The Political Pope

by George Neumayr

  He has accused traditional Catholics of “self-absorbed promethean neopelagianism,” without bothering to clarify the insult. Oozing contempt for traditionalist Catholics, he said they considers themselves “superior to others because they observe certain rules or remain intransigently faithful to a particular Catholic style from the past” and that their “supposed soundness of doctrine or discipline leads instead to a narcissistic and authoritarian elitism, whereby instead of evangelizing, one analyzes and classifies others, and instead of opening the door to grace, one exhausts his or her energies in inspecting and verifying.” (Bishop Fellay has said that Vatican officials tell him that these denunciations are directed primarily at “conservative Americans.”47)

  Early in his papacy, Pope Francis was captured on videotape belittling an altar boy for holding his hands together piously. Were they stuck together, he asked the bewildered boy. Another time he mocked a Catholic group for sending him a note saying that its members had recited thousands of rosaries for him.

  “It concerns me; when I was elected, I received a letter from one of these groups, and they said: ‘Your Holiness, we offer you this spiritual treasure: 3,525 rosaries.’ Why don’t they say, ‘we pray for you, we ask…,’ but this thing of counting,” he scoffed while talking to some fellow liberal priests and nuns. “And these groups return to practices and to disciplines that I lived through—not you, because you are not old—to disciplines, to things that in that moment took place, but not now, they do not exist today…”48

  With a friend like this pope, orthodox Catholics don’t need enemies.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Permissive Pope

  In the “ten tips to happiness” that he offered during a 2014 interview with the Argentinian weekly Viva, Pope Francis gave as the first tip: “live and let live.”1 That permissive spirit explains why the mainstream media often calls him the “cool” pope.2

  Pope Francis belongs to a generation of priests who saw themselves as people pleasers keen to “understand the contemporary world.” Pope Francis often makes it sound as if the Church’s moral theology should be put up for a popular vote. “To find what the Lord asks of his Church today, we must lend an ear to the debates of our time and perceive the ‘fragrance’ of the men of this age,” he has said.

  Historians have established that bad popes of the past committed mortal sins. But Francis is the first pope to bless sins. He has become notorious for giving scandalous advice to Catholics in adulterous relationships. In April 2014, it came out that he had placed a call to an Argentinian woman who had written to him about her adulterous relationship. The woman, Jacquelina Lisbona, was ecstatic over receiving his phone call, in which he introduced himself as “Father Bergoglio” and informed her that she could receive Communion “without problems.” When she told him that her local priest objected to her reception of Communion, Pope Francis replied, “There are some priests who are more papist than the Pope.”3

  The “cool” Pope was also a cool uncle, according to Francis’s niece, María Inés Navaja, who told the press that when she entered a marriage without the blessing of the Church, her uncle congratulated her. She said, “He listens a lot, but doesn’t judge, and never tells you what you have to do. I remember when I told him that I couldn’t wait to [get married] in the Church, that I was a grownup now and I was going to get married in a civil marriage; he answered that ‘it’s the best news you’ve given me.’”4

  According to Francis’s close Argentinian friend, Oscar Crespo, who met with Francis in 2015, the pope made a similar comment to him about a mutual friend’s adulterous relationship. When Crespo asked the pope if that friend could receive Communion, he replied, “Just tell her the Pope said that she can.”5

  Liberalizing Annulment Procedures

  In 2015, Pope Francis announced that he was liberalizing the Church’s annulment procedures, pushing through permissive changes that canon lawyers have described as the most significant alteration to those procedures in four hundred years.

  “It’s a sweeping reform; it’s a dramatic reform,” said Chad Pecknold, a theologian at Catholic University. “It’s a reform which essentially takes away the whole judicial process for deciding whether a marriage was null or not.”6

  Liberals inside and outside the Church cheered the changes, describing them as “pastoral” and a “Catholic version of no-fault Catholic divorce.” But some bishops were astonished at the laxity of the changes, noting that they eliminate most of the safeguards in place to prevent the abuse of the annulment process.

