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The ‘new narrative’ of the church under Bergoglio
comes with its own new orthodoxies
Translated from
December 6, 2017
Prof. Massimo Introvigne recently gave a long interview to Formiche, which is one of those strange occasions when you would wish very much that what you are reading were true but you know, with displeasure, that it is not.
[Introvigne (born 1955) is the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), an international network of scholars who study new religious movements. He has written more than 60 books in this genre. I consider him one of those opportunists in the guise of ‘a Catholic 1000% loyal to the pope whoever he is, right or wrong’, and therefore totally a-critical and laudatory of everything and anything this pope says and does.
It somehow makes it worse that in the previous pontificate, he was always very laudatory of Benedict XVI, for which reason I posted quite a number of his articles over the years. Which is what one could also say about Andrea Tornielli. Yet loyalty to an institution you believe in does not mean you have to be loyal to those of its men – especially its leaders – who are undermining the institution with a clear intention to destroy it, or at least re-make it completely in their own likeness and image.]
The interview proceeds in the line of the official narrative about this pontificate:
In words and gestures, Pope Francis is first of all a communicator. He works incisively on the texts of Tradition which he has received and which he is called on to transmit. He does not change a comma, but the language he uses is different”.
In other words, the ‘novelty’ about this pope is not to be found in the content of what he teaches (“The principles remain firm”), but only that of style (‘communicative and pastoral’), of language, of attitude (“What is different with this pope is his pastoral attitude!”) [Depends whom he is talking to or talking about – he has been just as bullying and arrogant as he has been faux-pastoral], and of tone (‘He has changed the tone of teaching, and for him, tone is fundamental”).
[Let me get this straight: Is Introvigne saying that Francis finds the tone of ‘traditional texts’ ‘wrong’ or somehow inappropriate for today? But those texts also include the words of Jesus in the Gospels. So not only must Bergoglio think he needs to correct Jesus’s teachings – by omitting anything he thinks modern man would find offensive or unpleasant – but he must also correct his ‘tone’ which ranged from meek and mild, to scathing and angry (as he was with the merchants in the temple). Which happens to be the very same range of tone that Bergoglio uses depending on who he is addressing or who he is talking about!]
Just from the outset, there is a lot to comment on: Introvigne seems to be taking it for granted that Pope Francis is a great communicator [‘excellent locutor!”] who succeeds, unlike his opponents (who constitute only an ‘intellectual elite’), to have a direct contact with the masses [“He seeks to avoid intermediaries and wishes to address the faithful directly”] [And other popes did not??? They thought they were only talking to themselves???]
But can we be sure of this? If such an immediate rapport with the faithful truly existed, then St. Peter’s Basilica and St. Peter’s Square should continue to be overcrowded (as they were in the time of the intellectual Benedict XVI), but why are there less and less people coming these days?
Besides, it is not true that the pope does not use intermediaries, because in a media-dominated world, how can it be otherwise? Only that these intermediaries are rather different from those in the past. Instead of using his own newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, to propagate his novelties, he prefers to use La Repubblica and Eugenio Scalfari, a choice Introvigne justifies by saying: style “It is better for him to have a good press on Repubblica or on CNN than in the Catholic media”. [Really now!] So it’s a question of taste. But please, let us have no illusions that in Repubblica, the message of the Gospels will come through in all its purity.
style “By using intermediaries, he risks misunderstanding and reduction of his messages… He knows he may have made mistakes with Scalfari and in his airborne news conferences. It is a risk he chooses to take, in his insistence on the need to start processes more than to occupy space”. [One obvious fallacy of this Bergoglian inanity is that in order to start any process, one needs to occupy a space - as he now ‘occupies’ the Church of Christ as if it were his very own, because without the space he occupies as pope, he would be unable to start any of his processes at all.]
It is true that sometimes, perhaps always, in order to reach an objective, one must take risks: whoever is not ready to run any risk is inevitably condemned to inaction. The problem with this Bergoglian attitude is whether the risks are worth whatever is at stake. It would seem, from Introvigne’s words, that everyone (i.e., all the faithful) reads Repubblica, and that therefore, for the pope to communicate with the faithful, he must use that particular medium of communication.
