Pope Francis

Pope Francis the Inconsistent

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Pope Francis, as everyone is beginning to notice, is erratic. He is not a systematic thinker; he does not like to be bound by logic; you never know what he is going to do or say next.

Peter Isely, a survivor of sexual abuse, told Crux:

In Isely’s view, survivors have typically encountered two different personas in Francis, one being the sympathetic pastor who has a deep sense of the horrifying impact of abuse, and another who can be cryptic, insensitive and who appears to fail to take action against known abusers.

“I don’t think we’ve ever heard someone from the Chair of Saint Peter talk about these crimes the way he has, and the effect and impact it has on the victim,” he said. “But then we’ve got this other Pope Francis.”

“Sometimes he says some alarming things, like he did in Chile,” Isely said, alluding to Francis essentially accusing abuse victims who protested against Bishop Juan Barros on charges that he covered up for Chile’s most notorious abuser priest, of calumny.

“We’ve got this guy who allows these bishops to cover up these crimes. And when a bishop is removed, we know that’s why he’s being removed, but he won’t say that’s why he’s being removed,” Isely said, adding that it’s not yet clear which persona will show up to the summit, but he’s hoping it’s the first.

In his Amoris Laetitia, he seemed to say that divorced people who entered second unions can receive Communion. Catholic theologians have followed the logic that a person may be civilly divorced, but if he is still in a valid, sacramental marriage, he commits adultery if he tries to marry again, and is therefore in a state of serious sin and cannot receive communion. The four cardinals who asked Francis to explain –the Dubia–were simply ignored.

Worse still, Father Antonio Spadaro, S.J., confidant of the pope, tried to defend Francis by this tweet.

This phrase has a disturbing history.

The phrase “two plus two equals five” (“2 + 2 = 5”) is a slogan used in many different forms of media, most notably the 1949 dystopian novel 1984 by George Orwell. In the novel, it is used as an example of an obviously false dogma that one may be required to believe, similar to other obviously false slogans promoted by the Party in the novel.

Orwell’s protagonist, Winston Smith, uses the phrase to wonder if the State might declare “two plus two equals five” as a fact; he ponders whether, if everybody believes it, that makes it true. The Inner Party interrogator of thought-criminals, O’Brien, says of the mathematically false statement that control over physical reality is unimportant; so long as one controls one’s own perceptions to what the Party wills, then any corporeal act is possible, in accordance with the principles of doublethink (“Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. (Wikipedia)

Solidarity in Poland used the slogan Two plus two always equals four to counteract the Communist party line.

The poster reads: Let Poland be Poland. Two plus two always equals four.

Spadaro is obviously no deep thinker; nor is he much acquainted with history, or he would never have used that example.

But for Francis, one day 2+2 equals 4, the next day maybe 5, the next day maybe 3; and his courtiers, sycophants, and defenders have to justify his erratic statements.

Francis proclaims the need for synodality and lay involvement in stopping sexual abuse. Then he forbids the American bishops from voting on proposals, one of which is to set a lay investigative board. Only the pope can investigate bishops! But then Francis lets Chinese Communist atheists appoint bishops.

He in a footnote in Amoris laetitia raises the issue of communion for Catholics in invalid unions, a question that raises many serious doctrinal questions. But he dismisses any serious discussion of changing the rule of celibacy for priests in the Latin church, although most of the Eastern churches in union with Rome have married priests. Married priests raise no doctrinal issues; the question is whether it would be a fruitful change in the Latin church. Maybe, maybe not. Most the laity would welcome it or at least not object.

Because Francis is erratic, he has not established a clear policy to deal with sexual abuse; he has lessened the penalties that abusers received under Pope Benedict. Since there is not clear policy, one cannot even object to it. One day he lets an abuser function as a priest; the next day he defrocks McCarrick. It all depends the whim and mood of the day. I have little or no hope that any clear and consistent policy about sexual abuse will be established as long as Francis is pope.

Oh, yes. And his critics are tools of the devil:

Speaking on the eve of a landmark Vatican summit on the prevention of clerical sex abuse, the pontiff told a congregation of 2,500 pilgrims in Saint Peter’s Basilica that those who “live their whole life accusing the Church” are “friends, cousins and relatives of the devil”.

Take that, you mean-spirited victims of sexual abuse. Can’t you shut up!

 

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Attacking the Messenger

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As usual, the messenger who delivers unwanted news is attacked to discredit his news.

Heidi Schlumpf (I love Low German names) at the leftist National Catholic Reporter:

Many, including more progressive Catholics, questioned Vigano’s credibility, because he has been implicated in covering up alleged sexual misconduct by former St. Paul-Minneapolis Archbishop John Nienstedt.

Others pointed out that Francis had replaced Vigano as nuncio after he was involved in the papal meeting with controversial Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis during the pope’s visit to the U.S. in 2015. New York Times religion reporter Elizabeth Dias noted on Twitter that “Vigano and Francis have been political enemies.”

Michael Shawn Winters, also at the National Catholic Reporter, has an objective headline: “Vigano letter exposes the putsch against Pope Francis”:

Vigano’s tissue of misinformation will leave its mark. In the midst of a feeding frenzy, no one stops to ask basic questions and even journalists can forget to undertake basic tasks like asking for corroboration or looking at the questions a text such as Vigano’s poses. Here are a few of my questions:

Vigano says he must unburden his conscience now.  Why now? If he felt as disturbed by the filth as he claims to have been, why did he not say anything publicly or at least speak to the bishops conference? I recall a few years back, at a meeting of bishops’ conference, sitting outside the ballroom in Baltimore chatting with a monsignor from the nunciature. He was waiting for Vigano who was in the executive session of the bishops’ meeting. Why did he say nothing then?

Vigano is a disgruntled former employee. Such people are always a bit angry. They are also often a bit unreliable. He was always a crackpot. But, make no mistake: This is a coordinated attack on Pope Francis. A putsch is afoot and if the U.S. bishops do not, as a body, stand up to defend the Holy Father in the next 24 hours, we shall be slipping towards schism long before the bishops meeting in November. The enemies of Francis have declared war.

(BTW can’t NCR afford accents?)

Notice Winters’ focus is not on the truth or falsehood of Viganò’s accusations, but on Viganò’s motives and character. A person may not have completely clean hands and may still tell the truth. In fact, those who know damning truths usually do not have completely clean hands.

Viganò has an agenda, and he focuses on the failures of Francis, who is, after all, the current pope, rather than on the egregious failures of John Paul II, who, after all, is dead. As for me – a pox on both their houses. Both popes failed sexual abuse victims, both allowed the evil to fester.

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Nominalism, Voluntarism, and Amoris Laetitia

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Although we are usually not aware of it, our moral attitudes have been shaped by centuries of philosophical and theological controversies. The ones that have shaped the modern world, and almost always for the worse, are nominalism and voluntarism. They are the wrong or at least inadequate answers to important questions: “Does reality have a logical, comprehensible structure, or is everything dependent solely on will, whether the will of God or the will of man?” The wrong answers to these questions continue to distort both secular culture and the culture of the Church. The distortions are perhaps most severe, or perhaps at least most visible, in sexual matters, such as the question of gender identity or marriage and divorce.

Dominicans in particular have seen in nominalism and voluntarism the source of severe distortions in Christian moral attitudes.[i] Both sides in the current controversy in the Catholic Church over the admission of divorced and remarried persons to the sacraments claim the other side suffers from these distortions.

To begin with the beginning.

