I found his comments a-historical and thought they suggested that only very smart, well-informed and well-read Catholics could qualify as good Catholics.

Now Barron has launched a criticism of British author and papal birapher Austen Ivereigh.

Specifically, Barron charged that Ivereigh had made conversion a "dirty word," shunned evangelisation properly understood and that the disagreement was essentially terminological.

"What Ivereigh is calling 'evangelisation' is, in point of fact, 'pre-evangelisation.'

One can indeed prepare the ground for Christ in a thousand different ways: through invitation, conversation, debate, argument, the establishment of friendship, etc.," Barron writes.

"One might legitimately say, at this stage of the process, that one is not pressing the matter of conversion, but one is most definitely paving the way for it. Unless it conduces toward real evangelisation, pre-evangelisation is an absurdity."

It is hard not to conclude that Barron's real target is not the biographer, Ivereigh, but the biographee, Pope Francis.

Ivereigh has, in turn, responded at the website Where Peter Is.

He writes:

"Francis is clear, then, what evangelisation is: witness through open-hearted hospitality, service of the poor, a life lived according to the Beatitudes.

"But he is also clear when this becomes proselytism, and here's the challenging part.

"The witness can be in tension with, even contradicted by, our attempt to evangelise by means of persuasion, strategies, theological explanations, and apologetics programmes.

"Why? Because in so far as these lead us to put our faith in our own powers, they suffocate the "meekness of the Spirit in the conversion."

That is, there is something semi-Pelagian in Barron's approach. In fact, the principal agent of evangelisation is the Holy Spirit, not the intelligent bishop.

But there is a related concern here to which Ivereigh alludes, a concern I voiced back in 2019.

There is something a little manipulative about Barron's approach.

Back then, I noticed it in the way he discussed the insights of Hans Urs von Balthasar about beauty as an attribute of God, insights that have played a prominent role in the thinking of Popes Francis, Benedict XVI and John Paul II.

For them, beauty is itself a kind of witness, but for Barron, beauty always seems like it is part of a marketing strategy.

He dazzles the putative convert with it. There is little sense of the person to be evangelised as a subject, a person of dignity and freedom. They are an object, someone to be instructed, and Barron is the instructor.

You see this in the quote above, when Barron writes that "one is not pressing the matter of conversion, but one is most definitely paving the way for it."

If you are calculating how and when to press, it is pretty certain what you are not doing is engaging the person as every bit as mysterious, noble and sinful as oneself, someone in whom God is already at work in ways hidden to either or both of you.

Where Balthasar was always suspicious of the Enlightenment, of the Cartesian cogito and all that followed, Bishop Robert Barron is a man of his age, an age of marketing and consumerism. Continue reading

• Michael Sean Winters is an American journalist and writer who covers politics and events in the Roman Catholic Church for the National Catholic Reporter

In such a church, women challenge clericalism without being co-opted by it, Ivereigh told a webinar on the role of women in church leadership.

Ivereigh said Francis had indicated the vital need for those women to have recognition and be commissioned by their bishops.

"He often puts women in positions where they can, not just exercise governance, but also challenge governance," Ivereigh noted.

"I would say Francis is dismantling what you might call the imperialist or clericalist model of governance...".

The papal biographer warned webinar participants against a "grievance culture".

In this he referred to Querida Amazonia, in which Francis highlighted the Amazon's lay ecclesial culture, where most Catholic communities have no priest and are run by women.

Another webinar speaker was Sr Patricia Murray (pictured), whom Francis appointed as a consultor to the Pontifical Council for Culture. She is also the executive secretary of International Union of Superiors General (UISG).

Murray noted lay and religious women's voices are missing despite some women taking up significant roles in the Church.

After lobbying, women religious received three places at the synod on the family, three at the youth synod and 20 at the Amazon synod. The body representing male religious doesn't have to lobby, Murray said. It automatically secures 10 places.

