The cause was a column by the Italian theologian and church historian Massimo Faggioli (pictured), who teaches in the USA.

In the column he linked parts of American Catholicism with the former US president and current Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

In response, the bishop's organisation threatened to take legal action. But what exactly had happened?

The article

Faggioli's article, entitled "Will Trumpism spare Catholicism?", drew a connection between Donald Trump and various Catholic figures and hinted at a possible link between Trump and Bishop Joseph Strickland.

Strickland was dismissed from his diocese after his rebellious behaviour and frequent criticism of Pope Francis' pontificate.

Faggioli described overlaps between Trump's controversial right-wing nationalism and the conservative Catholicism represented by figures such as Strickland and the former Apostolic Nuncio to the USA, Archbishop Vigano.

Strickland in particular has repeatedly accused Francis of spreading schismatic ideas with the declaration of blessing "Fiducia supplicans".

After the presidential elections in December 2020, the former chief pastor of the small Texan diocese of Tyler also took part in a demonstration of Trump supporters who did not want to recognise Joe Biden's election victory with a prayer via video message.

Criticism of the Catholic cultural establishment

Faggioli's thesis is therefore based on such events, but above all the "Catholic Prayer for Trump", which took place on 19 March in Mar-a-Logo - the former US president's place of residence.

There, Trump was presented as the "only Catholic option".

Six months before the presidential elections in the USA, the theologian spoke of an "ahistorical fundamentalism of militant Catholicism" that is "mixed with nationalist impulses".

This disguises itself as concern for the "forgotten ordinary American (white) man".

In the original version of the article, Faggioli spoke of an "emerging Catholic cultural establishment" in the United States, dominated by intellectual figures of traditional, apologetic Catholicism.

According to Faggioli, they may be theologically educated, but they are hostile to modernity and are "on Trump's side" with such a view.

Faggioli described overlaps between Trump's controversial right-wing nationalism and the conservative Catholicism represented by figures such as Strickland.

Faggioli was referring to the Barron Media Group's new theological magazine entitled "The New Ressourcement", according to a report in the "National Catholic Reporter".

Among conservative Catholics, Faggioli said, there is "no shortage of academic and intellectual initiatives, with various references to Trumpism", but which are "all intent on orthodoxy".

Barron and his critics

Barron has been repeatedly criticised by Catholics, especially for his collaboration with right-wing thinkers and influencers.

These include names such as Ben Shapiro, former editor of the right-wing internet portal "Breitbart News" and the psychologist, YouTube influencer and author of self-help books Jordan Peterson.

Over the past few years, Barron has responded to his critics by accepting invitations to events organised by companies such as Google, Amazon and Facebook in order to rebut criticism that he is only dealing with "conservative culture warriors".

At the end of January of this year, however, the senior pastor was once again a guest of Peterson to discuss the fallacy of self-deification.

Most recently, however, Barron published a guest post on the internet portal of the television channel "CNN", in which he praised the talk show host and comedian Bill Maher for no longer criticising religions, especially Catholicism, but "woke" thinking.

He therefore sees Maher as an "unlikely ally" in the ongoing and bitter culture wars.

Two cease-and-desist letters to the editors

The publishers of "Commonweal Magazine" reported to the Catholic portal "National Catholic Reporter" that the bishop's media organisation had sent a "cease and desist letter" to Faggioli.

After consultation, the decision was made to withdraw the "controversial" paragraph.

The editors' note reads: "With the author's permission, the editors have removed a paragraph that originally appeared here because Bishop Robert Barron's media office, Word on Fire, has informed us that they consider it defamatory to be associated in any way with Donald Trump and Trumpism."

But even that was apparently not enough for the Bishop of Winona-Rochester in Minnesota: In a second cease-and-desist letter, "Word on Fire" took an even firmer stance against the editors' note.

Once again, dissatisfaction was expressed at being associated in any way with Donald Trump.

Repeated threats of legal action were made against Commonweal, and both the article and the editor's note continued to be labelled "libelous and defamatory".

The editorial team responded with an article entitled "Silencing the press".

In it, the editorial team expressed surprise at Barron's actions: "Public figures must expect journalistic criticism precisely because they are public figures.

"This also includes those who bring their faith into the public eye."

It is their right to complain about criticism, but they are not exempt from it.

"They enjoy no special protection from opinions about their intentions, their statements or the political society in which they live.

"Moreover, no one is entitled to deference or special treatment simply because they speak from a position of religious authority," it says.

And further: "This includes American bishops, including or especially those who maintain a highly visible public presence through interviews, social media and popular media services."

The editorial team emphasises that a different agreement could have been reached.

A letter would have been "an obvious place to start if Word on Fire believes that we and Faggioli need a fraternal rebuke".

A letter would also have led to a constructive or at least clarifying exchange and saved Word on Fire from being "perceived as another well-funded organisation that wants to silence its critics through litigation". Read more

• Mario Trifunovic is a theologian & journalist from the Frankfurt Rhine-Main Metropolitan Area in Germany.

In the latest example of a bully is Minnesota Bishop Robert Barron's Word on Fire organisation threatened Commonweal magazine and theologian Massimo Faggioli over Faggioli's April 22 essay, "Will Trumpism Spare Catholicism?"

The commotion is too weird to behold.

Sticks and stones

It began like all schoolyard fights.

Barron, or someone who works for him, thought Faggioli, who teaches at Villanova University, called the bishop a name.

In best fourth-grade fashion, an unsigned "cease and desist" email went to Faggioli and to Commonweal editor Dominic Preziosi.

Apparently without a lawyer or even a dictionary nearby, the email claimed Commonweal and Faggioli were guilty of "slander,".

That name is usually applied to spoken defamatory statements, instead of published ones, which are libel.

Faggioli's opinion piece examined the influence of conservative, anti-Francis bishops.

He described them as the ones whose political alliances mix "ahistorical, magisterial fundamentalism in militant Catholicism with nationalistic impulses masquerading as concern for the ‘forgotten' common American."

He apparently included Barron in what he called the "'Trump-Strickland' axis,".

He was referring to former Texas Bishop Joseph E. Strickland, a named supporter of the pro-Trump "Catholics for Catholics" organisation.

That organisation counts among its supporters former Trump advisers Michael Flynn and Steve Bannon.

Barron's company complained about his inclusion, and Commonweal indulged him, writing in an editor's note:

"With the author's permission, the editors have removed a paragraph that originally appeared here because Bishop Robert Barron's media ministry, Word on Fire, informed us that they consider it slander for them to be in any way associated with Donald Trump or Trumpism."

Unwilling to take yes for an answer, Barron's folks sent another unsigned email, this time to the entire Commonweal staff.

It said that the retraction notice was "clearly malicious" and that the email was "a formal notice to preserve all records in anticipation of litigation."

Strange and bullying

To be clear, no Catholic, let alone a bishop, should want to be connected to Trump, whose ongoing legal entanglements and documented disrespect for women and migrants are outside the pale.

That Trump benefited from a strange Catholics for Catholics fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago is enough to warn anyone.

It was there a man identified as Father Dennis led what he called "the meal prayer" and former Trump national security adviser Flynn said they would "do the rosary,".

But bullying a 100-year-old liberal Catholic opinion journal emphasises the conservative bent of Barron's enterprises.

It smacks of the sort of "conservatism" Pope Francis recently called "suicidal" on CBS' "60 Minutes."

The "suicidal conservatism" Francis worries about stifles growth and, he said, leaves people "closed inside a dogmatic box."

Those U.S. bishops who cannot think out of the box — and there are many — daily damage the beliefs of Catholics who think Catholic social teaching is a good thing and who wish for less clericalism and more transparency in church matters.

To to start with, where, exactly, does the money go?

The ubiquitous Catholic bully

Bully clerics abound at every level, in the United States and around the world. And bullying Catholic lay initiatives is not new.

In the 19th century, Mother Cabrini, the champion of immigrants, had her problems with Archbishop Michael Corrigan, who wanted her out of New York.

In the 20th century, another archbishop of New York might have wished the same for Dorothy Day.

Now, in the 21st century, a group of lay Catholics suffers a legal threat come some 1,300 miles from Minnesota to a small office suite on New York's Upper West Side.

It may be a good thing that Barron wants to distance himself from Trumpism, because many of his followers may still think Trump is OK.

But bullying is not the way to do it.

• First published in Religion News Service
• Phyllis Zagano PhD is a Senior Research Associate in Residence at Hofstra University. She has written and spoken on the role of women in the Roman Catholic Church and is an advocate for the ordination of women as deacons. Phyllis is also an author at Religion News Service

The nutshell of the article is this sentence: "Generations of Catholics who embraced the modernizing tide sparked in the 1960s by Vatican II are increasingly giving way to religious conservatives who believe the church has been twisted by change, with the promise of eternal salvation replaced by guitar Masses, parish food pantries and casual indifference to Church doctrine".

This news report is based on a few carefully chosen examples of Catholic parishes, schools, centres, and college campuses — it cannot offer the complete picture of a Church as big and diverse as Catholicism is in the United States.

But it tells a story of what those who work in the American Church today have seen in the last few years: students and colleagues on school campuses, new magazines and academic institutions, to say nothing of social media and various kinds of ministries available on the internet.

The article says that "despite their growing influence, conservative Catholics remain a minority. Yet the changes they have brought are impossible to miss."

Yes, it is hard to deny that we are seeing a slow process to replace a certain kind of "Vatican II Catholicism" (granted the many ways in which this expression can be interpreted) with younger Catholics (lay men and women, clergy, members of religious orders) who privilege different formulations of Catholic theology, spirituality, and mix between action and contemplation.

It is a generational movement of young Americans looking for a sense of identity that they can claim is distinct and different.

This quest is articulated in doctrinal leanings, individual and communitarian lifestyles, and liturgical styles.

But it is not just young people.

It's a moment of rebalancing, a swinging of the pendulum of theological thinking and religious needs that is trying to find a way to deal with a post-20th century material and intellectual world and its uncertainties, and in the United States especially, different from the expectations of the Vatican II period: persisting and heightened social and economic inequalities, the normalisation of war and militarisation of social control, the debate on gender, etc.

Discerning a healthy sense of the Church

This return of conservative Catholicism exists in different ways, not only in the United States.

It is a fact, and the sooner we stop denying it, the better.

The question is how to interpret and relate to it.

One option is to let these different identities develop in separate worlds and let a certain Darwin-like idea of life in the Church have its course.

Coexistence is possible but does not always happen naturally: unity takes work.

Putting this in the hands of "cultural warriors" would be potentially destructive, augmenting polarization and mutual alienation.

It would probably not lead to a formal schism but to a house divided, which, in the long run, cannot stand.

A different option would be to reconstruct spaces and moments for mutual recognition of the Catholicity of others' Catholicism and a process of discernment, in all these different identity camps, of what is conducive to a healthy sense of the Church, of the Catholic tradition, of a Jesus-like life, and what is instead just an ecclesial mirroring of identity politics.

The Synod on synodality is just the beginning of this.

However, we cannot pretend that the Synod will succeed, even in opening spaces for this process, without some acceptance of uncomfortable reality.

Liberal-progressive Catholics today must find a different and alternative way to deal with the past and the tradition of the Church.

They must avoid the "burn it down" blindness and willful ignorance of self-flagellating intellectuals who refuse to see how much is true and good in the Catholic tradition and are incapable of seeing its good use.

An ostracising reading of the past responds to goals that are more political or of academic politics than ecclesial ones.

The other side (and it must be said that there are so many variations of the traditionalist-conservative movement in the Church) needs to find a different and alternative way to a neo-traditionalism which is incapable of criticising and, when necessary, changing the theological and ecclesiastical Catholic traditions on the grounds that "it cannot change because it never changed".

A blanket glorification of the past is just a variation of the ideological fury of the self-righteous who think they are always "on the right side of history", and it's not how the Catholic magisterium deals with the past.

A sense of what the living tradition is

As French theologian Pierre Gisel wrote in a chapter recently published in a book, the central issue is the relationship with the past.

Gisel urges "a structuring relationship with the past [which] occurs in a scenario of differences".

