The Quick-Step to Irrelevance

Never Dance To Secularism's Hymnody

It behoves all public Christian leaders to stick to Christian knitting.  When Christian leaders begin to pontificate publicly over "global warming" or "climate change" or advocate for "global unity" they are edging towards the precipice.  They begin to sound like just one more empty headed politician seeking to bolster their public appeal and approval ratings.

Pope Francis is falling into this trap.  Consequently, he is undermining his office. 

The approval rating of Pope Francis declined all over Europe during the course of 2018, a new analysis observed Wednesday, in large part because of his ever-less popular pro-immigration stance and other globalist positions.

Among German Catholics, the pope’s popularity plummeted by a staggering 20 percentage points in one year, notes analyst Francesco Galietti, who runs the political risk consultancy Policy Sonar, and with Francis at its helm, the Catholic Church as a whole also suffered a drop of 9 percent in its approval rating among the same constituency. . . .

The pope’s marked political character has heightened the willingness of Catholics to disagree with their pastors, Galietti notes, since the pontiff’s approximation to United Nations positions on global warming and international immigration can easily be brushed aside as simple leftist slogans with little if anything to do with the gospel of Jesus Christ. [Breitbart News]

When Christian leaders forget that their authority does not reside in the institutions they lead they teeter on the cliff.
  Their authority lies not in councils, nor talkfests, but primarily and originally in the Scriptures alone.  Nothing good can be gained by attempting to "prove" to the world that we are "regular guys" so as to gain credibility and respect for Christ's church.

Rather our true glory lies far closer to restating regularly the abiding antinomy between Belief and Unbelief .  Those Christian leaders who are foolish enough to forget that fundamental are doomed to issuing effete benedictions upon pop culture, and experiencing a rapid descent into irrelevance.

Hence, Galietti's conclusion:

All in all, Galietti suggests, the pope’s declining popularity is a side-effect of having hitched his horse to globalist political platforms and supranational formations, which to many Europeans is looking more like the past than the future.