Can you be more Catholic than the Pope?
The American arch-reactionary Pat Buchanan clearly thinks so.
He has been lambasting Pope Francis for sowing “confusion among the faithful” by refusing to defend “the unchanging truths of Catholicism”.
Indeed, says the US Catholic paleo-conservative, the Pope may be “speaking heresy”, which would imply that Francis is “not a valid pope”.
Yet how does this high-octane indignation square with widespread reports at the end of last week that a liberal Pope had been defeated by doctrinaire traditionalists in his attempts to make the Church more welcoming to gays and divorcees?
The fortnight-long Extraordinary Synod on the Family ended with headlines like: “Pope snubbed” and “Liberal Hopes Dashed”.
The answer is that, as the dust settles, what has become clear is that, for all the hoo-ha made by conservative cardinals, the overall outcome has been a remarkable advance for those who want the Catholic Church to be more compassionate and inclusive.
The vociferous minority who tried to box the Pope into a corner, on gays and divorcees who remarry, may have won one small battle.
But they are losing the wider war.
To understand why, you need to know something of the “two steps forward, one step back” method of making progress within the Catholic Church.
Pope Francis knows he is operating in a deeply conservative environment which requires a “softly softly” approach.
The truth is that this Synod was extraordinary in many ways.
The story began last year when Pope Francis asked for a questionnaire to be sent out all around the world to find out what ordinary Catholics thought about the teachings of their church on a range of controversial issues like premarital sex, contraception, divorce, remarriage and same-sex relationships.
This had never been done before.
Indeed, previous popes made it clear that they did not want to know what the people in the pew thought. They should just pray, pay and obey. Continue reading
Source
- Paul Vallely in The Independent
Paul Vallely is author of ‘Pope Francis – Untying the Knots’.
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