Pope Francis is behaving like a Latin American dictator –
but the liberal media aren’t interested
by Damian Thompson
on his blog COFFEE HOUSE
THE SPECTATOR (UK)
July 12, 2017
At the end of June, Pope Francis dismissed Cardinal Gerhard Müller from his position as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) – arguably the most important position in the Catholic Church after that of the Pope himself, since the CDF is in charge of doctrine.
Müller was given no notice that the Pope was breaking from tradition by not renewing his five-year mandate – and no explanation. A few days later, on July 4, he explained what had happened in a long phone call to his friend Cardinal Joachim Meisner, one of four cardinals who had challenged Francis on the question of Communion for divorced and remarried Catholics.
Meisner was horrified to hear the details of Müller’s humiliation. And, that night, he died in his sleep at the age of 83.
Now Müller – who has always been careful never to question the Pope – has also broken with tradition. He has spoken angrily about the way he was treated – drawing attention to the fact that a pope who never misses an opportunity to uphold workers’ rights plays by very different rules inside the Vatican. [Thomspon goes on to quote what
Müller told the Bavarian newspaper Passauer Neue Presse - I won't repeat it as it has already been cited more than one in previous posts
on this thread.]
‘Within one minute’, note.
[Refers to Müller's words that his dismissal meeting took all of one minute.] And it turns out that Francis has a history of sacking people without explanation. In an article for
First Things magazine, the Italian journalist Marco Tossati fleshes out the story:
[Refers to the pope firing three CDF priests and refusing to explain to Mueller why. I won't repeat the citation either, because it has been posted here first with Tosatti's original story and then with a 1P5 account of Mueller's recent travails.]
This is not the behaviour of an unassuming pope who thinks of himself as ‘Bishop of Rome’ rather than supreme pontiff. It brings to mind his most authoritarian predecessors – or, indeed, some Latin American dictator who hugs the crowds and advertises his ostentatiously humble lifestyle while his lieutenants live in fear of his rages.
It’s difficult to explain, since Francis is a man consumed by his faith who drew up
an admirable plan for reforming the Curia [What exactly was admirable about it since it was mainly and almost exclusively concerned with structural changes and naming some trusted aides of the post to positions where he needs total control?] –
even if he’s made almost no progress in doing so.
Don’t expect the English-speaking media to enlighten you. Coverage in secular newspapers is patchy, biased and unreliable –
The Times [of London] is perhaps the worst offender – while
certain Catholic journalists who write about the Vatican appear to be taking dictation from a liberal faction in the Church that is trying to hijack this pontificate.
I say ‘hijack’, because the progressive churchmen who present themselves as Francis’s allies are pretending to be better connected than they are. The Pope frequently wrong-foots them by saying the opposite of what they expect.
That’s one of the points made by canon lawyer Dr Ed Condon in today’s Holy Smoke podcast discussion about the rapidly deteriorating situation in Rome.
audioboom.com/posts/6098534-is-pope-francis-turning-into...
Ed’s insights are fascinating – and invaluable, because he offers a plausible theory as to why a supposedly approachable pontiff is regarded as a bully by many of the people who work for him.
[Bergoglio famously insisted in one of his first interviews as pope that he won't change who he is because 'he is too old to change'. So we can say that with him ,WYSIWYG - and some of what we see is not just the narcissistic authoritarian curmudgeon that he appears to be, but also the bully who will not hesitate to use his position to run roughshod over his subordinates, and inevitably, the seemingly mal-educated boor with horrid bad manners that is behind the bully.
I sometimes wonder if his grandmother, whom he credits for raising him Catholic, ever lived long enough to see her grandson in this persona which from all accounts, he exhibited openly and consistently when he was named Provincial General of the Jesuits in Argentina in his mid-30s. One of his English biographers, Paul Vallely, theorizes that Bergoglio put on his persona of humility and simplicity in part to make up for that episode.]
P.S. Damian Thompson who, besides being associate editor of the UK Spectator, is also editorial director of the Catholic Herald, of which more than a decade ago, before William Oddie and the current editor Luke Coppen, he was the editor. (I don't know if his present title is a bigger role.) In any case, it turns out he wrote the cover story for this week's issue of the CH dated July 14, 2017, as seen below. And the online edition was gracious enough to share it with its followers one day earlier.
