Yes, the pope is Catholic

Monday, March 20th, 2023

Hunting season doesn’t normally begin in most places in the United States until the autumn.

But some self-appointed US Catholic intelligentsia members apparently agreed that, this year, it would start on March 13th.

That was the day we marked the 10th anniversary of Pope Francis’ election to the papacy.

And while writers generally used the occasion to try to offer a balanced assessment of his decade in office, the super Catholic know-it-alls who don’t like him decided it was time to turn their scopes on the 86-year-old pope.

“A Somber Anniversary,” was the title of an article in First Things penned by George Weigel, the self-promoting “official biographer” of John Paul II.

“Pope Francis’ Decade of Division,” donned the piece Ross Douthat wrote in his regular column in the New York Times.

And Raymond Arroyo, host of the EWTN program “The World Over,” egged on Cardinals Raymond Burke and Gerhard Müller as they complained about all the ills in Church over these past ten years.

The autocratic pope who is feared in the Vatican

Weigel, who has increasingly displayed his deep dislike for Francis and his pontificate, wrote a piece that was a scattershot of unverified accusations and laments.

He blasts the pope for allegedly creating “fear engendered by (his) systematic effort to deconstruct the legacy” of the late Polish pope in the field morality — sexual morality.

“The approach to the moral life that has dominated the ‘synodal process’ thus far is a flat-out rejection of the basic (and classic) structure of Catholic moral theology that undergirds the Polish pope’s 1993 encyclical Veritatis splendor,” Weigel says, “just as the deliberate ambiguities in the 2016 apostolic exhortation, Amoris laetitia, undercut John Paul II’s teaching in the 1981 apostolic exhortation on marriage and the family, Familiaris consortio.”

Perhaps Weigel, who is “distinguished senior fellow” at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington (DC), sees sexual morality in terms of black and white.

But that’s not really the issue here.

His real beef is that Francis, even though he’s the pope who canonized John Paul, refuses to support the uncritical hero-worship of the late pontiff that Weigel and his buddies have long been pushing.

We learn that some of those same pals are disgruntled officials in the Roman Curia.

“The prevailing mood in today’s Vatican is one of trepidation,” he says, claiming that even officials who actually support Francis’ vision and policies are scared. “Because papal autocracy has created a miasma of fear, parrhesia (the “speaking freely” Francis encourages) is not the Roman order of the day, except in private,” he alleges.

And Weigel would know, as he is part of the coterie of clergy and influential laity that privately gripe about Francis as they strategize to find a candidate to their ideological liking that can get elected to replace the Jesuit pope when the time comes.

The silent pope who is courting schism

This is not to say that Francis should be sheltered from criticism.

Not all at all.

Weigel is right to question the pope’s record on sexual abuse, for instance, especially the pope’s own involvement in the cases concerning the Slovenian Jesuit mosaic artist, Marko Rupnik.

But this “distinguished senior fellow” does not have a single good or kind word for Francis and his ten years in office.

And that is just unfair.

While he notes the pope’s “efforts to display God’s mercy in his public persona”, he does not mean it as a compliment.

Weigel blasts Francis for creating a “slough of dysfunction” inside the Vatican by the “inconsistencies and contradictions in papal pronouncements and policy”.

He says the pope who acts like an autocrat at home (and stomps on “the authority of American bishops to provide for the liturgical nourishment of some faithful Catholics”– that is, people who want the Old Latin Mass) is the same pope who allows Germany’s bishops to “openly defy Roman authority”.

Weigel claims that “much of institutional German Catholicism seems comfortable with apostasy”, though nobody in Germany has suggested changing anything in the creed.

But, nonetheless, he claims that “schism is not out of the question”.

His target is not the Germans, however. It is clearly Francis.

“The papal voice in response to this crisis is, at best, muted,” Weigel says.

He saves the heavy artillery for the pope’s

continuous appointment of “bishops and cardinals who have a tenuous grasp on fundamental truths of the Catholic faith”,
his “imperious manner” of governing “with little concern for established procedure”,
and for dramatically diminishing the “Vatican’s moral authority in world affairs” by his “inept papal commentary and Vatican policies that create the impression that the Church is abandoning her own”.
And, as expected, Weigel pulls out some of his old ammunition for what he calls the pope’s “kowtow to the Marxist mandarins of the People’s Republic of China”…

“George Weigel’s column is syndicated by the Denver Catholic, the official publication of the Archdiocese of Denver,” readers are informed.

This is not surprising, given that its archbishop, Sam Aquila, has called Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò — the former papal nuncio to Washington who continues to demand that Pope Francis resign — “a man of deep faith and integrity”.

Tellingly, Aquila issued no statement on the occasion of the pope’s 10th anniversary. At least he had the good sense to keep his mouth shut.

The cruel pope who is dividing the Church

Meanwhile, in the pages of the venerable old Gray Lady, the New York Times, Ross Douthat says the “Catholic right has started a civil war” in the Church, but he insists that this is “a consequence of the specific ways that Francis has pursued his liberalization, rather than just a reflexive opposition to anything outside their comfort zone”.

Douthat, who calls himself a “conservative Catholic”, is an excellent writer.

But he’s a no theologian.

Douthat repeats the longstanding lament of his tribe that Francis causes confusion.

He says the pope’s attempted “strangulation” of the Tridentine Mass was “micro managerial cruelty”.

Worst of all, he links to a nasty article by British writer Damian Thompson, lending credibility to this tortured soul’s malicious attacks on the pope, which are full of innuendos, half-truths and outright lies.

“Seen now at its 10-year milestone, then, this pontificate hasn’t just faced inevitable resistance because of its zeal for reform,” Douthat says in his final lines.

“It has needlessly multiplied controversies and exacerbated divisions for the sake of an agenda that can still feel vaporous, and its choices at every turn have seemed to design to create the greatest possible alienation between the Church’s factions, the widest imaginable gyre.”

The only thing Douthat gets right in this last sentence is that there is a great alienation between the Church’s factions. But it is wrong to take aim at Francis and accuse him of deliberately causing it.

Obviously, for one side of this ecclesial divide it’s now open season on the pope.