
[Apocalypse (Revelation) 8:13]

Tuesday, April 24, 2018

Francis is an Antipope: Antipope Probability Calculator

Francis is an Antipope: Antipope Probability Calculator

Perhaps you gathered from our latest video that we at Meddling Catholics have a very real suspicion that Benedict may still be the one-and-only reigning Pope. That, of course, would make Francis an antipope.
Antipope? Whoa there, crazy-pants!

My friends, if we truly believe Christ’s ironclad promise that the popes will preserve the Church from error, how on earth could a Francis papacy be compatible with that promise?
Not to put too fine a point on it, but if it’s possible to have a pope who is so wretched that we have to ignore and even resist his teachings because they are contrary to the deposit of faith, then what good is the papacy?
To borrow a phrase from Flannery O’Connor: “To hell with it!”
No, no, no. Christ’s promises can be trusted with absolute confidence. He promised that the popes would preserve the Catholic faith, and because Francis is doing the opposite of that, we have very good cause to contemplate the possibility that he may well be an antipope.
To that end, most discussions of this topic focus on one or more of the following four events, any one of which, if it could be shown to have occurred, would mean that Francis is, in fact, an antipope.
  1. Pope Benedict’s resignation was coerced. This possibility was rumored from the moment Benedict announced his resignation, and with the revelation of the machinations of the St. Gallen Mafia, these rumors have only picked up steam over time.
  2. Pope Benedict’s resignation was made in substantial error. This is the argument that Ann Barnhardt has made famous. It focuses on the words and actions of Benedict and his closest confidants since the announcement of his resignation, many of which seem to indicate that Benedict believes that he continues to exercise certain aspects of the Petrine ministry and that his resignation has, in effect, expanded the papacy such that there can, in essence, be two popes at the same time.
  3. Francis participated with the St. Gallen Mafia’s illicit vote canvassing plot at the 2013 Conclave. The existence of the St. Gallen Mafia, a long-running, secret confederation of leftist Cardinals dedicated to overturning Catholic doctrine, is now widely acknowledged, and the election of Francis in the 2013 Conclave was their crowning achievement. What is less clear is whether Francis was a co-conspirator in, or merely an unwitting beneficiary of, their skullduggery.
  4. Since his election, Francis has engaged in public heresy. This one is pretty self-explanatory. It goes without saying that, if any of the first three events has occurred, this last one would be rendered superfluous.
The sad fact that there are so many “paths to antipope” means that we need not possess overwhelming confidence in any single event’s occurrence in order to reasonably conclude that we are dealing with an antipope.
This is simply the way probability works. For example, if you believe that each of the four events described above, in isolation, is only 30% likely to have occurred, that means you believe that at least one of them is 76% likely to have occurred.
With that in mind, we present a handy little calculator to help you estimate the likelihood that Francis is, indeed, an antipope.

click here for the calculator: