Is Cardinal Pell “the quintessential scape-goat”?
“The Australian leftist establishment hates him,the gay lobby hate him,
the atheists, liberal Catholics and feminist ideologues hold him in contempt
and he has taken on the Italian mafia in trying to reform the Vatican’s finances.”
Editorial
by Carl Olson
CATHOLIC WORLD REPORT
July 6, 2017
I’m not an expert — not even close — on Australian politics or Catholicism Down Under, but over the past few years I’ve carried on correspondence with a number of Catholics in Australia. And these folks, all of them serious and learned Catholics, have consistently painted a picture that is often troubling, even disturbing. One of them recently lamented that
while, until recently, “there was an identifiable thing in Australia known as Catholicism”, that “thing no longer exists.”
To Americans, this source noted, this will sound “pessimistic,” but to Australians “it could well not seem pessimistic enough.” Hyberbolic to some degree, but also indicative of the frustration of many Catholics Down Under.
Anti-Catholicism runs deep, and while the U.S. certainly had its share of anti-Catholic nastiness in the day — notably in the Nativism of the early 1800s and the animosity against Catholic immigrants in the decades that followed — much of Australia seems to have held on rather tightly to its suspicion, dislike, and even hatred of the Catholic Church. (This is not to disregard how much the secular media and elites still go after the Church in the U.S., but to note the difference in degree between the two countries.)
Church leadership in Australia has, by and large, not helped matters in the least. Not because the bishops there have been overly orthodox or “conservative”, but because they have been mostly soft, squishy, or worse. Or, in the words of another correspondent, “worse than useless”.
This same correspondent notes that
Cardinal George Pell has been one of the few exceptions, being personally responsible for almost anything and everything good that has taken place in the Church in Australia since “the mid-1990s.” This has earned him many enemies, as Mercatornet.com’s Michael Cook — who writes from Australia, where the site is based — summed up in a recent piece:
George Pell’s problem is his strength of character. He was born two generations before Mark Zuckerberg, but the motto of Facebook, “move fast and break things”, expresses something of his style.
Even physically, at 6-foot-3-inches, he is an imposing figure. He is a blunt speaker, a tough and practical manager, a theological conservative, a supporter of the Pope, and an outspoken critic of contemporary social mores. He was the plumber of the Australian Catholic Church, the man who fearlessly waded into the sewer of its sex abuse scandal and cleared the blocked drains.
So Pell has no shortage of enemies.
- When Australia had a referendum on changing the head of state from the Queen of England, he was a leading supporter of Australia becoming a Republic. That was divisive.
- He opposes homosexual activism, which is divisive.
- He strongly opposes same-sex marriage, which is bitterly divisive.
- He supported John Paul II to the hilt and amongst his clergy that was divisive.
- He set up his own sex-abuse protocol and amongst the Australian bishops that was divisive.
- He shook up the Melbourne seminary and that was divisive.
- In his role in the Vatican, he has worked hard to set finances right and root out corruption and that was divisive.
George Pell’s career is a kind of mise en scène for an Agatha Christie novel in which Hercule Poirot finds that the dead man in a pool of blood was living in a hotel and every resident had a motive for murder.
Or, as one of my correspondents put it:
‘The Australian leftist establishment hates him, the gay lobby hate him, the atheists, liberal Catholics and feminist ideologues hold him in contempt and he has taken on the Italian mafia in trying to reform the Vatican’s finances. There is also the issue of freemasonic influence in the Victorian police force’.
Freemasonry? Many Americans will either scoff or be puzzled by such claims, but the role of freemasonry in Australia (and some countries in Europe) is not something of past centuries or moldy conspiracy theories. But even setting that aside, Pell has plenty of enemies from:
•
Secular liberals, as Cook explains:
“The attacks on Pell ultimately stem from a loathing of the Church and its moral teachings amongst the left-leaning Victorian political establishment. At the moment it is in government, noisily campaigning for euthanasia and transgender rights and quietly gloating over the possibility of destroying Australia’s best-known Catholic.”
•
Liberal Catholics, as described by Peter Craven of
The Sydney Morning Herald:
“The antagonism between Pell and those urbane worldlings of the Church is certainly true and many people don’t realise that Pell was loathed by a lot of Catholic liberals long before he became identified with the abuse issue in the public mind. In fact, the opposition to Pell (which was shared by his predecessor as Archbishop in Melbourne, Sir Frank Little, who seems to have been rather more of an appeaser of sexual offences) was quite marked at the very stage that Pell was making an impact as the most forceful and personable churchman since Daniel Mannix.”
•
The media, as lambasted by former politician Amanda Vanstone:
“The media frenzy surrounding Cardinal George Pell is the lowest point in civil discourse in my lifetime. I’m 64. What we are seeing is no better than a lynch mob from the dark ages. Some in the media think they are above the law both overseas and at home. Deep pockets of your boss or lesser pockets on your victim, build bravado. If your assets aren’t on the line you can trash a reputation with gay abandon.”
It’s worth pointing that the media in Australia has long had very low approval ratings (something that Americans can identify with). With such a poisonous and poisoned situation, the question many are asking is: Can Cardinal Pell get a fair hearing?
“It has been Pell’s misfortune to be a good man, an effective manager and a loyal priest,” states Cook. “In today’s world that is a dangerous combination. Ensuring that he gets a fair trial will be the ultimate test of the fairness of Australia’s courts.”
Vanstone, a political liberal, wonders:
If there were a real prospect of Pell being charged one might have thought authorities would have sought an injunction to prevent the publication of a recently published book on him and certain allegations. Isn’t it normal to try to ensure a person can get a fair trial by keeping prejudicial, untested material out of the public arena?
The book in question is
Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of George Pell (Melbourne, 2017), by Louise Milligan.
“Each and every allegation of abuse and cover up against him is false,” said a spokesman for Pell in May about the book, adding it “is an exercise in character assassination.” The book, as of late June, has been pulled by the publisher. But the book has been reviewed in great detail by Julia Yost of
First Things, and has been found wanting:
The formal charges against Pell may differ from those highlighted in Milligan’s book. It is in the nature of sex abuse hysteria that allegations, true or not, will multiply. So I would be surprised if the formal charges did not include novel accusations. But let us scrutinize the case we have before us, in the same way those formal charges must be scrutinized: in terms of their cogency, credibility, and underlying assumptions.
Milligan does not attempt to conceal her hostility to the Catholic Church. She recalls her Catholic girlhood with a shudder. When she can, she quotes her sources disclaiming any vendetta against the Church. But she is equally happy to quote a source, for instance, who recalls that his mother “took her shoe off and hit me in the face about six or seven times and said I was dirty” — in accordance, he says, with the “Catholic system.”
Whenever she can, Milligan associates Catholicism with the victimization of children. In her image of Pell, this association takes a monstrous form. Pell, she writes, exhibits a “sociopathic lack of empathy,” not least in his adherence to traditional Catholic moral teaching. This portrait soon descends into schoolyard caricature.
Taking up a popular epithet for him, Milligan calls Pell a “bully” over a dozen times. As a bishop, Pell used print, radio, and televisual media to bully his flock, by (for instance) voicing his concurrence in Veritatis Splendor. Pell is a bully because, when confronted by people who feel that Catholic moral teaching is unkind, he insists, nonetheless, that it is true.
One source recalls Pell’s televised argument with actress and remarried divorcée Colette Mann: “There was sheer pain in her voice and there was pain and hurt in her whole attitude and she was speaking from her heart. If George had just reached out to her and touched her on the forearm and said something like ‘I am so sorry’ … But no. He hasn’t an ounce of empathy.”
Pell is endlessly convicted by his critics of being insufficiently therapeutic, of failing to model emotiveness and bring about catharsis. The freighting of one churchman with such vast psychodynamic potency verges on the fetishistic.
There is much more, which is important reading — but not easy reading, as Yost does not turn away from questions about the alleged logistics of groping, and probing.
Her comparison to the daycare abuse hysteria of the 1980s is, I think, a legitimate and important one; the parallels are quite striking on many levels.