But the premise is wrong because even if it is true that Repubblica readers are far more numerous than those of the OR, obviously not everyone reads Scalfari’s flagship newspaper. Moreover, Repubblica, like other mainstream media, is not a neutral medium but plainly partisan. For the pope to choose this newspaper as his privileged communications outlet does not mean reaching out to a wider audience, but rather, to make a partisan choice and exclude a priori a huge chunk of potential readers that do not share the newspaper’s ideology [and therefore never get to read it]. Of course, the pope has a right to choose, but a shepherd cannot be partisan – he must be father to all…
I also think that this fable of media equivocation and misunderstanding about Pope Francis ought to be shelved once and for all. This pope, when he wants to, can be extremely clear. For example, about AL, which is in itself a deliberately ambiguous document, he has made it very clear how it must be interpreted. If anyone still has any doubts [or dubia, for that matter], then just read the Acta Apostolicae Sedis for October 2016. [That’s right – although the general public has just been recently made aware of it, the Argentine bishops’ letter on AL and the pope’s reply to it were posted in a timely manner, i.e., ‘officialized’ right away, in the AAS.]
It seems to me that we need a ‘different narration’. There’s this emblematic anecdote about the 300,000 Catholic prostitutes of minor age with whom “dissecting Vatican II nor discussing the indissolubility of marriage would be a useless undertaking". I don’t think anyone has ever had the occasion nor the inclination to discuss Vatican II with a gathering of prostitutes (although since they are Catholics, it would not be a bad idea to give them some basic catechesis). [I never heard this anecdote before, but for some reason, Fr. Scalese describes these prostitutes as Filipinas. I do not understand why such an association has to be made with my countrymen – I doubt there are 300,000 prostitutes in my country even if we are a nation of 70-plus million – and it is uncharacteristically insensitive of Fr. S to do this. The anecdote loses nothing if he does not provide a nationality for the prostitutes.]
But here we find ourselves before the great error in the current ecclesial conjuncture in which we find ourselves: To concern oneself with doctrine is supposed to be the ‘old narrative’ that would never ‘reach’ the faithful and must therefore be abandoned to be replaced by the ‘new narrative’ which is simply paying attention to others. One would think that in a Church that is concerned with correct doctrine, no one pays attention to people and their problems.
It is as if the new course – besides its attentiveness to others (which is hardly emphasized as one expects it to be) [because the stress is ideologically selective] – did not also imply a new orthodoxy to replace the old. Oh yes, the rhetoric of Bergoglio’s ‘new church’ continually proclaims the new orthodoxies to live by (climate change, the environment, migrants) [to limit it to the pope’s purely secular priorities, but his ‘religious’ priorities are just as objectionable: weakening Catholicism and ultimately destroying it by coddling Islam and increasing protestantization of ‘the Church’, with the eventual goal of abandoning Catholicism for ‘one-world-religion’ (though I don’t see the non-Christian faiths - Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism - ever going for that at all)].
Introvigne explains Bergoglio’s secular priorities this way: “Through these issues, the pope believes he can dialog with a greater number of people and get closer to them”. You would think most human beings go to sleep at night wringing their hands over the ozone gap and global warming!
The same goes for this pope’s idea of ecumenism. I do not know if the mythical prostitutes care at all about dialog among Catholics, protestants and Orhtodox, but this year, the fifth centenary of Luther’s schism seemed to be the center of attention for the pope and many of his cardinals and bishops. Is this not a discussion limited to restricted circles?
But after having made a [relatively] big to-do about the 50th anniversary of the closing of Vatican II, we are now being told that the debate over Vatican II is nothing but a pastime for a few layabouts who don’t know what to do with their time.
Wait, why am I limiting myself to Vatican II? Haven’t we been also told that even on AL, the debate is closed? Until just recently, and for three years, it seemed as if communion for remarried divorcees was the number-one problem facing the Church – and now, we are told to stop talking about it, that what matters now is ‘to address the peripheries’. [The center does not hold and cannot hold – it lacks a centrifugal force - and yet it purports to reach out and bring the peripheries closer!]
