Freezing Out Conservatives, Promoting Liberals
According to the prominent German philosopher Robert Spaemann, churchmen connected to Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI have been rendered irrelevant by this pontificate. “He has excluded the Institute John Paul II for Studies on the Family from the pre-Synod consultations,” he said. “I wonder why he throws so many people out of the Vatican who had been called in by Benedict.”20 (In 2016, Pope Francis changed the leadership of the John Paul II Institute, telling its new leader to broaden the “life” agenda to include environmentalism.21)
“He has frozen out Benedict’s appointments,” says a Church insider, who asked to remain anonymous, in an interview for this book. “To the extent that they are still around, they are just figureheads at this point.” Indeed, Vatican observers speak of a “de-Ratzingerization” of the Curia, evident in Francis’s sacking of Benedict-friendly bishops from the crucially important Congregation of Bishops.
“Soon after his election, Francis removed two Americans—Cardinal Justin Rigali and Cardinal Raymond Burke—from the congregation. Both men were major players in constituting the American episcopacy during the papacy of Benedict XVI. Rigali also previously served as secretary of the congregation,” reported the National Catholic Reporter. “Many of the bishops appointed during that era formed the core of ‘culture warrior’ bishops who kept such issues as opposing same-sex marriage, the contraception mandate of the Affordable Care Act, as well as religious liberty foremost on the agenda of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The tone of the conference in recent years has become heavily legalistic both in terms of pastoral approach within the church and in battling in court over civil matters.”22
Pope Francis is stacking the Curia with determined progressives and giving plum assignments to dissenters who had been sidelined during Benedict’s pontificate. In 2015, Pope Francis made Fr. Timothy Radcliffe, one of the Dominican Order’s most flagrant liberals, a consultor to the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. Radcliffe had visited Bergoglio during his tenure as archbishop of Buenos Aires and then had a “long conversation” with him after he became pope. Radcliffe was pleased at his promotion “out of the blue.”23
Radcliffe is a perfect representative of the progressive ideology that Pope Francis seeks to normalize in the Church. Radcliffe is known for his open promotion of gay-rights ideology, his support for Communion for the divorced-and-remarried, and his insistence that the Church embrace female deacons and “loosen” its opposition to female priests and other feminist innovations. He has said that gay sex is “expressive of Christ’s self-gift.” He is heartened by the increasing support for gay civil unions under Pope Francis, and has urged Catholics to watch Brokeback Mountain and read “gay novels.” Catholics, he said, must “belong to each other across every theological boundary.” Gay priests, he argues, are among the “most impressive and dedicated” priests in the Church today and applauds Francis for appreciating their “gifts.”24
Many churchmen who hold the same views as Radcliffe have gone from the margins to the mainstream under Pope Francis.
“The liberals are in charge,” says a Church official interviewed for this book. Pope Francis is “like a low-level Argentinian pol” who surrounds himself with liberal cronies and refuses to brook dissent, he says.
“Discussions during the Synod on the Family revealed the determination with which a group of pastors and theologians do not hesitate to undermine the Church’s doctrinal cohesion. This group functions in the manner of a powerful, international, well-heeled, organized and disciplined party,” according to Monsignor Michel Schooyans. “The active members of this party have ready access to the media; they frequently appear unmasked. They operate with backing from some of the highest authorities in the Church. The main target of these activists is Christian morality, criticized for having a severity incompatible with the ‘values’ of our time. We must find ways which lead the Church to please, by reconciling its moral teaching with human passions.”25
“He has loosened the awful intellectual clamp imposed by John Paul II and Benedict XVI where people were afraid of being silenced,” Mary McAleese, the former president of Ireland, has said.26
That appears painfully true to conservative Catholics. In a sign of the free-wheeling atmosphere under Pope Francis, Johan Bonny, the bishop of Antwerp, explicitly citing the pope’s liberalism, has said that the Church should embrace gay relationships. “There should be recognition of a diversity of forms,” he said. “We have to look inside the church for a formal recognition of the kind of interpersonal relationship that is also present in many gay couples. Just as there are a variety of legal frameworks for partners in civil society, one must arrive at a diversity of forms in the church.”