The Greeks had confidence that the universe had a rational structure, a logical structure, and that beyond the seeming disorder there was a logos which was at least partially accessible to human reason. The Wisdom literature of the Old Testament was influenced by this, and Christians believe that in Jesus the Word, the Logos, has become flesh and dwelt among us.

Greek philosophy and its heirs believed in the ability of reason to comprehend reality. Philosophers were realists; they believed that our ideas, our concepts, our categories correspond to something that exists out there, outside of our minds. We can form true ideas that correspond to the essences or natures of things.

Plato took this to an extreme with his doctrine of Ideas that have an eternal, independent existence. Aristotle and Aquinas thought that the underlying essences or natures did not exist independently, but nonetheless had a real existence in, not apart from, the individuals in that category. That is, there is no independent eternal idea of DOG, but there is a species of dog and this species is not simply a construct of the human mind but corresponds to something, a nature, an essence, outside our minds.

But for nominalists, only particulars exist. Our general ideas, our categories, our concepts are more or less arbitrary, mere names we apply to groups of particulars. Our ideas do not correspond to anything outside of us; they exist only in our minds. There are no natures or essences. There are only mental categories into which we place particular beings. There is no human nature, only particular human beings. Therefore there cannot be a natural law based on the essence or nature of something, since natures do not exist.

We decide which individuals we will put into a category; we do not discover the reality that unites and underlies a group of particular beings. Our ideas are only names, nomina in Latin; they are based on an act of our will, voluntas, not on an act of reason.

William of Occam is the philosopher most associated with nominalism, and from nominalism he deduced another type of voluntarism. If reality has no logical structure; it is governed solely by acts of the divine will, voluntas. For Ockham, God’s omnipotence dominated to the extent that God’s freedom had to be so absolute that it could not be limited by reason, by nature, by truth, by anything he had done in the past or promised for the future. God was free to be arbitrary, to change at any time, to change the laws of human nature (which is after all only a human category). God’s freedom was undetermined by anything. Omnipotence was the first and most important attribute of God; he could do anything; he was not subject to any higher law, including, some said, the laws of logic, even the law of contradiction.

Since reality does not have a logical structure, morality is based solely on the will of God. The voluntarists taught that God could command us to kill, steal, commit adultery, and we would be obliged to do so; some even taught that God could command us to hate Him, and we would be obliged to hate Him.

Because the omnipotence of God had already become prominent in medieval philosophy, the sovereignty of God was a leading doctrine of the Reformation. Luther said that “God is He for whose will no cause or ground may be laid down as its rule and standard…What God wills is not right because He ought or was bound so to will, what takes place must be right, because He so wills.” Calvin concurred; “God’s will is so much the highest rule of righteousness that whatever He wills, by the very fact the He wills it, must be considered righteous.”

Submission in Arabic is Islam; and both nominalism and voluntarism entered Western philosophy at the time when Western Christendom was beginning to interact with the Islamic world.

Pope Benedict in his Regensburg address considered the analogues of Western nominalism and voluntarism in Islam and described the consequences of this voluntarism:

“This … might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness. God’s transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God.”

Benedict sees this as a false idea of transcendence. On the contrary, Benedict insisted,  

“God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf. “

Love transcends reason but it “continues to be love of the God who is Logos. Consequently, Christian worship is “λογικη λατρεία” [rational adoration], worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason.”

Before I turn to how Catholicism has been affected by voluntarism, let us briefly look at how our culture has been influenced by nominalism. Pope Francis at the United Nations criticized “declarationist nominalism,”[ii] and I think this is what he meant: Today a person is a male; tomorrow he decides he is a female; and his reality is determined by an act of will, not an exercise of reason. A family is anything we decide it is and declare it to be; marriage is whatever we say it is. We do not perceive reality; we create it by an act of will.  An article I read, I think in the NYT, explained why reporters used the term fetus when talking about abortion but the term unborn child when referring to a miscarriage. The article explained that the parents decided whether the thing in the womb was a fetus which could be cut up and sold or an unborn child to be loved. Will has triumphed over reason.

Roman Catholic theology never went to the extremes that the Reformation did in emphasizing the omnipotence of God, but among the Jesuits moral theology tended to focus on the will rather than on the reason as the locus of morality. The Jesuits were interested mainly in the interaction of God’s will and the human will. This variety of voluntarism stressed that the main content of morality is obedience to commandments, rules, laws, coming from an authority, a will, outside of oneself.

Germain Grisez[iii] describes the attitude toward the moral law that this produced:

“By keeping these rules one would merit heaven; by violating them one would deserve eternal punishment in hell. In this perspective, an understanding of the intrinsic connection between Christian life in this world and eternal life was far less important than a firm conviction that the disobedience of mortal sin must be avoided.”

This focus on law and obligation as the norm of moral actions created a legalistic mentality.

Grisez continues: “Legalism often causes the faithful to view the Church’s moral teaching as an imposition. The suspicion grows that the Christian life itself is a kind of arbitrary test for which different rules could well be devised if only the test maker chose. In these circumstances, the desire increases to do as one pleases as much as one can.”

Catholics therefore tend to see morality in terms of things that are forbidden, and even worse, tend to think that things are wrong only because God or the Church forbids them, not that God or the Church forbids them because they are wrong and destructive. And many Catholics tend to think that God and the church can change these rules and are simply mean not to do so. The moral life becomes a contest between the human will and the divine will, in which the human will pursues its own ends and tries to carve out a space for itself by obeying only those divine commands it has to obey to avoid damnation.

The voluntarist view of morality focuses on the obligation imposed by the authority of the divine will when it promulgates a law. The main point of the moral life is to avoid guilt which is a deliberate and conscious transgression of a known commandment.

The person who sees everything only in terms of obligation has a strong tendency to be a minimalist. How late can I arrive to mass, how early can I leave and still fulfill the Sunday obligation? How much am I obliged to give to support the Church? How much can I eat and not break the Lenten fast? And, the main concern of young males, how far can I go and not commit a mortal sin?

This is not a good attitude for a Christian. It becomes even more destructive when casuists minimize the obligations. Pascal in the Provincial Letters lambasts the Jesuits for their casuistry, for the mental contortions they went through to justify acts, such as dueling, that were clearly immoral. However, he acknowledged that the Jesuits had a defensible motive: they did not want by moral rigorism to drive people out of the church; they preferred to have someone remain in the church and be a bad Catholic rather than leave the church. They knew that some men would insist on dueling and would abandon Christianity if they were told they could not duel.

Pope Francis has ignited with his Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia a controversy over the admission to communion of divorced and remarried Catholics. Each side claims the other side suffers from the distortions of post-Tridentine moral theology, which emphasized keeping rules rather than growing in virtue.

Francis criticizes what he sees as a legalistic voluntarism, a stress that the will of God must be obeyed because it is the law. His critics on the contrary see in Amoris laetitia an opening to antinomian voluntarism, that is, an implication that divine laws can be changed, and that the pope has the authority to change them. Archbishop Scicluna of Malta said, “Whoever wishes to discover what Jesus wants from him, he must ask the Pope, this Pope, not the one who came before him, or the one who came before that. This present Pope.”[iv] —An odd statement that seems to claim the pope is an oracle, like the head of the Mormon church, who can have new revelations.

Some cardinals and bishops, including our Bishop Lopes,[v] reason in this way:

Divorce does not dissolve a sacramental marriage. The marriage is real; it exists until death. A person who divorces his spouse and tries to enter into another marriage is in fact committing adultery every time he has intercourse. Adultery is always a mortal sin. A person in a state of mortal sin cannot receive communion, because his relationship with God is sundered. Therefore, a person who has tried to enter into a second marriage cannot receive communion unless he abstains from sexual intercourse. This is simply the reality of the situation.

The Jesuit Antonio Spadaro, a confident of Pope Francis, responded to this reasoning in a tweet: “Theology is not #Mathematics. 2 + 2 in #Theology can make 5. Because it has to do with #God and real #life of #people…”

This remark was a red flag to critics of the lenient interpretation of Amoris Laetitia, because it looks like Spadaro claims that God is not bound by logic, that He can make 2 plus 2 to equal 5 by an act of His will. This means that reality does not have a logical structure and morality is determined purely by God’s will. Spadaro would almost certainly reject this idea, but he has not explained what he really meant.

Of course, ignorance has long been recognized as mitigating or removing the guilt of breaking a law. Ignorance can be the result of a mental blindness, not simply a result of lack of information. Some divorced and remarried cannot see or accept that their second marriage is invalid and their relations are adulterous. Such people may be without subjective guilt.  They want to grow in virtue, to participate in the life of the Church, and to raise their children in the Faith. That is why they desire to receive the sacraments. Amoris Laetitia seems to open the sacraments to such people, and this is in fact how Cardinal Schönborn[vi] and many bishops have interpreted what Pope Francis wrote.

But it seems to me that this approach misses an important point. An erring conscience may absolve a person from guilt, but it does not prevent harm to God’s creation. Even if those who have attempted remarriage are without subjective guilt, their wrong actions are still destructive and harm reality. A sacramental marriage by its indissolubility is not simply a sign but a sacrament of the unbreakable love of God for the Church. That is, a sacramental marriage gives an unshakeable foundation to the family and is a mighty aid for the provision and protection of children, who are the main sufferers from the acceptance of divorce and remarriage and the atmosphere of instability it creates. An erroneous conscience may absolve a person from guilt, but it does not prevent him from hurting others.

Cardinal Ratzinger in one of his interviews recounts a conversation with an unnamed German theologian (I presume it was Hans Kung). The other theologian said it was good that the people of Europe were invincibly ignorant about sexual morality. They were going to fornicate anyway, so at least they were doing it without guilt, because they were not violating their consciences. Ratzinger asked if the Nazi SS men who killed Jews because they thought it was the right thing to do were also without guilt, because they were also following their consciences. The other theologian said yes, the Nazis who were following their conscience and killing Jews were without guilt. Ratzinger sensed there had to be something wrong with this analysis of the erroneous conscience.

The law is given as light to our eyes and a lamp to our feet. It is not good to be ignorant of it. It is not a set of more or less arbitrary rules; it is a guide to reality. It is not being merciful to people to let them live undisturbed in a false world of their own creation instead of the real world that God has created.

 Seeing the moral life as only obedience to rules is inadequate, but obedience to the rules is a necessary step for moral and spiritual progress, because those rules are a guide to reality.  Moral theologians who tried to get away from a purely rule-based morality and who tried to develop a morality of virtue whose aim is happiness never denied the validity of the rules. The commandments are the lowest rung of the Christian life; the Beatitudes and the infused gifts of the Holy Spirit are the higher rungs. But we can’t get to the higher rungs unless we climb the lower ones first. It’s only logical.

Pope Francis has a taste for chaos, a “mess” as he calls it[vii]; he is, after all, an Argentine. Not everyone enjoys or profits from confusion. As Cardinal Müller, the head of the CDF, said in an interview, “The task of priests and bishops is not that of creating confusion, but of bringing clarity.” Clarity is important because we should feel that moral demands are based on reason’s accurate perception of reality, not on the whim of God or of a pope.

Pope Francis has refused to answer questions that a group of cardinals put to him. The church is often reluctant to resolve a controversy prematurely, until issues are clarified. In the 17th century Dominicans and Jesuits argued violently about the nature of grace and human cooperation in grace. The Jesuits accused the Dominicans of being Calvinists, and the Dominicans accused the Jesuits of being Pelagians. This controversy was given the name De Auxiliis. The pope intervened; he forbade anyone from calling an opponent a heretic and said that the church would resolve the controversy at an opportune time.[viii] We are still waiting.

Perhaps Pope Francis is following this policy.[ix] But eventually the Church will have to arrive at some clarity and agreement about remarriage after divorce. Morality can’t differ from one diocese to the next. And do the irregular unions that Francis seems to tolerate include polygamous marriage? African bishops have a real problem with people in polygamous marriages who convert to Christianity.

But to return to our own lives and the basis for the repentance that Lent calls us to.  We should always strive to be conscious that God’s commands are not arbitrary, but are based upon reality, and that He desires our happiness. Most of the time we can see this, but we all suffer from blindness about particular faults – if you are married your spouse will inform you of them. Sometimes we can’t see why God has commanded or forbidden something, but we have to trust that He can see things more accurately than we can. We should strive to understand His point of view and make it our own, through the study of Scripture and of the teachings of the Church, and through conversation with Him in prayer. His ways are the ways to true happiness, and will fulfill our deepest desires.

[i] Especially Servais Pinckaers, Romanus Cessario and Augustine De Noia,

[ii] “Our world demands of all government leaders a will which is effective, practical and constant, concrete steps and immediate measures for preserving and improving the natural environment and thus putting an end as quickly as possible to the phenomenon of social and economic exclusion, with its baneful consequences: human trafficking, the marketing of human organs and tissues, the sexual exploitation of boys and girls, slave labour, including prostitution, the drug and weapons trade, terrorism and international organized crime. Such is the magnitude of these situations and their toll in innocent lives, that we must avoid every temptation to fall into a declarationist nominalism which would assuage our consciences. We need to ensure that our institutions are truly effective in the struggle against all these scourges.”

[iii] See his The Way of the Lord Jesus.

[iv] The bishops of Malta are merely following the directives of Pope Francis in their interpretation of Amoris Laetitia, Archbishop Charles Scicluna said in a radio interview.

Archbishop Scicluna said that the Maltese bishops’ guidelines on implementation of the papal document follow the Pope’s clear indications. He admitted that he was surprised when the Pontiff, in a letter to bishops in Buenos Aires, said that “there are no other interpretations.” However, the Maltese prelate said, “one has to accept the interpretation that the Pope gives of his own document.”

In a recent homily, speaking on the same subject, Archbishop Scicluna stressed the importance of following the pastoral guidance of the Roman Pontiff: “Whoever wishes to discover what Jesus wants from him, he must ask the Pope—this Pope, not the one who came before him, or the one who came before that. This present Pope.”

[v] Bishop Steven J. Lopes of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter (the U.S.-based structure for former Anglican communities who have joined the Catholic Church) has also written that the Church’s traditional teaching on marriage has not been changed, and that couples who are remarried without an annulment cannot receive absolution or the Eucharist without the intent to refrain from sexual relations.

“Pastoral discernment admits of no exceptions to the moral law, nor does it replace moral law with the private judgements of conscience,” Bishop Lopes wrote.

[vi] Cardinal Schonborn: The complexity of family situations, which goes far beyond what was customary in our Western societies even a few decades ago, has made it necessary to look in a more nuanced way at the complexity of these situations. To a greater degree than in the past, the objective situation of a person does not tell us everything about that person in relation to God and in relation to the church. This evolution compels us urgently to rethink what we meant when we spoke of objective situations of sin. And this implicitly entails a homogeneous evolution in the understanding and in the expression of the doctrine.

Francis has taken an important step by obliging us to clarify something that had remained implicit in “Familiaris consortio” [St. John Paul II’s 1981 exhortation on the family] about the link between the objectivity of a situation of sin and the life of grace in relation to God and to his church, and –- as a logical consequence –- about the concrete imputability of sin. Cardinal Ratzinger had explained in the 1990s that we no longer speak automatically of a situation of mortal sin in the case of new marital unions. I remember asking Cardinal Ratzinger in 1994, when the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had published its document about divorced and remarried persons: “Is it possible that the old praxis that was taken for granted, and that I knew before the [Second Vatican] Council, is still valid? This envisaged the possibility, in the internal forum with one’s confessor, of receiving the sacraments, provided that no scandal was given.” His reply was very clear, just like what Pope Francis affirms: There is no general norm that can cover all the particular cases. The general norm is very clear; and it is equally clear that it cannot cover all the cases exhaustively.

[vii] “They wrote a speech for me to give you. But speeches are boring,” the Argentine pontiff said to loud cheers, casting aside his script. “Make a mess, but then also help to tidy it up. A mess which gives us a free heart, a mess which gives us solidarity, a mess which gives us hope.”

[viii] Pope Clement XII, on October 2, 1733, issued the papal bull Apostolicae Providentiae Officio, in which he declared, “We forbid these opposing schools either in writing, or speaking or disputation or on any other occasion to dare impose any theological note or censure on the opposite school of thought or to attack their rivals in offensive or insulting language.”

[ix] Jesuit Father James Bretzke, a moral theologian at Boston College, noted that Pope Francis’ reluctance to further clarify the document and its application is intentional.

“Pope Francis is well aware of what’s going on, but I think he believes, methodologically as a way of governance, that these sorts of issues are best interpreted at the ground level,” Father Bretzke said. “He has by and large avoided the temptation to come down on high and cut off discussion or responses at lower levels, and not just in this area, but many others as well. This is the principle of subsidiarity in practice.”

As to how long the debate continues, and if it eventually works itself out, as Keating suggested, or remains a controversy for the next pope to address, are questions for the future. What the experts agree on is for the faithful to remain hopeful and to pray for the Church. (Our Sunday Visitor)

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Misapplied Mercy and Pope Francis

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Francis Mercy

Because I saw how mercy and forgiveness were misused in cases of clerical sexual abuse, I have been suspicious of Pope Francis’s stress on God’s mercy, which seems to lack an equal stress on justice. My suspicious were justified. Nicole Winfield of the AP reports:

Pope Francis has quietly reduced sanctions against a handful of pedophile priests, applying his vision of a merciful church even to its worst offenders in ways that survivors of abuse and the pope’s own advisers question.

One case has come back to haunt him: An Italian priest who received the pope’s clemency was later convicted by an Italian criminal court for his sex crimes against children as young as 12. The Rev. Mauro Inzoli is now facing a second church trial after new evidence emerged against him, The Associated Press has learned.

The Inzoli case is one of several in which Francis overruled the advice of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and reduced a sentence that called for the priest to be defrocked, two canon lawyers and a church official told AP. Instead, the priests were sentenced to penalties including a lifetime of penance and prayer and removal from public ministry.

In some cases, the priests or their high-ranking friends appealed to Francis for clemency by citing the pope’s own words about mercy in their petitions.

“With all this emphasis on mercy … he is creating the environment for such initiatives,” the church official said, adding that clemency petitions were rarely granted by Pope Benedict XVI, who launched a tough crackdown during his 2005-2013 papacy and defrocked some 800 priests who raped and molested children.

[Greg] Burke said Francis’ emphasis on mercy applied to “even those who are guilty of heinous crimes.” He said priests who abuse are permanently removed from ministry, but are not necessarily dismissed from the clerical state, the church term for laicization or defrocking.

“The Holy Father understands that many victims and survivors can find any sign of mercy in this area difficult,” Burke said. “But he knows that the Gospel message of mercy is ultimately a source of powerful healing and of grace.”

“While mercy is important, justice for all parties is equally important,” Collins said in an email. “If there is seen to be any weakness about proper penalties, then it might well send the wrong message to those who would abuse.”

It can also come back to embarrass the church. Take for example the case of Inzoli, a well-connected Italian priest who was found guilty by the Vatican in 2012 of abusing young boys and ordered defrocked.

Inzoli appealed and in 2014 Francis reduced the penalty to a lifetime of prayer, prohibiting him from celebrating Mass in public or being near children, barring him from his diocese and ordering five years of psychotherapy.

In a statement announcing Francis’ decision to reduce the sentence, Crema Bishop Oscar Cantoni said “no misery is so profound, no sin so terrible that mercy cannot be applied.”

In November, an Italian criminal judge showed little mercy in convicting Inzoli of abusing five children, aged 12-16, and sentencing him to four years, nine months in prison. The judge said Inzoli had a number of other victims but their cases fell outside the statute of limitations.

 

Don Mercedes

Inzoli was a leader in Communion and Liberation. He was known as Don Mercedes because he had a taste for that car. He also had a taste for b0ys. Pope Benedict defrocked Inzoli; Francis reinstated him

La Procura ha contestato a «don Mercedes», come era soprannominato per la sua passione per le auto di lusso, otto abusi sessuali, che il religioso avrebbe commesso tra il 2004 e il 2008 sfruttando la sua autorità di leader di Cl e di rettore del liceo linguistico Shakespeare di Crema, oltre che, per 17 anni, parroco della chiesa della Santissima Trinità della cittadina. Sono invece stati prescritti un’altra quindicina di episodi. I suoi accusatori parlano di baci, abbracci, carezze e altro ancora nello studio accanto all’oratorio o nelle case-vacanze che ospitavano i ritiri spirituali. La giustizia religiosa ha già punito don Inzoli riducendolo, con papa Ratzinger, allo stato laicale. Il sacerdote ha presentato ricorso e, con papa Francesco, la pena è stata ammorbidita: don Inzoli resta prete ma può celebrare messa solo in privato, è bandito da Crema, deve «condurre una vita di preghiera e di umile riservatezza come segni di conversione e penitenza», oltre a intraprendere, per almeno cinque anni, «una terapia adeguata».

Sexual abusers come in all ideological varieties; they worm their way into organizations so they can have access to money and children. The Pope has not learned his lesson. Children suffer.

 

Addendum: This is how Don Mercedes explained his actions to young boys:

Un ragazzo racconta che nel 1996 don Inzoli lo toccò “nel corso della confessione” e che alla sua richiesta di spiegazioni, il leader carismatico di Cl giustificò gli atti sessuali “facendo riferimento ad una sorta di ‘battesimo dei testicoli’ che gli aveva presentato come un rituale ebraico citato nell’Antico Testamento come segno dell’affetto del padre nei confronti del figlio

 

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The Gift of Tears

in Liturgy, Uncategorized No Comments Tags: , , , , ,

Horeb photo

The Rock of Horeb

Pope Francis has preached about the gift of tears, a little known gift of the Holy Spirit:

“All of us have felt joy, sadness and sorrow in our lives, [but] have we wept during the darkest moment? Have we had that gift of tears that prepare the eyes to look, to see the Lord? We, too, can ask the Lord for the gift of tears. It is a beautiful grace … to weep praying for everything: for what is good, for our sins, for graces, for joy itself. … [It] prepares us to see Jesus.”

Today’s reading at Morning Prayer is from Exodus:

Therefore the people found fault with Moses, and said, “Give us water to drink.” And Moses said to them, “Why do you find fault with me? Why do you put the LORD to the proof?” But the people thirsted there for water, and the people murmured against Moses, and said, “Why did you bring us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our cattle with thirst?” So Moses cried to the LORD, “What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me.” And the LORD said to Moses, “Pass on before the people, taking with you some of the elders of Israel; and take in your hand the rod with which you struck the Nile, and go. Behold, I will stand before you there on the rock at Horeb; and you shall strike the rock, and water shall come out of it, that the people may drink.” And Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel.