Murray says "change has begun to happen" and "as we set out on our synodal journey, we will see the presence and leadership of women flourishing."

The issue of women's leadership in the Church was also the subject of a working group report in Limerick this week. The preparation of the report was a central recommendation from Limerick's Diocesan Synod in 2016.

Acknowledging the difficulties and struggles for women, both lay and religious, particularly in a parish environment that revolves around the priest the working group suggested rethinking the balance of leadership within the Church and the entire Christian community.

It also highlights the "need to honour the dignity of Christian women in ministry" who are generally unnoticed.

Rose O'Connor, who chairs Limerick's women in leadership working group, says there are "very significant challenges" and "opportunities for women in ... leadership roles in the Church."

"While the issue of ordination of women is at the forefront of most people's thoughts when it comes to inequalities ... we concentrated on what is possible within canon law; what we can impact ... what we can change."

O'Connor says two important questions emerged from the report.

One is whether the Church provides women, men and children the spaces and opportunities to exercise their gifts and calling in the service of the common good.

The other is whether the official and de-facto structures within which people operate, facilitate or frustrate them in their ministry.

Canon law does not distinguish between women and men, O'Connor says. "The principal distinction is between ordained and lay. So, if an office or function is available to a lay person, it is equally available to both women and men."

Source

• The Tablet
• Image: Global Sisters Report

According to Novena News, the women's response is a reaction to Francis statement that women do not need to be priests in order to lead in the church.

Novena News reports that many Catholic women remain unhappy that the pontiff has not furthered the cause of women's ordination beyond a 'timid' opening to the study of the possible restoration of the female diaconate.

In a statement November 24, the Womens Ordination Commission (WOC) said it rejected the Pope's "mischaracterisation" of its own movement and others like it "working for a renewed priesthood, free from clericalism and gender discrimination".

They continued.

"Women's exclusion from ordained ministries not only undermines their capacity to make decisions as leaders, but reinforces cultural and social discrimination, and perpetuates structures that subordinate women and can lead to gender-based violence.

"Until the hierarchy starts accusing every man seeking ordination of ‘clericalism', we ask that the pontiff stop projecting the problems and corruption of his male hierarchy onto women longing to serve the Church.

"We urge Pope Francis to listen to women who long for equal recognition of their ministries and an equal place at the church's governing tables".

The WOC closed its reply to Pope Francis inviting him to join them this weekend to celebrate their 45 years witnessing to the "abundant gifts of those working for ordination justice".

The pontiff makes the remarks on the women's ordination movement in a new book he authored with his English-language biographer Austen Ivereigh.

The book entitled 'Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future', is to be released December 1.

In it, the pontiff defends himself against accusations that he has not done enough to further the leadership of women in the church.

He argues that he has tried to "create spaces where women can lead, but in ways that allow them to shape the culture, ensuring they are valued, respected, and recognized".

The Pope cites as evidence for his claim the fact that he has appointed a number of women to high Vatican roles, "so that they can influence the Vatican while preserving their independence from it".

Francis also notes that in Catholic dioceses across the world women often serve in leadership positions. These include running Catholic schools or hospital systems, or heading up diocesan departments.

"Perhaps because of clericalism, which is a corruption of the priesthood, many people wrongly believe that Church leadership is exclusively male," the pope states in the book."

"To say they aren't truly leaders because they aren't priests is clericalist and disrespectful," he adds.

Sources

• Novena News
• National Catholic Reporter
• The Tablet

Massimo Borghesi's dazzling ‘intellectual biography' of Jorge Mario Bergoglio shows that this criticism - born of a mixture of snobbery and ignorance, as he wrote in a recent article in the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano - is, whatever your view of Francis, simply wrong.

In his fascinating and deeply textured exploration of the pope's thinking since the 1960s, Borghesi, who is professor of moral philosophy at Perugia University and the author of many studies of the dialectics of Romano Guardini, demonstrates that Francis's straightforwardness is, as he puts it, "simplicity as a destination that presupposes the complexity of a profound and original thinking."