Under previous popes, such a baldly heterodox claim would have generated a Vatican reprimand. In Bonny’s case, he not only escaped a reprimand but received a promotion. After his comments, he was given by the Vatican a position at the Synod on the Family. “Do not underestimate the significance of this,” said Professor Rik Torfs, a canon law expert and rector of the Catholic University of Leuven. “Bonny advocates a change from principles long held as unshakable, something no bishop could have done under the dogmatic pontificates of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI.”27
In 2016, Pope Francis entrusted the Pontifical Academy for Life to a social liberal, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, whose praise for the propagandistic television show Modern Family has confused Catholics.28 Under the direction of such worldly progressives, the Vatican has received criticism for its unreliable documents. Conservative Catholics, for example, protested the risqué and misleading content in sexual education materials that the Vatican distributed at World Youth Day in Poland in 2016.29 The materials encouraged the use of sexually explicit films as occasions for discussion and neglected to highlight Church teaching. “It’s bad enough when Planned Parenthood pushes perverse forms of sex education into our schools. For the Vatican to jump on that bandwagon is a nightmare scenario,” said Judie Brown, president of the American Life League.30
Pope Francis’s post-synodal apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia marked a theological reversal from Pope John Paul II’s Familiaris Consortio, which he wrote in 1981. That reversal may go down as one of the most historically significant moments of his papacy and is likely to reverberate through the Church for years to come.
In Familiaris Consortio, Pope John Paul II had explicitly rejected access to Communion for the divorced and remarried and reaffirmed moral absolutes against the objections of situation ethicists. Amoris Laetitia strikes at the roots of his work by encouraging the “help of the sacraments” for the divorced-and-remarried, by emphasizing conscience over magisterial teaching, and by obscuring the distinction between mortal and venial sin.
Cardinals who were close to Pope John Paul II have been dismayed by Amoris Laetitia. Cardinal Carlo Caffarra, the former archbishop of Bologna, has described the document as “objectively unclear” and bemoans that it has given rise to a “conflict of interpretations ignited even among bishops.”31
“What has been certain before has become problematic,” wrote Jude Dougherty, the former head of Catholic University’s philosophy department. “Pope Francis’ ambiguous teaching on marriage and the family as well as on other matters lends itself to interpretation by a secular media all too willing to promote a progressive interpretation of any document, indicating that the Church has changed its former teaching.”32
It is commonly said by the media that Francis’s pontificate is one of “mercy.” But in fact he is teaching Catholics that they don’t need mercy, for they haven’t sinned. Pope John Paul II had anticipated this problem when he wrote in Veritatis Splendor, “It is quite human for the sinner to acknowledge his weakness and to ask mercy for his failings; what is unacceptable is the attitude of one who makes his own weakness the criterion of the truth about the good, so that he can feel self-justified, without even the need to have
recourse to God and his mercy.”
In other words, if living in a state of adultery doesn’t constitute “mortal sin” and doesn’t deprive one of “sanctifying grace,” as Pope Francis says in Amoris Laetitia, why would anyone need mercy?
Cardinal Martini’s Dream Realized
“Proselytism is solemn nonsense,” Pope Francis said to the Italian atheist Eugenio Scalfari after reassuring him that he didn’t want him to convert to Catholicism. Pope Francis’s opposition to Catholic evangelization is impossible to square with the message of Dominus Iesus, the 2000 document issued by Joseph Ratzinger and approved by Pope John Paul II, which said “If it is true that the followers of other religions can receive divine grace, it is also certain that objectively speaking they are in a gravely deficient situation in comparison with those who, in the Church, have the fullness of the means of salvation.” That document also sought to “rule out, in a radical way… a religious relativism which leads to the belief that ‘one religion is as good as another.’”