Horeb

Christina Rossetti in her poem about the gift of tears alludes to this episode at Horeb. She feels her heart a dry stone within her, unable to weep at Calvary, and asks God to smite her heart as Moses smote the rock at Horeb so that life-giving water might flow forth. Her life was filled with affliction, but she asks for the affliction that creates a tender heart.

AM I a stone and not a sheep
That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy Cross,
To number drop by drop Thy Blood’s slow loss,
And yet not weep?

Not so those women loved 5
Who with exceeding grief lamented Thee;
Not so fallen Peter weeping bitterly;
Not so the thief was moved;

Not so the Sun and Moon
Which hid their faces in a starless sky, 10
A horror of great darkness at broad noon—
I, only I.

Yet give not o’er,
But seek Thy sheep, true Shepherd of the flock;
Greater than Moses, turn and look once more 15
And smite a rock.

 

Francis said if we let ourselves cry, we can then recognize “the cry of the penitent, the cry of the brother and the sister who are looking upon so much human misery.”
 
But, he assured the congregation, “Mary will make us understand how great and humble this mystery [of the cross] is; how sweet as honey and how bitter as aloe. That she will be the one who accompanies us on this journey, which no one can take if not ourselves. Each one of us must take it. With the mother, weeping and on our knees.”
Mary Weeping
 
The solution to the refugee crisis in Europe is hard to see, but Francis calls on us to have tender hearts:
 
“Who has wept for the deaths of these brothers and sisters? Who has wept for the people who were on the boat? For the young mothers carrying their babies? For these men who wanted something to support their families? We are a society that has forgotten the experience of weeping, of ‘suffering with’; the globalization of indifference has taken from us the ability to weep.”
 
“Who has wept? Who in today’s world has wept?” We must “ask Lord for the grace to weep over our indifference, to weep over the cruelty in the world, in ourselves” to weep at the foot of the Cross.
Dead refugee child
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Francis the Fixer

in clergy sex abuse scandal, Pope Francis 34 Comments Tags: , ,

This is from CM:

Pope Francis was visited by George Weigel last week, so it is no surpise that his statements yesterday on the abuse crisis mimick Weigel’s ideological views of the crisis: holiness is what was lacking; abuse is greater among the laity; we are getting blamed unjustly for a common problem; Benedict was at the forefront of the reform.
You, Leon, and so many other reformers have rebutted these false notions with hard facts, which continue to get pushed under the tide of high rhetoric.
Yes, there are slightly more pedophiles among laity than priests but pederasty (abuse of adolescent boys) by priests, which is the main problem, has been at a rate Sipe proved to be between 9% and up to 40% in some urban settings.

Sadly, Pope Benedict only acted under pressure, and after years of knowing the truth, and allowing, for example, Maciel to continue to abuse. I believe his brave stepping aside was in recognition of his failure and the moral impossibility of his leading any reform. It is example all must follow who betrayed children. It will be Francis’ fate if he does not act decisively.

Yes, holiness was lacking. But the kind of “holiness” which insists on couping men up together for years in seminary, without possibility of marriage, leads to situational homophilia with lifelong tendencies to be attracted to boys, if ex-Legionnaires’ accounts can be believed.

The Church has not been singled out. With over 4,000 creditable accused pederast priests in the US alone, the enormity of the diabolical infestation is almost unimaginable. In addition, known pederast cardinals and bishops remain in power, and are well known by the pope. His failure to remove them is aiding and abetting their continued abuse of children. If he thinks telling them to stop is sufficient, he should consult his chief demonologists.

The Pope struggles to appoint his abuse commission because, I believe, he realizes the clerical experts who now claim to be architects of reform were themselves minions in the original cover-up.

The crisis is far from over. Sick priests are still permitted to remain priests under insufficent supervision. Child protection measures being foisted on bishops conferences worldwide are a smoke screen to avoid addressing this horror.

True experts need to be consulted if the pope has any chance of coming out of the brainwashing that has deeply affected Church leadership on the topic. Leaders such as you, Leon, and Richard Sipe, and Jason Barry. The Pope should hold a private summit with reformer experts to educate himself first, including the real anatomy of the ring of abusers and abettors that exists under his nose, and continue to advise him.

Most importantly, he must establish a truth and justice commission, trying in court any bishop who moved priests around and through whose actions children continued and continue to be molested.

The Pope bemoans the lack of generative bishops. No honest priest will step forward to be bishop to support the continued practices they know will burden them with living a lie. There is no generativity possible without placing the protection of children before everything else. If that means most of the bishops in the Church must step down, then so be it. God will raise up 7000 more. The Church was reduced to a handful of clerics during times of heresy. This is the heresies of gnosticism, Jansenism and angelism writ large. Cleansing the house of the Lord must be complete now, or the enemies of the Church will do it later with violence. I believe the persecution of Christians has so increased because of contempt issuing from a crisis clearly not addressed.

The Pope must learn what he does not know. If not, his papacy will be for naught.

Weigel has not uttered the three words that, I am told, women love to hear: I was wrong.

Benedict did more than any pope in centuries to deal with abuse, but it was not enough.

Francis is a fixer. Whenever a parish or diocese experience a disaster, a fixer is sent in, as O’Malley was to Boston. Francis is the papal fixer. He is changing the subject from sexual abuse by his charm, hominess, and willingness to let people indulge their minor vices without a censoring voice from the clergy.

A fixer differs from a reformer in that a fixer does not address the roots; he is not radical. He merely papers over the problem, merely puts a poultice on the cancer.

Karadima is a terribly abusive priest in Chile. The archbishop of Santiago told him to stop saying mass in Public. Karadima ignored the order, and photos of him saying mass were tweeted to tens of thousands of people.

A prominent Chilean priest who was ordered by the Vatican to never again celebrate a public Mass as punishment for sexually abusing altar boys has been photographed apparently defying the order.

Chile’s top church leaders confirmed the Rev. Fernando Karadima’s act of insubordination Friday and sent the case to the Vatican for investigation. The photos were taken Dec. 4, but they were only released this week by Juan Carlos Cruz, a journalist and one of Karadima’s victims.

“It’s a very painful situation that shows that this priest continues to do as he pleases,” Cruz told The Associated Press. “It’s a slap in the face for the victims of his abuse. He should be in jail but instead he’s still being protected by the church.”

The Roman Catholic Church retains a firm grip on Chilean society, although in recent years its influence has waned after scandals in which priests have been accused of molesting children. Victims say Karadima began abusing them at his residence at the Sacred Heart of Jesus church in Santiago about 20 years ago, when they were between 14 and 17 years old.

The Vatican sanctioned Karadima by ordering him to a life of “penitence and prayer” in 2011. He was also barred from celebrating Mass in public, from hearing confessions or offering spiritual direction and from having contact with his ex-parishioners. A Chilean judge later dismissed a criminal case because the statute of limitations had expired, but she determined the abuse allegations were truthful.

The timing of the photos’ release appeared aimed at embarrassing both the current and former archbishops of Santiago, who were in Rome for Saturday’s ceremony to name current Archbishop Ricardo Ezzati Andrello a cardinal.

The victims in Chile say the retired archbishop, Cardinal Francisco Javier Errazuriz, failed to act on accusations that they were abused by Karadima, who was long one of the country’s most popular priests. They say the cardinal declined to even meet them.