Catholics in the West have adopted the liberal-versus-conservative mindset that has fractured non-Catholic denominations.
Can anything stop Catholic infighting?
Liturgical squabbles, doctrinal rows, vicious public spats:
the Church is once again gripped by a 1970s-style factionalism
by Damian Thompson
July 13, 2017
My first parish priest was a little old man with pebble spectacles who looked like a gorgeously coloured beetle as he bent over the altar in his Roman chasuble. His name was Fr Albert Tomei; my family went to his tiny church – St Margaret’s, Carshalton Beeches, Surrey – on most Sundays between 1966 and 1972.
Those were the years of the great liturgical upheaval after Vatican II, but I can’t say that I noticed many changes at St Margaret’s. Admittedly, I wasn’t paying attention – but, even if I had been, there wasn’t much to see. Fr Tomei did not suddenly turn round to face the people:
he flatly refused to install what he called a “kitchen table” in the sanctuary.
He celebrated the New Mass, but usually in Latin. I didn’t listen to his sermons, but I gathered from things my father said on the drive back home that he never missed an opportunity to rail against the new services. My father thought this was bad form, even though he liked Fr Tomei, and from time to time we would escape to a more mainstream parish in Sutton, Wallington or Wimbledon.
When we moved from our Surrey suburb – so leafy that walking along the pavement was like hacking through the jungle – to grim Reading, we were faced with a similar situation. Fr Michael Nugent ran the parish of Christ the King as a benevolent dictatorship. He was almost a caricature of an old Irish PP, with a red face and a booming laugh; his improvised sermons weren’t very tautly constructed, to put it politely. (Not that many of the men in the congregation cared: they were outside having a smoke.)
His conservatism was not consistent, liturgically or politically: when Margaret Thatcher was elected leader of the Conservative Party, I remember him saying he could never vote for “that adulteress” (a reference to the fact that Denis Thatcher had briefly been married before). Five years later, “that wonderful woman” could do no wrong.
Fr Nugent celebrated Mass with visible joy: at the elevation his face shone and he blinked, as if the Host was illuminated. But there was a lot he didn’t like about the revised liturgy, and there was a distressing scene when someone tried to receive Communion in the hand. He would celebrate in Latin from time to time, but by the mid 1970s that was a rebellious thing to do. It didn’t help that the local bishop was the icily progressive Derek Worlock, who tried to force Fr Nugent into a brutal reordering of the sanctuary. (He failed, but of course it happened in the end.)
Again, our family would sometimes shop around. There was a modern, thickly carpeted church a few miles away where the Mass was uninspiring but the sermons mercifully short. The parish next to that was full-on 1970s trendy, with a game-show pastor and unctuous pastoral assistants; one visit was enough to send us back to Fr Nugent.
Catholics in this country really were a divided community during those years; one priest in the diocese used to amend pastoral letters so that they ended with the words “Derek, by the grace of God and his own cunning, Bishop of Portsmouth”. Even at my school, the Irish Brothers ranged from virtually Lefebvrist (Brother Fidelis) to virtually Methodist (Brother Joseph).
Yet there was no hint of civil war, because after the Council the conservatives were marginalised with incredible speed; I grew up assuming that I’d never attend a Tridentine Mass but that I would live to see women priests.
Fr Tomei, Fr Nugent and Brother Fidelis were not only on the wrong side of history but also on the wrong side of modernist Church bureaucrats, who were determined to see them squashed by the Holy Spirit. Traditionalists in particular were in no position to fight back, though they missed no opportunity to air their grievances. The bitterness of the Latin Mass brigade in those years, though understandable, did so much to damage their cause as any episcopal edict.
Then, thank God, the temperature lowered. Westminster went to the holy but crafty Basil Hume instead of the culture warrior Worlock.
