aging and same-sex-attracted Jesuits to the exodus from Jesuit ranks beginning in the ’60s.

. . . Not to worry. Bistro manager can explain everything.

“We can’t support this brand,” said Todd Feinberg, general manager of Bistro Campagne, 4518 N. Lincoln Ave.

Hollis Bulleit’s allegations, detailed in a recent Washington Post article, were brought to Feinberg’s attention by the restaurant’s front-of-house manager.

Acknowledging that Bulleit’s assertions — which have been disputed by the distiller’s parent company, Diageo — amount to “he said, she said,” Feinberg said he opted to err on the side of caution.

It’s an approved object of caution, apparently — in favor of the accuser but not the accused.

“I can’t in good conscience support a product that even has this possibility” of discrimination, Feinberg said.

Gosh no. “This possibility”? But heavens, where does this possibility not exist?

In July the Vatican’s divine worship executive made a strong pitch for ad orientem masses (priest facing same direction as people) in a speech in England, was promptly countermanded by a higher-than-he at the Pope’s behest and  was called in by the Pope himself.

What was that all about, including the prelate’s being summoned to the papal carpet before being shot down? Well the prelate, Cardinal Robert Sarah, had “touched an ecclesial third rail,” Christian Browne wrote at the time in Crisis Magazine:

It seems that churchmen at the highest levels do not wish anyone to notice that certain practices associated with the Novus Ordo—Mass facing the people, Communion in the hand while standing, the use of laymen to distribute Holy Communion—have no grounding in the Missal of Paul VI, let alone in the mandate for liturgical reform set forth at the Second Vatican Council.

Rather, these practices sprouted up throughout the 1970s as a result of devastating anti-traditional fads that even the radical post-Council crafters of the 1969 Missal never envisioned.

Done with many a wink, many a nod. For the best of reasons, to be sure.

Thomas Reese SJ in NC Reporter, early in Francis’ incumbency:

Francis . . . lived in Argentina at a time when there was a clash of ideologies going on, and he grew to hate ideological thinking.

I define an ideology as a system by which we ignore data and experience in order to preserve our opinions.

Peronism, communism, and libertarian capitalism were fighting for power. The military, following the idea of the national security state, violently suppressed all opposition.

Makes sense, but Ivereigh’s Great Reformer has the young Bergoglio possessing an “affinity” for Peronism. Also has him imbibing anti-ideologue-ism from his knowledge of Jesuit expulsions from Argentina by the Bourbon king of Spain in the 18th century.

Which is merely additional to Reese’s explanation unless it tells us more about Francis than what he lived through in a fractured Argentina.  And which I submit tends to make him more comfortable with dictators than with elected heads of democracy.

Cuban, for instance:

. . . when he visited Ecuador and Bolivia, [a few weeks after Reese puffed his anti-ideologue-ism] Pope Francis mingled with presidents Rafael Correa and Evo Morales, avowed disciples of Fidel and Raul Castro with tyrannical tendencies, but he refrained from speaking about their human rights abuses. He also received a blasphemous hammer-and-sickle crucifix from Evo Morales and accepted this gift with a smile. What if that crucifix had been in the shape of a swastika rather than a hammer and sickle?

That incident was a portent of things to come in Cuba, where Pope Francis has smiled his way through meetings with blood-soaked tyrants and failed to speak out about human rights abuses on the island, or to challenge the cruelty of his hosts. Pope Francis also failed to meet with any of Cuba’s non-violent dissidents, despite their urgent pleas for an encounter. This is not so much the “preferential option for the poor” as the preferential option for oppressors.

Returning to Reese’s analysis and Ivereigh’s, keep in mind the latter’s imprecision and inexactitude in smaller matters. He also called the Jesuit expulsion Argentina’s “Boston Tea Party,” did he not, as if it was the Brits who dumped the tea.

If expelling Jesuits from Argentina in 1767 reminds Ivereigh of the Boston Tea Party, we have to wonder.

The DAILY GRIND News

It’s what “keeps minutes and loses hours.” (Milton Berle)

A breath of fresh air from a newspaper editor, speaking of a draft copy of story about Trump’s Phoenix rally and speech:

“Sorry. This is commentary dressed up as news reporting,” Mr. Baker wrote at 12:01 a.m. on Wednesday morning to a group of Journal reporters and editors, in response to a draft of the rally article that was intended for the newspaper’s final edition.