That's not news to me.

In wading through his complex early writings for my biography of Francis, I was aware that I was in the presence of an astonishingly far-reaching intellect, one shaped by a pattern of thinking with deep theological roots.

Yet until now that's been hard to show because no one has given that thinking the systematic treatment it deserved.

The sophistication of Francis's thinking has been obscured in part because giant Latin American Catholic intellectuals such as the Argentine philosopher Amelia Podetti and the Uruguayan thinker Alberto Methol Ferré - both very influential on Bergoglio - are off European and American Catholic academic maps.

It's also because, as Francis's longtime friend Guzmán Carriquiry, secretary of the Vatican's Latin-American commission, points out in the preface to Borghesi's book, Francis has never wanted to pass himself off as an academic, in part because of his own horror of intellectual abstraction, and in part because of his desire as a pastor to communicate in the language of simplicity.

So anyone trying to summarize the pope's thought has to dig deep and range widely, as well as have a grasp of the complexity of dialectics. Borghesi is one of the few with the capacity and the commitment to undertake that task. Continue reading

• Austen Ivereigh is a British writer, journalist and commentator, and co-founder of Catholic Voices, a communications project now in 20 countries.

The choice of the largely unknown Argentine cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio as head of the world's 1.2 billion Catholics came as a surprise to Vatican watchers and the faithful alike when the announcement was made in March last year.

The conclave to elect a successor to Benedict XVI, the first pope for more than 600 years to step down, was viewed as wide open, although most predicted that the Italian Cardinal Angelo Scola or Cardinal Marc Ouellet of Quebec would be elected.

When 76-year-old Bergoglio emerged as Pope on only the second day of voting, it was largely explained as a unity candidacy to prevent deadlock between rival factions.

But a biography of Pope Francis, to be published next month, discloses that there had been a discreet, but highly organised, campaign by a small group of European cardinals in support of Cardinal Bergoglio.

The Great Reformer, by the British Catholic writer Austen Ivereigh, nicknames the group "Team Bergoglio" and says members toured private dinners and other gatherings of cardinals in the days before the conclave, quietly putting their case.

Cardinal Bergoglio was effectively the runner-up in the 2005 conclave, in which Joseph Ratzinger was elected, having been put forward by an alliance of mainly European reformists.

But it later emerged that his chances of election were hampered by what amounted to a dirty tricks campaign by opponents from Argentina.

He also effectively pulled the plug on any campaign in 2005, urging would-be supporters to throw their weight behind Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and making clear that he did not wish to be the focus of a faction. Continue reading

Sources

• The Telegraph
• Image: NBC Latino

I was presenting a biography of the Pope to the Pope, and it had the bold title of The Great Reformer.

How would he react? What would he say?

It is a provocative title — too provocative, in fact, for the Italian publishers, who have opted in their translated edition for the gentler and safer Tempo di Misericordia ("A Time of Mercy").

"Reformer", after all, has an ambiguous resonance in church history.

Once upon a time epoch-changing popes and humble saints were called reformers — Gregory the Great, St Francis of Assisi — but the word has become linked in the modern age to a different kind of change-maker: thus the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain's famous 1925 text, Three Reformers, which charted the breakdown of the medieval synthesis under the fragmenting influences of Luther, Descartes and Rousseau.

Because of the word's association with the Reformation, the Second Vatican Council spoke of purification and renewal (renovatio).

All true reform, in fact, is a return to the Church's own sources — the Gospel and the Holy Spirit — by shedding attachments to power, prestige, and money.

It is a process of permanent conversion.

Pope Francis in Evangelii Gaudium quotes the Vatican Council document Unitatis redintegratio: "Every renewal of the Church essentially consists in an increase of fidelity to her own calling."

This is what Francis is doing.

