THE CHURCH MILITANT - BELEAGUERED BY BERGOGLIANISM

Francis has mobilized the papacy's
absolute monarchy against justice
Fundamentally, neither bishops nor laity have any power in the government of their church.
That's leading to some huge problems as Francis works against resolving the priest abuse crisis.
By Willis L. Krumholz and Robert Delahunty
THE FEDERALIST
NOVEMBER 19, 2018

Pope Francis administered a stunning and humiliating shock to the bishops of the Catholic Church in the United States last week. The American bishops had gathered in Baltimore to discuss a pair of measures to deal with the continuing crisis over clerical sexual abuses in this country.

The measures were fairly modest. One sought to build on the 2002 “Dallas charter” — measures designed to stop priests’ abuse of children, mostly young boys — by extending its rules on reporting and accountability to bishops.

The other would have launched an investigation, led by lay Catholics, into reports of abuses by bishops. Conceivably, this would have looked into how former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, D.C., could have risen to the top of the U.S. Catholic hierarchy, despite being widely known — in secular circles, to the Vatican, and to many in the church — as being a serial abuser and harasser of young adult male seminarians (and at least one young boy).

The night before the conference, the pope abruptly quashed both measures. The bishops were left reeling, and lay Catholics were stunned and dismayed. For some, it may even be the last straw: If their church will not deal honestly with these issues, they will leave it.

Francis’s pretext was that a Vatican summit in February would address these matters “globally.” It then emerged that Francis, despite the outcry of American Catholics for action, had tried to get the entire meeting cancelled.

Back to the McCarrick scandal
The pope’s decision was likely related to the scandals that followed the news of McCarrick’s decades of abuse. After McCarrick’s predatory activities became widely publicized, other media accounts of the abuse of Catholic seminarians — young men entering the priesthood — have frequently appeared, detailing sexual misconduct and cover-ups by bishops, supervisors, and priests both in this country and around the globe. (Although the publicity is fairly recent, the existence of this type of abuse had been reported and documented well before 2018).

But Francis and his acolytes have steadily played down or ignored this post-McCarrick crisis, sometimes by trying to conflate it with the question of the clerical abuse of minors.
- It just so happens that McCarrick was a close adviser and intimate of Francis, and is believed to have lobbied for his election to the papacy.
- After becoming pope, Francis may have relieved McCarrick of (mild) sanctions that Francis’s predecessor, Benedict XVI, is said to have imposed.
- There is a trove of evidence that, despite knowing of McCarrick’s misdeeds, Francis protected the man nonetheless.

That hints at the reason for Francis’s brazen action against the American bishops. An investigation led by lay American Catholics into McCarrick and the clerical networks that had promoted him would be beyond Francis’s power to control. If Francis has something to hide, such an investigation would carry dangerous consequences for him and his allies.

The dismay of American Catholics
So when the papal diktat was announced by Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, gasps echoed across the room.

“It makes it look like we don’t care,” said Bishop Thomas Daly of Spokane, Washington, adding: “No reason is good enough for the laypeople who expect the bishops to act. … How are we going to explain this to the people back in our dioceses?”

“We are not, ourselves, happy about this. … We’re disappointed, because we were moving along on this,” said DiNardo.

The pope found an apologist in Chicago’s Cardinal Blase Cupich, whose rapid rise in the Catholic hierarchy under Francis has been disconcerting to traditional Catholics. In Baltimore, Cupich quickly stood up to defend the pope’s actions. There is a pattern here.
- In recent weeks, Cupich’s Chicago seminarians were appalled by his apparent indifference to the sexual molestation practiced by those in charge of their institutions.
- Along with former cardinal Donald Wuerl, who had to step down for his inaction in the face of abuses by his subordinates, Cupich is a member of Francis’s Congregation of Bishops, the body that oversees bishops globally and the same body that, by all accounts, has taken no action to address the crisis.
- Cupich and Wuerl also sought to derail the conference’s proposal for lay involvement. Before the conference began, the two had collaborated on a plan to scrap the idea of an independent, lay-led commission. Their alternative plan called for any investigations of bishops to be controlled by the bishops.
- Cupich defended his and Wuerl’s approach at the bishops’ conference, saying that their proposal better adhered to Catholic “ecclesiology.” In other words, only bishops — however badly compromised and conflicted themselves — could be permitted to look into charges against their brother bishops.