The members of the St. Gallen group disdained that document and pushed for the election of Bergoglio in the hopes of neutralizing it. Cardinal Walter Kasper openly criticized that document, calling it an “unfortunate affirmation.”33 Kasper now celebrates that under Francis the Church enjoys a diversity of belief and practice suppressed by previous popes and that Catholic evangelization no longer occurs. “So ‘the door is open’ for admission of the divorced and remarried to the sacraments,” Kasper has said. “There is also some freedom for the individual bishops and bishops’ conferences. Not all Catholics think the way we Germans think. Here [in Germany] something can be permissible which is forbidden in Africa. Therefore, the pope gives freedom for different situations and future developments.”34
Pope Francis’s decision in 2013 to establish a special Council of Cardinals to advise him was an implicit rebuke to his predecessors, who had been criticized by the Catholic left for “centralizing” the Church. Pope Francis found the idea for this council of cardinals in the work of the Milanese cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, who was one the chief critics of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI.
Martini was a loud supporter of “democratizing” the Church and proposed to further it by making the Church more “synodal.” Martini claimed that the Church was “200 years out of date” and that it should adjust its teachings to the philosophy and culture of the post-Enlightenment West.
Giving credit to Martini for the idea behind the Council of Cardinals, Pope Francis made a revealing comment about its significance: “This is the beginning of a Church whose organization is not only vertical but also horizontal. When Cardinal Martini spoke about this and emphasized the role of the Councils and Synods, he knew only too well how long and difficult the road ahead in that direction would be.”
Marco Garzonio, who is a biographer of Martini, has written that the liberal Church of Pope Francis represents the realization of Martini’s dream for a more temporally minded church:
Martini believed in and never gave up on the “dream,” which Bergoglio is now trying to get onto its feet so that it can be turned into reality.
In the interview of August 8, 2012, published in “Corriere della Sera” on September 1, the day after his death, Martini, with the grave tone of the testamentary bequest and the prophetic admonition, also indicated the practical means: the pope should surround himself with twelve bishops and cardinals if he wants the barque of Peter not to be submerged by internal waves and by a society that no longer believes in it, two hundred years behind as it is on issues like the family, the young, the role of women (this being a topic on which Pope Francis has promised to speak more).
Garzonio added that one of the pope’s comments—that God is not “Catholic”—comes straight from Martini’s work: “In 2007 Martini said in the book-interview ‘Nighttime conversations in Jerusalem’: ‘You cannot make God Catholic. God is beyond the limits and definitions that we establish.’ Many there were who tore their garments. In the Catholic world this seemed to some almost a blasphemy.”35
Supporting Liberal Nuns
Pope Benedict XVI attempted to address the problem of politically and theologically liberal nuns in the United States. It has been an open secret for decades that American nunneries operate as centers of left-wing dissent. To take just one example, Sister Carol Keehan, who makes more than a million dollars a year as a health care lobbyist, helped Barack Obama pass Obamacare with its contraceptive mandate. Pope Benedict XVI had sent a team of Vatican officials to conduct a doctrinal investigation of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. The expectation was that that investigation would result in a serious orthodox reform of the organization.
No such reforms ever took place. In 2015, Pope Francis pulled the plug on the investigation and let it be known through his aides that he had no intention of arresting the liberalization of U.S. nuns. Churchmen around Pope Francis indicated their displeasure at the investigation, with Boston cardinal Seán O’Malley going so far as to call Benedict’s investigation a “disaster.”
The liberal media was thrilled by this turn of events. The New York Times ran a story in 2015 titled “Vatican Ends Battle with US Catholic Nuns’ Group,” with a picture of the nuns, bereft of habits, meeting with Pope Francis. The story noted that Francis had “abruptly” ended Benedict’s investigation.
