The Political Pope

by George Neumayr

  St. Paul wrote his letters to “fools for Christ” to confirm them in their faith. Pope Francis writes letters to opponents of Christian teaching to confirm them in their errors. Italian atheist Eugenio Scalfari felt so confirmed in his unbelief and relativism after his epistolary exchanges with Francis that he gushed, “an openness to modern and secular culture of this breadth, such a profound vision between conscience and its autonomy, has never before been heard from the chair of St. Peter.”49

  His pontificate has proceeded almost like an apology tour, designed to allay the anxieties of the liberal elite. On his way back from Armenia in 2016, he insulted Catholics by offering a series of gratuitous apologies tailored to left-wing sensibilities: “I think that the Church not only should apologize… to a gay person whom it offended but it must also apologize to the poor as well, to the women who have been exploited, to children who have been exploited (by being forced to) work. It must apologize for having blessed so many weapons.” He bemoaned the “closed Catholic culture” of the past and celebrated the supposed enlightenment of modern times: “The culture has changed—and thank God.”50

  After this extravagant apology, the liberal Jesuit Fr. Thomas Reese marveled on Twitter, “Pope Francis is speaking about gays and lesbians in ways that would have gotten anyone else disciplined, censured, or silenced ten years ago.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  How Francis Is Undoing the Legacy of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI

  In a veiled swipe at his two predecessors, Pope Francis told an interviewer that Vatican II had encouraged openness to “modern culture” and “dialogue with non-believers” but that after it “very little was done in that direction” in the Church. He promised to correct this shortcoming: “I have the humility and ambition to want to do something.”1

  Close advisers to Pope Francis, such as Cardinal Kasper, have acknowledged the lack of continuity between this pontificate and past ones. The program of Pope Francis is “not to preserve everything as it has been of old,” according to Kasper.2

  The liberal aides of Pope Francis speak of him as a revolutionary pope steadily working to liberalize the Church after a period of conservative retrenchment. To progressives concerned that the changes haven’t been quick enough, Archbishop Victor Fernández, one of the pope’s ghostwriters, offered words of reassurance: “The pope goes slow because he wants to be sure that the changes have a deep impact. The slow pace is necessary to ensure the effectiveness of the changes. He knows there are those hoping that the next pope will turn everything back around.”3

  By laying the groundwork for change so methodically, “it’s more difficult to turn things back,” said Fernández. The pope is aiming for “irreversible” change and that even if some cardinals have “regrets” about electing him that “doesn’t change anything,” said Fernández.

  It is now taken for granted in the press that Francis’s pontificate is a repudiation of the restorationist priorities of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. As the Wall Street Journal put it, Pope Francis is presiding over a “new Rome,” in which he “has effectively reversed course.”4

  Where Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI tried to counteract the influence of liberal theology, Pope Francis is seeking to spread it, noted the Journal.

  “Pope Francis’ immediate predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, devoted much of their pontificates to correcting what they deemed unjustified deviations from tradition in the name of Vatican II,” wrote Vatican correspondent Francis X. Rocca, while Francis “In word and deed… has argued that the church’s troubles reflect not recklessness but timidity in interpreting and applying the principles of Vatican II, especially the council’s call for the church to open itself to the modern world.”5

  “Popes John Paul and Benedict, who had played key roles at Vatican II, concluded that the church had gone too fast and too far in innovations ranging from the abandonment of religious garb to the acceptance of liberal ideas on sexual morality,” Rocca continued. “In response, they issued the first universal catechism since the 16th century, systematically laying out the church’s fundamental teachings; they censured dissent among theologians and within religious orders; and they reversed moves to expand the role of bishops in the development of church teaching and practice.”6

  Francis’s predecessors worried about liturgical looseness, but he shrugs at it. They resisted calls for reopening discussion on issues such as married priests and female deacons, but he signals an openness to it. At a time of rampant religious relativism, they revived a distinctive Catholic identity, but he downplays it. They acknowledged differences between Islam and Christianity; he blurs them. They upheld moral absolutes; he “discerns” exceptions to them.

  Some apologists for the pope and his “mercy-over-morals priorities,” as the press has put it, have tried to pass off these and other differences as a mere change of style. But they go well beyond it, as manifest in his support for changing the Church’s sacramental discipline for the divorced-and-remarried. If anything, the changes of style are at the service of changes in substance. His deliberately “pastoral” style is tied to a progressive theology.

  In 2011, Pope Benedict XVI delivered a speech to the Tribunal of the Roman Rota about the dangers of “pseudo-pastoral claims.” In retrospect, the speech reads like a warning of his successor’s pontificate, which has been nothing if not pseudo-pastoral. In the name of false pastoralism, Pope Francis pits canon law and doctrine against mercy and the Gospel. In this speech, Pope Benedict XIV takes direct aim at that distortion, arguing that canon law is not contrary to mercy but a safeguard of it:

  Canon law is at times undervalued, as if it were a mere technical instrument at the service of any given subjective interest, even one that is not founded on truth. Instead, canon law must always be considered in its essential relationship with justice, in the recognition that, in the Church, the goal of juridical activity is the salvation of souls… It is necessary to note the widespread and deeply rooted, though not always evident, tendency to place justice and charity in opposition to one another, as if the two were mutually exclusive… One must avoid pseudo-pastoral claims that would situate questions on a purely horizontal plane.