The quest of younger generations for identity is a way of rejecting the slippage from equality based on imago Dei to (self)enforced uniformity.

Dealing with this quest requires leaving behind any fantasy of having direct contact with the truth in real-time immediacy.

This means restoring some trust in the importance of mediations for the faith: mediations that are intellectual, liturgical, and institutional.

It's a task that applies, in different ways, to both the neo-traditionalist and the post-ecclesial, futuristic Catholic imaginations.

For most of my life, as a Catholic born five years after the end of the Council, I found it easy to wear lightly and comfortably my Vatican II theology and spirituality as both a lay member of the Church and an academic.

This has become more complicated lately.

Sometimes, conservative Catholicism claims or attempts to be a return to the "real" Vatican II.

Sometimes, the return of traditionalism is dismissive of the theology of Vatican II or outright anti-conciliarism.

This has dangerous consequences on all levels—the return of antisemitism in some Catholic circles, for example.

The fact is that to respond to the ills of neo-traditionalism, you must have a sense of what the living tradition is, how it has worked in the past, and how it can work in today's world.

And this is where we need to begin.

• Massimo Faggioli is a Church historian, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University (Philadelphia) and a much-published author and commentator. He is a visiting professor in Europe and Australia.
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

There is an institutional opposition that seeks to maintain the institutional status quo, a theological opposition that's resisting "synodality", the newest phase of the reception of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), and a political opposition that sees very clearly the pope's attempt to dis-align Catholicism from the various versions of the "America first" worldview.

But the United States is a big country with an ebullient religious and spiritual scene.

Everything here tends to be interpreted in a two-party and almost metaphysical division of everything - "liberals vs. conservatives".

The country split between contrasting views of what it means to be "American", is experiencing an identity crisis. This is a cultural phenomenon that the Catholic Church and the Vatican needs to take seriously.

Looking to satisfy a spiritual hunger

Tara Isabella Burton, an essayist with a PhD in theology from Oxford University, published a very interesting article last year in The New Atlantis. She discusses the rise of a "loose online subculture known as the post-rationalists".

The piece is titled "Rational Magic.

Why a Silicon Valley culture that was once obsessed with reason is going woo".

It examines a new online subculture that has emerged in the last decade in various quarters - online, social media, and the virtual world — where many influential Americans and Anglo-Americans with a spiritual hunger now congregate.

One of the most important places to look, in order to understand what is coming on our screens, in front of our eyes and in our brains, is Silicon Valley.

The people who people live and work there, or are connected with, have immense power to influence our culture in many different ways.

Burton says that a new elite has concluded that "rationality culture's technocratic focus on ameliorating the human condition through hyper-utilitarian goals" has "come at the expense of taking seriously the less quantifiable elements of a well-lived human life".

She points out that was becoming clear already the last decade.

"By the late 2010s, the rationalist landscape had started to shift, becoming increasingly open to investigating, if not necessarily the truth claims of spirituality, religion, and ritual, then at least some of their beneficial effects," Burton writes.

Her essay does not address Catholicism directly, except for this disturbing passage:

There's the rise of what you could call popular neo-Jungianism: figures like Jordan Peterson, who point to the power of myth, ritual, and a relationship to the sacred as a vehicle for combating postmodern alienation — often in uneasy alliance with traditionalist Christians. (A whole article could be written on Peterson's close intellectual relationship with Roman Catholic Bishop Robert Barron.)

There's the progressive-coded version you can find on TikTok, where witchcraft and activism and sage cleansing and "manifesting" co-exist in a miasma of vibes.

There's the openly fascist version lurking at the margins of the New Right, where blood-and-soil nationalists, paleo bodybuilders, Julius Evola-reading Traditionalists like Steve Bannon, and Catholic sedevacantist podcasters make common cause in advocating for the revival of the mores of a mystic and masculinist past, all the better to inject life into the sclerotic modern world.

What transpires from online culture is a phase of disenchantment with progressive faith in technology and with the promises made by the new masters of the universe since computer technology and the internet changed our lives.

This is how Burton describes it:

The chipper, distinctly liberal optimism of rationalist culture that defines so much of Silicon Valley ideology — that intelligent people, using the right epistemic tools, can think better, and save the world by doing so — is giving way, not to pessimism,exactly, but to a kind of techno-apocalypticism.

We've run up against the limits — political, cultural, and social alike — of our civilizational progression; and something newer, weirder, maybe even a little more exciting, has to take its place.Some of what we've lost — a sense of wonder, say, or the transcendent — must be restored.

This particular disillusionment with technocracy and rationalism, and its openness to the transcendent, is not a return to traditional Christianity.

Burton says it is also a refusal of a naïve secularism that is "no less full of unexamined dogma, tinged with moral and intellectual unseriousness".

Core message of Vatican II is non-negotiable

What Tara Isabella Burton writes here is extremely important, not just for the United States and its Catholics, but also for Pope Francis and the Roman Curia.

This is especially true for dealing with sensitive issues, such as the culture of the current generation of young priests and seminarians, the movement for "the reform of the liturgical reform" and the so-called "Traditional Latin Mass".

To be sure, there are hotbeds of an unapologetic anti-Vatican II sentiment spiked with sectarianism and neo-Gnostic vibes to be found in the techno-apocalyptic Catholic right.

As I wrote already at the beginning of 2010, what's at stake are ecclesiological issues on which the teaching of the Church must be firm.

When dealing with the core message of Vatican II, no negotiation is possible.

In the United States, however, the movement to perpetuate the so-called "Traditional Latin Mass" is a rejection of Vatican II.

It is also linked to libertarianism, a key cultural attitude present in much of America, including religious America.

The Old Mass proponents, in fact, in see Vatican II and the current pope as part of a technopower that is oppressing their genuine religious quest.

This attitude looks similar to that which shaped Marcel Lefebvre's traditionalism, but it's not quite the same.

This is why it's a movement that will continue underground, and at the same time to be hosted in rooms close to people in power in the United States.

A "legitimate weird" that can be acceptable

But there is also a post-rationalist hunger for the weird that is not exactly the same as the nostalgia for the "smells and bells" from an over-idealised past most of our contemporaries never knew.

It's something that the institutional Church struggles to discern and distinguish.

On the one side is the "openly fascist version", driven by provocateurs like Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò and the traditionalist Catholic convert Taylor Marshall.

On the other side are those who embrace a "legitimate weird" for which there must be space in the enlarged tent of a synodal Church.

This post-rationalist disenchantment with secular modernity and re-enchantment with the transcendent is more a Werner Herzog-like fascination with the wild and strange, the numinous and the primal.

It is less about the heresiological view of Christianity à la Cardinal Gerhard Mueller.

It's also very different from the techno-optimism of some post-ecclesial, trans-humanist Catholic theologians.

They are not just in the United States.

If you want to understand the success of the post-rationalist turn, just look at the success of the Italian publishing house Adelphi Edizioni and the titles of its books on religion (one of them, a collection of esoteric essays by the late Cristina Campo, was recently translated into English).

Without a doubt, Catholic theology is also struggling with this new subculture, maybe even more than the institutional Church.

The language of academic theology is deeply shaped (if not dominated) by the social sciences and a religious studies approach.

It is less literate about philosophy and history.

Thus it has become difficult to capture the healthy instincts and even unconscious deep theological insights that come from these apparently marginal, but influential voices.

A more capacious and less polarised Church

The attitude that this post-rationalism charts — a realism laced with reference to the transcendental — takes experience into account and recognizes (in the language of Thomas Aquinas) that grace perfects nature.

It is a useful and serious critique of the wholesale objectification/quantification of everyday experience.

It also converges, not just with Pope Francis' strong critique of the technocratic paradigm, but also with Vatican II theology both in its ressourcement and aggiornamento versions and especially in their interaction with critical theory.

To those who don't know the different faces of the vitality of the Catholic tradition, these woo and weird post-rationalists look like natural candidates to qualify as traditionalists - different and opposed to a dynamic, but Enlightenment-derived idea of the tradition.

But that would be a simplistic answer.

Acknowledging the validity of some points of this contemporary culture "going woo" entails some conversions in how we look at non-conformist Catholic voices, including, for instance, some of seminarians and younger priests.

But Catholic theological academia is not always open to giving a voice and or listening to those who express such "diversity".

The Church needs to be more capacious in its theological culture, lived expressions, and liturgical life. This capaciousness must not be, as often said in academic jargon, "less Catholic".

But just the opposite. It should be more Catholic.

A certain passion for the weird and the woo in Catholicism has never been and never will be everyone's cup of tea. But recognizing that there is also space in the tent for those Catholics from whom it is may be the first and most necessary step towards addressing polarization in the Church.

• Massimo Faggioli is a Church historian, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University (Philadelphia) and a much-published author and commentator. He is a visiting professor in Europe and Australia.
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

Journalists can only hope that the hypothesis of imposing the pontifical secret (the highest kind of confidentiality in the Church) on the deliberations will be rejected.

This is a very important issue for those who cover the Vatican, but also for all those - Catholics and non-Catholics - who will follow, more or less intentionally, the October 4-29 session of this Synod assembly on the Church's future.

This is a very important event that has no precedent in the history of the Synod of Bishops, which Paul VI instituted in 1965.

Indeed, in some ways it resembles the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), which spanned four sessions.

Vatican I and Vatican II: from still photos to live television

If the (First) Vatican Council (1869-70) was the council of newspapers and photography, and the pontificates between World War I and World II were in the age of the radio and of cinema, Vatican II was the council of television.

John XXIII was the first pope regularly on TV: when he visited the parishes of Rome and the prison near the Vatican, when he travelled to Loreto and Assisi, and when he signed - live on camera - his last encyclical, Pacem in terris.

At the time, the only mass media outlet in Italy was the RAI (Radiotelevisione Italiana), the national radio and television network funded by taxpayers and under the control of the country's political parties.

It was the beginning of an alliance between Christian-Democrats and Socialists - the so-called "opening to the left", which right-wing Catholics and Vatican officials loathed, but John XXIII actually welcomed.

RAI had a monopoly on the images of the Vatican at the time of Vatican II, and it kept it until 1983 when the Holy See created the Centro Televisivo Vaticano (CTV).

RAI had a very pro-Vatican II stance.

It offered a lot of programs, specials, and documentaries explaining the Council to a wide audience.

Not only did it feature interviews with the council fathers, theological experts (periti), and ecumenical observers from all over the world, but it also showcased historians, artists, filmmakers, and legal thinkers. It was visibly different from Vatican Radio, which only interviewed the bishops.

Television became part of the history of Vatican II right from the beginning, broadcasting the procession of the world episcopate and council fathers during the opening ceremony of October 1962 and John XXIII's "moonlight speech" of that same night.

The communication of the conciliar events by the media, especially through television and film reels, became an integral part of the experience of Vatican II.

Certainly, more people have seen that extensive footage than those who have read the Council's documents, history or commentaries.

Thanks to the mass media, the reception of Vatican II started not at the end but right at the beginning of the council.

Between the Council's first (1962) and the second session (1963), it became clear that the Vatican's attempt to control media access could not work.

Things inevitably became more transparent.

When seeing (on TV) was no longer believing

It was a golden age for the collaboration between the Catholic Church and the media: not just because most or many decision-makers at the RAI (which provided other broadcasting corporations with all kinds of content) were Catholic.

That was an era when television still played an educational, teacher-like role for a trusting and docile public;

• when mass media channels were few and acted like gatekeepers, with an attitude of deference to the institution and the clergy;
• when the Church was still not divided in different parties around the hot-button issues; and
• when the Vatican and the Catholic media system had a large degree of control over the Church's narrative.

There was a different ecclesial dynamic, but also a different relationship between the media and social-political events in the early 1960s.

Then in the late 1960s, shortly after the Council ended, something broke.

The war in Vietnam became the first ever to be played out on television.

People began questioning how fairly the media was covering it and other disruptive events at the time, such as the radical politics that descended on Chicago for the 1968 National Democratic Convention, the students' protests in European and American campuses, or the Black Power salute at the Olympic games in Mexico City.