It is reasonable to infer that Cupich and Wuerl knew that DiNardo and the other bishops’ attempt at accountability would be shot down by Francis, and that they had worked in advance to craft this alternate proposal, which they would then announce once Francis’s decision to nix any lay investigation had been made public.

The bishops tried
Just think about this. America’s Catholics have been demanding — crying out — for action.
- They have, to no avail, been patient for a very long time in the face of behavior that is antithetical to Christ.
- But they have been balked by Francis and his Vatican bureaucracy. - Indeed, their requests have been treated with stony silence or cold contempt.

In August, the American Catholic bishops requested that the pope appoint an “apostolic visitor” to the United States to investigate the McCarrick matter. After delaying the request for weeks, the pope flatly rejected it, reportedly telling the bishops to go on a spiritual retreat instead. After that rebuff, the American bishops sought to take action on their own. That would have launched an investigation into themselves, and applied rules for the lower clergy to themselves.

The bishops’ behavior may be both insufficient and belated, but it is nonetheless laudable. For all their deference to one another, the majority of the bishops appear to be good men who are seeking to do justice. But the dark center within that silver lining is the pope who commanded them to stand down. There is a rot and a stench coming from the Vatican. The pope is the problem.

Why? Here are three possible explanations.
- The first, briefly mentioned above, is that the pope fears any independent inquiry into the McCarrick affair, and specifically into his treatment of McCarrick. At this point, the only reasonable assumption is that Francis has something to hide — and does not want anyone who is not under his watchful eyes to look into the matter. If that assumption is mistaken, then it falls to Francis to prove it so.
- The second explanation concerns the pope, and the third concerns the papacy.

The pope and the American Church
Francis’s attitude to the American church is by now unmistakable: He scorns it. Possibly this scorn stems from his hostility to things American generally — including our capitalist system, our belief in openness and transparency, our attitudes to sexual misconduct, our views on Mass, illegal immigration, or our current president. Or he may think that we are simply too nosy and noisy. In any case, he has regularly humiliated the American bishops and ignored the American laity.

The recent episode in Baltimore and the earlier refusal to designate an apostolic visitor are by no means the only instances of this. Consider Francis’ decision to re-impose the discredited Wuerl on the archdiocese of Washington D.C., from which Wuerl’s own Catholic people had sought to expel him.

Wuerl’s problems began with the release of a Pennsylvania grand jury report detailing a decades-long pattern of clerical sexual abuses in that state. The Pennsylvania grand jury looked into Wuerl, a close associate of Francis, who before moving to Washington had been the bishop of Pittsburgh. The report mentioned Wuerl some 200 times in connection with looking the other way on child abuse.

When the grand jury report revealed Wuerl’s actions and inactions in Pittsburgh, Catholics in Washington and across the country demanded his removal from his position in the nation’s capital. Pope Francis yielded to those demands, but only outwardly: [B]He ordered Wuerl to remain in charge of his DC archdiocese until Francis named a replacement — that is, for as long as Francis pleases.

Francis also went out of his way to hold up Wuerl as a model bishop with “the heart of a shepherd” and a person of singular “nobility.” What had Wuerl done in Pittsburgh to cause his own flock to rebel against him? Here is a summary from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette:

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The [grand jury] report alleges that Cardinal Wuerl ultimately permitted a molesting priest, Ernest C. Paone, to remain in ministry for years despite being made aware of the priest’s long, ugly history of abuse. It says he presided over a settlement agreement with two brothers who were abuse victims of a different priest, Richard Zula, that prohibited them from discussing the terms. It provides a detailed chronology of his negotiations with Zula about money the priest would receive from the diocese upon release from his incarceration in state prison.

It also tabs Wuerl as the originator of the phrase “circle of secrecy” — essentially the conspiracy of silence by which dioceses in Pennsylvania worked to shield abusing priests from the eyes of law enforcement, kept abusive clergy members in ministry, and limited public disclosure — a claim Wuerl vehemently denied. This is the man whom Francis, in a contemptuous display of raw power, re-imposed on the resistant Catholics of Washington.

