THE GALAXY OF DISSENT
I must warn beforehand that I am forced to insert a lot of material to explain and clarify many issues that the writer of this article only
refers to incompletely – on the assumption that all his readers will necessarily know what he is referring to. Such incomplete information
fails to provide the appropriate context for the points he is trying to make and thus fails to convey their full significance, or at best,
tends to downplay this significance. On the whole, it seems quite clear that the writer, unfortunately, was unqualified to tackle the
topic he was assigned. Moreover, his sampling is necessarily incomplete and understandably weighted towards the Italian opposition.
La Verita (The Truth) is an Italian newspaper begun in September 2016 in opposition to the ultra-liberal government of then Prime
Minister Matteo Renzi. The newspaper's mission statement said "it aspires to be a watchdog as in he journalism of the English-speaking
world - defending serious and resasonable positions even at the cost of unpopularity, and biting at the heels all enemies of truth and of
honesty". One hopes La Verita does not turn out to be like its namesake Pravda (Russian for 'truth), which was the official newspaper
of the Soviet Communist Party and was anything but 'the truth'.]
It says something that an Italian secular newspaper picks up the not-insignificant fact of the not-inconsiderable opposition to Jorge
Bergoglio whose expressions proliferate on the Internet and also appear in some 'mainstream' Catholic media. The article and its
accompanying graphic appear to be a conscious but non-partisan echo of a surprising article in October 2016 by La Stampa's senior
Vaticanisti, Andrea Tornielli and Giacomo Galeazzi (and therefore prime movers of the newspaper's VATICAN INSIDER online initiative),
who however undermined their objectivity by their title "Those Catholics against Francis who adore Putin", using a totally irrelevant
and false qualification of anti-Francis Catholics!
The galaxy of Catholics who oppose the Pope
by Ignazio Mangrano
Translated from
May 17, 2017
Internet sites, blogs, periodicals, books. There is a Catholic universe that is unable to ‘harmonize’ with Pope Francis. And it is not just the world that is indiscriminately tagged traditionalist or conservative but a movement that opposes a hyper-idolatrous Bergoglian lobby, and which cannot understand or accept the actions and statements of this pope whom they find to be a willing prey to populist secular themes while ignoring the more profound issues of Catholic doctrine.
[Not so much’ ignoring the more profound questions’, but in general, ignoring essential parts of Catholic doctrine which he does not agree with!] And their criticisms and doubts
[Nay, PROTESTS!] are being manifested more and more openly.
One can no longer count the criticisms written against this pope by a band of militant opponents, especially on the Internet, who protest his most obvious choices - from being a neo-environmentalist to being a totally uncritical 'friend of Islam’,
Giuliano Ferrara
[editor of the daily newspaper Il Foglio, and one of Benedict XVI’s famous ‘devout atheist’ followers] writes about a liquid Catholicism evident in the church of Bergoglio. Antonio Socci accuses the pope of choosing to keep silent on the real issues of the faith. Sandro Magister underscores the ambivalence of the Vatican lobby. Other Vatican observers criticize the pope for his apparent efforts to reach a deal with the Chinese Communist government at the expense of mainland China’s underground Church.
But the questions do not just come from traditionalist or conservative Catholics. Even
Newsweek [examining this pope’s obvious secular priorities at the time of his visit to the United States in September 2015] entitled its cover story
‘Is the pope Catholic?’ [in what was not a rhetorical question].
The galaxy on the worldwide web that is critical of this pope has already drawn the interest of specialized observers who, however, are primarily
bent on seeking to ‘ghetto-ize’ the Bergoglio opponents into an insignificant though indubitable reality. But their loyal efforts to defend the pope, sometimes in a manner that is too adulatory, under-estimate what is very evident to anyone who has eyes.
What are the sites, and who is behind them? And what do they have against this pope?
Anti-pope opposition certainly was not born with this Argentine pope. The most recent example we can cite would be Blessed Paul VI, who in 1968, encountered orchestrated opposition which was, if anything, more ferocious than that mounted today against Bergoglio.
In the pre-Internet world, theologians, prelates, intellectuals and the media went wild after the publication of
Humanae Vitae, the encyclical in which Paul VI proclaimed the Church’s NO against artificial contraception.
Entire episcopal conferences, like that of Belgium, openly defied the pope on this. In the Belgian bishops’ message of opposition, notable was that of Cardinal Leo Suenens, friend of Paul VI and one of his Grand Electors, whose criticism of the pope was far more harsh than the DUBIA expressed last year by four cardinals against positions expressed by Bergoglio in his Apostolic Exhortation
Amoris laetitia. “Rarely has a recent Magisterial text become such a sign of contradiction as
Humanae vitae”, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger has written of that white-hot controversy.
But if the opposition to Papa Montini on HV was from progressivist circles, those who oppose Bergoglio today are those who are routinely called ‘convervatives’ or ‘traditionalists', but in fact they are those Catholics most concerned about protecting the doctrine of the faith and its further understanding by the faithful in the context of continuity with everything that has gone before.
The criticisms against the pope who described himself as someone summoned ‘from the ends of the earth’
[quite an exaggeration to describe Argentina which since the late 19th century, has prided itself as being so European that they consciously made their capital Buenos Aires into ‘the Paris of Latin America] began almost from the moment he first appeared on the central loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica on March 13, 2013, as the newly-elected pope.
One might perhaps identify the first significant signal of the opposition to Bergoglio in a book written by Italian journalists Alessandro Gnocchi, Mario Palmaro and Giuliano Ferrara in early 2014, with an ironically eloquent title
“Questo Papa piace troppo” (This Pope is much too well-liked)
[for the wrong reasons, obviously, in the authors’ view].
The writers clearly distanced themselves from a Pontiff whose major positions were too ‘pop’, but not ‘pope’ enough in matters essential to Catholicism. They underscored, among other things, that
“there is no homily, there is no crowd-drawing event, there is no interview in which he does not turn his back on a faith that has prided itself on its rigorous relationship with reason – and when this element is disseminated to the very peripheries of the Church, it produces a Catholicism without doctrine or reason, but rather emotional, sentimental, generically spiritual, and marking the birth of a liquid Catholicism”. [‘Liquid’, that is, as opposed to the rock-like firmness and solidity of the Catholic faith since the Church was founded by Jesus Christ more than 2000 years ago.]
Then there was
«Non è Francesco» [He is not Francis] by journalist and Catholic author Antonio Socci
[whose title may be translated on two levels: 1) He is not a Francis of Assisi despite all the show of ‘poverty’ and ‘humility’, and 2) He is not Pope Francis either because, in Socci’s view, there are a number of significant factors that cast doubt on the legality of his election, not the least because Benedict XVI may not have resigned out of his own free wll, in which case, he is still the Pope].
The book is a stinging ‘
J’accuse’ about supposed manipulations during the Conclave that elected Bergoglio, but more generally, a denunciation of
the doctrinal and pastoral distance that separates this pope from his predecessors.
Socci, with more than 60,000 followers on Facebook, may be considered as the most active and implacable of Bergoglio’s critics today. Among the major issues Socci has with this pope
[In fairness, Socci started out as generally noncommittal and objective in the first few months of the pontificate] are
- the interviews Bergoglio has given to Eugenio Scalfari
[who has reported a number of startlingly anti-Catholic statements by Bergoglio which were never denied by the Vatican, which instead featured Scalfari’s reportage in the ‘Documents’ section of the web pages dedicated to the reigning pope in the Vatican website, and has included those reports in Vatican-published anthologies this pope’s now dime-a-dozen interviews];
- the pope’s ‘ecological’ encyclical
Laudato si, where he ridicules the pope’s concern for the survival of algae, worms, insects and reptiles, and the encyclical’s detailed instructions on garbage recycling and warnings against the use of air-conditioning; and
- the pope’s failure to attribute violence and terrorism to Muslims. These are the principal themes Socci hammers on to manifest his objections to this pope’s statements and actions.
Sandro Magister,
L’Espresso’s longtime Vaticanista, in his blog
[it continues to be hosted by that weekly magazine, although he has been deprived of the site www.chiesa that he ran for 15 years to disseminate the articles he writes for the magazine], also raises many issues he finds problematic with this pontificate.
One in particular made much noise. In the summer of 2013, Magister published the article "Ricca and Chaouqui: Two enemies in the house" questioning the high-profile papal appointments of these two persons.
The pope who famously said “Who am I to judge…?’
[precisely when asked about Ricca’s case] yet claims he wants to fight a homosexual lobby in the Vatican, had named Mons. Ricca as ‘spiritual adviser’ of the Vatican ‘bank’, IOR.