Different from just a few years earlier at the time of Vatican II, seeing (on TV) was no longer believing; or at least it meant seeing, believing something different from or opposite to the institutional narrative.

It was the beginning of the widespread belief that the media could not be trusted, or that only that media one are already agreed with could be trusted.

One way or another, media will be a part of the synodal process

Fast forward to the Synod assembly of October 2023.

No one expects something like the 1968 National Democratic Convention in Chicago in terms of public demonstrations and violence (as a memento for the next conclave: that year ended with the election of Richard Nixon to the US presidency).

But the changes in the relationship between the media, institutions, and public trust is a lesson that the Catholic Church is learning the hard way because of the abuse crisis.

This is the age of social media and digital media, where the Internet allows anyone to broadcast his or her opinion to the entire world in real-time, and the more divisive, the better for a certain militant mentality.

The dynamics of identity-driven media narratives are essentially contrary to the idea of a shared ecclesial experience.

One way or another, the media will be part of the synodal process.

This is because the Catholic Church lives of tradition but also of history and memory.

How many participants will keep a diary of their Synod experience or write letters that future scholars of Catholicism will be able to study in the future?

A Synod assembly that independent media cannot cover or have access to its participants will not reach many Catholics to say anything of the rest of the world.

Moreover, as French historian Pierre Nora said almost fifty years ago, reflecting on the turbulent events of 1968, "Press, radio, images do not act only as means from which events are relatively independent, but as the very condition of their existence."In other words, having a synodal discernment exercise draped in secrecy is as good as not having it all - or worse.

A question of credibility

The Synod is in a bind.

On the one hand, there is the necessity to avoid media coverage that magnifies existing polarization, where there seem to be only two sides or two parties (and only two) for every issue.

There is also the risk for the Church of what Nora called the "monster event", where the media system tends to make everything sensational or permanently manufacture novelties and feed the hunger for events.

On the other hand, the Church also needs the media to convey the synodal energy and momentum and to create a minimum of commonly accepted information about what is happening inside the Synod assembly.

In order to be credible, this cannot come only from Vatican-controlled media.

The role of the media at Vatican II was crucial because it helped Catholics and non-Catholics discover - and in many cases, see for the first time - the catholicity of Catholicism.

The colourful procession at the opening ceremony on October 11, 1962 - with all the bishops coming to Rome from the Eastern Catholic Churches and the Catholic Churches in the Americas, Africa, and Asia - visually represented the end of centuries of Romanization, Latinization, and Eurocentrism.

Synodality is also about a reformulation of the catholicity of Catholicism in a global Church.

The Synod assembly of 2023-2024 is a test of how to do this while dealing with a 21st-century media system.

• Massimo Faggioli is a Church historian, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University (Philadelphia) and a much-published author and commentator. He is a visiting professor in Europe and Australia.
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

In an interview with the National Catholic Register, Fernández (pictured) acknowledged that while the core doctrine remains unchanged and the Gospel is immutable, the Church continually seeks to expand its comprehension of these profound truths.

Fernández, a 61-year-old Argentine theologian, cautioned against bishops who claim a "special gift of the Holy Spirit to judge the doctrine of the Holy Father," noting that such a path could lead to "heresy" and "schism."

"Remember that heretics always think they know the true doctrine of the Church," Fernández said.

In a letter accompanying Fernández's appointment, the Pope emphasised the importance of "guarding the faith" and expressed the hope that the dicastery would focus on this essential mission.

Fernández echoed the Pope's sentiment in his interview. "I believe that this dicastery can be a space that can welcome these debates and frame them in the secure doctrine of the Church, thus avoiding for the faithful some of the more aggressive, confusing and even scandalous media debates," he said.

Tension between Vatican and theologians

Martin Lintner, OSM, a Servite priest and theologian teaching at the Philosophical-Theological College of Brixen/Bressanone, Italy, is hopeful the appointment of Fernández brings a shift in the Vatican's approach to theologians and their roles within the Church.

Lintner has been denied approval by the Vatican's Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith to become the college's next dean. This decision comes after six months of waiting and a visit by Bishop Ivo Muser, who initiated the approval process.

The denial has brought to light the ongoing tension between the Vatican and theologians regarding theological positions and teaching roles.

Writing on the Lintner case, theologian Massimo Faggioli noted: "The relationship between [theologians] and the institutional Church has seen some changes since Francis's election. For one thing, there's been an obvious truce following the John Paul II and Benedict XVI eras. Yet it seems that theology has been more responsive to the pope's impulses than the Curia has."

Part of the difficulty in analysing Father Lintner's case is that, like other theologians who have been denied Vatican approval, no reason has been given for the decision.

Lintner described the appointment of Fernández as prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith as "a sign of hope," because Fernández himself was once denied a nihil obstat, literally, "nothing obstructs."

"His bishop at the time, now Pope Francis, stood up for him and in this way obtained approval from the Vatican Curia. So he knows from his experience what it's all about."

Sources

Catholic News Agency

America Magazine

National Catholic Register

There is speculation that Pope Francis may request his departure.

The recent developments came to light following a meeting between Pope Francis, Archbishop Robert Prevost - the Vatican's Dicastery for Bishops prefect, and Archbishop Christophe Pierre, the papal nuncio to the United States.

Among a range of alleged comments and actions Catholic news media report Strickland has

• accused Pope Francis of undermining the Catholic faith,
• endorsed videos labelling the current pontiff as a "diabolically disordered clown",
• undermined other bishops by expressing support for priests disciplined by their respective dioceses
• and most recently, in a public letter, predicted an unveiling of ‘true schismatics' at the forthcoming Synod of Bishops on synodality in Rome this October.

Despite the swirl of uncertainty, Strickland (pictured) has made it clear that he has received no formal communication from the Vatican and has no intention of voluntarily relinquishing his position.

The nature of their discussions is undisclosed but, according to The Pillar, sources suggest that Strickland's resignation was on the table.

However, the Vatican has not officially confirmed these claims, leaving room for speculation.

No information from Rome

The uncertainty surrounding Strickland's future follows an apostolic visitation to his diocese in June.

The visitation is a rare disciplinary investigation initiated by the Holy See.

