The Political Pope

by George Neumayr

  Those guiding the Holy See’s interface with politics today were born and bred in the Casaroli School. And they are busily replicating Casaroli’s accommodationist (or, if you prefer, less confrontational) formula. This seems clear, if unfortunately clear, in the Vatican’s diplomacy with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and in the Holy See’s refusal to describe what is afoot in Ukraine as a gross violation of international law: an armed aggression by one state against another. It seems evident in the welcome that was afforded Raúl Castro in the Vatican several months ago. Now, to judge from the just-concluded papal visit to Ecuador, Bolivia, and Paraguay, Casaroli 2.0 seems to be informing the Vatican’s approach to the new authoritarians of continental Latin America.41

  Even Pope Francis’s canonization of Pope John Paul II, a movement which began under Pope Benedict XVI, was seen as “manipulative,” according to German philosopher Robert Spaemann, insofar as Francis combined it with the canonization of Pope John XXIII in an attempt to pacify liberals in the Church.

  “It was already apparent that Francis views his predecessor Pope John Paul II from a critical distance when he canonized him together with John XXIII, even though a second required miracle was not attributed to the latter,” Spaemann has said. “It seemed as if the Pope wanted to relativize the importance of John Paul II.”42

  The Polish Church remains upset about Francis’s slighting treatment of John Paul II. “It is spoken about openly in private, but rarely in public,” writes Fr. Raymond de Souza. “If ever there was a contemporary Cause that deserved, as it were, a solo canonisation, it was that of John Paul, perhaps the most consequential historical figure of our time. Had Providence brought the two Causes to maturity at the same time, that would have been one thing, but it was altogether different to waive the requirements for John XXIII in order, it appeared, to diminish or to balance out the attention given to John Paul.”

  At the actual canonization ceremony, Pope Francis appeared indifferent. “It was conducted in such an understated fashion as to come off rather flat, despite the enormous number of bishops who came from all over the world. Pope Francis said next to nothing about John Paul, and nothing about Poland at all, despite the immense number of Poles in Rome,” according to de Souza.43

  A Worldly Vatican

  Respect for worldly opinion and secular prestige have also figured far more into this pontificate than the two previous ones. Pope Francis has accelerated canonization movements his predecessors stalled while blocking politically incorrect causes they supported. Croatian Catholics, for example, were disappointed to learn that the canonization cause of Cardinal Aloysius Stepinac has been suspended by Pope Francis out of fear of offending the Serbian orthodox. The victim of a Soviet disinformation campaign, Stepinac has long been the subject of smears. Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI rejected this communist-inspired propaganda. But Pope Francis is taking it seriously, telling Orthodox clerics that he is no “rush” to canonize Stepinac.44

  Meanwhile, his support for the canonization of Óscar Romero continues to win him points from the liberal elite. In El Salvador, supporters of Che Guevara call Romero the “saint of America,” but many conservatives feel ambivalence toward the pope’s drive to make him a saint.45

  Pope Francis is also winning praise for his “modernizing” of Vatican operations. Reporters walking around the Vatican have spoken of the rise of “God’s consultants,” a worldly group of advisers that Francis has hired. Vatican correspondent John Allen says Francis’s reliance on these advisers “represents a clear break with the Vatican’s traditional ambivalence about relying on secular expertise, on the grounds that secular values are inevitably part of the package… In the past the Vatican [showed]… an instinctive distrust of claims to specialized expertise from people who don’t share the moral and metaphysical worldview of Catholicism. They fear that while they might build a better mousetrap, they also might smuggle alien values and ways of doing business into the Church.”46

  The reliance on these experts backfired in the case of Francesca Chaouqui, a public relations consultant whom the Italian press dubbed “pope’s lobbyist” after Pope Francis handpicked her to work on a Vatican financial commission. In 2015, she was arrested by Vatican authorities after she was accused of leaking, in violation of Holy See laws, financial details to the Italian press.

  Traditionalists had protested her appointment, pointing to her lewd Facebook selfies and outré tweets. Francis, in “who am I to judge?” mode, ignored these complaints, and Vatican officials extolled “her authoritative leadership based on strong relational and communicative endowments.”

  Previous popes weren’t so easily impressed by the “communicative endowments” of a prospective Vatican employee. They were more interested in orthodoxy. But that is now the last, not the first, consideration at the Vatican. In the course of her Vatican trial, she was accused of trying to seduce a Vatican monsignor, a charge that she has vehemently denied.47

  In 2015, the Vatican hired PricewaterhouseCoopers to help reform its finances, but then mysteriously pulled its contract the following year, leading some to wonder if the talk of reform under Francis had been overblown. After some bad press, the contract was later renewed.48

  Some Vatican employees have complained about the unfair labor practices of a “social justice” pope. He tends to romanticize the sufferings of the proletariat, whom he calls the “pueblo.” “The word ‘people’ is not a logical category, it is a mystical category,” he has said. But as Crux reported, “some of the Vatican’s own lay employees would like to ask him, ‘What about us?’”

