The Political Pope

by George Neumayr

  The pope is not seeking to convert Protestants but to apologize to them. In 2014, he baffled the Catholic community in Caserta, Italy, by visiting a Pentecostal congregation and apologizing to it for the Church’s past evangelical activities.

  “Someone will be surprised: ‘The pope went to visit the evangelicals?’ But he went to see his brothers,” he said, delighting in his maverick reputation. “Among those who persecuted and denounced Pentecostals, almost as if they were crazy people trying to ruin the race, there were also Catholics. I am the pastor of Catholics, and I ask your forgiveness for those Catholic brothers and sisters who didn’t know and were tempted by the devil.”

  Sandro Magister reports that Pope Francis had planned to ignore the Catholic community in Caserta during his visit, but when the bishop caught wind of his visit to the Pentecostals the pope was forced to change his plans:

  When the news got out, and was confirmed by Fr. Federico Lombardi, that Pope Francis intended to make a private visit to Caserta to meet with a friend, the pastor of a local Evangelical community, the city’s bishop, Giovanni D’Alise, was thunderstruck. He hadn’t been told a thing. Moreover, the pope had planned his visit to Caserta for the same day as the feast of Saint Anne, the city’s patron. Seeing themselves snubbed, some of the faithful threatened an uprising. It took a good week to convince the pope to change his schedule and divide the trip into two phases: the first a public one with the faithful of Caserta on Saturday, July 26, and the second in private with his Evangelical friend on the following Monday.23

  The pope’s lack of interest in converting anyone has led commentator Ann Coulter to joke, “If you’re the head of the Catholic Church and your position is, ‘ah, join any church. In fact, you don’t even have to be a Christian.’ Maybe, you know, you can get a show on CNN, but maybe you shouldn’t be the head of the Catholic Church.”24

  Pope Francis goes out of his way to prop up the Church’s historic opponents. Who could have imagined any other pope than this one celebrating the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation? In October 2016, Pope Francis traveled to Sweden to participate in a Catholic-Lutheran service that commemorated the beginning of Martin Luther’s revolt against Catholicism. According to L’Osservatore Romano, the idea for the joint commemoration came from Pope Francis, not from the Lutherans. (Before it, he revealed to an interviewer that “I wasn’t planning to celebrate a Mass for the Catholics on this trip” lest it undercut “the ecumenical witness.” He later changed his mind after a “fervent request” from Scandinavian Catholics.)

  In anticipation of the trip, Pope Francis praised Luther, describing him as a “reformer.” He didn’t mention Luther’s sweeping rejection of Catholic doctrine and sacraments, reserving his criticism not for Luther but for the Church. “I believe the intentions of Martin Luther were not wrong,” he said.25 It has become fashionable in Vatican circles to shower lavish praise upon Martin Luther. When city officials in Rome were debating whether or not to name a town square after Luther in 2015, Pope Francis’s aides readily supported the idea.26

  “Luther Was Right, Says the Pope’s Preacher,” ran a headline in the UK’s Telegraph. Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, the preacher to the papal household, has mystified Catholics with his paeans to Luther. The Church is “indebted” to Luther’s theology, according to Cantalamessa. In deference to Protestants, the pope’s preacher has also advised Catholics to tone down their devotion to the Virgin Mary. “Mariology in recent centuries has become a non-stop factory of new titles, new devotions, often in polemic against Protestants,” he said.27

  In 2016, the Vatican announced that a Protestant theologian, Marcelo Figueroa, would edit the Argentine version of its newspaper L’Osservatore Romano. Figueroa is a friend of Pope Francis. The German bishops, in anticipation of the commemoration of Luther’s revolt, called Luther a “religious pathfinder, Gospel witness, and teacher of the faith.”28 On October 13, 2016, in an event that played out almost like an Onion parody at the Vatican, a group of Lutherans presented a smiling Pope Francis with a copy of Martin Luther’s “95 Theses” against the Church.29

  At that event, a young Catholic girl asked the pope, “My friends do not go to Church, but they are my friends. Do I have to help them to go to Church or is it enough that they remain good friends?” Don’t bother, the pope replied: “It is not licit that you convince them of your faith; proselytism is the strongest poison against the ecumenical path.”30 Former Protestants who have entered the Catholic Church find the Vatican’s promotion of Luther absurd and consider the pope’s blunt statement—“And today Lutherans and Catholics, Protestants, all of us agree on the doctrine of justification”—false.