And he has spent a lifetime preparing for it through two previous reforming leaderships, as the dominant figure of the Jesuit province in Argentina from the early 1970s to the late 1980s, and as head of the Archdiocese of Buenos Aires from 1998 to 2012, during much of which he was also the dominant Latin-American church leader. Reform runs in his veins.

It is his life's work, both in theory and practice. Continue reading

• Austen Ivereigh in MercatorNet

Austen Ivereigh is a Catholic writer, campaigner, and co-ordinator of Catholic Voices. His book Pope Francis, The Great Reformer, will be published in December.

As the press centre fills, the first reports filter out of the Pope's remarks to journalists accompanying him on the plane. The familiar Alitalia A330 touches down on the airport tarmac flying the Vatican and local flags from its cockpit; state officials and bishops form a welcoming committee; the Pope emerges, is greeted, is whisked away in a limousine to the city centre, where he climbs into the "popemobile" for a tour of streets lined with well-wishers. Then comes the welcoming ceremony in which the president or prime minister addresses him, and he gives a speech in response.

Soon after the press centre fills with Italian voices and veteran journalists as the dozens of VAMPS - journalists working for the major agencies, permanently accredited to the Holy See Press Office, who sit at the back of the papal plane - arrive. Father Frederico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, breaks away from the papal entourage to give a briefing to the press corps that helps shape the first stories.

True to form, all of this happened yesterday. Yet Pope Francis's arrival in Rio de Janeiro - just before that of the royal baby - managed to be strikingly different from what we have been used to in papal trips. Once he was in the air - after carrying his own bag onto the plane - he rejected the usual interview with pre-prepared questions in order to meet the reporters one by one, asking them about their families, getting to know them and telling them, jokingly, that journalists are not the saints he is most devoted to. In a flight in which he remained permanently active - "this pope has an extraordinary energy," Father Lombardi remarked - he also visited the cockpit for 15 minutes to chat with the pilots shortly before landing.

But he still gave journalists their story, making some important criticisms of a throwaway culture in which the jobless young are set aside. "The world crisis is not treating young people well," the Pope said. "We are running the risk of having a generation that does not work. From work comes a person's dignity." Continue reading

Sources

• Austen Ivereigh in ABC Religion and Ethics
• Image: BBC

Austen Ivereigh is a Catholic journalist and the co-ordinator of Catholic Voices.

Catholic Voices, whose aim is to improve the Catholic Church's representation in the media, began in Britain in 2010 with the training of 24 lay people and a priest in preparation for the visit of Pope Benedict XVI.

Its success there has led to groups of trained Catholic spokespeople being established in 10 other countries, providing the media with access to "well informed, practising Catholics who will represent the Church truthfully and passionately".

The latest group has been established in Melbourne, where a training weekend for nine speakers, led by the founders of Catholic Voices, was attended by two New Zealand observers.

"Catholic Voices Australia were thrilled to have the founders of this initiative, Mr Jack Valero and Dr Austen Ivereigh, come to Melbourne to launch the first speakers training weekend," said the group's co-ordinator, Kathleen O'Shea.

"Their visit to Australia, which also involved speaking about Catholic Voices at the Great Grace Conference in Sydney last week, has sparked huge support and excitement for the project across the country.

"CV Australia is hopeful that this momentum will carry across the Tasman, and would be very keen to see it take shape in New Zealand," she said.

Though Catholic Voices speakers do not represent the official Church, the project in Australia has been supported by the president of the Australian Catholic Bishops' Conference, Archbishop Denis Hart of Melbourne, and by Cardinal George Pell of Sydney.

The founders of Catholic Voices are both prominent Catholics in the UK.

Ivereigh, who has been deputy editor of The Tablet and public affairs director for Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, has written several books, the most recent being How to Defend the Faith without Raising your Voice.

Valero is press officer for Opus Dei in the UK and in 2010 was press officer for the beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman during the papal visit.

Sources:

Catholic Voices

Catholic Voices Australia

Image: The Record