  “Most lay workers in the Vatican who spoke to Crux did so on background, because they’re not authorized to give interviews and also for fear of consequences on the job,” it was reported. “‘If it was up to Pope Francis, we’d all work for free,’ one Vatican employee said.”49

  On matters both large and small, Pope Francis has deviated from the path of his predecessors. His program has been not to complete their projects but to derail them and pursue his own. Like many priests of his generation, he had chafed under the conservative remnants in the post–Vatican II Church. As pope, he saw his chance to wipe them out. Whether he will succeed remains an open question. “While Pope Francis has had a great acceptance in milieus which otherwise have little to do with the Church, there exists a polarization within the Church,” allows Cardinal Christoph Schönborn.50

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Will Paul Correct Peter?

  In his Letter to the Galatians, St. Paul wrote that he corrected the first pope, St. Peter, “to his face because he clearly was wrong.” St. Paul objected to St. Peter’s imposition of obsolete Jewish customs on the Gentiles, saying to him, “If you, though, a Jew, are living like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?”

  St. Thomas Aquinas cited that confrontation as an example of how “prelates must be questioned, even publicly, by their subjects” for the good of the Catholic faith. St. Augustine, noting St. Peter’s acceptance of St. Paul’s rebuke, commented that “St. Peter himself gave the example to those who govern so that if sometimes they stray from the right way, they will not reject a correction as unworthy even if it comes from their subjects.”

  As the current pontificate fosters more and more confusion and error, Catholics, both lay and clerical, find themselves playing St. Paul to Francis’s St. Peter. Occasioning much of the criticism is the pope’s elastic view of the Church’s moral teachings, particularly its teaching on divorce.

  Before the second part of the Synod on the Family in 2015, a group of conservative cardinals wrote an anxious letter to Pope Francis, complaining in effect that the synod was in danger of turning into a debacle of theological relativism, manipulation, and phony collegiality.1

  “As the Synod on the Family begins, and with a desire to see it fruitfully serve the Church and your ministry, we respectfully ask you to consider a number of concerns we have heard from other synod fathers, a
nd which we share,” they wrote. In diplomatic language, they essentially accused him and his advisers of running a fixed synod for the sake of undermining Church teaching.

  The rules of the synod were designed to shut the conservative bishops out, they wrote: “The absence of propositions and their related discussions and voting seems to discourage open debate and to confine discussion to small groups; thus it seems urgent to us that the crafting of propositions to be voted on by the entire synod should be restored. Voting on a final document comes too late in the process for a full review and serious adjustment of the text.”

  “A number of fathers feel the new process seems designed to facilitate predetermined results on important disputed questions,” they continued. Beyond process questions, they worried, the synod was flirting with ideological novelties that would end up hurting the family and weakening the Church:

  Finally and perhaps most urgently, various fathers have expressed concern that a synod designed to address a vital pastoral matter—reinforcing the dignity of marriage and family—may become dominated by the theological/doctrinal issue of Communion for the divorced and civilly remarried. If so, this will inevitably raise even more fundamental issues about how the Church, going forward, should interpret and apply the Word of God, her doctrines and her disciplines to changes in culture. The collapse of liberal Protestant churches in the modern era, accelerated by their abandonment of key elements of Christian belief and practice in the name of pastoral adaptation, warrants great caution in our own synodal discussions.

  In Britain, 461 priests signed a letter petitioning Pope Francis and the synod fathers to remain true to the Church’s perennial teaching on marriage:

  We wish, as Catholic priests, to re-state our unwavering fidelity to the traditional doctrines regarding marriage and the true meaning of human sexuality, founded on the Word of God and taught by the Church’s Magisterium for two millennia… We affirm the importance of upholding the Church’s traditional discipline regarding the reception of the sacraments, and that doctrine and practice remain firmly and inseparably in harmony.2

  According to the Catholic Herald, “One signatory, who asked to remain anonymous, claimed there ‘has been a certain amount of pressure not to sign the letter and indeed a degree of intimidation from some senior Churchmen.’”

  Pope Francis ignored these letters. He accused the conservative bishops of surrendering to the “hermeneutic of conspiracy.”3 But there was nothing paranoid about their concerns. What they suspected would happen did: Pope Francis used the synod as a pretext to push a conclusion he had reached before it even began.

  A Church Divided

  “The Pope during the Synod will show whose side he is on,” said Archbishop Jan Paweł Lenga. “If he accepts the statement of those who want to distribute Holy Communion to the divorced, there would be a heresy in the Church, and if he does not accept, there could be a schism in the Church.” He added, “Either we are on the side of Christ, or on the side of the devil. There is no third option. The common people are sometimes closer to Christ than priests.”4

  “I wonder if he realizes how much confusion he is causing,” said an unnamed conservative cardinal to Reuters in 2016. Another high-ranking cleric said that this pontificate is alarming “not only tradition-minded priests but even liberal priests who have complained to me that people are challenging them on issues that are very straight-forward, saying ‘the pope would let me do this’ why don’t you?’”5

  A Catholic psychiatrist told the Washington Post that one of his patients quit therapy, saying, “I’m much more of a Pope Francis–Nancy Pelosi Catholic, and you’re an old-school, Pope John Paul II Catholic.”6

  “We have a serious issue right now, a very alarming situation where Catholic priests and bishops are saying and doing things that are against what the church teaches, talking about same-sex unions, about Communion for those who are living in adultery,” a church official said to the Washington Post. “And yet the pope does nothing to silence them. So the inference is that this is what the pope wants.”