But the Monsignor carried some baggage with him - a homosexual history which included tumultuous police reports regarding his last assignment abroad in Montevideo, Uruguay
[where he lived with his Swiss male lover, whom he also managed to get employed at the Vatican nunciature where Ricca worked as a middle-level diplomat. Recalled to the Vatican, he was named by his employer, the Secretariat of State, as manager of the residence-hotels owned by the Vatican in Rome, including Casa Santa Marta within the Vatican itself, and the downtown hotel used by many visiting bishops including then Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio when they were in Rome.] Ricca’s history appeared to openly contradict Bergoglio’s vaunted desire to ‘clean up’ and reform the Roman Curia.
On the second person, Francesca Chaoqui – subsequently convicted by a Vatican court for her role in ‘Vatileaks-2’ – Magister asked, at the time she was appointed by the pope to be a member of the commission to study and propose administrative reorganization at the Vatican, how the pope could have personally named her, when the Secretariat of State was well aware and forewarned of Chaoqui’s ‘loquacity’.
[Perhaps being notoriously and irrepressibly loquacious himself, Bergoglio did not think this was any problem at all. Except that Chaoqui on the social media and in feeds to Italy’s #1 gossip column had, in the past, accused Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone of never-proven malfeasances, and worse, had been spreading rumors about Benedict XVI’s impending death from some lethal disease months before his resignation. Well, the Vatican got exactly what Magister had warned about. Chaoqui, who theoretically had unlimited access to any Vatican documents as a member of the Bergoglio Commission, also had her husband hired as one the Vatican’s webmasters. All of which facilitated her access to documents that she subsequently provided to a couple of Italian journalists who went on to write a book, individually, about questionable financial happenings behind the scenes even in the Bergoglio Vatican. For this, she was convicted to some jail time by a Vatican court. ]
Another major area of disagreement with this pontificate’s political line is its efforts to reach an agreement with the Communist Chinese regime, a problem that has lasted for decades and which this pope seems to wish to ‘resolve’ as soon as possible. At stake is the pope’s right to name bishops and continuing Chinese interventions into the affairs of the Church in China.
[The writer does not even bring up the fact that the regime has been doing this through the so-called Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association (CPCA) established in 1957 by the Religious Affairs Bureau to exercise state supervision over mainland China's Catholics, in effect creating an official ‘national’ Catholic church completely independent of the Pope and the Vatican. This unyielding state control – which alternates between episodes of outright persecution which includes imprisonment and death for Catholic bishops and priests and, during Benedict XVI’s Pontificate, agreeing to some of his Episcopal appointments – led to the so-called ‘underground Church’ in China, in which Catholics faithful to Rome, have been practicing their faith in secrecy to avoid being persecuted.]
Although in a low key, AsiaNews, the news agency of the Pontifical Institute for External Missions [PIME from its Italian acronym), currently headed by Fr. Bernardo Cervellera, has not made a secret of its doubts about an accord which it fears the Bergoglio Vatican may be trying to reach with the Chinese regime - a
t an unacceptable cost to the Church, in which ultimately, it will be the Chinese government, not the pope, who will have the last word on episcopal nominations.
This is a theme also hammered on by retired Vaticanista Marco Tosatti who has been very vigilant about Church affairs on his blog
Stilum Curiae. This former staffer of
La Stampa [the Italian newspaper which launched the VATICAN INSIDER website edited by its senior Vaticanista today, Andrea Tornielli, an all-but-official spokesman for the reigning pope] does not mince words in his almost daily criticisms – from the Vatican’s takeover of the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate and the power grab at the Order of Malta, to the intrigues that marked the two Bergoglian ‘family synods’, to this pope’s appointments of cardinals and bishops who are almost to a man persons who think like him.
One other veteran Vaticanista who comments with parrhesia on the problems within the ‘Sacred Palaces’
[the venerable Italian term ‘Sacri Palazzi’ to describe the Vatican should not, properly, apply to Bergoglio’s preferred residence, the very secular four-star hotel deceptively called Casa Santa Marta] is journalist Giuseppe Rusconi who, on his blog
Rosso Porpora, uses the term Bergoglio 'thurifers’ [incense bearers] to refer to the whole mediatic and ecclesiastical world who are more concerned with toadying up to the reigning pope rather than rendering service.
Recently, Rusconi started a public ‘debate’ with retired Vaticanista Luigi Accatoli, a Bergoglio fan, over the current situation in the Church, in which they do not resort to false ecclesiastical prudence.
[This is something I have completely missed and must look into.]