  “The Protestant movement sparked by Martin Luther was not a legitimate reformation of the church,” writes Fr. Dwight Longenecker. “It was an open rebellion against the Catholic Church that ended not just in one schism, but in thousands. It also led to civil unrest, bloodshed, rebellion and revolution that tore Christendom apart.”

  Richard Ballard, a former Lutheran pastor who now serves as a Catholic deacon, told Longenecker that the pope’s claim of theological unity between Lutherans and Catholics on the doctrine of justification is simply not true.

  “According to orthodox Catholic theology, Luther did err,” he says. “Catholics insist good works (empowered by God’s grace) are meritorious and that they contribute to the process of the soul’s salvation and purification. Lutherans still cling to the notion of salvation by ‘faith alone’ and thus negate the importance of good works in the economy of salvation.”31

  Lutheran leaders, meanwhile, marvel at the Vatican’s promotion of Luther. “In the 1980s no one would have believed that Lutherans and Catholics were capable of reaching an agreement on the justification question, as was the case in 1999 and just a few years ago, had someone spoken about a joint commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the Martin Luther’s Reformation, many would have believed it to be impossible,” Reverend Martin Junge, General Secretary of the of the Lutheran World Federation, said before the pope’s trip to Sweden.32

  In his own lifetime, Luther was condemned by Pope Leo X in scalding terms: “we condemn, reprobate, and reject completely the books and all the writings and sermons of the said Martin, whether in Latin or any other language, containing the said errors or any one of them; and we wish them to be regarded as utterly condemned, reprobated, and rejected.”

  To commemorate the Reformation, the Vatican issued a document rehabilitating Luther at the expense of Pope Leo X and the Council of Trent (which condemned Luther’s theology):

  To fulfill his “pastoral office,” Pope Leo X felt obliged to protect the “orthodox faith” from those who “twist and adulterate the Scriptures” so that they are “no longer the Gospel of Christ.” Thus the pope issued the bull Exsurge Domine (15 June 1520), which condemned forty-one propositions drawn from various publications by Luther. Although they can all be found in Luther’s writings and are quoted correctly, they are taken out of their respective contexts… The Council of Trent, although to a large extent a response to the Protestant Reformation, did not condemn individuals or communities but specific doctrinal positions. Because the doctrinal decrees of the Council were largely in response to what it perceived to be Protestant errors, it shaped a polemical environment between Protestants and Catholics that tended to define Catholicism over and against Protestantism.

  The pope during his trip to Sweden spoke of “unity.” But in what did it consist? Mainly, a shared commitment to left-wing politics. The liberal Lutherans with which the pope met in Sweden reject the Church’s teachings on abortion, gay marriage, contraception, female priests, and many other issues. But they do agree with him on climate change, as he made clear in his remarks: “I share your concern about the abuses harming our planet, our common home, and causing grave effects on the climate. As we say in our land, in my land: ‘In the end, it is the poor who pay for our great festivity.’ As you rightly mentioned, their greatest impact
is on those who are most vulnerable and needy; they are forced to emigrate in order to escape the effects of climate change.”

  Pope Francis signed a joint statement with the Lutheran World Federation that gushed over the “spiritual and theological gifts of the Reformation” and committed Catholics to working with Lutherans in defense of illegal immigrants and against the “insatiable greed” of planet-destroying capitalists.