If Yost is correct in her analysis and Pell is true in his denials, then one of my Australian correspondents is right on the mark in stating: “He is the quintessential scape-goat. This is an example of white martyrdom.”
Yes, Cardinal Pell may be guilty of some or all charges. But I’m inclined to think he is probably “guilty” of being blunt, occasionally insensitive, orthodox, and unwilling to bent to the whims of those who would prefer he go away. He has expressed readiness, even eagerness, to clear his name. “However that plays out —” writes George Weigel at National Review Online:
...and investigative reporters looking for a really good story should be digging into the possibility of an Italian–Australian connection or connections in this affair — George Pell will have his day in court. He will not be the only one on trial as he faces his accusers in a court of law, however.
The reputation for fairness and probity of the Australian police and judicial systems will be on trial with him, as will the Australian media and those in Australian politics who have directly or indirectly encouraged — or at the very least failed to stand up against — the relentless and brutal attack that has been underway against one of Australia’s most accomplished sons for years.
There's another newly-prominent scapegoat in current news about the Church - and this time, he is the scapegoat for many anti-Bergoglio 'conservative' bloggers. As Carl Olson writes above about not being an expert on Australia or the state of Catholicism Down Under, I know little of Archbishop Luis Ladaria Ferrer, the new CDF Prefect, other than what has been written through the years about him - not much but not damaging either - since Benedict XVI named him Secretary of the CDF when Cardinal Levada was Prefect. Despite what I thought was one of Benedict's rare lapses of judgment (naming Cardinal Bertone to be his Secretary of State - for all the friendship and trust he had in him, and for all of Bertone's qualifications which he failed to put to good use when he was Secretary of State), I would take his nomination of Ladaria as an earnest of the latter's bona fides.
As mentioned in previous posts, he is now accused of having allegedly written an Italian bishop not to publicize that one of his priests had been defrocked by the CDF for proven charges of sexual abuse. If he did that - and one would have to see the entire letter for context - then it was unwise of him to put it in writing. Yet earlier stories also said that he had been instrumental in having the priest defrocked, so what's wrong with that?
Yet it is emblematic of smear campaigns - because I fear this may be one - that somehow, I have not seen any news report that has sought to come out with the full story about this episode, in favor of isolated snippets meant to provoke.
Then there were the attacks from the anti-Ladaria bloggers against Prof. Robert George for writing that Ladaria is not a liberal because it contradicts their narrative that Ladaria, being a Jesuit, cannot be anything but heterodox in his doctrine much as Bergoglio is, because it is claimed he has written that he does not believe there is a hell, which would be genuinely alarming if it were true. (I will comment about this after this article.)
CWR has now published this examination of Ladaria's published statements about marriage and sexuality in the past three years (i.e., amid the doctrinal storm occasioned by the pope's two 'family synods' and the continuing cyclone over Amoris laetitia). I think the statements provide a good beginning to judge for ourselves. I can only hope that those who think they have a case against Ladaria, based on what he has said and done before, will come out with it as soon as they can fact-check themselves.
My own greatest reservation about Ladaria is that if Mueller, for all his conservative credentials and the books he has written about the faith, consented to be a patsy for Bergoglio, can we expect Ladaria, a Jesuit, to do better and get in the way of anything Bergoglio says and does that does violence or offense to the faith? Or is he there simply to be Bergoglio's willing rubber stamp?
Ladaria's consistent record of upholding
Church teaching on marriage, sexual morality
Reports of the supposed unorthodoxy of the new CDF Prefect have been greatly exaggerated.
by Michael J. Miller
CATHOLIC WORLD REPORT
July 7, 2017
The announcement on July 1, 2017, that Pope Francis has appointed Curial Archbishop Luis Francisco Ladaria Ferrer as the new Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith surprised even many Vatican watchers who had predicted a changing of the guard. Reports of his unorthodoxy, though, have been greatly exaggerated.
Ladaria, a 73-year-old Spanish Jesuit who wrote his doctoral thesis on the Holy Trinity and once taught theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University, has described himself as a “moderate conservative”. Pope Benedict XVI appointed him Secretary of the CDF in 2008, in other words, second-in-command to Cardinal Levada in a Congregation that the Holy Father himself had headed for almost a quarter century (1981-2005). This was not a decision that he made carelessly.
Readers of Catholic World Report may recall that four years later, when the Pope called then-Bishop Gerhard Müller from the Diocese of Regensburg to be the Prefect of the CDF, there were anguished cries in the Traditional Catholic blogosphere that the doctrinal sky was falling. It didn’t.
[The main objection was Mueller's proud, open and continued association with Gustavo Gutierrez, father of Liberation Theology as it was applied to Latin America in the 1980s. Mueller claims that Gutierrez's LT is not Marxist or anti-Christian, and continues to write ind efense of Gutierrez.]
Now some of those same commentators are stirring up controversy because Cardinal Müller has not been reappointed for a second five-year term.
Professor Robert George, a legal scholar who teaches at Princeton University, knows Cardinal Müller and Archbishop Ladaria and has worked with both, most recently during the 2014 Humanum Conference on marriage.
In a July 1 FaceBook post responding to some of the rumors and fact-free commentaries, Prof. George wrote that
the Pope “is not replacing a ‘conservative’ with a ‘liberal’…. Both are faithful Christians who are deeply committed to the Church’s doctrinal and moral teachings.” [A comment that unleashed jeremiads against George from the anti-Ladaria bloggers!]
During the Humanum Conference “the two men were completely of one mind in upholding the biblical and natural law understandings of marriage and sexual morality.”
In October 2014, only a few days after the end of the Extraordinary Synod on the Family (i.e. part one of the two-part Synod), Abp. Ladaria responded to a letter that a French priest, Father Claude Barthe, had sent to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, asking whether a priest in the confessional can given absolution to a civilly divorced-and-remarried Catholic while the person is still living with the new partner.
In his answer, Ladaria cited paragraph 84 from the Post-Synodal document
Familiaris consortio by Pope John Paul II, which clearly states that divorced-and-remarried Catholics must repent and stop contradicting the indissolubility of marriage by their lives before they can receive the sacrament of Reconciliation or Holy Eucharist worthily.
In effect, Ladaria wrote that
although one may investigate whether the sacramental marriage was valid, any impression of “Catholic divorce” must be avoided. The possibility of reconciliation with the sacramental spouse should be considered. If for serious reasons — for instance, the duty to raise the children of the civil marriage—separation from the new partner is not possible, the divorced-and-remarried Catholics should live “as brother and sister”. If only the proceedings at the 2015 Ordinary Synod on the Family had been as clear as Abp. Ladaria’s letter to Fr. Barthe!
Again in 2014, in the midst of the pre-Synod consultations, debates and media coverage, Abp. Ladaria highly recommended
Un sola carne in un solo spirito [One Flesh in One Spirit], at that time the most recent book by Father José Granados, a professor at the Lateran University, a prolific writer and a member of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family.
“It is a beautiful, deep and well documented volume, in which the discussion of the topics is always guided by a strict criterion,” His Excellency said at the presentation of the book in the Auditorium of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute in Rome.
Fr. Granados went on to publish in Spanish and English in 2015 another book entitled
Eucharist and Divorce: A Change in Doctrine?, answering the question in the title with a decisive “No”.
Some see trouble brewing in the fact that Abp. Ladaria is president of a commission to study - again - the role of deaconesses in the early Church and the possibility of women deacons in the future.
The Secretary of the CDF heads the commission ex officio and is neither responsible for setting it up nor amenable to the views of a notoriously radical feminist from the United States who was also appointed to it.
Abp. Ladaria participated in the doctrinal discussions between the CDF and the Society of Saint Pius X back in 2009-2010. He knows the dossier very well. In his new position as CDF Prefect he will also be President of the Ecclesia Dei Commission which continues to negotiate with the SSPX.
Perhaps Fr. Zuhlsdorf put it most succinctly when he wrote that, considering the views on record of some of the other potential candidates for the position of CDF Prefect, “the Church has dodged a bullet” with the appointment of Abp. Ladaria.