But what is most amazing is the rock-hard conviction with which we are constantly being told that in this ‘new narrative’, “No, the principles have not changed”. To stay with the major moral issues like abortion, euthanasia and marriage, Introvigne tells us: “No, the Church will not change its position. That is impossible… Bergoglio, even if few acknowledge it, is clearly in continuity with his predecessors on these issues”. Really? Yet Introvigne immediately follows up by saying, “Doctrine does not change – it develops”.
But this is an acknowledgement that once ‘the church’ led by Bergoglio starts to change the language, style, tone and attitude of its teachings, it is inevitable that the content of that teaching, one way or the other, also changes.
I am not saying that Introvigne’s entire interview should be thrown into the trash bin. He says things that we can all agree with – which is when he speaks according to his occupation of being a sociologist of religion. He is correct when he says that Mass attendance does not depend on who is pope: “There are processes that have been going on for some time which continue with a constant but slight reduction in active participation”. It is as if Introvigne has forgotten that he was among the very first to allege a positive ‘Francis effect’.
He is also right when he says that the future of the Church is not to be played out in Europe but in the Third World – Latin America, Africa and Asia. However, we really do not see a concrete harmony between this pope and the churches of the Third World. In this case, Introvigne acknowledges that “the African bishops were among the most conservative at the family synods”. Indeed, one might say that Pope Francis has adopted the sensibility not of the Churches of the global South, but rather that of the Churches of northern Europe.
I must credit Introvigne for being fundamentally honest: He acknowledges with apparent sincerity that his own personal vicissitudes have contributed to distancing his former friends from him. But all is well with him now, except that his personal problems coincided with the sudden ‘change of route’ for the Catholic Church under Bergoglio. And so unlike some of his friends who were once defenders of the papacy in general and who now contest this papacy, he can say that he has remained loyal to the pope. [And what about remaining loyal to the truth???]
But even so, he is also forced to admit that in supporting everything this pope says and does, without any ifs and buts, he has risked making blunders that he must regret. Yet popes are not infallible in everything they say and do. Just a modicum of healthy criticism serves us all well, even when it concerns a pope. Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas. (Plato is my friend, but truth is a greater friend].
One last comment: In the present global and acritical acceptance [and acclaim] for this pontificate, there has been one exception, and only one: the controversial article on evangelical fundamentalism and Catholic ‘integralism’ in La Civilta Cattolica last summer. [I don’t understand why Fr. S considers it an exception. First of all, it is not primarily about the pope, but an attack against the ‘conservatives’ in the American Church, and by extension, President Trump, whose actions with regard to the social issues about which Catholics have long been at a disadvantage, have served to level the playing field. But the concluding part of the article is a paean of praise for this pope’s supposed ‘application’ of the spiritual dimension to his geopolitical agenda.]
Introvigne’s annoyance with that article is quite significant, as apparently, it has cut him to the deep. His ideological course - (starting with Plino Correa de Oliveira and his ultra-traditionalist TFP - for Tradicion, Familia, Patria - movement, then the Alleanza Cattolica in Italy) and his unabashed sympathy for the contemporary course of the Church in the USA make him a ‘theocon’ who would have felt himself targeted by that article.
My interest is to underscore the weakness of an ideological position (that of the ‘Catho-conservatives’ in Italy) that is showing itself incapable – because of a misguided total submission to the papacy – of making an objective reading of the current situation in the Church.
The undisciplined pope
It seems he does some things just to make news
December 9, 2017
No one noticed it, during and after Francis’s journey to Myanmar and Bangladesh, immoderately focused on the situation of the Rohingya. But in Dhaka, on December 1, the patriarch of the Bengali Buddhists, Sanghanayaka Suddhananda Mahathero, addressed his homage to the pope by recalling with admiration this specific action:
“I will never forget the image of Your Holiness when you washed the feet of the young African refugees. You, Holy Father, have attained the stature of the great, and you are a great example for me.”