Pope Francis’s response: he made Archbishop Ricardo Ezzati Andrello a cardinal. This sends a clear message. The Vatican does not care how a bishop handles sexual abuse cases.

Francis has not appointed the sexual abuse commission he promised. I will be flabbergasted if he appoints anyone like Tom Doyle or Richard Sipe, someone who knows the problem from the inside. The Voice of the Faithful here in Naples asked me to go to Boston to speak to O’Malley about Southwest Florida’s being a dumping ground for abusive priests (El Paso has a similar problem). I had to inform them that the mere mention of my name had reduced a cardinal to screaming fits (I guess I should be flattered). I was blackballed by my pastor from the Knights of Malta because I criticized bishops.

The caliber of members of review boards has declined, because bishops want only those who will say that everything is OK, that a bishop never makes a mistake.

The Roman Catholic Church claims that outside the church there is no salvation and that apostasy leads to eternal damnation. It encourages its members to confide their deepest secrets and inmost sins to a priest. It therefore has a far stronger obligation than any other organization or church to ensure that its clergy are of sterling character. After Augustine approved of the civil measures to force Donatists to become Catholics, he also insisted that Catholic clergy give the highest example of probity and that corrupt priests be disciplined and removed from the clergy.

But little or nothing will be done unless there is a crisis as serious as the Reformation, and even then reform was only partly implemented. Bishops have allowed priests with criminal convictions for abuse to serve in ministry, and are still trying to hide abusers. The Vatican deeply does not care. Only external pressure will force the hierarchy to act, and then they will act only grudgingly and minimally. Francis will canonize John Paul II, who refused to act on abuse and who called the psychopathic incestuous child molester Maciel “an efficacious guide to youth.” Bishops will notice that tolerating child molestation does not prevent canonization, so it can’t be all that serious a matter.

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One-handed Economists

in Economics 5 Comments Tags: , ,

I think it was Harry Truman who said that he wanted a one-handed economist. When asked why, he said, economists were always saying in response to a policy question, “On one hand… on the other hand….” In economics, there are always trade-offs.

In the burst of enthusiasm among “progressive” Catholics that Pope Francis’s criticism of the current economic system, what is often forgotten is that good intentions do not produce good results. Extreme poverty has been decreasing throughout the world at an astonish rate, largely because of policies that allow poor nation to develop trade and bring more people into the market economy.

What this means is that workers in developed countries have felt downward pressure on their incomes. The good factory jobs have disappeared in the US. They have gone overseas where they allow millions to escape destitution and starvation. But profits have not declined. Although the American market may have lost comparative income, the incomes less-developed countries have expanded to produce far more customers for international companies. Inequality may be increasing not because poverty is increasing but because the people at the top have so many more customers. A movie star who has only American fans may be wealthy, but one who has fans all over the world is super-wealthy. But is this really unjust?

Unions gain a comparative advantage in wages for their members by restricting the labor market. They usually kept women and blacks out, and tariffs kept out foreign competition. But American workers now have to compete with workers in India, and the internal labor force has expanded with the addition of women and minorities. Some win, some lose, but overall poverty has been reduced.

Immigration also is a difficult issue. Immigrants put some downward pressure on American wages – how much is hotly contested. The fact that the Wall Street Journal supports open immigration should make one suspicious whether the ordinary workers will benefit from it. Companies would, especially tech companies who can bring in foreign tech workers who will work for less than Americans – who still make pretty good six figure incomes. Is it just to raise wages by limiting competition?

Immigration may also hurt poorer countries, as the most ambitious and educated leave for the U.S. Paul Collier raises the question in his NYT article Migration Hurts the Homeland. It is true that immigrants to the US can send home remittances and also bring home ideas about democracy and justice, but open immigration to the US can be harmful to poor countries.

There is migration that helps poor countries:

Migration is good for poor countries, but not in every form, and not in unlimited amounts. The migration that research shows is unambiguously beneficial is the kind in which young people travel to democracies like America for higher education and then go home. Not only do these young people bring back valuable skills directly learned in the classroom; they bring back political and social attitudes that they have assimilated from their classmates. Their skills raise the productivity of the unskilled majority, and their attitudes accelerate democratization.

And there is migration that can hurt poor countries:

But many poor countries have too much emigration. I do not mean that they would be better with none, but they would be better with less. The big winners from the emigration of the educated have been China and India. Because each has over a billion people, proportionately few people leave.

In contrast, small developing countries have high emigration rates, even if their economies are doing well: Ghana, for instance, has a rate of skilled emigration 12 times that of China. If, in addition, their economies are in trouble, they suffer an educational hemorrhage. The top rankings for skilled emigration are a roll call of the bottom billion. Haiti loses around 85 percent of its educated youth, a rate that is debilitating. Emigrants send money back, but it is palliative rather than transformative.

Even allowing refugees to come and stay in the US can hurt a poor country:

Seemingly the most incontestable case for a wider door is to provide a refuge for those fleeing societies in meltdown. The high-income democracies should indeed provide such a refuge, and this means letting more people in. But the right to refuge need not imply the right to residency. The people best equipped to flee from societies in meltdown are their elites: The truly poor cannot get farther than a camp over the border. Post-meltdown, the elites are needed back home. Yet if they have acquired permanent residence they are reluctant to return.

The type of people who come to the US may help us, but their own countries need them more:

Bright, young, enterprising people are catalysts of economic and political progress. They are like fairy godmothers, providing benefits, whether intended or inadvertent, to the rest of a society. Shifting more of the fairy godmothers from the poorest countries to the richest can be cast in various lights. It appeals to business as a cheap supply of talent. It appeals to economists as efficient, since the godmothers are indeed more productive in the rich world than the poor. (Unsurprisingly, our abundance of capital and skills raises their productivity.) It appeals to libertarians as freeing human choice from the deadening weight of bureaucratic control.

If we allowed open immigration, we might be helping individuals

but we might be feeding a vicious circle, in which home gets worse precisely because the fairy godmothers leave. Humanitarians become caught up trying to help individuals, and therefore miss the larger implications: There are poor people, and there are poor societies. An open door for the talented would help Facebook’s bottom line, but not the bottom billion.

Pope Francis and the American bishops seem unaware of the trade-offs in real-world situations. They want one-handed economists, but alas, real-world choices have unintended side effects. Helping “the poor” is not a simple matter, and good intentions do not guarantee good results.

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The Vatican and a Sicilian Fraternal Organization

in crime, Pope Francis 9 Comments Tags: , ,

While I was researching my book on sexual abuse in the Church, I saw many indications that the abuse was intertwined with organized crime: drug dealing, prostitution of male teenagers, and money laundering.

Decades ago I read in Time magazine of a monastery in southern Italy which had been completely taken over by the Mafia. Mafia members had joined quietly and eventually expelled all the legitimate religious. The monastery became a center for cigarette smuggling. The Vatican Bank has a profitable sideline in money laundering, and Pope Francis wants it to stop.

An assistant prosecutor for the province of Reggio Calabria has warned that Pope Francis is becoming the target of Mafia ire, according to RNS, the Guardian, and other papers.

Nicola Gratteri, 55, a state prosecutor in the southern Italian region of Calabria, where the ‘Ndrangheta is most active, said the pope’s effort to reform the church is making the ‘Ndrangheta “very nervous.”

The Vatican bank has been very useful in money laundering. Gratteri explains:

“Those who have up until now profited from the influence and wealth drawn from the church are getting very nervous,” he added. “For many years, the mafia has laundered money and made investments with the complicity of the church. But now the pope is dismantling the poles of economic power in the Vatican, and that is dangerous.”

