A plague on both your houses

This from the learned pages of the National Catholic Reporter (I have added the underlining):

... welcome back to the 'twilight zone' that was well and truly entered by the Catholic Church on 13/3/13. In the vortex of diabolical mayhem known simply as the 'post-Benedict XVI era', Catholic bloggers are tasked with the mission of encouraging Catholics to stay faithful to the Faith passed down to us while it is further polluted, corrupted and overthrown centrally by men who have overseen its decline locally for the past 30-40 years, while lauding the wisdom of the 'new direction'. Yes, vocations can plummet, Churches can empty and close and the souls of millions can - through deliberate, wilful ambiguity on the part of prelates - be placed in graver jeopardy that ever before, but the esotericist can still claim the 'new direction' to be a success even when objective statistics suggest anything but success. I guess that's just part of what makes the new Catholic gnosticism so much fun.

And this from the rather unintelligent extreme of Tradition (again, I have added the underlining):

A Christian is not supposed to give up hope. She is not to despair.

But after three very uplifting and incredible years under the prophetic leadership and compelling personal witness of Pope Francis, many reform-minded Catholics have again become quite worried about the future direction of their church.

It is not that their honeymoon with the first New World pope is over. (The memory of what a disastrous state the church was in before his election has prevented that from happening just yet.)

But there are growing concerns that, despite being able to effect a seismic change in attitude and ethos throughout the worldwide Catholic family, Francis has done nothing to ensure that this will not all be tossed aside once he is gone.

It should be stated again, without any gloss, that he must move more quickly to make structural and juridical changes that cannot be easily undone by one of his successors.

I am reminded of Abbot Vonier's insight, on which I have commented at length - The Church we are in. I concluded that post as follows:

To return to the reflection based on Abbot Vonier's notion that the Church should not be seen as divided into an "ideal" and a "real", but exists as a single entity whose beauty and holiness shine out to the world. If we look around us during the papacy of Pope Francis, we see the Church that we are in, and some of it - perhaps more on the reform-minded side than on the Traditionalist side - appears pretty far off the wall. But if we take Abbot Vonier's insight seriously, there is an abiding beauty and splendour that is there in all of it. And we need to trust that it is there and that it does still shine out.

The touchstone of that shining out is, as it has ever been, the office of the Successor of Peter. Nothing is to be gained by excoriating - or mis-representing -  its holder.