By Damian Thompson
(The Spectator) The Catholic Church is this week in the biggest mess it’s been in
since the Second Vatican Council, and Pope Francis is to blame.
The Vatican cardinals in charge of doctrine, finance and worship are
believed to have written to Francis at the beginning of the Synod on the
Family – now in its second chaotic week – privately warning him that it
was likely to spin out of control. That’s because most of the world’s
bishops don’t support any major change to the church’s rules on allowing
divorced and remarried people to receive communion, or to the way it
treats gay couples. You may think they’re wrong, but that is the
situation. Also, the cardinals were exasperated by changes to the
synod’s procedures that seemed designed to give undue prominence to
liberal voices.
A version of the letter was leaked yesterday.
There’s confusion over its wording and the names of the 13 cardinals
who reportedly signed it, but we know roughly what it said and we can be
pretty confident that it had the support of Cardinal Müller, Prefect of
the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith; Cardinal Pell, Prefect
of the Secretariat for the Economy; Cardinal Sarah, Prefect of the
Congregation for Divine Worship; Cardinal Dolan, Archbishop of New York;
and Cardinal Napier, Archbishop of Durban. So there we have three out
of the four most powerful cardinals in the Curia, plus the most
important American cardinal. Sarah (who is from Guinea) and Napier are
the two most influential African cardinals.
When the letter appeared, liberal Catholic journalists made desperate
attempts to play down the story – making them look like idiots when,
this morning, Cardinal Müller described it as ‘the new Vatileaks‘, referring to the revelations of Vatican skulduggery that probably triggered the resignation of Benedict XVI.
I don’t know how all this will play out. The conflicts and the
boundaries between liberals and conservatives are too difficult to map.
But it’s time to recognise that – however endearing you find him – Pope
Francis is responsible for this crisis. Not only has he made bad
decisions, but he has sometimes made the same bad decision twice. In
order, then:
First, he decided to kick off a debate about
admitting divorced and remarried Catholics to communion by handing the
microphone to Cardinal Walter Kasper, a retired German theologian who
takes the – by Catholic standards – extreme view that people should be
allowed to decide for themselves whether to receive the sacrament.
Kasper is an old adversary of Benedict XVI, with whom he clashed on the
fundamental subject of the authority of bishops vis-à-vis popes. This
offended Benedict loyalists and confused everyone, since it seemed to
imply that Francis, like Kasper, favours devolution of spiritual
authority to local churches.
Second, Francis called a preparatory synod on the
family a year ago during which the two officials running it, Cardinal
Baldisseri and Archbishop Forte, were allowed to stage a mid-synod
briefing suggesting that the synod fathers favoured lifting the
communion ban for people in second marriages and granting a limited
degree of recognition to same-sex couples. Since this wasn’t true, all
hell broke loose. Baldisseri and Forte should have been banished to
dioceses in Antarctica. Instead…
Third, Francis reappointed these two prelates to run
the full-scale synod that’s falling apart as I write. Why, I have no
idea. It was hardly in his interests to tell the world that he couldn’t
learn from his mistakes.
Fourth, the Pope made the aforementioned changes to synod procedures that enabled conservatives to go around saying that the whole thing was rigged. I’m not saying it was, but yesterday Cardinal Napier, no less, said it was ‘hard to tell’
whether the result of the synod had been decided in advance (i.e.,
rigged). What I do know is that more than one of the alleged signatories
to the leaked letter have been very angry about the changes for some
time and felt the Pope wasn’t taking their objections seriously.
Fifth, Francis personally invited to a synod on the family
the ultra-liberal Belgian Cardinal Godfried Danneels, who five years
ago tried to conceal the fact that a bishop had molested his nephew. The
invitation was a disgrace and it reflects badly on all the Synod
Fathers that none of them has interrupted the proceedings to demand
Danneels’s expulsion.
These serious errors have been seized on by conservatives, as you’d
expect. But if I were a liberal (and, for what it’s worth, I do favour
some of the changes espoused by the radicals) I’d be furious that the
stubbornness and questionable judgment of a good and holy man, Pope
Francis, has turned sensitive debates into ideological warfare.
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LONDON, MARCH 12, 2009 (Zenit.org).- Modern liberalism has strong totalitarian tendencies, according to the archbishop of Sydney.
Cardinal George Pell affirmed this at a conference last week in Oxford on "Varieties of Intolerance: Religious and Secular."
The Australian prelate began his address considering two examples of intolerance. The first was the little-publicized reaction to California's vote in November to define marriage as between one man and one woman.
The cardinal said that religious groups, businesses and individuals that worked toward the amendment have been the victims of pro-homosexual retaliation, ranging from death threats to boycotts to forced resignation from jobs.
He went on to consider as a second example the opposite reaction of human rights groups to what is considered intolerance of Islam.
The prelate said these cases show there is "onesidedness about discrimination and vilification."
"Some secularists seem to like one way streets," he added. "Their intolerance of Christianity seeks to drive it not only from the public square, but even from the provision of education, health care and welfare services to the wider community. Tolerance has come to mean different things for different groups."
The cardinal noted how particularly in the United States, members of Church organizations are facing more and more legal obstacles when it comes to following their consciences.
And in Australia, he said, the abortion law enacted last year in the state of Victoria "made a mockery of conscientious objection."
"Pro-abortion commentators attacked the concept of conscientious objection as nothing more than a way for doctors and nurses to impose their morality on their patients," Cardinal Pell recalled. "Victoria’s statutory charter of rights, which purports to protect freedom of religion, conscience and belief, was shown to be a dead letter when it comes to abortion. […] The human rights industry ran dead on the freedom of conscience issues which the legislation raised. Amnesty International seems to have been completely missing in action. […] As we know, abortion corrupts everything it touches; law, medicine and the whole concept of human rights."
Christian response
The cardinal contended that "there is an urgent need to deepen public understanding of the importance and nature of religious freedom."
"Believers should not be treated by government and the courts as a tolerated and divisive minority whose rights must always yield to the minority secular agenda, especially when religious people are overwhelmingly in the majority," he said. "The opportunity to contribute to community and public good is a right of all individuals and groups, including religious ones. The application of laws within democracies should facilitate the broadening of these opportunities, not their increasing constraint."
Affirming that "modern liberalism has strong totalitarian tendencies," the cardinal went on to explain how it is different than "traditional liberalism, which sees the individual and the family and the association as prior to the state, with the latter existing only to fulfill functions that the former require but which are beyond their means to provide."
He said the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic and Social and Cultural Rights understand and articulate this proper relationship.
Cardinal Pell stated that new trends in using anti-discrimination law and human rights claims to advance the "autonomy project" is not new but that there is a new and "dangerous" trend: the withholding or retrenchment of exemptions for church agencies and conscience provisions for individuals.
The broad effect of this, he said "is to enforce conformity."
The key to the solution, Cardinal Pell affirmed, is that "Christians have to recover their genius for showing that there are better ways to live and to build a good society; ways which respect freedom, empower individuals and transform communities. They also have to recover their self-confidence and courage.
"The secular and religious intolerance of our day needs to be confronted regularly and publicly. Believers need to call the bluff of what is, even in most parts of Europe, a small minority with disproportionate influence in the media. This is one of the crucial tasks for Christians in the 21st century."
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On the Net:
Full text of address: http://documents.scribd.com/docs/1aqyamje35bx7w1omesl.pdf
