Is Lut'ran the New Catholic? The Church's Civil War, Part CXLVII

It appears that some highly-placed Catholic prelates are leaning toward brotherhood with the Lutherans.  But some of them may well topple into the wrong part of the pond.

In 1903, Pope St. Pius X declared himself “terrified” by humanity’s self-destructive apostasy from God: “For behold they that go far from Thee shall perish” (Ps. 72:27). How much more “daunting,” said Cardinal Burke, is today’s “widespread apostasy.”

... In Pascendi, St. Pius X named the trajectory toward the “annihilation of all religion”: “The first step … was taken by Protestantism; the second … by [the heresy of] Modernism; the next will plunge headlong into atheism.”

So let us, said Cardinal Burke, heed Fatima’s call for prayer, penance, and reparation. Let us be “agents” of the triumph of Mary’s Immaculate Heart.

A few weeks after that speech, the Vatican announced its shining tribute to the Protestant revolution: a golden stamp with Luther and Melanchthon at the foot of the cross, triumphantly supplanting the Blessed Virgin and St. John.

If that last graf was jarring to you, that's good.  Shows you have the common sense that God gave most squirrels--but that He has withheld from "Vatican officials."

But it's not just nameless bureaucrats.  Some of them have Very Big Names, indeed:

...In Martin Luther: An Ecumenical Perspective, Cardinal Kasper confirms that the excommunicated, apostate monk is now a “common church father,” a new St. Francis of Assisi. This prophet of the “new evangelization” was “forced” into calling the pope the Antichrist after his “call for repentance was not heard.” But Kasper finds ecumenical hope in Luther’s “statement that he would…kiss the feet of a pope who allows and acknowledges his gospel.”

Kasper says Pope Francis’s Evangelii Gaudium, “without mentioning him by name,” makes Luther’s concerns “stand in the center.”

So it’s Luther’s “gospel of grace and mercy” behind, apparently, the high disdain for “self-absorbed promethean neopelagianis[ts]” plagued by a “soundness of doctrine” that’s “narcissistic and authoritarian” (EG 94).

So it’s Luther—the bizarre protagonist of “ecumenical unity”—behind the demand for a “conversion of the papacy” that gives “genuine doctrinal authority” to episcopal conferences (EG 32). ...

Kasper has been a notorious coocoo bird for decades.  And he has often claimed that Pp. Francis' writings (and speechifications) have been ........well......un-orthodox.  Francis has so far been smart enough not to confirm or deny Kasper's ravings, but to Normie RC's in the pews, this is becoming more than a little bothersome.

I have a number of Lut'ran pals, by the way, some with Lut'ran pastor creds.  I've asked whether they would like to take Pp. Francis off our hands, and they smiled like the Chesire cat and walked away.  I think they know something.