  Asked by a reporter at the cable channel EWTN if Pope Francis’s changes could result in a rash of phony cases, Bishop Robert Morlino of Wisconsin replied: “That could happen. That is the sort of thing that has been happening for 50 years in the United States and the tribunals. In the name of mercy, in the name of a kind of accommodation to people who can become very pushy and very insistent, the truth has been the casualty. If that kind of an abuse were to be prevalent as these new regulations go into effect, that would simply be a continuation of what has been the case for 50 years.”7

  “Relations between Pope Francis and the canonical-legal community are strained,” says canon lawyer Michael Dunnigan in an interview for this book. “Most of the Holy Father’s references to law and lawyers are negative, and he seems to see the law as almost the antithesis of mercy. Most canonists, by contrast, see the law itself as pastoral. Indeed, I would say that the Church of Christ is unintelligible without its juridic aspect. The reason is that, without law or a juridic principle in the Church, it would be difficult or impossible to speak coherently about the rights of the faithful or the constitution of the Church.” For all of his talk of “collegiality,” Pope Francis inserted these changes into canon law autocratically.

  “The Holy Father engaged in very little consultation before promulgating his reform. For such a far-reaching revision of the law, one might have expected him to consult broadly with the Roman Curia, pontifical faculties of canon law, and professional associations of canonists. However, he did not do so,” according to Dunnigan.

  Another canon lawyer interviewed for this book says, “He is not winning points with canon lawyers, for sure.” This priest recalled a conference of canon lawyers at which one stood up and asked, “Why does the pope hate us?” “There was a lot of anger among canon lawyers, with all of his unfounded novelties and his attacks on ‘doctors of the law’ and so forth,” he continued.

  Speaking to a group of priests and nuns at a pastoral conference in Rome in 2016, Pope Francis outraged Catholics by declaring that “the great majority” of Catholic marriages are invalid.8 His inflammatory remark was apparently offered by way of explaining his permissive annulment practices. But the comment generated so much backlash—a columnist for the Spectator called it “disastrous,” while a columnist for the New York Times called it “ridiculous” and “irresponsible”—that the Vatican decided, scandalously, to falsify the transcript of the meeting and change “great majority” to “a portion.”9

  The undoctored transcript, however, reveals his true thoughts. He had been saying for many years that a majority of Catholic marriages are invalid, according to Cardinal Walter Kasper: “I’ve spoken to the pope himself about this, and he said he believes that 50 percent of marriages are not valid,” said Kasper in 2014.10 (Catholic commentators dismissed this story at the time as wild “hearsay,” but it turned out to be, if anything, an understatement.)

  Pope Francis made other peculiar comments at that pastoral conference in Rome, indicative of his idiosyncratic take on Catholicism. He mused that as archbishop of Buenos Aires it was his practice to refuse to preside at “shotgun” weddings. He didn’t make it clear why the desire of a couple to provide an illegitimate child with a married mother and father constituted an unworthy motive for marriage.

  He added that he considers priests who don’t baptize these illegitimate children to be “animals.” It was an unusually harsh comment to make about pr
iests who are simply following canon law, which instructs them to delay baptism until there is a “founded hope” the child will be raised by practicing Catholics. (In the first year of his pontificate, showing contempt for this provision of canon law, he baptized the child of an unmarried couple at the Sistine Chapel. He has said that he would even baptize “an expedition of Martians.”)

  The pope was also remarkably blasé about couples living together before marriage. He said the majority of couples in Buenos Aires taking marriage preparation courses were living together but that he didn’t consider that too worrisome. He told the priests at the pastoral conference not to press such couples to marry. “They prefer to cohabitate, and this is a challenge, a task. Not to ask ‘why don’t you marry?’ No, to accompany, to wait, and to help them to mature, help fidelity to mature,” he said.