When prosecutors asked the Orthodox Jews of Murder Incorporated how they could reconcile killing and the Torah, the mobsters explained that business is business. The Italians have a similar attitude:

Gratteri said mobsters did not consider themselves wrongdoers, and used the example of a mafioso putting pressure on a business owner to pay protection money, first by shooting up his premises, then by kneecapping him. “If the person still refuses, the mobster is ‘forced’ to kill him. If you have no choice, you are not committing a sin.”

The mobsters are uniformly pious (superstitious?)

“A gunman from the ‘Ndrangheta will pray and kiss his rosary before shooting someone,” said Gratteri.

Prelates cultivate their devout criminal contacts:

Gratteri attacked priests and bishops in southern Italy who legitimise mobsters. “Priests continuously visit the houses of bosses for coffee, which gives the bosses strength and popular legitimacy,” he said.

The Bank of Italy estimates the criminal activity (drug dealing, extortion, illegal disposal of toxic chemicals, corrupt public contracts) accounts for 10% of the Italian Gross Domestic Product. The criminal organizations have taken their profits and invested them in legitimate businesses, and therefore control perhaps 25% of the Italian economy.

Francis has a nice papacy; it would be a shame if anything happened to it. I am sure many Italians bishops are trying to explain this to the Argentine. Another papal election would be very inconvenient.

Remember Calvi?

Add (Thanks to comments)

And the case of Emanuela Orlandi

These criminal organizations are not nice people. They specialize in extortion. If someone balks at helping them, a child may disappear. Or it may become known which priests-bishops-cardinals  have have Mafia-supplied boys in the beds at night. Corruption is like cancer. It spreads, and is often fatal.

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Conversion and Repentance

in Catholic Church, clergy sex abuse scandal, Pope Francis, Protestantism 8 Comments Tags: , , , , , ,

I have never been in pastoral work and have only visited South America. But in researching the role of men in the churches in Latin America, I have noticed the consensus among anthropologists that Evangelicals have more success is reach men, especially young men involved in drugs and gangs, than Catholics do.

Evangelicals do this by a simultaneous proclamation of repentance and conversion to Jesus. Francis seems to be envisioning first conversion, and then, sometime later, repentance.

Rod Dreher has had discussions on Pope Francis’ interview, and one South American does not like the interview.

Mr. Dreher, I’m Latin American (Brazilian) and, let me tell you, this explanation is bunk.

The “very juridical and hierarchical and morality-focused Catholic Church of Latin America” has not existed for fifty years. It was replaced by exactly the Church that Pope Francis seems to want. The results have not been impressive, to say the least. There’s no reason to think that more of the same will give different results.

The section that describes the new Evangelical Protestants as not putting the culture war agenda in the foreground is, again, precisely backwards. They do precisely that which Mr Chapp says they don’t. They are very, very morally strict, which is why they grow so fast in the poorest areas: they give order to the disordered lives of the very poor, who come from generations of poverty and broken homes and have never known anything better. They take a huge portion of the poor’s meagre income in tithes and “gifts”… and even then the poor are better off in these churches, because the order the church gives, much like a military boot camp, helps them to plan for the future, educate themselves, not fall into drugs, not have multiple children out of wedlock, etc.

And this is not just inwards. The politicians elected by the Evangelicals are at the forefront of the resistance to homosexual “marriage”, to abortion, and most of the left’s culture war agenda. In my own country, abortion would have been legalized a few years ago if not for the resistance organized by the Evangelical politician-preachers across almost all parties – a fight in which, by the way, the Catholic hierarchy was entirely silent. If the Church retreats from these issues, the pull of the Evangelical Protestant churches will only INCREASE throughout Latin America.

To sum up, as we say here, when “the Church chose the poor, the poor chose the Protestants”.

This is also what neutral anthropologists have found.

Francis, like many of us as we grow older, may be fighting the battles of his youth, although history has moved on. The dead textbook Thomism he laments disappeared over a generation ago. Traditionalist restorationism is a tiny, tiny fringe movement in the Church. Strict moralism has disappeared, and laxity reigns.

It is true that a few bishops seem to delight in enforcing petty rules (even as they have let sexual abusers continue in ministry). Cardinal Müller, when he was bishop of Regensburg, severely disciplined priests for participating in an ecumenical wedding and for receiving communion at a Lutheran service. But Müller assigned a convicted abuse to a parish, where the priest molested numerous children. When parents complained, Muller threatened to sue them for criticizing him. In Baltimroe a priest was removed for letting an Episcopal priest, a woman, read the Epistle at a funeral mass for a relative of hers. But I was at a funeral of a friend of mine at the Cathedral in which all, even the unbaptized, were urged to receive communion. Bishops seem to be very arbitrary in their exercise of discipline, and strain out the smallest flies while swallowing obese camels.

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Francis’ New Approach

in Catholic Church, Pope Francis 7 Comments Tags: ,

In the early Church, converts were baptized with a minimum of instruction: the crowds at Pentecost, the Ethiopian eunuch.

However, it soon became apparent that this was not a good idea. The heresies and immorality that Paul combated flourished, and recent converts fell away rapidly when persecutions began.

The Church then began insisting on a lengthy catechumenate before baptism. This provided a time for instruction, repentance, and the breaking of sinful habits. Only then were converts baptized. The Church maintained the disciplina arcana; the Eucharist was reserved for the fully converted.

But as Christianity spread and infant baptism became the norm, and whole tribes were baptized because their kings commanded them to convert, the level of Christian knowledge and practice declined. Christianity became the religion of whole societies.

In the modern Church infant baptism is the norm, and instruction and conversion are chancy.

Some are appalled by the low level of knowledge, practice, commitment, and spirituality in the Catholic Church. Most parishes are sacrament factories. Spiritual seekers often leave for evangelical churches. Church discipline is non-existent. This situation has led to widespread support among Catholics for abortion and same-sex marriage, as well as almost complete ignorance of Christian doctrine and a lack of discipleship. The book Forming Intentional Disciples discusses this unhappy situation.

Some want to tighten up discipline and cultivate more intense practice and spirituality, even if that leads to a smaller church, which however would a better witness to the world.

Others denounce such an approach as sectarianism, and want the Church to be pastoral, that is,  lax, even more so than at present, so as to include as many people as possible, with little regard for what they might believe or their level of moral practice or spirituality. The proponents of this approach want a least a vague Christianity among many, rather than an intense Christianity among few.

To some extent Francis agrees with this second group:

This church with which we should be thinking is the home of all, not a small chapel that can hold only a small group of selected people.

But he continues

We must not reduce the bosom of the universal church to a nest protecting our mediocrity.

Neither sectarianism or lax mediocrity.

Francis wants both approaches: he wants the Church to both universal and intense: open to sinners, perhaps by not emphasizing the hard moral doctrines, but preaching the heart of the Gospel, the saving death and resurrection of Jesus, which will lead to conversion.

the thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds, heal the wounds…. And you have to start from the ground up.

To be with sinners, to heal them:

the ministers of the church must be ministers of mercy above all. The confessor, for example, is always in danger of being either too much of a rigorist or too lax. Neither is merciful, because neither of them really takes responsibility for the person. The rigorist washes his hands so that he leaves it to the commandment. The loose minister washes his hands by simply saying, ‘This is not a sin’ or something like that. In pastoral ministry we must accompany people, and we must heal their wounds.

To be both zealous and merciful is the ideal:

The ministers of the Gospel must be people who can warm the hearts of the people, who walk through the dark night with them, who know how to dialogue and to descend themselves into their people’s night, into the darkness, but without getting lost.