“Under the previous pope, Benedict XVI, the Vatican’s doctrinal office had appointed three bishops in 2012 to overhaul the nuns’ group, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, out of concerns that it had hosted speakers and published materials that strayed from Catholic doctrine on such matters as the all-male priesthood, birth control and sexuality, and the centrality of Jesus to the faith,” it reported. “But Francis has shown in his two-year papacy that he is less interested in having the church police doctrinal boundaries than in demonstrating mercy and love for the poor and vulnerable—the very work that most of the women’s religious orders under investigation have long been engaged in.”
“He met with them himself for almost an hour, and that’s an extravagant amount of papal time,” Eileen Burke-Sullivan, a feminist theologian at Creighton University said to the Times. “It’s about as close to an apology, I would think, as the Catholic Church is officially going to render.”36
“Radical Nuns Okayed by Pope Francis” was among the headlines Francis’s whitewash of the group had produced. Officials under Pope Benedict XVI had spoken about the “doctrinal errors” and “secular mentality” of U.S. nuns. But the final report on them produced by Francis’s Vatican muted these criticisms and ended up praising their political liberalism, likening it to Francis’s. U.S. nuns, according to the report, “resonate with Pope Francis’ insistence that ‘none of us can think we are exempt from concern for the poor and for social justice.’”37
It is no accident that Pope Francis in 2016 made a critic of Benedict’s investigation of U.S. nuns, Archbishop Joseph Tobin, a cardinal, a promotion not lost on the liberal Catholic press, which warmly recalled Tobin’s role in protecting the nuns.
“Tobin is a former superior general of the worldwide Redemptorist religious order, who served from 2010 to 2012 as the number two official at the Vatican’s Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, better known as the ‘Congregation for Religious,’ during the time when the Vatican was conducting two separate investigations of American nuns,” wrote John Allen. “Tobin was publicly critical of those probes, suggesting they had been launched without dialogue or consultation with the women religious, and behind the scenes that didn’t always sit well with some of the prelates who had pushed for them in the first place. Many observers believed at the time his 2012 transfer to Indianapolis, before the usual five-year term in a Vatican office was up, reflected some unhappiness with his more conciliatory line.”38
A Church insider interviewed for this book called the Tobin promotion “a direct poke in the eye to Burke,” a reference to Cardinal Raymon
d Burke, who had disagreed with Tobin’s opposition to the investigation.
While keeping his hands off orders of politically liberal nuns, he is seeking to “reform” orders of contemplative nuns. In 2016, he issued a binding document governing their orders. Conservatives balked at it, seeing it as an attempt to force traditional houses of contemplative nuns to conform to the liberal regime of Francis.39 “This is a scary document. It could kill off the lifeblood of the church,” said a priest interviewed for this book.
Pope Francis appointed the liberal Brazilian João Braz de Aviz to head up the Vatican’s congregation for religious life. Oblivious to the fact that liberal religious orders are dying, Braz de Aviz has lectured formation directors obtusely, “Do not distance yourself from the great lines of the Second Vatican Council.” He holds that “those that are distancing themselves from the council to make another path are killing themselves—sooner or later, they will die. They will not have sense. They will be outside the church. We need to build, using the Gospel and the council as a departure point.”40 In fact, the religious orders most suspicious of the liberal interpretation of Vatican II favored by Pope Francis and his aides are flourishing.
On matters both doctrinal and political, Pope Francis is breaking with the direction of his predecessors. In the area of diplomacy, Pope Francis is pursuing policies of pacifism and appeasement, which represent a significant departure from the policies of the John Paul II era. As Pope John Paul II biographer George Weigel has written, “the contemporary Vatican seems to have forgotten some crucial lessons from the teaching and diplomacy of the saint who came to Rome from Cracow and became the most consequential pope of the second half of the second millennium.” Francis’s Vatican, wrote Weigel, has embraced the appeasement policies of Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, who served as a leading diplomat during the Cold War and favored “détente” with the Soviet Union:
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