He added in a follow-up, “Could we please just stick to reporting what he said rather than packaging it in exegesis and selective criticism?

Earlier, in February, he “suggested that other newspapers had abandoned their objectivity about the president” and “encouraged journalists unhappy with the Journal’s coverage to seek employment elsewhere.”

Good.

Spoken like a true celibate, with neither wife nor children nor anything else to lose but his own life. It’s (a) bold of him, to say the least, if not (b) irresponsible. Easily ignored at any rate.

Vatican City • Pope Francis on Monday urged countries to greatly improve their welcome to migrants and stop collective expulsions, saying migrants’ dignity and right to protection trumps national security concerns.
……………….
Ignoring critics who say his calls are unrealistic and naive, Francis insisted in the new message that border guards must be trained to protect migrants and that each new arrival, regardless of legal status, must be guaranteed access to basic services beyond health care.

What a guy.

On somewhat related point, in Austin Ivereigh’s bio of him, Francis is said have a “natural affinity” with the Peronism of his youth, which was an extreme rightist-leftist, take yr pick, embracing of gummint running everything, including the church. Explains a lot.

It’s a sloppily written book, by the way, a challenge to the reader in any passages requiring detailed description, but clear as a bell when he has praise to heap on Pope F.

. . . shedding copious crocodilian tears in the process:

The dog days of August are a time to smuggle in the kind of article you’ve been meaning to write but putting off because of all the trouble it’s going to bring you. But still, I hesitate even now to write about convert neurosis, and how it conditions critiques of Pope Francis.

For one, I don’t want to be seen to be sniffy and condescending towards people who become Catholic, which is how Dr. Stephen Bullivant, writing in First Things, said he felt about a comment in Michael Sean Winters’s blogpost. “I am so tired of converts telling us that the pope is not Catholic,” complained the sage of the National Catholic Reporter [Winters].

This slave to conscience and duty is none other than Austen Ivereigh, a cradle Catholic (and proud of it!) whose book about Francis has the title The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope.

I hate to be a plot-revealer, but you will find this book a full-scale explanation of and apologia for Francis; so enter its pages with eyes open wide, prepared for some overwriting of the first journalistic order and (in its favor) also some good reporting.

For Crux in this piece, however, he lets his inner tiger take over, while dripping honey from his maw (sample of overwriting here, sorry, I get vivid myself now and then), naming names and getting down to the papal-critic converts’ problem, namely that they are nuts — not certifiably or irretrievably but clinically so, in Ivereigh’s humble opinion.

In a sort of revenge on interlopers, he unloads:

Now it is quite possible that elegant [papal-critic] commentators such as Ross Douthat [NY Times] and  Matthew [Schmitz’s] boss Rusty Reno (both former Episcopalians [First Things]), or, at the rougher end, writers such as Carl Orlson [sic – it’s Olson]  (ex-Protestant fundamentalist) and John Henry Westen [LifeSite] (ex-atheist), or indeed ex-Anglicans in my own patch such as Daniel Hitchens of the Catholic Herald and Edward Pentin of the National Catholic Register in Rome, are all correct in their readings. [Really? Raise your hands, all you who think Ivereigh means this.]

But it is a lot more likely [say, 100% more likely] that their baggage [as converts from whatever] has distorted their hermeneutic, [method of interpretation, as of the Bible] and they are suffering from convert neurosis. [The worst kind!]

And if you think Ivereigh is just tossing words around (he’s not a tosser!), think again.

A neurosis is a pathological or extreme reaction to something that simply doesn’t correspond to reality. A war-scarred victim, for example, might react to a friendly cop’s question by throwing herself on the ground and covering her ears. You understand why she does it, but it’s neurotic.

It pains Ivereigh to say this, but have a heart. He’s a liberal newsie-commentator, BBC and all that; and that’s a mold it’s hard to break out of. Meanwhile, talk-show style or not, let the show go on.

Meanwhile also, consider this point-by-point rebutting of Ivereigh the convert-slayer, at one hotbed of papal criticism, One Peter Five — “What if We Were All Cradle Catholics, Mr. Ivereigh?”

What if?