Let me share this unusual commentary to mark the five-year anniversary that got thoroughly storm-drenched and laid limp by the scandal of Lettergate
(but written before Lettergate)...
Five years of Bergoglio
Who are you to judge - and nullify -
2000 years of Catholic tradition and
the witness of saints, martyrs and popes?
by Marcello Veneziani
Translated from
March 12, 2018
Five years are infinitesimal in the perspective of eternity and but a speck in the Church’s bimillennial history. But they have given the world the impression of a radical turning point.
Pope Francis had seemed to be, right away, the Gran Simpatico, who seemed to have been universally welcomed, from his first words to the world on March 13, 2013, by the favor of the media and the instant sympathy of non-believers. They liked the pope who seemed to be 'down to earth’, not bound to liturgy, extroverted and averse to ritual.
But what was the specific trait that has characterized him in these first five years?
He is a pope who was been hailed more as a child of the times rather than son of the Church, a creature of globalization rather than tradition. Globalization gone full circle, that is, from all the ‘southern’ parts of the world, all its peripheries, its pauperism and its hospitality.
But on the global horizon, no longer just national or European, and not even Western or Christian: A pope open to those who are most remote from him, who 'loves' people more the more remote they are, so he is open to Muslims more than he is to Christians, more to Protestants than to Catholics, more to the ‘poor’ than to the faithful, more to ‘singles’ - including homosexuals – than to families.
At least, that is the way he is looked upon by public opinion because that is how he has been presented by the media.
[Which have only been presenting Bergoglio the way Bergoglio goes out of his way to project himself!] Yet all this was ‘ennobled’ in the reportage about Bergoglio as a return to Christianity at its origins!
Which has generated consensus and sympathy for him, starting with those who are farthest from the Church, from Rome and from the Crhistian faith. But more distrust if not dissent from those who are closest in their faith to Holy Mother Church, Catholic, apostolic and Roman. Leading to anathemas from some, and the accusation of heresy, about which I will not dare say a word.
But Bergoglio’s pontificate has coincided with the most acute phase of three great losses - the eclipse of faith and religion in the lives of people; the irrelevance of Catholics in politics; and the irrelevance today of Christian civilization and tradition.
The first phenomenon was not born under Bergoglio but is rooted in a process that has taken centuries – the de-Christianization of the world, the irreligiousness of the West, and the loss of faith, of the beyond-this-life perspective and of religious practice.
This historical process of course has now become more acute and accelerated: we have seen the collapse in devotion, in vocations, in Massgoers, and the general weakening of the religious sentiment. But one must note that the advent of Bergoglio to the pontificate has failed to hold back, slow down or attenuate this decline, but coincides with its acceleration and acuteness. It is not a pretty pastoral picture. It is a religious defeat.
The second phenomenon concerns Italy more closely. Since the last Italian pope, Paul VI (Papa Luciani was a too-brief parenthesis), the influence of Catholics in Italian politics has been gradually dwindling. It received a mortal blow with the end of the Christian Democratic Party in the late 1960s, but it seemed to revive subsequently because the papacy, the Italian bishops’ conference and the role of Catholics became the needle that balanced the scales in a bipolar system in which their role was central and decisive even if they were not the majority.
But the recent Italian elections – the first during Bergoglio’s pontificate – demonstrated for the first time the irrelevance of the Cahtolic vote. And I do not just refer to the effort by parishes and sacristies to guide the voters. But far more vastly and deeply, in terms of religious issues or those issues having to do with matters dear to the Church – the family, life and death, the birth rate, bioethics.
It was as though religious conscience had disappeared altogether from the polls. Because the church of Bergoglio had decided to step away from these great themes and the values they entail; it froze out the giant Family Day rallies by its complete silence about the events, and its silence about all the national controversies about life and sexuality, gender ideology and the education of children. And so, for the first time in the political history of the Italian Republic, Catholics were completely uninfluential in orienting the vote.
Finally, the irrelevance of tradition and of allusions to Christian civilization. The church of Bergoglio has not been ecumenical, but rather global, unrestricted and devoid of any spiritual bonds with Christian civilization. To the point of seeming to be nothing more than a huge NGO, a kind of emergency agency with priests who have lost a living link to tradition.
The church of Bergoglio almost seems to be finding Catholicism’s bimillennial history to be a deadweight and a nuisance. It prefers to present itself as a social and moral agency for today, citing Bauman
[Zygmunt Bauman, 1925-2017, Polish sociologist and philosopher who wrote about modernity and consumerism] more than Aquinas, chases to be in the news, and has traded in its spiritual charism in orderto seduce the world.
This is a pope who has refused to criticize some behaviors that up till yesterday had been considered reprehensible by the Church, justifying this as Christian humility: “Who am I to judge?” And one ought to say to him: “You are the Pope, the Hoy Father, and you not only have the right but the duty to judge, to orient, to exhort and to condemn. Otherwise, what for do you hve a pastoral role, what for do you have an evangelical mission?”
But the objection I would like to make to him and his followers is something else:
Who is he to judge – and in fact, to relativize and nullify - Christian and Catholic tradition, the thought of popes, saints and theologians before him, the life and example of martyrs and other witnesses to Catholic faith? Why must we bend truth to suit the times, and sacrifice millenary traditions to the habits of today and the manias of the politically correct?
But this question brings us back to where we started. That this pope is more a child of the times than of the Church, a child of globalization more than tradition. We would have liked him insteadto be the father or master of his time more than its child, a tree more than a fruit, and a fruit more than a leaf shaken here and there by the winds of the present.