It follows a November 2021 incident in which Archbishop Pierre privately reprimanded Strickland during a US Conference of Catholic Bishops meeting.

When reached for comment, Strickland expressed his unawareness of any formal resignation request from the Vatican.

He asserted, "I have received no information on this from Rome."

Furthermore, Strickland indicated his determination to hold his position, even in the face of a potential papal request, citing his commitment to the mandate given to him by Pope Benedict XVI.

"As a basic principle, I cannot resign the mandate given to me by Pope Benedict the XVI," Strickland wrote.

"Of course, that mandate can be rescinded by Pope Francis, but I cannot voluntarily abandon the flock that I have been given charge of as a successor of the apostles."

Canon lawyer John Beal, a Catholic University of America professor, clarified that a pope has the authority to remove a bishop against the bishop's will. However, there is no prescribed procedure for such an action.

Beal also noted that bishops who fall out of favour with the pope often see their authority diminished through creative means.

Strickland's critics have called for his removal, but many fear that his significant online following could lead to continued influence.

"I believe the fear is that, if he's removed, his visibility will be amplified," Massimo Faggioli, a professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University, told RNS earlier this year.

Sources

Religion News Service

The Pillar

CathNews New Zealand

A consistory will precede it on September 30 when Pope Francis is to create twenty-one new cardinals.

Both events are indicative of how high the stakes are for the Church in the next few months.

Previous Synod assemblies were very important, too, especially the initial gatherings during the pontificate of Paul VI, the 1985 assembly under John Paul II to mark the 20th anniversary of the Council, and the 2014-2015 assemblies Francis convened on family and marriage.

But none of those earlier assemblies were about the future of the Synod itself and none of them had among its priorities to "enlarge the space" of the Church, which was the title of the document for the continental synodal gatherings that helped prepare this October's assembly.

The recently unveiled list of those who have been chosen to participate at the upcoming assembly offers some clues about the ways in which the Synod, which Francis is continually reforming, embodies (or does not embody) the global Catholic Church today.

Fifty-four women and sixty-three cardinals

It's been noted how the pope has done an impressive job of trying to strike a balance by personally naming members to the assembly that will offset the delegates that some bishops' conferences have elected (see the similar and opposite cases of the United States and Germany).

The only people who are actually elected to the Synod assembly are delegates from episcopal conferences and the heads of religious congregations.

The latter are elected from the two Rome-based unions of (men's and women's) superiors general.

Other members of the Synod assembly (including 54 women who will have full voting rights for the first time ever) have been vetted and approved by the Synod secretariat and the pope, who have already made it clear that synodality is something different from (but not necessarily opposed to) democracy.

It is not enough to be a Catholic "in good standing" to be appointed a member.

One must also be "sponsored", held in high esteem, and be on the list of someone with the power to propose a name to those with the authority to appoint.

There are also features in this 2023 Synod assembly that are important from a systemic point of view.

The Synod of Bishops (still its official name) is not part of the Roman Curia.

However, the prefects of the major Curia offices are ex officio voting members of the Synod's assemblies, and their voices will be listened to with particular attention this October by the other members.

But there will be many more cardinals than just those working at the Vatican.

Sixty-three men with red hats will be members of the upcoming assembly.

Fifty-five of them were on the list of participants that the secretariat unveiled on July 7.

Eight others on that list are among the twenty-one new cardinals that Francis announced on July 9 (including the three recently appointed prefects of Roman dicasteries: Robert Prevost of the Dicastery for the Bishops, Claudio Gugerotti of the Dicastery for Eastern Churches, and Víctor Manuel Fernández of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith).

Theological thinking beyond Western Europe

Francis has gathered the entire College of Cardinals together for in-depth discussions in an extraordinary consistory only twice in ten years (February 2014 and August 2022).

And so the two assemblies of the Synod on synodality (2023 and 2024) will be rare occasions where many of the cardinal electors in next conclave will have the opportunity to talk and work together for a protracted period of time — each time for an entire month.

Many papabili — those who are considered leading candidates to succeed the nearly 87-year-old pope — will be at these Synod assemblies. But there will be one notable exception — Cardinal Peter Erdö, archbishop of Esztergom-Budapest and primate of Hungary.

And yet he played an important role as relator general at the 2014-2015 assemblies on marriage and the family.

Roman Curia prefects and cardinals aside, the Synod on synodality has some pre-eminent representatives that will dominate the composition of the assembly in terms of numbers.

Obviously, the bishops elected by the episcopal conferences were originally appointed to their diocesan posts by Francis or one of his predecessors.

Popes did not always appoint bishops around the world.

This is a reminder that the "new" Synod that Francis is trying to shape is an experiment in developing of the "Synod of Bishops" that Paul VI created in September 1965 at the beginning of the fourth and final session of Vatican II.

There is also a strong representation of the religious orders that are active in the world, especially on social issues, even if the cardinals and bishops vastly outnumber them.

The most interesting feature is the significant presence of theological thinking coming from places other than Western Europe.

It is more prominent than at Vatican Council II or any of the previous Synod assemblies.

There is a robust representation of Africa, Asia, and especially Latin America, which is the leading example on synodality both in terms of ecclesial practice and theoretical reflections.

The decision to give each of the continents ten "witnesses of the synodal process" — all voting members of the assembly — reflects Francis' option in favour of diversity and inclusion.

But this also means that Latin America and Africa (with the largest number of Catholics) have the same number of witnesses as the Middle East and the Oriental Churches.

Very interesting is that Eastern Europe is intentionally represented in a very strong way, if one looks, for example, at the pope's choice of the ten "witnesses" from Europe.

This is notable given the stark differences within Europe that emerged in previous phases over issues like the reception Vatican II or dealing with such things as the inclusion of LGBTQ people.

Who's missing?

Some notable absences or rather presences are marginal in relation to the role they have played in Church history and the current intra-ecclesial conversations.

For instance, there are very few parish priests and permanent deacons, those who are the frontline workers on synodality.

But a problem is how one is to choose clerics who are representative of their confreres.

The lay-run ecclesial movements seem to be absent, as well, except for three (mainly lay) associative movements — one is Italian (Azione Cattolica), another is a Spanish initiative (Frater España - Fraternidad Cristiana de Personas con Discapacidad), and the third is the international movement Focolare (itself of Italian origin).