  He even praised some of these premarital relationships and implied that it didn’t matter whether these couples got married in the Church: “I’ve seen a lot of fidelity in these cohabitations, and I am sure that this is a real marriage, they have the grace of a real marriage because of their fidelity.”

  To orthodox Catholics, the juxtaposition of these remarks with his claim that most sacramental marriages are invalid was deeply unsettling. He appeared to be saying that premarital relationships can confer real grace upon couples while “most” sacramental marriages do not.

  At the same pastoral conference, he said that traditional Catholics rely too much on “clarity of doctrine” and what “should be.” “We want a doctrine that is as certain as mathematics—this doesn’t exist,” he said. They should instead be “welcoming, accompanying, integrating, discerning, without putting our noses in the ‘moral life’ of other people.”

  That last gibe seemed calculated to delight the media, as it often lectures the Church on “staying out of people’s bedrooms.”

  His comments had a demoralizing effect on priests, some of whom complained that his denigrations were making it harder for them to fulfill their apostolates. “Please, Holy Father: Enough of these ad hoc, off-the-cuff, impromptu sessions, whether at thirty thousand feet or at ground level,” wrote Monsignor Charles Pope from the archdiocese of Washington, DC. “Much harm through confusion has been caused by these latest remarks on marriage, cohabitation, baptism, confession, and pastoral practice… the impact hits priests hard, and I cannot deny a certain weariness and discouragement at this point.”11

  “I will be happy when this pontificate ends,” says a priest interviewed for this book. “I have stopped paying attention to what he says. It is too painful.”

  Even as the pope demoralizes faithful priests, he makes a show of extending sympathy to lapsed ones. In 2016, the Vatican announced that he had made a special visit to priests who had broken their vows and started families, almost romanticizing their decision: “the young men in question took the difficult decision to leave the priesthood despite opposition in many cases from their fellow priests or their families after serving for several years in parishes where loneliness, misunderstanding, fatigue arising from their many responsibilities prompted them to rethink their choice.” Opponents of a celibate priesthood greeted the announcement with enthusiasm.

  The Liberalizing Synod on the Family

  The centerpiece of this permissive pontificate has been the pope’s liberalizing Synod on the Family, which was a pretext to weaken the Church’s sacramental discipline. Toward that end, he stacked the synod with proponents of situation ethics and dissenters from the pontificates of his predecessors.

  A product of his team of ghostwriters and hand-picked delegates, the synod’s preliminary report spoke of the “positive aspects” of premarital cohabitation and homosexual relationships. It praised the “precious support” homosexuals find in their relationships and condemned the Church for not turning “respectfully to those who participate in her life in an incomplete and imperfect way, appreciating the positive values they contain rather than their limitations and shortcomings.”12

  The pope’s rattled aides scotched that draft after it generated significant backlash. But it remains a highly relevant document of this pontificate, as it reflected the unvarnished opinions of the pope and his advisers. The significance of the document was not lost on the left.

  “For the LGBT Catholics in the United States and around the world, this new document is a light in the darkness—a dramatic new tone from a church hierarchy that has long denied the very existence of committed and loving gay and lesbian partnerships,” said Chad Griffin, president of Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBT rights organization in the United States, to the press after reading the document.13

  “Reading this #Synod14 document, I don’t know what to say. It feels like a whole new church, a whole new tone, a whole new posture. Wow,” wrote Joshua McElwee, the Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter, on Twitter. Vatican reporter John Thavis called the statement a “pastoral earthquake” and reported that “at least one bishop asked what happened to the concept of sin.”14

  The controversial proposal at the heart of the synod—the granting of Communion to the divorced-and-remarried—was also shot down by the bishops. “Catholic bishops handed Pope Francis an embarrassing defeat Saturday by withholding support for one of his signature initiatives—a pathway for Catholics who have divorced and remarried to receive Communion—thus showing the strength of conservative resistance to the pope’s liberalizing agenda,” reported the Wall Street Journal.15