Now about whether Ladaria believes in hell or not. The day his appointment was made known, Oakes Spalding - many of whose views I agree with - posted on his blog an essay entitled
'Pope Francis Appoints a Universalist - All Men Will Be Saved - to Replace Müller as Head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith' implying that Ladaria, like Bergoglio, does not believe in hell. He cites snippets from a 2009 book by Ladaria entitled
Jesus Christ, Salvation of All' - which clearly does not imply that 'all men will be saved', only that Jesus Christ represents salvation for all (meaning everyone who accepts his Word). However, Spalding does cite certain statements that are troubling, and I suppose one must read the book to place those statements in context and determine if they do say what they seem to say.
Here are the passages cited by Spalding, and I remark on those I feel need remarking upon. The rest of it I consider unexceptionable:
The saving influence of Jesus and his Spirit know no bounds: Christ’s mediation is universal. Salvation in Christ is possible for all humanity, and on the horizon of theological reflection. The hope may arise that this salvation will indeed reach everyone. Salvation itself would become denaturalized if its absolute certainty would be affirmed and if we lost sight of the possibility of damnation [p. 12] [Does that sound like denying there is hell?]
This universality includes more than it excludes, among other reasons because the unique mediation of Jesus cannot be separated from God’s will of universal salvation (1Tim 2:3–5) [p. 96].
We are all called to place ourselves within the body of the [Catholic] Church, which will not reach its fullness until the whole human race and the entire universe has been completely renewed. Christian faith begins with the premise of the unity of humanity as a whole because of its origins in Adam, and above all, because of its destiny in Christ. It is inconceivable that salvation, as it is presented in the New Testament, is only for Christians and not for those who do not know Christ [p. 117]. [OK, that is a questionable statement, but we do not know what else Ladaria writes after that.]
We may also add the early Christian conviction that hell is something neither wanted nor created by God. Maintaining the possibility of eternal damnation is the only guarantee of the truth and reality of the salvation offered to us, which is nothing less than God’s love [pp. 130-131]. [Citing an early Christian conviction, which is historical fact, does not mean he buys it. His next sentence makes that clear. One may quibble, of course, that he uses the word 'possibility' about eternal damnation, especially considering the number of times Jesus himself refers to Hell in the Gospels.]
Jesus includes everyone and excludes no one, and all of us have received his fullness (cfr. John 1:16). The universality of salvation and unity of Christ’s mediation mutually affirm each other [p. 144].
Yet by dying, he gave us life, that is the life of his resurrection. Even those who do not know him are called to this divine vocation, that is, to the perfect sonship in and through Christ. Christians and non-Christians reach this goal by virtue of the gift of the Spirit that associates us with the unique paschal ministry of Christ even if it is through diverse paths known only to God [p. 148-149]. [This, to me, is the most troubling because despite his first sentence, he then acknowledges there may be 'diverse paths known only to God' whereby even non-Christians may avail of Christ's unique Paschal ministry. It is a contradiction to the central point of DOMINUS IESUS.]
I looked up the Amazon blurb on the Ladaria book JESUS CHRIST, SALVATION OF ALL:
This book is a collection of essays that were published between 2003 and 2006. The author addresses why it is necessary to maintain that Christ is the universal saviour, even though this assertion may sound unintelligible, perhaps shocking, and even arrogant to some of our contemporaries.
Ladaria nevertheless holds to the uniqueness of the person of Christ as being essential for the ultimate salvation of humankind, because salvation means to participate in the glory that Christ possesses in His humanity, offering us salvation as a free gift and revealing himself as paradigm of what humanity can fully be and become.
So I suppose the jury is still out about Ladaria's orthodoxy or lack of it. Answering my own questions above of what we can expect of Ladaria as CDF Prefect, I think our expectations are irrelevant. Because in any case, Ladaria is not the problem. Bergoglio is. Ladaria has ceased to have any autonomy at all, and he can only be an accessory for Bergoglio to use or ignore as he pleases, as, for all intents and purposes, he simply chose to ignore Mueller.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 10/07/2017 01:57]