It’s not often I agree with progressive Christians, especially those chosen by Pope Francis as leaders in the U.S. church — from the “short list” drawn up by Francis’ longtime power broker (now disgraced child molester) Theodore McCarrick.

For a brief, shining moment, I wondered if I’d misjudged the intellectual leader of Pope Francis’ rising faction among American bishops, Cardinal Robert McElroy. He’s better educated and craftier with words than most of the catty office politicians whom Francis selected to help pick the next pope. (See Blaise Cupich and Joseph Tobin.)

What’s more, Cardinal McElroy apparently agrees with me on a crucial question. Each of us has written that attitudes toward sexual morality are so important to Christian faith, that to understand false teachings we must invoke the presence of evil — even of demons.

There’s just one teensy difference we need to iron out between us, the cardinal and me. I believe that the Enemy is behind the “new gospel” that fuels the rainbow juggernaut that’s crushing faithful Christians across the West on behalf of Caesar, Mammon, and Sodom. What Cardinal McElroy calls “demonic” is the traditional teaching of the Old and New Testaments, and 2000 years of bishops, popes, and saints.

Like a fire marshal and an arsonist, I and the cardinal are both interested in combustion. We just take different attitudes toward it. I’m not sure such a gap can be bridged.

Come On, Zmirak! Stop Making Stuff Up

Surely, Zmirak, you’re exaggerating again. You’re pulling out of context some random words of mercy or ambiguous attempts at empathy, the better to smear an ideological enemy. Not very Christian of you!

I wish, really wish, that I were. And I’ll admit that I consider McElroy an enemy — and have since he led a convention of Marxist radicals and 24 Catholic bishops in 2017. Among the points in that convention’s crackpot manifesto were the following:

Racism and all forms of human hierarchy, whether based on skin color, gender, sexual orientation, physical ability, arrest and conviction records, immigration status, religion or ethnicity are immoral. [emphasis added]

…

Racism is stripping Black, Latino, Asian, Muslim and Native people of their humanity and fueling police abuse and mass incarceration, and fueling a crisis of homelessness and displacement. Raids and Trump Administration Executive Orders are scapegoating immigrants and ripping families apart.

And:

We urge every faith community, including every Catholic parish, to declare themselves a sanctuary for people facing deportation …. All cities, counties and states should adopt policies that get ICE out of our schools, courts and jails, stop handing over people to ICE…

So, yeah, an enemy. I don’t want my church helping human traffickers by harboring illegal aliens from the authorities (which as The Stream has documented, Catholic Charities and the U.S. Catholic bishops in fact are getting rich by doing, nationwide).

The New Gospel’s Chapter and Verse

But am I exaggerating? Read Catholic scholar William Kilpatrick’s brilliant analysis of how not just gay activism but transgenderist Gnosticism is being mainstreamed by McElroy and Pope Francis’ other picked men inside our church.

Or if you have the stomach for it, read McElroy’s own jaw-dropping essay at America magazine. It really is in a way an historic document. Future religion scholars who want to explain how the “new gospel” of Antichrist took tangible form might very well cite McElroy’s essay the way historians of real Christianity point to the letters of Saint Paul. Want to understand how the Christian impulse to minister to sinners can be twisted into the devil’s own maxim, “Love the sin, hate the sinner”? McElroy’s essay explains it. From the inside, like The Screwtape Letters or the movie Nefarious.

McElroy on the one hand claims that sexual morality of any kind is not really that central to Christianity. He writes:

The heart of Christian discipleship is a relationship with God the Father, Son and Spirit rooted in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The church has a hierarchy of truths that flow from this fundamental kerygma. Sexual activity, while profound, does not lie at the heart of this hierarchy.

In plain English, it’s not that important. But I don’t know if McElroy really believes that. Elsewhere in the essay he states outright that false teachings about sexual morality are outright “demonic”:

It is a demonic mystery of the human soul why so many men and women have a profound and visceral animus toward members of the L.G.B.T. communities.

Now here he is surely speaking of cruel and bigoted acts aimed at individuals because of their apparent orientation, or outward appearances. Right? Alas, he isn’t. He goes on to explain that he’s referring to any disapproval of homosexual or transgender activities on the part of anyone at all:

The church’s primary witness in the face of this bigotry must be one of embrace rather than distance or condemnation. The distinction between orientation and activity cannot be the principal focus for such a pastoral embrace because it inevitably suggests dividing the L.G.B.T. community into those who refrain from sexual activity and those who do not.

It Rhymes with “Poltergeist”

Heaven forfend! We wouldn’t want to be divisive, would we? Splitting off the sheep from the goats, or the sheep from the wolves, is radically unbiblical. You’ll never see Jesus doing that. Remember how in Revelation He gathers together every sinner, penitent or not, with a fervent “attaboy” before giving them ponyrides to the magical kingdom of Equestria.

By Cardinal McElroy’s standard, the Book of Leviticus and the letters of St. Paul, which directly condemn such sexual sins, are not the fruit of divine inspiration, but of “a demonic mystery.”

Pope Francis and his allies have managed to reinvent the first and worst Christian heresy — that of Marcion, who damned the God of the Old Testament as unworthy of us, tossed out most of the Gospels, and cherrypicked the “good parts” from St. Paul.

This is indeed a new gospel. And St. Paul tells us what to call the men who preach it. It rhymes with “poltergeist.”

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”