  He also proposed during the trip that environmentalism be added to the Beatitudes, which caused the Wall Street Journal to remark: “his suggestion that Jesus’ words don’t merely need reinterpretation but updating was a rhetorical move only slightly less ambitious than proposing an Eleventh Commandment.”33

  Previous popes would have found the idea of a pope celebrating Luther’s revolt unfathomable. In 1928, Pope Pius XI condemned the very ecumenism in which Pope Francis routinely engages, saying that it only serves to weaken the Church and compromise her teachings:

  Is it not right, it is often repeated, indeed, even consonant with duty, that all who invoke the name of Christ should abstain from mutual reproaches and at long last be united in mutual charity?… [I]n reality beneath these enticing words and blandishments lies hid a most grave error, by which the foundations of the Catholic faith are completely destroyed… it is clear why this Apostolic See has never allowed its subjects to take part in the assemblies of non-Catholics: for the union of Christians can only be promoted by promoting the return to the one true Church of Christ of those who are separated from it, for in the past they have unhappily left it. To the one true Church of Christ, we say, which is visible to all, and which is to remain, according to the will of its Author, exactly the same as He instituted it.

  Future historians will find it difficult to explain how the papacy went from making statements such as that one to commemorating the Reformation. While most churchmen remained tight-lipped about the pope’s trip to Sweden, a few admitted it was inexplicable. “This pope is an indifferentist,” said a senior churchman interviewed for this book.

  “We have already had an infallible response to the errors of Martin Luther: the Council of Trent,” said Bishop Athanasius Schneider from Kazakhstan during a talk in Washington, DC. “The teaching of the Council of Trent about the errors of Luther, I repeat, are infallible, ex cathedra. And the comments of the pope in the plane are not ex cathedra.”34

  “We Catholics have no reason to celebrate October 31, 1517, the date that is considered the beginning of the Reformation that would lead to the rupture of Western Christianity,” said German cardinal Gerhard Müller before the pope’s trip. “If we are convinced that divine revelation is preserved whole and unchanged through Scripture and Tradition, in the doctrine of the Faith, in the sacraments, in the hierarchical constitution of the Church by divine right, founded on the sacrament of holy orders, we cannot accept that there exist sufficient reasons to separate from the Church.”35

  “One Hell of an Ecumenical Mess”

  The religious relativism of Pope Francis is complicating his relationship with conservatives, both non-Catholic and Catholic. In 2016, it appeared that the Society of Pius X was on the verge of returning to a regular canonical relationship with the Church. But the doctrinal confusion of this pontificate has caused the traditionalist group to hesitate. Bishop Bernard Fellay, the leader of the order, has said that it has been discouraged by the “great and painful confusion that currently reigns in the Church.”

  As long as “errors that have made their way into it and are unfortunately encouraged by a large number of pastors, including the pope himself” persist, the order will not submit to Rome’s direction, he said.36 In the summer of 2014, the aforementioned Tony Palmer died in a motorcycle accident. In defiance of canon law, Pope Francis told Catholic officials to give the Anglican Palmer a Catholic burial as a fellow “bishop.” A witness at the funeral held in Bath, England, at St. John the Evangelist Roman Catholic Church reported how the highly unorthodox Catholic funeral transpired:

  Fr. David told us that because Tony was not a Roman Catholic he had to ask his bishops permission to celebrate the requiem and though Tony’ s wife and children are Roman Catholics, permission still had to be given for the requiem. The bishop agreed but said that Tony could not be buried as a bishop as he was not a Roman Catholic bishop. However, Pope Francis said he should and could be buried as a bishop… and so that put an end to that little bit of ecclesiastical nonsense!37

  When a Lutheran woman in 2016 asked Pope Francis if she could receive Communion in a Catholic Church, he again ignored canon law and told her to follow her “conscience.” The woman posed the question to him at a Lutheran church in Rome. She said to him that her husband is Catholic and that they wished to “participate together in Communion” and that not doing so had caused “hurt.” To the bewilderment of Catholics, Pope Francis at first said that answering her question is “not my competence” and then said, “I ask myself the same question.”