On the eve of this pope’s trip to the United States in 2015, Newsweek – which cannot be suspected of anti-Bergoglio sentiments – entitled its cover story “Is the pope Catholic?” Even more explicit, Damian Thompson, writing in the weekly British conservative magazine, The Spectator, has written an article entitled “The pope against the Church: The anatomy of a civil war”.
There are two points of the iceberg [of anti-Bergoglio sentiment] on the web which are important to United States Catholics. Edward Pentin, writing for the
National Catholic Register which is a part of the Catholic media empire built by the late Mother Angelica, has been offering reports and analyses in depth of the divisions that run through the Church in the pontificate of Bergoglio.
He has written many scoops on the behind-the-scenes events in the Berrgoglio Vatican’s recent moves to gain control of the Sovereign Order of Malta
[even if the latter is, under international law, a sovereign state with equal status as the Vatican], an affair in which the Holy See seems to have behaved like a bull in a china shop. But there is also the questionable matter of a recent multi-million legacy to the Order
[which has always been very rich in its own right, having inherited upon its establishment in the 9th century the considerable patrimony of the medieval Knights Templar. However, the legacy was kept secret from the then Grand Master by the Grand Chancellor – i.e., Prime Minister – who had been dismissed and then reinstated by the pope ,at the root of the Vatican power grab, and whose protectors in the Vatican are very much involved in the receipt of the legacy.].
And there is the magazine FIRST THINGS
[which I would never have named as a ‘major’ anti-Bergoglio player, but the writer of this article is obviously not aware of many important facts about the ambitious subject he has chosen to write about! Before FIRST THINGS, I would have pointed out CATHOLIC WORLD REPORT], a magazine whose contributors include Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia, philosopher Roger Scruton, and Catholic lay commentators like Robert Royal and George Weigel. It is a think tank that has never hidden its editorial ‘perplexity’ over the statements and pastoral practices of this pope.
[Actually, FIRST THINGS was quite the traditional loyalist to the pope (any pope) in the first two years of the pontificate. But with Amoris laetitia, its editor broke his impartiality.]
Then there is the blog OnePeterFive, a militant site in the traditionalist wing, which has had many exclusive interviews with Bergoglio opponents such as that with Cardinal Caffarra in which the emeritus Bishop of Bologna said:
“Either sexual relations outside marriage are licit – which would be against the teaching of the Church; or adultery is not an intrinsically disordered act, and therefore there could be circumstances in which it is not disordered – which goes against both the tradition and the doctrine of the Church. I believe that the Holy Father must clarify such a situation”.
[Glaringly missing from the writer’s description of Cardinal Caffarra – and a major indication of how he appears to be supremely underqualified to write an article with its ambitious scope - is, of course, that Caffarra is one of the Four Cardinals of the DUBIA, and that in fact, the statement he quotes from Caffarra precisely had to do with those DUBIA which this pope apparently has no intention whatsoever of answering.]
Then there are the Catholic news portals like Infocatolica [a Spanish site] (which has more than 315,000 followers on Facebook), and which potentially reach a very wide public. Or the American LIFESITE NEWS, which is primarily interested in questions of bioethics and more generally, the so-called ‘non-negotiable principles’ which have been brushed aside by Bergoglio. There is kath.net, the German portal that has published many important interviews with German intellectuals, especially Robert Spaemann and Josef Seifert, who have been very critical of Bergolio’s
Amoris laetitia.
There are numerous blogs and sites associated with traditional liturgy, like the US-based
Rorate caeli, or the Italian
Messa in Latino, run by a group of priests and laymen who are promoting the ‘reform of the liturgical reform’ begun by Benedict XVI’s motu proprio
Summorum Pontificum.
This galaxy of blogs and sites, many of them by priests, have been advocating on the web a more attentive compliance by the faithful with the Doctrine, Tradition and Magisterium of the Church
[as it always was pre-Bergoglio].
In French, there is
Benoit-et-moi and
Salon Beige, and
Belgicatho. In Spanish,
La Buhardilla de Jeronimo [the writer does not seem au courant with so many other Spanish traditionalist sites], and in Italian,
Corrispondenza Romana and
Radici Cristiane, both edited by church historian Roberto De Mattei;
Chiesa e post-Concilio by the scholar Maria Guarini;
Riscossa Cristiana, edited by Paolo Deotto, and which hosts Alessasndro Gnocchi’s weekly commentary [in the form of an expansive answer to a reader’s question that best touches on the issue of the week]; and the site of Maurizio Blondet, an ex-
Avvenire Vaticanista, who specializes in against-the-mainstream commentary on geopolitical themes affecting the Church.