  Quoting Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict described this “misplaced compassion” as a counterfeit of charity, “sentimentality, pastoral only in appearance.” He called churchmen to courage, which becomes “more relevant the more injustice appears to be the easiest approach to take, insofar as it implies accommodating the desires and expectations of the parties or even the conditioning of the social context.”

  The self-consciously “pastoral” Catholicism to which Pope Benedict XVI referred is now on daily display under Pope Francis. A streak of antinomianism, the heresy that drives a wedge between divine law and mercy, runs through many of his speeches and serves as the subtext of his criticism of conservative Catholics.

  “Among Catholics there are many, not a few, many, who believe to hold the absolute truth,” Pope Francis has said. “They go ahead by harming others with slander and defamation, and they do great harm… And it must be combated.”7

  Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI exhorted Catholics to seek the truth, but Pope Francis makes them feel guilty for pursuing it. In his view, the crisis in the Church is due not to a betrayal of orthodoxy but to an emphasis on it. He rarely misses an opportunity to portray orthodox Catholics as unmerciful and unhinged. “It is amazing to see the denunciations for lack of orthodoxy that come to Rome,” he has said dismissively of Catholics worried about unsound catechesis in their dioceses.8

  To the extent that Francis’s Vatican condemns anyone, it is conservatives. Stop objecting to heterodoxy, he has lectured them: “If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist, if he wants everything clear and safe, then he will find nothing. Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal ‘security,’ those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer ex
ists—they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way, faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies.”9

  By condemning these Catholics, Pope Francis is implicitly condemning his predecessors, who urged the faithful to cleave to orthodoxy and value Catholic tradition and doctrinal fidelity.

  In a homily that almost perfectly anticipates Pope Francis’s caricaturing of orthodox Catholics as fundamentalists, Pope Benedict XVI said, “Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labeled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be ‘tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine,’ seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires.”

  The St. Gallen group, the cabal of liberal cardinals who were instrumental in Bergoglio’s election as pope, had long groused about the “fundamentalist” views of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. They bristled when Pope John Paul II wrote in his encyclical Veritatis Splendor that situation ethics reinforces the moral relativism widespread in society. Said Pope John Paul II: “An attitude of this sort corrupts the morality of society as a whole, since it encourages doubt about the objectivity of the moral law in general and a rejection of the absoluteness of moral prohibitions regarding specific human acts, and it ends up by confusing all judgments about values.” References to that document have been conspicuously absent from Pope Francis’s writings.

  Through Pope Francis, the St. Gallen group got its revenge in Amoris Laetitia, where the pope implicitly challenges Veritatis Splendor by stating that the avoidance of adultery is a mere “ideal,” which a Catholic can violate if he “discerns” that his circumstances and conscience justify it. “Hence it can no longer simply be said that all those in any ‘irregular’ situations are living in a state of mortal sin and are deprived of sanctifying grace,” Pope Francis wrote.

  Opposition to the Latin Mass

  At the beginning of Francis’s pontificate, an unnamed Vatican diplomat was quoted in the National Catholic Reporter as saying, “The traditional Latin Mass brigade is finished.”10 The remark wasn’t far off. Unlike his predecessors, Pope Francis has shown no particular attachment to the Church’s liturgical traditions—his indifference to rubrics are visible during his papal masses—and views liturgical conservatives with contempt.

  Under his pontificate, religious dedicated to the Church’s liturgical traditions have had to run for cover. One of Pope Francis’s first moves was to harass a growing traditionalist order in Italy called the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate, which had enthusiastically embraced Summorum Pontificum, Pope Benedict’s XVI order authorizing wider use of the traditional Latin Mass. Dismayed by the conservative direction of the order, Pope Francis authorized Vatican officials to meddle in the order’s affairs.

  These Vatican officials decreed: “the Holy Father Francis has directed that every religious of the congregation of the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate is required to celebrate the liturgy according to the ordinary rite and that, if the occasion should arise, the use of the extraordinary form (Vetus Ordo) must be explicitly authorized by the competent authorities, for every religious and/or community that makes the request.”11

  According to the Vatican correspondent Sandro Magister, this harassment of the order displeased Pope Benedict XVI. Magister reported that the “ban imposed by pope Bergoglio on the congregation of the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate against celebrating the Mass in the ancient rite has been an effective restriction of that freedom of celebrating in this rite which Benedict XVI had guaranteed for all” and that “It emerges from conversations with his visitors that Ratzinger himself has seen in this restriction a ‘vulnus’ [or wound] on his 2007 motu proprio Summorum Pontificum.”12

  “What Pope Francis did to the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate is disgusting,” said a monsignor interviewed for this book. Another high-ranking Church official interviewed for this book said that the pope’s treatment of orders like the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate has “emboldened” liberal bishops to harass conservatives in their dioceses. “Liberal bishops know they have the upper hand now,” he said.

  “Nobody wants to end up like the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate,” said a priest interviewed for this book. “Now is the time to lie low.”

