It turns out that Cardinal Pell's piece is a minor succinct masterpiece of tactful indirect criticism that could well be addressed against Cardinals Kasper, Baldisseri and their fellow advocates of Bergoglio style pastoral mercy, and not necessarily against Jorge Mario Bergoglio. But Pell tackles both the marriage-and-adultery preaching of Jesus to his lesson on forgiveness that ends with the injunction "Go and sin no more". Despite a deniability, in the impersonal way the statement is worded, of who precisely is being targeted, it's hard not to see that it refers to the much-vaunted Bergoglian preaching on mercy... Do you suppose the likes of Cardinal Wuerl will go against Pell next for 'dissenting'? It's one thing to diss Cardinal Burke who is, after all, poersona non grata at the Vatican, but Pell is still the second most powerful man there now. So how do you diss the Pope's 'right hand'?
What about Henry VIII?
By Cardinal George Pell
Thursday, February 262015
Interestingly, Jesus’s hard teaching that “what therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder” (Mt 19:6) follows not long after his insistence to Peter on the necessity of forgiveness (see Mt 18:21–35).
It is true that Jesus did not condemn the adulterous woman who was threatened with death by stoning, but he did not tell her to keep up her good work, to continue unchanged in her ways. He told her to sin no more (see Jn 8:1–11).
[If writing articles is Cardinal Pell's only way to make known his dissenting views to Pope Francis, then maybe parrhesia is not the rule at the meetings of the Crown Cuncil of Cardinals, of which Pell is a member, nor of any one-on-one meeting between the 'top two men' at the Vatican.
In the sentence above, Pell articulates the obvious objection of any right-minded Catholic to the consistent omission from the Bergoglian preaching on 'mercy' of the final dispositive part of Jesus's forgiveness of the adulterous woman. For a Pope who not infrequently talks about the importance of confession, JMB has been remarkably 'tacit' about the 'penitence' part of the Sacrament of Reconciliation (which is why I liked it better that it was taught to us more than six decades ago as the Sacrament of Penance, which tells us more bluntly and unequivocally what confession is all about).
But I don't suppose Pell or anyone other than Mons. Victor Fernandez could tell JMB, "Er, Your Holiness, why not talk about genuine repentance and penitence as necessary corollaries to seeking God's forgiveness? That we sinners are supposed to 'make amends' for our sins? You think that will scare off those you are hoping to attract?"]
One insurmountable barrier for those advocating a new doctrinal and pastoral discipline for the reception of Holy Communion is the almost complete unanimity of two thousand years of Catholic history on this point. [Since this article is an 'impersonal' statement, there is, of course, no reference to how, as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, circumvented this 'complete' unanimity with his 'communion for everyone' practice.]
It is true that the Orthodox have a long-standing but different tradition,
forced on them originally by their Byzantine emperors, but this has never been the Catholic practice.
One might claim that the penitential disciplines in the early centuries before the Council of Nicaea were too fierce as they argued whether those guilty of murder, adultery, or apostasy could be reconciled by the Church to their local communities only once—or not at all.
They always acknowledged that God could forgive, even when the Church’s ability to readmit sinners to the community was limited. Such severity was the norm at a time when the Church was expanding in numbers, despite persecution.
It can no more be ignored than the teachings of the Council of Trent or those of Saint John Paul II or Pope Benedict XVI on marriage can be ignored.
Were the decisions that followed Henry VIII’s divorce totally unnecessary?
[A point brought up by opponents of the Kasper proposal from the very beginning, because what he proposes (as does JMB over and above him, though tacitly so far as Pope) would render meaningless the martyrdom of Saints Thomas More and John Fisher for refusing to give their blessings to Henry VIII's divorce/adultery record (he turned out to be a serial offender in this) and had their heads cut off for that.]
Are the new stories targeting Pell and his personal integrity perhaps a consequence of his speaking against the Bergoglio-endorsed problematic statements in the midterm Relatio and leading the floor protest against the (Bergoglio)/Baldisseri announcement not to publish the reports of the 'smaller circles', at the October 2014 synodal assembly? Will Pope Francis appoint him again to the October 2015 Synod? The PR problem could be even worse by not appointing him than by appointing him again and risking that he will speak out his mind just as fearlessly. But October is several months away, and who knows what may happen to Pell meanwhile in the Vatican cauldron of cross-purposes, arriviste ambitions and sycophantic one-upmanship?