In 1978, John Paul II became pope and turned the blowtorch of his charisma on destructive factions in the Church. The Old Mass was gradually rehabilitated. John Paul declared that the Church had no power to ordain women priests: an irreversible ruling that, I believe, has spared Catholics much pointless distress for centuries to come.
On the other hand, he made no attempt to recreate the pre-conciliar Church, and he established that Catholic orthodoxy can flourish independently of purely Western cultural norms.
Benedict XVI, contrary to expectations, did not try to purge the Church of liberals. His rehabilitation of the Tridentine liturgy was not an attempt to turn back the clock but, rather, to concentrate the minds of all Catholics on the cosmic timelessness of the Mass, irrespective of its transitory forms.
In other words, the years 1978-2013 were a period in which the wounds that were so visible during my childhood slowly healed. So it is disturbing, in 2017, to see them reopening.
I’m not going to blame Pope Francis for this, because in a small way I’ve been responsible for making things worse. At Mass last Sunday, I remembered a recent comment by a Lutheran minister: “That Damian Thompson isn’t necessarily wrong, but he is mean.”
[My unkind paraphrase: "That Jorge Bergoglio is often wrong, and he is always mean!"] Some dreadful mistakes have been made during this pontificate, and perhaps my sardonic articles and tweets have amplified their consequences.
On the other hand, a few years ago I did leave journalism for four years to do a PhD in the sociology of religion, and everything I learned during that time tells me that the Church is in trouble.
Specifically, Catholics in the West – and that includes those in the Vatican – have adopted the liberal-versus-conservative mindset that has fractured non-Catholic denominations. It’s as if Christians are required to choose between two set menus, in which social justice comes with a side salad of transgender blessings – or, alternatively, you can opt for solemn liturgy with free-market seasoning.
I’m exaggerating, but I hope you get my point. Secular culture wars have created a dichotomy that is meaningless to Catholics in Africa and Asia, who are often happy to celebrate Mass with exuberant, made-up rubrics but are at the same time as uncompromising as Cardinal Burke on issues of sexual morality.
I won’t presume to suggest a route out of this mess, but I can think of some necessary-but-not-sufficient steps that the Church should take as an insurance against going down the route of the Anglican Communion.
First, liberal Catholics must accept that they’re not going to get women priests or gay marriage. Ever. The Church’s ruling on these matters is absolutely definitive. [Don't speak too soon! Absolutely definitive for the Church, yes, but not for the church of Bergoglio which is what the world and most Catholics are getting! Prohibiting Communion for persons not in the required state of grace is absolutely definitive in the Church, too, but the church of Bergoglio says living in chronic sin can also be a 'state of grace' - just not what the Church calls a state of grace. But of course, Bergoglians don't bother with making any distinctions because they are foisting this deception that the church of Bergoglio is still 'the Church' but 'a new, improved model' of it! ]
Married priests fall into a separate category: I sometimes think that if Francis had pushed through this change, instead of entering the quagmire of divorce and Communion, he might have been surprised by how may orthodox Catholics supported him.
[But there are married priests and married priests. If, as in the case of the married priests who have passed over from the Anglican Church via the Ordinariates, they are already married, then fine, Anglicanorum coetibus allows that, just that they can't ever be Catholic bishops (which is how it is with married priests in the Orthodox Churches). But to allow priests ordained in the Catholic Church - who vow celibacy for life - to get married is, IMHO, unacceptable. It can only cause chaos at every level that I can think of. And it's not going to relieve the priest shortage in any significant way, either. It has nothing going for it.
On the other hand, Bergoglio appears to want to experiment with so-called viri probati, older men of proven virtue, most of whom may be married and have stable families now able to fend materially without them, who are willing at this point in their lives to serve as priests (I think however they would thereafter be prohibited form having conjugal relations, which is a wise ban). Cardinal Hummes and other Brazilian bishops have said this pope wants to try out this idea in the vast but sparsely-populated Amazonia region of Brazil, to serve as a template for expanding the practice worldwide as one way of helping relieve the shortage of priests everywhere.