  In various interviews and speeches, Pope Francis has made it clear that it wouldn’t bother him if the traditional Latin Mass movement died. He has mischaracterized Benedict’s rationale for authorizing wider use of it as a “prudential decision motivated by the desire to help people who have this sensitivity.” In fact, Benedict had authorized wider use of the traditional Latin Mass both for the sake of older Catholics and for the sake of future generations of Catholics, whom he feared wouldn’t have access to the liturgical riches of the Catholic patrimony.

  Pope Benedict XVI repeatedly spoke of the need to tighten up the liturgy after a period of liberalization in Vatican II’s wake. He called for a “reform of the reform.” Pope Francis is on record calling that movement “mistaken.”13

  He doesn’t want a reform of the reform. He supports all of the changes made to the Mass in the 1960s. After a Mass in 2015 commemorating Pope Paul VI’s decision to replace the traditional Latin Mass with the vernacular mass, Pope Francis commented, “Let us give thanks to the Lord for what he has done in his church in these 50 years of liturgical reform. It was really a courageous move by the church to get closer to the people of God so that they could understand well what it does, and this is important for us: to follow Mass like this.”14

  In his view, the interest among young Catholics in pre–Vatican II liturgical traditions constitutes empty nostalgia.

  “When we were discussing those who are fond of the ancient liturgy and wish to return to it, it was evident that the Pope speaks with great affection, attention, and sensitivity for all in order not to hurt anyone,” Czech archbishop Jan Graubner said to Vatican Radio. “However, he made a quite strong statement when he said that he understands when the old generation returns to what it experienced, but that he cannot understand the younger generation wishing to return to it.”

  Graubner quoted Pope Francis as saying, “When I search more thoroughly, I find that it is rather a kind of fashion. And if it is a fashion, therefore it is a matter that does not need that much attention. It is just necessary to show some patience and kindness to people who are addicted to a certain fashion.”15

  This dismissive view contrasts sharply with the view of Pope Benedict XVI, who interpreted youth interest as a sign of spiritual health. “Young persons too have discovered this liturgical form, felt its attraction, and found in it a form of encounter with the Mystery of the Most Holy Sacrifice particularly suited to them,” he wrote in Summorum Pontificum. “What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred for us too.”

  In 2016, Pope Francis gave an interview in which he reiterated his dim view of youth interest in the ancient liturgy, casting it as sinister: “I ask myself about this. For example, I always try to understand what’s behind the people who are too young to have lived the pre-conciliar liturgy but who want it. Sometimes I’ve found myself in front of people who are too strict, who have a rigid attitude. And I wonder: How come such a rigidity? Dig, dig, this rigidity always hides something: insecurity, sometimes even more…”16

  Even when members of the current Curia give voice to the liturgical concerns of the previous pope, Pope Francis makes sure to undercut their comments. Consider the humiliation that Cardinal Robert Sarah, who is prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, suffered after he endorsed the liturgical views of Pope Benedict XVI. He received a widely publicized rebuke from the pope after merely suggesting at a conference in 2016 that “It is very important that we return as soon as possible to a common orientation, of priests and the faithful turned
together in the same direction—eastwards, or at least towards the apse—to the Lord who comes.”

  Sarah’s statement set off a panic among the liturgical liberals around Pope Francis, and within days Sarah had been called on the carpet. Francis-friendly bishops, such as Cardinal Vincent Nichols of the United Kingdom, instructed their priests to disregard Sarah’s suggestion. Nichols sent them a letter saying that this is no time to “exercise personal preference or taste.” That was followed up by a Vatican “clarification,” which indicated obliquely that Sarah had been confronted by Pope Francis over the matter. Sarah was in effect told to knock off his talk of a “reform of the reform.” According to the pope’s spokesmen, that phrase is no longer to be used, as it is the “source of misunderstandings.”17

  According to the Tablet, a liberal Catholic weekly in the United Kingdom, “It is highly unusual for the Vatican to publicly slap down a Prince of the Church, yet not entirely surprising given how Cardinal Sarah has operated since his appointment to lead the Holy See’s liturgy department. There have been a series of incidents that reveal the cardinal is part of a faction making life difficult for this Pope: take, for example, the fact it took Cardinal Sarah’s department more than a year to implement Francis’ simple request that women should be included in the Holy Thursday foot-washing ritual.”18

  In October 2016, Cardinal Sarah received a fresh snub: Pope Francis dropped all twenty-seven of his department’s members and replaced them with a roster of liturgical liberals, including Piero Marini, a prominent opponent of traditionalists and an advocate of liturgical dance.

  “This almost total clean-out of an entire Congregation’s voting members in a single hit—unprecedented in Vatican history, so it seems—is also in effect a sharp rebuff to Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, the centerpiece of whose pontifical legacy was a restoration of tradition, dignity, and Latin in the Sacred Liturgy,” wrote Fr. Brian Harrison on the day it happened. “One is filled with a deep sense of foreboding as to what changes to the way we are expected to worship, and what possible undermining of Benedict’s liberation of the Traditional Latin Rite, are portended by today’s breathtaking papal purge.”19