[Mangrano also mentions, without description, the Italian sites Cordialiter, Una Fides, and Scuola Ecclesia Mater, which I must admit I have not come across.]
Even in their variety of viewpoints and positions, those who oppose this pope in some way are very direct and clear in their opposition, in some cases, full frontal confrontation.
Resolutely harsh is the Italian portal
Radio Spada, for instance, which describes itself as ‘trenchant but scrupulous’ and is run by a number of young intellectuals, some of them with sedevacantist views (according to whom the pope now in place is not a legitimate pope, and that therefore, the Chair of Peter - the Holy See in general - is therefore vacant), others Lefebvrist.
Not to mention a myriad of anonymous blogs which disseminate anti-Bergoglio articles and feed a
mare magnum (large ocean) of opinion, in which not uncommonly, the opinions transgress the limits of decency.
One cannot fail to note the website of
Una Voce, an association which is a very active promoter of the traditional Mass. And the sites of the FSSPX – the multilingual
DICI, and
Porte Latine in French – as well as those of the society’s national branches.
[Notably missing from Mangrano’s survey are various sites promoting traditional marriage and family values, like VOICE OF THE FAMILY and FATIMA PERSPECTIVES, which he ought to have mentioned alongside LIFESITE NEWS.]
But the subject which has provoked more than all other issues a very rich series of criticisms and questions has undoubtedly been the two ‘family synods’ that culminated in the pope’s
Amoris laetitia.
Even the hitherto progressivist stalwart Aldo Maria Valli, anchor of Italian State TV’s premier newscast TG1, has been writing about his increasing perplexity
[There it goes again, that most inappropriate euphemism! Valli has gone far beyond perplexity by now to outright opposition of many propositions dear to this pope, starting with his concept of mercy].
Valli went so far as to publish a pamphlet written respectfully but clearly and firmly on the numerous questions raised in him by this pontificate, with the position that
the question of allowing communion for remarried divorcees merely hides a whole problematic over the continuity of Catholic moral doctrine.
Valli has called Bergoglio’s permissiveness the logic of ‘but also’. In a famous blog post which ignited the blogosphere, he wrote:
“After having read and rereads the text [of AL] many times, the answer seems to be: communion yes, but also no. Or communion no, but also yes. Indeed, it would seem that the document finds both answers legitimate. And therefore it advises a case-by-case approach, which is nothing by situational ethics. [If I were a remarried divorcee,] should I consider myself a sinner? Yes, but also no. No, but also yes. It depends!”
Thus, Cardinals Walter Brandmüller, Raymond Burke, Carlo Caffarra and Joachim Meisner decided to make public a letter they had written this pope in September 2016, requesting him to clarify five essential questions on Amoris laetitia. The five DUBIA raised by the Four Cardinals have received much play in Sandro Magister’s blog and in
La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana, an online Catholic journal edited by Riccardo Cascioli, once with
Avvenire.
Bussola is traditionalist and even papist
[Cascioli tries his best to bend over backwards to give Bergoglio the benefit of the doubt, but it is increasingly difficult for him to do that], but it has not masked its doubts nor feared to pose questions, even about the [now Bergoglio-controlled] Italian bishops’ conference.
With its mother publication, the monthly newspaper
Il Timone – whose contributors over the years have included Vittorio Messori, Rino Cammilleri and Francesco Agnoli –
Bussola recently organized a daylong conference not far from St. Peter’s Square in which six prominent Catholic laymen from around the world, explained in great detail and with much background, why the pope should respond to the DUBIA from the Four Cardinals.
Fr. Antonio Spadaro, the editor of the Rome-based Jesuit monthly magazine
La Civilta Cattolica [who has emerged as one of the principal, if not the principal, media spokesman and surrogate for Bergoglio], has many times
dismissed the anti-Bergoglio opposition as minority and merely annoying. And it
is difficult to numerically quantify this heteroclite world.
Nonetheless, the novelty is that against Francis, dissent has been growing like an oil spot. Spadaro, who self-describes himself as a cyber-theologian, knows very well the role and influence of the Internet in society, and this is a very relevant issue that cannot be resolved with dismissive and cutting words.
We live in the post-truth era of ‘fake news’, when objective facts matter less and less, and where opinions are constructed emotionally rather than objectively. At the same time, it has also become increasingly more difficult for the spin doctors of the establishment to counteract dissent – objective as well as subjective - because of the explosion of information access on the web.