Of course, we won't get to see how it works right away, because the viri have to be properly trained before they are ordained, which takes at least four years (to abbreviate their period of formation would be criminal!). So even the viri probati are not an immediate 'solution' (and it might be a useful exercise for a diocese in Western Europe or the Americas to do an informal survey of potential viri probati in their jurisdiction and get an idea of how many candidates there might be who would be willing to become priests!]
Second, the Tridentine Mass (I can’t bear the term “Extraordinary Form”) must not be banned again. That would be a betrayal of those traditionalist priests and lay people who stayed faithful to papal authority during the decades when they were treated as second-class citizens by their own pastors.
Third, traditionalists must stop fantasising that one day the whole Catholic world will return to the “timeless” Latin rituals of the pre-conciliar Church. It’s the Mass that’s timeless, not a particular cultural expression of it, however numinous.
Demand for the 1962 Missal may grow, but it will always be limited because there is almost no one left who grew up with it. [I don't think that in what's left of my lifetime, I will ever get to see the attendance at TLMs approach even 10%, say, of the worldwide attendance at the Novus Ordo. But I think Thompson under-estimates the number of younger priests and the not-inconsiderable number of younger people now attracted to the TLM, and I like to think these numbers can only grow. If it were not a distraction, I would make a count of the people age 30 and younger who attend the Sunday sung TLM at Holy Innocents, because right now, they seem to make up easily 50% or more of the congregation (strangely, the males outnumber the females in this group), and older people like me - 50 and older - are definitely in the minority. Not to mention that our parish priest himself, who celebrates the Mass beautifully, is only in his early 40s.]
Fourth – and here I can hardly avoid causing offence – reform of the Curia is desperately needed but won’t happen until its culture becomes more international and less Italian.
So many of the misfortunes that have befallen both Benedict XVI and Francis are rooted in the Italian way of doing things.
[Sure, Italians as a rule tend to be not as systematic as Germans, for example, nor as strait-laced as one thinks most British persons are, but Thompson and other Catholic observers of the Vatican have this unfair stereotype of Italians upon which they have been blaming the problems of the Curia for decades! The Curia is a bureaucracy - its problems are typical of all bureaucracies. Does it not tell its critics anything that no one can cite a pontificate in modern times when the Curia was ever considered comme il faut? It's the nature of bureaucracies to be generally inefficient if not dysfunctional.
And for all the exaggerations by commentators and reporters, they really have not presented any objective facts to prove that the Curias under John Paul II, Benedict XVI and now Francis, have been dysfunctional in the sense of not providing the bishops of the world the basic services expected from the Curia. Even Bergoglio as Archbishop, one year before he was elected pope, and at a time when not even he thought he would ever be pope, praised the Curia for the work they did for the bishops. (Though he forgot all that very quickly once he became pope.]
Finally, the Church needs to face up honestly to people’s fundamental objection to the Catholic faith. It has very little to do with sexual scandals or styles of worship. The problem is that doctrines such as transubstantiation and the Virgin Birth are hard to believe. These teachings are not negotiable – but, at the same time, they are less plausible to modern people than they were to our ancestors, whose imaginations were formed by societies that were naturally receptive to miracles and metaphysics.
[I don't know, but somehow, there must have been something in the way catechesis was taught to Catholic children in my generation (born at mid-20th century) and all the generations before that which made it seem like we imbibed the faith with our mother's milk, and never had to torture ourselves as grown-ups with existential, metaphysical and philosophical challenges to that faith. Or think of all the simple folk throughout history who lived the faith that they were born into (I do think this is significant, as much as the actual content of that faith into which one is born) as best as they could, accepting the facts of the Incarnation, virgin birth, Resurrection and Trans-substantiation without question and wholly 'on faith', literally.]
I’m not going to suggest arguments that will make these teachings accessible, because I struggle with them myself.
But the task can’t be accomplished without leaders with a passion for evangelisation and exceptional rhetorical gifts, untainted by factionalism and unconstrained by control-freak bureaucracy.
This is a huge challenge – and, sad to say, all the evidence suggests that we shall have to wait until the next pontificate before the Church can rise to it. In the meantime, damage limitation must be the order of the day, before we are all suffocated by the spirit of the 1970s.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 14/07/2017 04:37]