There is also a representative from an Italian NGO called Mediterranea Saving Humans, which was created in 2018 to help rescue migrants at sea. But this inclusion is different because, formally, it is not a Catholic movement or organization.

The small representation of lay movements and new ecclesial communities may reflect the policy of the pope and Cardinal Kevin Farrell — prefect of the Dicastery for the Laity, Family, and Life — to watch these groups.

Progressive Catholic movements with an agenda for change (for instance, promoting women's ordination) are also not represented in any significant number at the October assembly.

They will have to be in the corridors of Rome and carve out spaces in the so-called "peri-synod", which will likely consist of lectures by experts, press conferences, and unconventional media events.

Such activity on the sidelines was a very important feature at Vatican II.

According to the preparatory documents, the next Synod assembly will also discuss the diaconate for women, but it is not clear how the discussion will relate to the two study commissions that Francis appointed on the subject.

The Instrumentum laboris (working paper) for the upcoming Synod, which was published on June 20, seemed to be more of a document for a Church of celibate people.

It is not clear how the voice of families will be heard at the upcoming assembly.

And yet, the world of monastic and contemplative communities seems to be absent, at least in terms of members physically present at the Synod (though they've been invited to be spiritually present through their prayers).

The absence of academic theologians from the US and Germany

Something that should ease the anxieties of those who see the Synod as a Trojan horse aimed at bringing about some sort of liberal revolution in the Church, is the fact that representatives of academic Catholic theology from the United States and Germany are almost completely absent.

Comparatively speaking, theologians from the UK, Ireland, Canada, and Australia are more present.

This says something about what is happening in Anglo-American Catholicism and suggests that the vital experiences of synodality conceived ante litteram elsewhere (like the Plenary Council for Australia) have positioned these Churches well for the Synod in Rome.

This confirms the almost total estrangement between the Synodal process and the theology taught and researched in the most important Catholic institutions of higher education in the United States, at least for now.

The great theological faculties of German Catholicism have played a role in the synodal process but do not have anyone among the 2023 Synod assembly's members.

This is a major change from the past, including at Vatican II.

But some of the most prominent theologians of synodality will be at the October gathering.

Others, who have worked on this theme for the last thirty years and have made possible the very fact that we talk about this today, are not.

But their work has been and will be very much present - explicitly and implicitly - in the synodal conversations in Rome over the course of the next two years and assemblies.

Transitioning from a European to a truly global Catholicism

One recent commentary, very critical of the list of members, lamented that "it remains unclear if the process will necessarily be more representative of the People of God by including Catholic academics, diocesan workers, and staff members of atypical progressive parishes".

The fact is that the People of God are everywhere, and it has become impossible for any gathering or institution to be "politically" representative of a large and diverse body.

And in today's world there is hardly a community of people as large and diverse as the Catholic Church.

The list of those who will be participating in the 2023 Synod assembly has limits and includes some strange choices, but it does not constitute a pre-written script to follow.

The most important feature is that, from an historical point of view, looking at the presences and absences, the Synod on synodality is a key moment in Pope Francis' attempt to transition the Catholic Church to a more global Catholicism.

Vatican II happened largely thanks to a mostly Western European nouvelle théologie.

Now, the synodal Catholic Church is in the hands of a global Catholic theology whose contours are taking shape and trying to find a unifying voice.

• Massimo Faggioli is a Church historian, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University (Philadelphia) and a much-published author and commentator. He is a visiting professor in Europe and Australia.
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

The working document (Instrumentum Laboris) for the Synod of Bishops, a result of a comprehensive process involving the participation of the entire church, is a testament to the church's commitment to inclusivity and dialogue, he says.

Faggioli is a professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University.

Commenting in the National Catholic Reporter, Faggioli accuses conservative Catholic influencer Ross Douthat of a very basic error - getting the working document's status wrong.

He also points out that the working document is not a document of the Church's teaching authority.

Faggioli says the document's primary focus is to foster a culture of dialogue and participation within the church.

It emphasises the importance of listening to everyone's voice, irrespective of their status or position within the church.

Faggioli takes issue with conservative critics who say that the document is not biased towards any agenda, but encourages open dialogue and participation which are fundamental to the church's mission and crucial for the growth and development of the church.

"For the first time since Vatican II, and more than for the preparation of Vatican II, there has been an in-depth back and forth between the local churches and the leaders of the synod.

"The text represents this and puts the issues on the table without regard to taboos.

"The only issue it explicitly leaves out is the possibility of the ordination of women to the priesthood which, if put on the agenda today, would light the fuse of the anti-synodal and schismatic organisers instantly," he says.

Source

• NCR

Centuries before papal primacy was defined at Vatican Council I in 1870, the Bishop of Rome already enjoyed a type of immunity in both the religious and the political-secular spheres.

Today we have a more pope-centred Church, where five of the eight popes who served in the 20th century have been beatified or canonized, and a Vatican City State where the pope is the absolute monarch.

The Emanuela Orlandi case

But this theological, political, and legal order protective of the papacy is now under pressure because of the sex abuse crisis.

We have seen this with recent insinuations against John Paul II after the Vatican reopened investigations into the 1983 disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi, the fifteen-year-old daughter of a Roman Curia employee who lived with her family inside the walls of Vatican City.

It's one of the most enduring Italian mysteries I grew up with, and it was brought back in the news by the release late last year of the Netflix series "Vatican Girl".

Her older brother, Pietro Orlandi, insinuated on Italian national television that Emanuela fell victim to a sex slave ring and that John Paul II was aware of this.

Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, the late pope's private secretary from 1966 until his death in 2005, and the official Vatican media responded directly to the allegations, calling them "defamatory".

This prompted Pietro Orlandi to distance himself from his earlier statements.

At the Regina Caeli prayer on Sunday, April 16, Pope Francis defended John Paul, the man who appointed him bishop and made him a cardinal.

"Certain of interpreting the feelings of the faithful from all over the world, I address a grateful thought to the memory of Saint John Paul II, in these days the subject of offensive and unfounded inferences," Francis said.

