Pope Francis (Image courtesy Pixabay)
A report by the Vatican’s own newspaper reveals Pope Francis recently hung an image behind his desk depicting a naked Jesus Christ caressing his dead apostle Judas Iscariot.
In an article titled “Judas and the Scandal of Mercy,” L’Osservatore Romano dedicated the first three pages of its edition the day before Good Friday to a makeover of the disciple who betrayed the Son of God at the Passover.
The author of the lead editorial, Andrea Monda, said the paper chose this year to honor the “most tragic and unsettling” figure of the Gospel.
An edited version of the image portraying a naked Jesus caressing his dead apostle Judas Iscariot.
The Catholic-defense group Tradition in Action was among the first to blast the display, writing:
The editor – probably obeying an order of Pope Francis – chose to post on its front page the reproduction of a picture, above and below first row, that presents a naked Jesus bending over and tenderly ministering to a dead Judas.
Monda explains that the author of this painting is a French Catholic who became impressed by Francis’ words praising the Traitor in his book “When You Pray, Say Our Father.” The artist imagines that after Jesus was crucified, He would have returned to life immediately, gone to the fig tree and taken down Judas’ body and ministered to it. [Monda] also reports that Francis loved this painting so much that he has placed it on the wall behind his desk along with another representing Judas.
The inside pages of the Vatican paper feature a sermon by Fr. Primo Mazzolari saying that he believes Judas was forgiven by Our Lord; a brief comment by Card. Carlo Maria Martini on Mazzolari’s sermon, saying that each of us can have a Judas inside himself; a text by Giovanni Papini arguing that Judas must have had an ulterior motive to betray Christ because 30 silver coins did not have that great a worth; and a text by Giuseppe Berto impersonating Judas who affirms that Jesus owes His glorification to him.
In the last several decades, this is the first time – as far as we know – that L’Osservatore Romano has promoted Judas Iscariot on its first three pages. It seems the inauguration of a new saint and the official launching of the “Church of Judas” on a Maundy Thursday, the day of his betrayal …
The defense of Judas has been made in the name of the abyss of God’s mercy. So we see that now Divine Mercy, against all the Scriptural evidence, also applies to the most infamous criminal in History.
Are we far from the day when the same mercy will be applied to another Great Traitor, Satan? Does it not appear that the Vatican’s semi-official launching of the “Church of Judas” is the prelude to the coming “Church of Satan”?
Reformation Charlotte was stunned by the news.
“If this isn’t one of the most blasphemous and ungodly images the Roman Catholic Church has ever endorsed – and it has endorsed many – then nothing is,” it stated. Pope Francis is by far the most secular, ungodly pope to take the high office of the Roman Catholic Church in modern history.”
“No pope has ever taken strides to embrace profanity quite to the point that Francis has done. Whether it be his push for global climate control, performing a mass for gay Catholics, or saying that atheists are ‘children of God,’ one cannot deny the non-traditional influence this pope has been in the Vatican for the past few years.”
Author John Zmirak, a senior editor at the Stream, noted, “My own Catholic world is being roiled at the moment by Pope Francis’ latest effort to mark himself off as more ‘enlightened’ than any of his predecessors, going all the way back to St. Peter. He’s trying to redeem the good name of the apostle who betrayed Jesus to the Sanhedrin, then ran off and hanged himself.”
Zmirak suggested the pope is hypocritical for offering mercy to Judas, but not to politically conservative people today.
“Francis offers no such mercy to citizens worried that immigration into their countries has spiraled out of control,” he writes.
“Remember how he denounced Donald Trump and his supporters who favored a border wall as ‘not Christians.’ He said the same of anyone, anywhere, who manufactures weapons for anybody. Francis emitted this pearl in the course of a speech where he damned Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill for not bombing the tracks to Auschwitz using … weapons, which Francis had just said they shouldn’t have had. In the very same speech.”
“So Francis wants us to consider that Judas might be a saint, but offers no glimmer of empathy to conservative, pro-life voters in the U.S. and other countries.”
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