Nothing exciting or really new in the news and commentary I have seen today, October 10, which are mostly variations on the same theme of THE PRESENT CRISIS. But Sandro Magister did have something strange to report - yet another weirdness in the living gallery and tableau vivant of weirdnesses that is the Bergoglio Vatican...
A new team, or rather two,
at the Vatican, on 'Life and Family'
October 9, 2018
While the attention of the media was distracted by the work of the synod and by the statement from the Holy See on the McCarrick case, on Saturday, October 6, Pope Francis appointed the new members and advisers of the newly created Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life under Cardinal Kevin Farrell [McCarrick's roomie for six years in Washington DC].
Reading their names holds not a few surprises in store.
In the first place, among the members of the dicastery there is a glaring failure to name the president of the Pontifical Academy for Life (PAV, from its Latin name), Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, and the chancellor of the same. Monsignor Renzo Pegoraro. These absences appear all the more strident taking into consideration the close connections between the academy and this dicastery, which is evident in the updated statutes of both.
- Is this the sign of a decline of the pope's partiality towards Paglia?
- Or of a growing irritation in the Secretariat of State over his uncontrollable activism and his statements that are often embarrassing for the Holy See?
- Or of a friction between Paglia and Cardinal Farrell, prefect of the dicastery,
who appear to have very distant and contrasting visions on sexuality, family, and bioethics? [They do??? I had the impression both of them were LGBTQists - Paglia perhaps more than Farrell.]
The second and third reasons appear to be the most plausible. Of course, the absence of Paglia is even more striking if one thinks of the important role played by the past president of the Pontifical
Academy for Life, Elio Sgreccia, today a cardinal, in the Pontifical Council for the Family, which was the precursor to the current dicastery - for several years he was also its secretary - and with the even more important role played by Paglia himself in the same pontifical council, of which he was president until its breakup.
A considerable influence in this absence of officials of the PAV life among the members and advisers of the dicastery must have been Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin, whose strategy, over this past year, has been that of seeking to gloss over the increasingly evident contrasts between Cardinal Farrell and his coworkers - in particular his undersecretary, Gabrielle Gambino, on the one hand, and on the other Paglia and his own underlings, particularly the Jesuit Carlo Casalone, former head of the San Fedele cultural center in Milan - in the recent past a hotbed of disconcerting bioethical innovations.
Casalone has been working in tandem with moral theologian Maurizio Chiodi of the Theological Faculty of Northern Italy - now working in Rome in the “inner circle” of Pope Francis, alongside his confrere Antonio Spadaro, and omnipresent at the PAV.
To control the blaze, like a good fireman. Parolin has tried to separate fire and “paglia” [straw]. “
Divide et impera.” And perhaps he has done just that with this selection of the members and advisers of the dicastery.
Now, however, there will be not one but two “authorities” on bioethics and the family within the Holy See: on one side, the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life, and on the other, the PAV and the [Bergoglianized[ John Paul II Pontifical Theological Institute for Marriage and Family Sciences at the Lateran University, which is
also by Paglia, with nominal president PierAngelo Sequeri in a manifestly subordinate position.
- Will this twofold channel of Vatican bioethics work, moreover with a pope not personally versed in the subject, unlike his two predecessors?
-
Or will it instead create confusion among the bishops who on their ad limina visits will make the rounds of the dicasteries and of the other Vatican institutions in search of guidelines and clarifications on the delicate questions of life, sexuality, procreation, family, biomedical research, euthanasia, that arise in their countries?
- To which will they pay heed if they hear two different bells?
In the second place, a carefful reading of the names of the members and advisers appointed by Pope Francis reveals that they include members of the PAV currently in office, meaning that they were reconfirmed after the statutes were updated, like Manfred Lütz, a personal friend of Joseph Ratzinger, Laura Palazzani, and Monsignor Jacques Suaudeau, who was for several years assistant for studies at the academy with Sgreccia, both of them former members who were 'sensationally' excluded after the updating of the statutes, along with the American Thomas W. Hilgers, founder and director of the Pope Paul VI Institute for the Study of Human Reproduction and one of the leading experts on natural family planning, a courageous and combative defender of “Humanae Vitae”. All three have known "conservative” positions on Catholic bioethics based on the magisterium of the popes and of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith.
Does this means that, unlike the PAV, Farrell's discastery will aim to position itself on the “traditional” side of Catholic bioethics, leaving it to Paglia to be “open” on controversial issues or to cultivate new issues like robotics, ecology, artificial intelligence?
Or in other words:
Will there be two strands of anthropology and of the ethics of life, of sexuality and of the family that will develop in parallel or even in conflict with each other, in the bosom of the Holy See? [That's Bergoglio and his minions for you! Confusion is their master strategy - why be clear and unequivocal about anything at all, when being ambiguous and ambivalent will maybe 'please' or placate everyone who, as with AL, will choose to interpret Bergoglio's 'confusion-ism' the way they want to?]