How many times do you need to gaslight your fellow Catholics who sincerely object to problems with Pope Francis? How is gaslighting charitable or Catholic?
The central problem with popesplaining is it treats ultramontane ecclesiology as if it is official Church teaching, where some ultramontane theologians held that papal infallibility extends to the entire papal Magisterium, including discipline, which would include the liturgy. But that isn’t Church teaching. Therefore, while you are free to hold that view, you are not free to impose it on others who don’t hold that view while judging their Catholicity for observing the pope to be promoting error. Ironically, that also usurps the authority of the bishop or pope who alone can judge if a Catholic has become a schismatic.
The popesplainer must allow himself to fall into cognitive dissonance and intellectual dishonesty to square the circle on Pope Francis’ scandals, and argue the papal critics are being rebellious schismatics. It is the equivalent of calling the good bad, and the bad good, which uses duplicity and sophistry to dominate the “rad trad.” It is a form of bullying. And it should stop, and be replaced with intellectually honest disputation, online public debates, and in the end peace between brothers in the Faith, and not internet flame wars.
I will at least say popesplaining has its merits. It is attempting to preserve respect for the papacy and prevent people from leaving the Church. No doubt many have fallen away from the Faith or converted to Orthodoxy because of the contradictions coming from Pope Francis. Trying to solve those contradictions is praiseworthy in so far as it shows the Catholic Church is not falsifying itself with the problems of this pope, or any pope since Vatican II.
However, intelligent human beings who use their God-given intellect and five senses can’t be manipulated to believe that 1 + 1 = 3, when 1 + 1 = 2. Sooner or later popesplaining itself will lead many intelligent Catholics to leave the Church over the contradictions from Pope Francis.
I would tell them instead to read the SSPX analysis of Pope Francis and the Crisis in the Church, and similar analysis, which is orthodox. Understand the problem of applying ultramontane theology to the current situation, the limits of infallibility and indefectability, and how Magisterial documents can in fact contain error. That could include a papal document permitting blessings of same sex couples. Therefore, that does not falsify the Church, and there is no need to leave.
Edit: as a side note, to be clear, I am not accusing the pope of teaching error in the homosexual blessing document, though that is the impression it gives to many reasonable Catholics.
There IS a solution to the errors of Pope Francis and the agenda coming from this pontificate spread downward on the universal Church, and that is to go to the ancient and venerable liturgical rites, whether the traditional Roman rite or an eastern rite, and let that parish be a living resistance to the modernism.
I have mixed thoughts about talking about the pope. On one hand, we shouldn’t be focused on the papacy. It is central to the government of the Church, and the hierarchy is central to Church, but the state of the current pope or local bishop is marginal compared to our daily domestic spiritual life. On the other hand, when the modernist Crisis is threatening our faith, and the Faith itself, and is to a great extent caused by the bad agenda of the current pope and those who elected him, it becomes vitally important to fight back by calling it out, by calling for resistance to a false agenda.
Also, one of the main problems with popesplaining is it denies there is a Crisis of modernism throughout the Church. They falsely think modernism doesn’t exist anymore, just liberalism or secularism. You don’t have to call yourself, your theology, style of liturgy, architecture, spirituality, etc modernist to be espousing and practicing the principles of modernism, and therefore are in fact a modernist, with modernism still existing.
Popesplainers identify as conservative Catholics, which is accurate even if they claim to transcend the political spectrum in the Church, characterizing those “on the right and the left” as “radical dissenters.” However, conservative or rather neoconservative Catholics, the ones who are anti-traditionalist, which is at the heart of popesplaining, are more liberal than they will admit. In reality, traditionalist Catholics are simply Catholics because they are as our forefathers were before the conciliar revolution. We are simply being Catholics as they were, upholding Tradition, so in reality we ourselves are not on the political spectrum to the far right. The neoconservatives in contrast are essentially of this political spectrum to the extreme right. Traditionalists transcend this spectrum because Tradition, and our practice of it, is transcendent and timeless.