If there was a need for yet another confirmation of the global communicative power of Pope Francis, here it is.
In effect, the washing of the feet that he performs every Holy Thursday, during the Mass “in coena Domini,” for prisoners, immigrants, men, women, transexuals of every ethnicity and religion, is a gesture of extraordinary media efficacy. [Because in one fell swoop, it reinforces the myth of Bergoglio 'the humble, the simple, the unconventional reformer, upon whom 'the world' has pinned its hopes of finally destroying Catholicism.]
Jorge Mario Bergoglio is so aware of this that in order to increase its impact he does not hesitate to push beyond the rules that he himself has set for this rite, according to which it should be performed only with members of the Catholic Church.
While vice-versa there is not the least bit of news, so much is it disregarded, on the Mass “in coena Domini” within which Francis performs the washing of feet, the opposite of what happened with with previous popes and in particular with Benedict XVI, who at this Holy Thursday Mass delivered very intense, memorable “mystagogical” homilies, a guide to the mystery. [Bergoglio's fundamental 'low regard' for the Eucharist - which he does not mind being received sacrilegiously by adulterers, aborters and blatant homosexuals - has caused him to forget, so it seems, that the Mass in coena Domini primarily recalls Christ's institution of the Eucharist and of the priesthood, and has focused all the attention on an optional sidebar to the Mass, this big deal of feet washing.]
For Francis, in fact, another set of priorities applies, which always puts in first place the action of mercy, invariably manipulated for its greatest communicative efficacy, even at the cost of contradicting itself.
For example, he made news three days after his election as pope when he declined to impart his blessing to the journalists from all over the world who were packed into the audience hall, “respecting,” he said, “the conscience of each, since many of you are not members of the Catholic Church, and others are not believers.”
Thunderous applause greeted this surprise move by the pope, whom many admired for his delicate discretion. [Is that what they call flagrant hypocrisy now?]
But just two weeks later Francis did exactly the opposite. On the first Holy Thursday of his pontificate, not only did he impart his blessing without any scruple to the young prisoners whom he had gone to visit, even though quite a few of them were non-Catholic, but he even celebrated Mass in front of them.
But that’s just it, his priority was elsewhere, and he successfully asserted it. The action that made news all over the world was the pope’s washing of the feet of a dozen young prisoners, some of whom, including a Serbian woman, were Muslim. (And at the time there was still a liturgical ban - later lifted by Francis himself - on washing the feet of women, out of the need to imitate the action of Jesus who performed it with the apostles).
The liberties that Francis takes with the liturgy for communication purposes are also valid for him when it comes to Sacred Scripture.
Settimo Cielo has already pointed out, for example, how in a morning homily at Santa Marta Francis attributed to Saint Paul the words, “I boast only of my sins", and also invited those listening to him to give the same kind of “scandal,” meaning to boast of one’s sins in that they have been forgiven by Jesus.
And this in spite of the fact that in none of his letters did Paul ever say the words in question, but if anything, in two instances (2 Corinthians 11:30 and 12:5), something different: “I will boast of my weaknesses”, after listing all of the travails of his life, the imprisonments, floggings, persecutions, insults, shipwrecks.
But “boasting of one’s sins” is more appealing to Francis. It makes a bigger splash. And in fact he said it again two days ago, on Thursday, December 7, at the end of the Mass for the 90th birthday of Cardinal Angelo Sodano, again putting them into the mouth of Saint Paul: “Saint Paul even boasted of his sins, because the glory goes to God alone, and we are weak, all of us.”
In this same celebratory address, Francis congratulated Cardinal Sodano for being “ecclesially disciplined.” But the pope knows well that it is [his own] lack of discipline that makes more news.
I suppose the following post by Fr H qualifies to be another item under Magister's rubric of 'The undisciplined pope':
Will he never stop ... (1)
December 10, 2017
PF thinks the traditional translations of the Oratio Dominica [Lord's Prayer] need to be changed. 'Lead us not into temptation' displeases him. Why should God lead people into temptation to sin? Obviously, this must be a Bad Translation. Would May we not be led into temptation be better?