  Providence Bishop Thomas Tobin commented, “In trying to accommodate the needs of the age, as Pope Francis suggests, the Church risks the danger of losing its courageous, countercultural, prophetic voice, one that the world needs to hear.”7

  Chaos erupted after the release of Amoris Laetitia, with bishops and national conferences dividing over its meaning and application. Some bishops are using it as a justification for loosening up their policies; others are ignoring it and maintaining traditional policies. In the United States, divorced-and-remarried Catholics can receive Communion in such cities as San Diego and Chicago but not in Philadelphia.

  “Priests are divided from one another, priests from bishops, bishops among themselves. There’s a tremendous division that has set in in the Church, and that is not the way of the Church. That is why we settle on these fundamental moral questions which unify us,” according to Cardinal Raymond Burke.8

  This chaos is not contrary to the pope’s program for the Church but a deliberate component of it.

  “What Francis has done in effect is give local bishops permission and space to try innovations that are more flexible, merciful, and pastoral,” said Lisa Cahill, a liberal theologian at Boston University. “Hence individual bishops or dioceses can come up with their own policies.”9

  According to Archbishop André-Joseph Léonard, former primate of Belgium, the pope and his advisers crafted intentionally fuzzy documents at the Synod on the Family as a form of heterodox misdirection: “I was a bit disappointed by the fact that they cultivated ambiguity around the most sensitive issues. Some bishops told me the texts were deliberately formulated in an ambiguous way, in order to leave them open to interpretation in different directions.”10

  Bishop Thomas Tobin has written sardonically, “The good news is, that because of this ambiguity, people can do just about whatever they want. The bad news is, that because of this ambiguity, people can do just about whatever they want. Go figure!”11

  In Europe, liberal national conferences have embraced the ambiguity. “The door is open,” said Cardinal Kasper. “There is also some freedom for the individual bishops and bishops’ conferences… things are not any more so abstract and permeated with suspicion, as it was the case in earlier times.”12 Cardinal Lehmann has said, “Francis wants us to explore new paths. Sometimes you don’t have to wait until the large tanker begins to move.”13

  Resisting the Revolution

  “The people who traditionally have been defenders of papal authority for the last 50 years suddenly find themselves out of step with the pope, and that’s a very strange situation,” Fr. Gerald Murray said to the Wall Street Journal. “This is an exploding land mine and I regret that it’s going to be a continual fight until it’s changed back to the old discipline. The unity of the church’s pastoral ministry is affected severely when you have contrasting practices in different places… There may not be a schism in the sense of a rejection of papal authority, but there is going to be a debate in the church about the directions in which the pope is taking the church and whether we should go along or we should resist.”14

  Some bishops, such as Cardinal Burke, have made it clear that they will not submit to Francis’s revolution. “I shall resist,” Cardinal Burke has said. “I can do nothing else. There is no doubt that it is a difficult time; this is clear, this is clear.”15

  “In Amoris Laetitia [308] the Holy Father Francis writes: ‘I understand those who prefer a more rigorous pastoral care which leaves no room for confusion.’ I infer from these words that His Holiness realizes that the teachings of the Exhortation could give rise to confusion in the Church,” said Cardinal Caffarra. “Personally, I wish—and that is how so many of my brothers in Christ (cardinals, bishops, and the lay faithful alike) also think—that the confusion should be removed, but not because I prefer a more rigorous pastoral care, but because, rather, I simply prefer a clearer and less ambiguous pastoral care.”16r />
  Under Pope Francis, the Church is moving down the same ruinous path as liberal Protestantism. In the 1960s, the British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge wrote that the Catholic Church was joining the “army of progress just when it is in total disarray.” Muggeridge found it mystifying that the Church, “having witnessed the ruinous consequences to its Protestant rivals of compounding with contemporary trends, should now seem set upon following a like course.” “Just when the Reformation appears to be finally fizzling out, another, it seems, is incubating in Rome,” Muggeridge wrote. “Luther escapes from John Osborne’s hands into—of all places—the Vatican.”17

  Fifty years later, the condition of the Church appears just as bleak, as Pope Francis tries to revive that failed formula of trendy political liberalism and fashionable heterodoxy. Indeed, Muggeridge’s metaphor has materialized in the Catholic celebrations of Martin Luther’s Reformation led by Pope Francis.

  Ross Douthat of the New York Times wonders what the “Francis effect” on the Church will be and proposes that sociologists of religion study dioceses that “are conducting clearer Francis-blessed experiments than others.”18 One simple place to start is the floundering archdiocese of Buenos Aires. According to the Latin American press, even the “Francis effect” in Argentina has been embarrassingly negligible, with the Buenos Aires seminary producing only three priestly ordinations in 2016.19