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An Absolute Monarchy
These problems in the Roman Catholic Church come, at least in part, from a deeper source.
- It is not only the idiosyncrasies of a particular pope.
- It is a matter of the institutional structure or, in a broad sense, the “constitution” of the Roman Catholic Church as it stands today. The papacy is the last absolute monarchy in the world.

Fundamentally, neither bishops nor laity have any power in the government of their church, except within limits conceded by the pope. The pope may delegate some power, but he can retract it in an instant.

Consider what this means.
- There are no checks and balances within the Catholic Church, as now organized.
- Neither the College of Cardinals nor the Catholic episcopacy — and least of all, the Catholic laity — operates as a counter-weight to the pope.
- Indeed, since about the 16th century (although not through most of church history) not even an ecumenical council of the entire church has been held to have the authority to correct or depose a pope.


The Catholic Church has not always had such a “monarchical” character. True, the pope as Bishop of Rome has long been accorded a kind of primacy over all other bishops in communion with him. But primacy in that earlier understanding meant “respect,” not absolute power.

As late as the 18th century, the French episcopacy claimed that it had governing authority independent of the pope. Such was the position of French bishops of impeccable orthodoxy, deep learning, and personal holiness, including the celebrated bishop of Meaux, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627-1704).

Bossuet taught that it was “the full and supreme and universal authority of the Catholic Church that supplies what is lacking even in the Roman Church.” That authority was most generally exercised by the bishops of the worldwide church convening in a council. Bossuet’s opinion was shared by other Catholic bishops, clergy, and scholars, even outside of France.

That “Gallican” idea faded throughout the 19th century, largely in consequence of the French Revolution, which decimated the French church and left it clinging to the pope. The full results became apparent in the first Vatican Council (1869-70).

For all the fanfare, the second Vatican Council (1962-65) did not really roll back that conception of papal power, or recognize any non-derivative episcopal power, even though Catholic bishops claim to be the successors of the twelve apostles.

As for Catholic lay power, that was bleached out too over the centuries. Although emperors and kings had traditionally played a significant role in papal elections, and even the Roman population once had a role, the College of Cardinals is now prohibited from giving any heed at all to lay (or other clerical) voices outside itself when selecting one of its members to be pope.

Despite his feints at power-sharing with the bishops and his professed hostility to “clericalism,” Francis knows he is an absolute monarch. He exercises his powers ruthlessly. The episode in Baltimore is a perfect instance of his style: both bishops and laity be damned.

Perhaps the problems in the Catholic Church will never be solved — unless through the intervention of secular governments — until Catholics begin to recover their history, and their church starts to return to its roots. Until then, like King George, Francis is a tyrant who has a grudge against Americans. How much damage will he do before he is held to account?

 
How ironic that with a pontiff afflicted with unprecedented and irrepressible logorrhea - the output being mostly banal, often offensive to his critics, usually outrageous because anti-Catholic in tone and content, and hardly ever worth remembering for any particular insight or fact - he and the institutional church he heads (now effectively the church of Bergoglio, and not the one Holy Roman Catholic and Apostlic Church of Christ) is increasingly mute on the burning issues on which it ought to speak out as a duty it owes to the faithful!


A silent Vatican in a time of crisis
The Holy See has become increasingly mute in the face of frequent criticism —
an approach with a detrimental effect on the Vatican, the papacy and the Church

November 16, 2018

Whether it be the sexual abuse crisis, the Holy See’s recent landmark deal with China, or allegations raised in Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò’s testimonies, the Vatican is often being subjected to a barrage of important questions from the faithful eager to have convincing, official explanations and answers.

But usually these days, the Vatican’s response to these inquiries is obfuscation or, more commonly, silence.

When the Congregation for Bishops issued its unpublished directive to the U.S. bishops meeting in Baltimore this week, instructing them not to vote on two proposals on handling of clergy sexual abuse, the Register contacted six Vatican dicasteries, including the Holy See Press Office, to find out the reasons for their decision.