Fundamentalist traddies are likely to be outraged. Changing the Our Father!!!!!
Although of course I am a Rigid Pharisee, I am not that sort of fundamentalist. The Lord's Prayer contains a number of mysteries. Let me go off at a tangent and give you an example from elsewhere in the Prayer. Let me tell you about 'Give us this day our Daily Bread'.
The Greek word translated 'daily' is particularly mysterious. Epiousion is pretty well a hapax legomenon (a Greek word occurring only once) and Origen remarked that you never heard it used in his time. It looks as though it should be related to epiouse, which means coming. Put that together with hemera (day) and it would mean our bread of the coming day, and St Jerome knew of a Hebrew Gospel which did indeed render it by mahar, of tomorrow.
Might it mean the Bread of the Kingdom? Might it mean the eschatological Food, tomorrow's Bread which we are allowed to receive today ... i.e. the Blessed Sacrament? Or might epiousion mean supersubstantial? Etymologically, it could do so. And so on.
Far from finding my Faith disturbed, I find such questions exhilarating. If you wanted to go further, you could compare the Lucan version of the Our Father with St Matthew's. The Tradition, in all its breadth, gives us such riches upon which to meditate ...
Despite the different possible interpretations of parts of this Prayer, if I were a person of immense authority, I would not choose to use my power to change one single inherited rendering.
- My first reason for not doing so would be that I am profoundly aware that I am not infallible.
- And that a rendering which appealed to me 100% today might no longer do so in a year's time.
- And it is worth remembering that the Church has got along for two millennia without prescribing to us what meaning we should each attach to the words of this prayer.
Two Millennia of hermeneutical freedom ... until we reached the Age of Mercy, the Aetas Bergogliana. Now, it seems, we need to be tied down to those particular interpretations and meanings which appeal to this particular, all-wise, pope.
It's almost as if PF has decided to give a big plug to the recent e-book, The Dictator Pope, by Professor Marcantonio Colonna, about which I wrote a few days ago.
And let me make this clear: the Greek original and its Latin version do not mean what PF wants them to mean. Anybody who claims that they do, is either ignorant or dishonest. PF's proposal is not a translation, but an alteration. But I'll return, Deo volente, to that tomorrow.
(I'm afraid it has occurred to me that all this might be a ploy to provoke yet another disagreement with Cardinal Sarah, with the intention of finally getting rid of him. After all, PF is suggesting that a change be made in liturgical texts which involves eliminating the actual words of what the Greek and Latin and Syrian bibles say the Lord actually said, and replacing them with what a twenty-first century Roman Bishop says he prefers. It is Cardinal Sarah's job, quite frankly, to resist the imposition of a gratuitous mistranslation of an authorised original.)
My second reason for making no change is pastoral. Back in the 1970s, we in the Church of England did indeed experiment with 'modern' translations of the Pater noster.
Those experimental forms are now, I think, rarely used. The reason is: the clergy discovered that among infrequent church-goers, including the house-bound sick and elderly, and those attending Baptisms, Weddings, and Funerals, and the Midnight Mass brigade, the Lord's Prayer was the only formula they knew. Any other liturgical memories they had lingering from their childhoods had been rendered out-of-date by the liturgical revolutions of the 1960s.
Was it 'pastoral' to deprive such people of the only remaining bit of a worship-experience which was in the least familiar to them ... which had any sort of purchase upon their memories? So most of us just change 'Our Father which...' into 'Our Father who...', and left it at that.
Incidentally, the 'modern language' Anglican version ... in case you were wondering ... finds no problems whatsoever in the phrase which makes PF and, we gather, some French and Italian bishops, lose so much sleep.
We were right not to meddle.
12/11/17
And here's the conclusion to Fr H's latest broadside against the not very Christian 'Vicar of Christ' today...
Will he never stop ...(2)
PF, the Lord's Prayer and the next Conclave
December 11, 2017
"Lead us not into temptation". It is unlikely that the Greek and Latin words translated as 'temptation' meant the sort of thing we mean by 'temptation' in the confessional ... the 'temptation' to steal something, or to speak uncharitably, or to suspend the Custody of the Eyes.