  “We’re not giving in to the secular agenda; we’re not collapsing in a heap. We’ve got no intention of following those radical elements in all the Christian churches, according to the Catholic churches in one or two countries, and going out of business,” explained Australian cardinal George Pell, who called the preliminary report “tendentious” and said “it didn’t represent accurately the feelings of the synod fathers.” He added, “In the immediate reaction to it, when there was an hour, an hour-and-a-half of discussion, three-quarters of those who spoke had some problems with the document.” That document contained, he said, “a major absence,” namely, a connection to “scriptural teaching” and “church tradition.”16

  These rebuffs from the synod fathers angered Pope Francis. At the end of the synod in 2015, he delivered a homily in which he excoriated traditionalists for their “blinkered viewpoints” and “closed hearts which frequently hide even behind the church’s teachings, in order to sit in the chair of Moses and judge, sometimes with superiority and superficiality, difficult cases and wounded families.”

  Pope Francis gave Cardinal Kasper, the leading proponent for opening Communion up to Catholics in a state of adultery, a starring role at the synod. In a moment of indiscretion during it, Kasper denounced the conservative African cardinals as reactionaries who had no business influencing its outcome. “Africa is totally different from the West,” he said, “especially about gays.” The synod fathers, he said, should disregard their views: “they should not tell us too much what we have to do.” Kasper at first denied making these remarks, saying, “I am appalled. I have never spoken this way about Africans and I never would.” But an audiotape had captured them, and his denial disintegrated.17

  Yet Kasper’s proposal prevailed, shaping Pope Francis’s post-synodal apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia. Using vague language, Pope Francis endorsed the proposal, writing that “divorced who have entered a new union, for example, can find themselves in a variety of situations, which should not be pigeonholed or fit into overly rigid classifications leaving no room for a suitable personal and pastoral discernment.”

  His advisers spelled out the meaning of the document more explicitly in interviews after its appearance. Jesuit father Antonio Spadaro, one of the pope’s closest advisers, summed up the meaning of the document bluntly: “Francis has removed all the ‘limits’ of the past, even in the ‘sacramental discipline’ and for the so-called ‘irregular’ couples: and these couples ‘become recipients of the Eucharist.’”18r />
  To anyone who had listened closely to the pope’s off-the-cuff interviews, the outcome of the synod was inevitable. In one interview, he had complained bitterly about the Church’s prohibitions on adulterers: “they cannot be godfathers to any child being baptized, mass readings are not for divorcees, they cannot give communion, they cannot teach Sunday school, there are about seven things that they cannot do, I have the list over there. Come on!” He continued, “Thus, let us open the doors a bit more. Why can’t they be godfathers and godmothers?”

  Criticism of Amoris Laetitia

  The German philosopher Josef Seifert said that Jesus and Mary must be “weeping” over Amoris Laetitia. “Pope Francis, who does not even once mention the possibility of sacrilege or peril for the soul of a person who receives Communion unworthily, tells adulterers that in certain circumstances, which are to be considered individually, it is possible for those who live in adultery or in other ‘irregular’ unions to receive Holy Communion without changing their lives, and so to continue living as adulterers,” he wrote.19

  The effect of the pope’s exhortation has been an unfolding disaster, said Bishop Athanasius Schneider. It “has unfortunately, within a very short time, led to very contradictory interpretations even among the episcopate,” he notes.20

  He argues that it has given aid and comfort to modernist dissenters within the Church, as bishops and priests “declare that AL represents a very clear opening-up to communion for the divorced and remarried, without requiring them to practice continence.” It shocked him that “a president of a Bishops’ Conference has stated, in a text published on the website of the same Bishops’ Conference: ‘This is a disposition of mercy, an openness of heart and of spirit that needs no law, awaits no guideline, nor bides on prompting. It can and should happen immediately.’”