  He then told her an odd story about a bishop who “went a little wrong—48 years old, he married, [and then had] two children”—but who would attend Mass with them. “There are questions that only if one is sincere with oneself and the little theological light one has, must be responded to on one’s own,” he concluded, thoroughly confusing Catholics.38 Later, a Vatican-approved Jesuit publication in Rome, La Civiltà Cattolica, edited by one of Pope Francis’s advisers, published an article in favor of Communion for Lutherans.39

  He also confused conservative Catholics by appearing in a photograph in which he received a blessing from the archbishop of Canterbury. He had adopted the practice of receiving blessings from Protestant pastors during his tenure as archbishop of Buenos Aires. In one famous photo, he is kneeling as he receives a blessing from Evangelicals.40

  “For many Roman Catholic traditionalists, this is one hell of an ecumenical mess, sending out confusing messages about the Faith, the (Roman) Catholic Church and the uniqueness of ministry of the Vicar of Christ,” observed Cranmer, a popular Anglican blog in the United Kingdom. “Pope Francis is more Anglican than many believe, or would find it possible to admit.”41

  In 2016, the Vatican announced that it would make no attempts to evangelize members of Judaism. That statement, yet another historic first under Francis, appeared in a document released by the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews. “In concrete terms this means that the Catholic Church neither conducts nor supports any specific institutional mission work directed towards Jews,” stated the document titled “The Gifts and Calling of God Are Irrevocable.”42

  Rabbi Abraham Skorka, one of the pope’s close friends, has said that Francis’s view of “evangelization” is aimed not at converting non-Christians but convincing Christians to embrace “social justice.” “This is the idea of evangelization that Bergoglio is stressing—not to evangelize Jews,” he said. “This he told me, on several opportunities.”43

  The upshot of his many speeches and writings on evangelization is that the Church shouldn’t evangelize anyone but rather devote her energies to temporal political projects. Cardinal Walter Kasper, from whom Pope Francis takes many of this theological cues, has said that the Church’s new understanding of evangelization is the exact opposite of how the word is used in common speech: “In strict theological language, evangelization is a very complex and overall term, and reality. It implies presence and witness, prayer and liturgy, proclamation and catechesis, dialogue and social work… which do not have the goal of increasing the number of Catholics. Thus evangelization, if understood in its proper and theological meaning, does not imply any attempt of proselytism whatsoever.”44

  Liberal politics, not the salvation of souls, preoccupies Francis’s Vatican. In 2016, a reporter asked his secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, “What are you most concerned about in today’s world?” In his reply, he didn’t mention a single spiritual issue. He talked instead about refugees, victims of exploitation and “war,” “conflicts, violence
, human rights violations, environmental degradation, extreme poverty, the trade and trafficking of arms, corruption and sinister commercial and financial plans.”45

  At a time of rampant loss of faith and morality, he gave an answer that could have been given by the head of the United Nations.

  Soft toward Everyone but Traditionalists

  The only religious group whom Pope Francis dares to critique are fellow Catholics. They come in for frequent scoldings from him for their “rigidity.” On numerous occasions, he has blasted them for adherence to the “law.” In 2016, he even described them as “heretical” for not appreciating his loose interpretation of Catholicism. The essence of Catholicism, he said strangely, lies in accepting ambiguity:

  The Church never teaches us “or this or that.” That is not Catholic. The Church says to us: “this and that,” he said. “Strive for perfectionism: reconcile with your brother. Do not insult him. Love him. And if there is a problem, at the very least settle your differences so that war doesn’t break out.” This [is] the healthy realism of Catholicism. It is not Catholic [to say] “or this or nothing:” This is not Catholic, this is heretical. Jesus always knows how to accompany us, he gives us the ideal, he accompanies us towards the ideal, He frees us from the chains of the laws’ rigidity and tells us: “But do that up to the point that you are capable.” And he understands us very well. He is our Lord and this is what he teaches us.46