Peirasmos has been thought to refer much more probably to the time of testing, that is to say, of being tortured or intimidated to give up our Faith. Scripture teaches us that the End Times will indeed be marked by just such testings or persecutions. It is natural to ask God, whose providence disposes the times, to spare us this. [See for example Mt 26:41; Luke 8:13; Apocalypse 2:10 and 3:10.]
'
(And, by the way, 'Evil could be either masculine or neuter (tou ponerou). Many, probably most, people think it refers to the Evil One.)
So, in my opinion, PF is proposing a revision which is not, as he appears to have been told, a revised translation but a radical change in the meaning of the Greek original. With sorrow, I have to say that this new example of his gigantic self-confidence does not surprise me.
What repeatedly ... it seems, almost daily !! ... irritates me about PF is his endless propensity to treat the Depositum Fidei, the Universal Church and what she has inherited from the Apostles or from the generations since, as something which is at his disposal to change, to criticise, or to mangle in any way that appeals to his personal whimsy at any particular moment.
He is like a toddler who has been given toys to play with ... a big, boisterous and wilful child who likes to play with them rather roughly; whose commonest phrase is "I want ...". If anyone suggests that he should perhaps handle them rather more gently, he throws a tantrum.
I am immensely sorry to have to write like this about Christ's Vicar but, ever since his election, PF has appeared to me to want attention to be drawn particularly to those parts of his personal 'style' which mark him as most radically different from his predecessors.
A pope who disliked close scrutiny and the consequent criticism would keep the journalists and cameramen at a distance, say a very great deal less, and speak only after taking competent advice. An ecclesiastic who deliberately sollicits attention is ill-placed to complain if he gets it, nor can his sycophants plausibly do so on his behalf. This pontificate did not invent the unfortunate modern phenomenon of the celebrity pope, but it has shown how very dangerous and divisive that cult is.
PF's election was, I suppose, the responsibility of the Cardinal Electors ... to whom one has to add such Cardinal non-Electors as Murphy O'Connor, who, we are told, dinnered his way around Rome encouraging his friends, and the other Anglophone Cardinals, to vote for Bergoglio (as he had every right to do).
But there are also perhaps systemic problems here too. I do not think that even those whose analysis of this pontificate is totally different from mine will wish to disagree with much in what follows. Firstly ...
Time was when the Church was blessed with perhaps a dozen or two cardinals, pretty certainly not more than seventy; so that, in a conclave, each elector was more likely to know something about at least the more prominent and papabili of his brethren.
If there are 120 or more electors, you are inevitably going to have the sort of situation in which an Eminent Father "from the peripheries" who knows next to nobody, will be open to be influenced by fellow electors who appear knowledgeable and who combine to assure him that Cardinal X is a Splendid Fellow.
Additionally, PF has (significantly) suppressed the open discussions which the Cardinals used to be allowed to have with each other when they met formally in consistories. His once-claimed passion for parrhesia did not survive his experiences in his two 'synods'.
Secondly, it has come to be felt that it is edifying ... that the World will be impressed ... if a pope is elected within a couple of days. Almost as if it would be dangerous if the electors got to know each other, or if it became apparent to the waiting Press that there were deep divisions inside the Sistine Chapel.
Even those simple souls (Ratzinger and I think they are misguided) who believe that the Holy Spirit chooses the pope, might have trouble giving a plausible theological explanation as to why the Holy Spirit should be so keen to operate through a quick-fire conclave rather than through a more lengthy and carefully considered one.
And, thirdly, PF will bequeath to the next interregnum a Church ... and a Sacred College ... much more deeply and ideologically divided than has been true for a very long time, possibly for ever.
I pray that the next conclave may be very, very, lengthy, even if that does encourage the Vatican press corps endlessly to lecture the watching World on such arcane mysteries as Blocking Thirds. Surely, their Eminences will have learned the lessons of the last five disastrous, destructive, divisive years...
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 13/12/2017 13:59] |