What no one has referred to since the big brouhaha over an environmental encyclical from our 'trust-me-I-know-about-anything-better-than-anybody' Pope is my original question: Has JMB ever thought of asking Cardinal Pell to enlighten him on the reasons for Pell's skepticism over 'manmade climate change' and the scientific evidence for any such climate change that has been fluctuating in the past several decades that it has become a favorite liberal ideology? And would Cardinal Pell ever have had a chance to discuss this with the Pope at all? Is JMB even aware of Pell's more-than-informed interest in this topic?
BTW, call me petty but Pell's rightness on doctrine and on climate change still won't make me overlook the gratuitous and truly unkind and unwarranted remarks he made about Benedict XVI the day he stepped down from office, all the more shocking because he had always been among those considered to be true-blue 'Ratzingerian'.
PewSitter headlines - 2/27/15:
AP's account of the new attack on Pell is objectionable because it uses the accusation against Pell as an occasion to recall Vatileaks with all the malicious defamatory baggage that media loaded onto it...
Pope Francis's finance czar Cardinal Pell
comes under intense scrutiny over spending
VATICAN CITY, February 27, 2015 (AP) - Pope Francis's finance czar is coming under intense scrutiny after ruffling feathers at the Vatican as he seeks to impose order on its unruly finances.
Italian weekly
L'Espresso reported in its Friday editions that Cardinal George Pell's economy secretariat had run up a half-million euros (dollars) in expenses in the first six months of its existence. The total includes seemingly legitimate expenses, including computers and printers, but also a 2,508 euro bill from the famed Gamarelli clergy tailor.
[So a clothes bill is the worst they can pin on Pell? But he cannot have spent far more at Gamarelli than the Vatican would have spent on Pope Francis's wardrobe in the same time period, considering that papal whites must necessarily be more plentiful on hand than lesser prelates' black garments. Just imagine the number of fresh papal whites a Pope has to have when he travels, as surely a papal trip is hardly the occasion for his valets and aides to worry about laundry!
The expenditures are notable given that Pell has instituted a spending review across the Vatican to ensure any excess money is spent on the poor,
L'Espresso noted.
[Maybe Pell should have paid his tailor bills on his own rather than charging them to his official budget. At least, all the alleged high spending attributed to Cardinal Bertone in recent months - for his new apartment, for his 80th birthday celebration, etc - wee on his own personal account, not the Vatican's.]
Resistance to the Australian Pell from the largely Italian Vatican bureaucracy has been growing steadily but spiked in December after he boasted that he had "discovered" hundreds of millions of euros that had been "tucked away" in sectional accounts off the Vatican balance sheet.
[The AP reporter does not mention it but the major 'opposition' to Pell at the moment comes from Cardinal Coccopalmiero at Legislative Texts, who may well have the authority to clip Pell's wings by editing the still-pending charter of the Secretariat for the Economy in order to limit its powers. But would JMB go along with that, or can he override the recommendations of the Vatican's own internal review body for new canonical and civil law, rules and regulations?]
In fact, the money was well-known and was purposefully kept off the books, much of it set aside for use as reserves for funding shortfalls. [Oh yes! There was that fairly recent disclosure made in the name of financial transparency but which raised more questions for lack of a simple, clear explanation as the one AP provides above. As though somehow all those 'hundreds of millions of euros' had been 'tucked away' for sinister if not criminal reasons. Yes, I think Pell over-reached unnecessarily on that - though if he had explained it right away, his 'disclosure' would not have left such a bad taste in the mouth!]
The leak of Pell's receipts to L'Espresso — as well as other documents detailing cardinals' complaints about his efforts — was clearly aimed at discrediting him and harked back to the Vatileaks affair that badly tarnished the final year of Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI's papacy.
In that scandal, which some say prompted Benedict's resignation, the pope's butler leaked reams of documents [random, mostly worthless or picayune, except for a few that had already been reported contemporaneously about Cardinal Bertone's attempts to consolidate a power base of his own separate from the establishment-dominated Secretariat of State] [dim] to an Italian journalist that were aimed at discrediting Benedict's No. 2, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone [whose rather inept but open power-grabbing attempts, as reported by the media at the time of the different episodes, were all blocked by Benedict XVI before they could be executed.]
The documents also laid bare the dysfunctions and political intrigue that afflict the Vatican bureaucracy — problems that were central to Francis's election as pope with a mandate for reform. [This is the central fallacy of largely unfounded or maliciously inflated assumptions by the media that colored not just public perception and opinion about the whole Vatileaks affair, but worse, that of the cardinal electors who should have known better but showed themselves to be just as gullible and malleable to media manipulations as the man-on-the-street. A tribute to the powerful influence of the media, when even Princes of the Church who are generally men of exceptional intelligence, consider media reporting and commentary a necessarily reliable source of information.]
The Vatican spokesman declined to comment late Thursday.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 06/03/2015 15:23]