None responded, apart from Cardinal Marc Ouellet, prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, who gave a brief, one sentence statement most people felt failed to satisfactorily shed light on the reasons behind the decision.

This tendency to ignore questions from the media has increased in recent years. The issues are also not trivial, often concerning the very survival of a particular group of faithful, or even more importantly, the well-being of their eternal souls.

When a controversy breaks over a doctrinal matter, for instance, the Vatican often fails to reaffirm the Church’s teaching or refute the substance of the claims.
- An example took place in March this year, when reports emerged of an interview the Pope gave to atheist Eugenio Scalfari. Francis allegedly denied the existence of hell and the story spread rapidly around the world, but the Vatican responded late, and with a vague statement that failed to reassert the Church’s teaching in the face of the claim.
- Despite, or some argue because of, the recent Holy See-China agreement, Chinese authorities have reportedly been brainwashing four priests into joining the state-run church, and for the fifth time in two years, Bishop Shao Zhuyin of Wenzhou has been arrested. But requests this week for comment or reaction from the Vatican have so far met with no response.

Silence is not always golden
Some examples of other inquiries that have gone unanswered include:
- a request for an official clarification of the Pope’s goals for the Pan-Amazonian synod next year, especially with regard to clerical celibacy;
- why the Pope has continued to grant interviews to Scalfari, despite the 94-year-old's unreliable accounts of those interviews;
- why the final document on the recent Youth Synod contained very little on the Church’s moral teaching; and
- whether there have been any developments on the Vatican investigation into Archbishop Theodore McCarrick.

This silence also extends beyond issues concerning the faithful and relates to the well-being of the Pope himself.
- When Archbishop Viganò called on Francis to resign in his first testimony, the Vatican was silent, neither defending the Pope in the face of such a strong charge nor offering any reaction at all. (Cardinal Ouellet’s response did not appear until two months later, and was in response to Archbishop Viganò challenge to him, made in his second testimony. [That's their much-hyped super-dicastery for communications failing even its most elementary duty to come to the breach tout de suite to remedy a PR malfunction.]

The Pope 'responded' [in a way] to Archbishop Viganò's claims himself when he called on journalists to investigate the veracity of the former nuncio’s allegations — efforts which naturally must entail Vatican cooperation — but the Holy See failed to either comment or be cooperative.

At least five possible reasons account for the Vatican’s silences and inadequate responses to the media:
- it wishes to ignore controversial issues knowing that, in today’s rapid news cycle, they are quickly forgotten;
- it is unable to provide a response because officials are not privy to the reasons behind whatever action has been taken;
- it doesn’t want to be transparent because it would expose a hidden agenda;
- the Vatican is unable or unwilling to defend the indefensible; or
- it simply does not have the capacity to provide timely and substantive responses to controversial news coming out of the Vatican [super-dicastery nothwithstanding!] (A Rome truism is never underestimate in the Vatican how much can simply put down to incompetence.)

Whatever the true reason is, and it is possibly a mix of all of the above, the silence and dearth of adequate responses to the media on so many crucial issues cannot but have a detrimental effect on the Vatican, the papacy and the Church as a whole.

It is a truth of social communications that if an institution does not step in to provide a truthful and convincing official response to a relevant matter, particularly during a crisis, then others will fill the vacuum — and usually it will be those who shout the loudest, and may not always be sufficiently informed, who get heard.

It is therefore unsurprising that some in the Vatican perceive themselves as under frequent attack and often criticized. In the absence of creating an official and trustworthy narrative, the faithful cannot be blamed if they start to believe there isn’t one, and that the situation is perhaps as bad as it seems.


Vatican autocracy and the U.S. bishops
What happened to the “synodality” and “collegiality” that
were supposed to characterize the Church under Pope Francis?
by George Weigel

November 21, 2018

As the U.S. bishops gathered in Baltimore on the weekend of Nov. 10-11, it seemed certain that, after a day of prayer, penance, and reflection on the Church’s sexual abuse crisis, they would take two important steps toward reform.
- An episcopal code of conduct, holding bishops accountable to the standards applied to priests in the 2002 Dallas Charter, would be adopted.
- And the bishops would authorize a lay-led mechanism to receive complaints about episcopal misbehavior, malfeasance, or corruption; allegations found credible would be sent to the appropriate authorities, including those in Rome.