“without getting lost” – Is this possible? Many priests, many Jesuits, have gotten lost, even about the central truth of the unique mediatorship of Jesus Christ.

Francis desires priests (and this interview seems to be directed mainly to priests) to focus on the central message of the Gospel:

Proclamation in a missionary style focuses on the essentials, on the necessary things: this is also what fascinates and attracts more, what makes the heart burn, as it did for the disciples at Emmaus. We have to find a new balance; otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel.

It is true that proclaiming the Law without the Gospel leads to despair. Laws, however good and holy and wise, cannot give sinful man the power to obey them. The Law by itself leads only to despair or to the modern rebellion  that seeks to change the Law itself.

A beautiful homily, a genuine sermon must begin with the first proclamation, with the proclamation of salvation. There is nothing more solid, deep and sure than this proclamation. Then you have to do catechesis. Then you can draw even a moral consequence. But the proclamation of the saving love of God comes before moral and religious imperatives. Today sometimes it seems that the opposite order is prevailing.

This indeed sometimes happens. I agree with the sermons that condemn abortion and same-sex marriage and sexual trafficking and torture, but I fear that sometimes the focus on these obscures the central message of the Death and Resurrection. As Francis said

The message of the Gospel, therefore, is not to be reduced to some aspects that, although relevant, on their own do not show the heart of the message of Jesus Christ.”

Obviously one matter is more central than the other, but they are not really separate. The proclamation of the Gospel always includes an immediate call to repentance.

Repentance is always joined to faith, not a remote and much later corollary of faith. As now, during the initial proclamation of the Gospel hard-heatedness, cruelty, lust and avarice were major obstacles to hearing the Gospel, and had to be set aside simultaneously with accepting the Gospel, not much later, if ever.

But times change, and perhaps Francis’ approach would work. I agree that the Church has not done a very good job of proclaiming the central Christian message, and that the departure of Catholics for evangelical churches demonstrates this – and Bergoglio saw that happening in Argentina.

However, I do not see any evangelical ardor in the Jesuits or what is usually called the progressive movement in the Church (It is also lacking in the traditionalist movement, which Francis rightly criticizes).  I suspect that Bergoglio’s approach will be used to cultivate in the Catholic Church a situation such as the Episcopal Church suffers from: a vague acceptance of historic Christian doctrine and a total acceptance of modern moral vagaries. This approach has not contributed to the health of the Episcopal Church, and I do not see why the Catholic Church should be any different.

But God has many surprises, and perhaps He will raise up, perhaps He is already raising up, saints large and small through whom His healing light will shine in the world. In the meantime, I  thought the best part of Francis’ interview was this:

“I see the holiness,” the pope continues, “in the patience of the people of God: a woman who is raising children, a man who works to bring home the bread, the sick, the elderly priests who have so many wounds but have a smile on their faces because they served the Lord, the sisters who work hard and live a hidden sanctity. This is for me the common sanctity.“

Fulfilling our duties, caring for people, praying for the living and the dead – and thereby making present the Kingdom in the midst of the world.

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Protestant Brazil

in Protestantism 12 Comments Tags: , , ,

The Pew Research Center has documented the growth of Protestantism in Brazil.

Brazil’s total population more than doubled over the last four decades, increasing from approximately 95 million to more than 190 million. Between 1970 and 2000, the number of Catholics in the country rose even though the share of the population that identifies as Catholic was falling. But from 2000 to 2010, both the absolute number and the percentage of Catholics declined; Brazil’s Catholic population fell slightly from 125 million in 2000 to 123 million a decade later, dropping from 74% to 65% of the country’s total population.

Women shifted to Protestantism, men to unaffiliated status.

Der Spiegel has an article about Silas Malafaia, a successful pastor, “Gottes Entertainer.”

Franciscan he isn’t. He wears expensive suits, a Rolex, and travels by private jet.

The Protestants tend to be very conservative on political issues:

The evangelical churches also involve themselves in politics. They brought up to two million people in past years in Sao Paolo alone in demonstrations against abortion – more than the mass protests that have made headlines in past weeks.

The evangelical churches also believe that homosexuality can be healed and want a government project to provide such healing.

Why are they successful and why are Catholics converting to them? This Der Spiegel’s take:

Brazil’s cities have grown enormously in the past decades. Many immigrants to the metropolis are uprooted, families torn apart, alcohol and drug addiction widespread. People seek help in the evangelical churches. “The Catholic church is content to wait for the afterlife, that is less attractive,” says the professor of sociology Christina Vital: “By contrast the evangelical churches offer practical help for this life.”

The pastors are above all active in prisons and poor neighborhoods, many former drug dealers let themselves be baptized. In Jardim Primavera, a poor suburb of Rio, Malafaia supports a project for alcoholics, the demented, and drug addicts; his organization offers courses in literacy and help in looking for work.

This is the situation that Pope Francis faces in Brazil and in many Latin American countries. Liberation theologians wanted to identify with and help the poor – but the evangelicals are doing it in person, on the ground.

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NO ONE CARES

in clergy sex abuse scandal, Pope Francis, Vatican 13 Comments Tags: , ,

I recently read Daniel Quinn’s novel After Dachau. It is a cleverly done piece of alternate history: its premise (warning – spoiler!) is that the Nazis won the war, but the reader does not realize this until he is well into the novel.

I won’t go into all the details, but we learn that time dated A.D., After Dachau, where the great hero Adolf Hitler defeated the Jews.

Someone discovers what really happened, and tries to alert people. But what he learns for his pains is that NO ONE CARES.

I often feel that way about the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church. A handful of people do care, but the Vatican realizes that even in the developed world, very few care, and the typical Catholic is a South American or African peasant who has not even heard of the sexual abuse crisis, and in any case is facing problems even more urgent, such as starvation, massacres, and persecution.

Pope Francis may say the right things – after all, who will defend child molestation? – but will he do the right thing? His record in Argentina does not look promising.

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Papa Francisco

in clergy sex abuse scandal, Vatican 56 Comments Tags: , ,

The election of Jorge Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires, was somewhat of a surprise, although it should not have been, because he seems to have been the runner-up in the last papal election,, coming in second after Ratzinger.

A few thoughts:

From all reports he is dedicated to the poor and leads a simple, austere life.  He wants to seek out the most wounded and despised members of society. He is fiercely orthodox in his denunciations of abortion and gay marriage.

His record as Jesuit superior during Argentina’s dirty war has been questioned. Leftist terrorism in the1970s was designed to provoke a crack-down which would provoke a revolution. The leftists got the crackdown, but not the revolution, and the military executed 30,000 victims.  Bergoglio remained publicly silent, although he seems to have helped some victims.

What can one infer about his character from this public silence? It is hard to say. He may have had trouble understanding what was going on and uncertain about how to proceed. I think one can say that he does not seek out confrontation, even when provoked.

What does all this mean for the church?

His embrace of the despised may include abusers and enablers of abusers in the Church; he just visited Cardinal Law.

He may ignore the Curia and concentrate on the horrendous problems of the Catholic poor. The typical Catholic, we forget, is a South American or African peasant. These people face starvation, oppression, disease, and grinding poverty. If he concentrates on these problems he will be praised, and he may ignore sexual abuse and the corruption in the Church administration that has enabled it, viewing it as a minor problem compared to what the poor are suffering throughout the world.

That may have been the intention of the Italian cardinals, who are happy with the way the Curia functions and thinks that all the fuss about sexual abuse is Anglo-American Puritanism.

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