Then, at the last minute, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops [USCCB], received an instruction from Rome stating that the Vatican did not want the U.S. bishops to vote on these two measures. The lame rationale given with the instruction was that any such decisions should be made after the presidents of the world’s bishops’ conferences meet in Rome in February, to discuss the abuse crisis in its global dimensions.
- What happened to the “synodality” and “collegiality” that were supposed to characterize the Church under Pope Francis?
- What conceivable meaning of “synodality” or “collegiality” includes an autocratic Roman intervention in the affairs of a national bishops’ conference that knows its own situation far better than the Roman authorities?

And spare me the further excuses about Roman concerns over canon law. If there were canonical problems with the U.S. proposals, they could have been ironed out after the bishops had done what they had to do and what Rome effectively prevented them from doing — demonstrating to furious U.S. Catholics that the bishops are firmly committed to addressing the episcopal dimensions of the abuse crisis and the meltdown of episcopal credibility it had created in its wake.

(And while we’re on the subject of Church law: By what legal authority did Cardinal Marc Ouellet, prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, instruct the USCCB not to vote on matters the conference membership thought of the gravest importance?

A sliver of justification for that intervention might be extracted from Canon 455.1, on the authority of bishops’ conferences. But given the insouciance about canon law demonstrated by Rome in recent years, not to mention a seemingly endless series of strictures against “legalism,” such concerns over canon law ring hollow.

In any event, and according to Canon 455.2, any legal fine tuning could have taken place after the U.S. bishops had done what they deemed essential to restoring trust in this critical situation.)

I recently spent almost five weeks in Rome, during which I found an anti-American atmosphere worse than anything I’d experienced in 30 years of work in and around the Vatican.
- A false picture of the Church’s life in the United States, in which wealthy Catholics in league with extreme right-wing bishops have hijacked the Church and are leading an embittered resistance to the present pontificate, has been successfully sold.
- And in another offense against collegiality, this grossly distorted depiction of American Catholicism has not been effectively challenged or corrected by American bishops enjoying Roman favor these days.

Honest disagreements — about, say, Amoris Laetitia and its implications for doctrine and pastoral practice — are one thing. A systematic distortion of reality, which tramples on the presumption of an opponent’s good will that should guide any internal Catholic debate, is quite another.

Those involved in this anti-American-bishops calumny might also reflect on its disturbing genealogy. For one of those who injected this toxin into the Roman bloodstream was a serial sexual predator specializing in the abuse of seminarians under his authority — Theodore McCarrick, former archbishop of Washington.

Mainstream media reporting on the bishops’ recent Baltimore meeting generally got it right: The U.S. bishops tried to do the right thing and got bushwhacked by Rome, which Just Doesn’t Get It on sexual abuse and episcopal malfeasance. But the story cannot be allowed to end there. Nor can the Church afford to “wait until after February.”

Cardinal DiNardo and the majority of the bishops are determined to get to grips with the awfulness that has come to light, for the sake of the Church’s evangelical future. The bishops’ challenge now is to temper their ingrained deference to “Rome” and get on with devising responses to this crisis that are within their authority, and that address the legitimate demands of the Catholic people of the United States for reform. [How can Mr Weigel think the US bishops could 'temper their ingrained deference to Rome' - read 'the pope', though Weigel cannot bring himself to say so - when two-thirds of them would not even approve a resolution simply 'encouraging' the pope to make public the documents relevant to the McCarrick case???]

BTW, I will light a candle to St. George the day George Weigel finally reproaches Bergoglio himself directly for all the evils Weigel obviously sees in this pontificate. He remains stubbornly 'ultramontane' in attributing everything bad to 'Rome' or 'the Vatican', when he knows full well that the words are stand-ins so he will not have to 'accuse' Bergoglio directly of any wrongdoing. After all, back in 2013, he had hailed him widely and loudly as the pope who would finally bring to fruition the 'evangelical Catholicism' Weigel advocated in his 2013 book.