John Paul II has also been under attack from investigative journalists in his native Poland for knowingly covering up sex abuse when he was the archbishop of Krakow.

Those allegations are detailed in a book that is harder to liquidate in a short statement.

This is not just about John Paul II

But it's not just John Paul who's come under fire.

In these last few years, Benedict XVI and Francis have become part of the broadening focus on eminent cases of abuse in ways that were not imaginable while the Polish pope was still alive.

What we are seeing is a new form of an offensive against the papacy.

It's no longer a frontal attack, manu militari, as it was in previous centuries - from Sciarra Colonna and William of Nogaret against Boniface VIII in 1303 to Napoleon Bonaparte against Pius VI and Pius VII five centuries later.

It's not even the old-style, political anti-papalism similar to the time of Bismarck's Kulturkampf or the anticlericalism of the elites driving 19th-century European nationalism.

No, this is more subtle and "democratic" - or at least as democratic as conspiracy theories aspire to be.

It's a different kind of delegitimisation that is taking place manu mediatica, (through the media), despite all the efforts of the modern papacy to be more media friendly.

This is not a conspiracy or an alliance.

Rather, it is part of large cultural changes in our societies, especially in the West.

Secularisation has changed the way in which secular, mainstream journalism approaches Catholicism and the papacy.

The automatic deference that was once granted to the "Vicar of Christ" is no more.

Now there is a more dispassionate, sometimes trashy and gossipy, attention to the private lives of the members of the ecclesiastical elite, which is closer to tabloid coverage of the British royal family. And lately, certain Roman Curia officials have willingly played a role in this current infotainment.

The Catholicism portrayed by "Spotlight" and "The Young Pope"

Of course, the entertainment industry is also involved.

A prime example is the 2015 movie Spotlight.

It narrates the Boston Globe's investigation into the cover-up of sexual abuse by Catholic priests, portraying the Church as a mafia-like organization that goes all the way up to the Vatican.

The fact that it won the academy award as Best Motion Picture of the Year (and many other awards worldwide afterwards), means something has changed — a certain idea of Catholicism has gone mainstream.

Another example is the 2016 TV series The Young Pope and its 2020 made-for-television sequel, The New Pope.

They have normalised the idea of the papacy as part "Roman holiday" and part ecclesiastical vice, using stylish settings to display corruption of all kinds (beginning with sexual sort), all "typical" of the papal pornocracy of the 9th and 10th centuries to the Borgias in the 15th century.

These are not just money-making operations.

These changes in how the media and the entertainment industry portray the papacy and Catholicism are just the tip of the iceberg.

They are only one small visible part of some massive cultural changes in how Catholicism has been perceived in these last forty years, certainly since the beginning of the current sexual abuse crisis.

One of these changes is the idea of ubiquity of sexual violence and abuse, where the "elite pedophilia" paranoia about the Vatican is just a less sophisticated version of the notion that "the holy proved to be the best hiding place for evil" - as one of the most influential scholars of Catholicism in the United States, Robert Orsi, wrote in History and Presence (Harvard University Press, 2016).

Tectonic shifts

Another is the crisis of the male in a society where the redefinition of gender roles has been mapped in ways that are, at least in theory, much clearer for women than for men.

This crisis for an all-male clergy has prompted Catholic bishops and influencers to offer recipes promoting "Catholic masculinity" that are anything but reassuring. (The internet is a pandora's box in that regard.)

The abuse crisis has produced tectonic shifts; Catholics - not just the bishops and the Vatican -are struggling to find their footing.

The rise of the #MeToo movement combined with the crisis to create a climate of suspicion against genuine relationships and, in the Church, spiritual direction.

This has instilled anxieties about what our Church leaders and fellow Catholics - but also neighbours, co-workers, even family members - might one day reveal about themselves (or might be revealed by others) as victims/survivors or abusers.

All this is more typical of a totalitarian police state than of a liberal-democratic society and even less of a Christian community.

It's closer to The Lives of Others than Babette's Feast.

The Catholic Church's inability to manage the abuse scandal from a legal and institutional point of view is the symptom of dashed hopes that new laws would result in just punishment and prevention systems sufficient to re-establish our common humanity.

The papacy is paying the price for its historical responsibilities in the deconstruction of that hope, and this has wide-ranging consequences.

The abuse crisis has produced a hard-to-reverse disenchantment (if not contempt or rage) with the magisterium's attempt to send a positive message about sexuality.

For at least another century, it has tarnished the credibility of Catholicism and the papacy to speak on a whole range of issues.

Can Catholicism weather yet another storm?

Pope Francis accelerated his response to the abuse crisis after scandals emerged in 2018 concerning the bishops of Chile and the former cardinal Theodore McCarrick.

That was the year when the scandal affected his personal credibility.

And this is now part of the "new Roman question".

The old one emerged in the face of the collapse of the Papal State between 1860 and 1870.

The new one has come about because of the collapse of something less tangible but not less substantial — the papacy's (and the Vatican's) credibility and legitimacy for the Catholic Church, the largest non-governmental provider of social, education, and medical services in the world.

Clearly, the policy of the popes of late 20th and 21st centuries to canonize their immediate predecessors on the Chair of Peter is worse than ineffective.

It is actually counter-effective because it gives the impression of a pre-emptive defence of the papacy and an impediment to an understanding of their sainthood that is not pure apologetics.

What we are witnessing could be just another storm that Catholicism will weather, like many times before, because "the Church thinks in centuries".

But the abuse crisis and its developments in the last several years have revealed how much has changed in the perception of the Church, papal office included.

The Roman papacy was built both theologically and architecturally in the second millennium. It became an icon of Christian civilisation to the point that pontifical romanitas and catholicity were often seen as synonymous.

John Paul II wrote that the papacy in the third millennium was to serve ecumenical unity.

These last two decades have sent quite a different message.

• Massimo Faggioli is a Church historian, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University (Philadelphia) and a much-published author and commentator. He is a visiting professor in Europe and Australia.
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

This gathering, and a second one in October 2024, are the culmination of the Synodal Path on which Pope Francis launched the Catholic Church in late 2021.

The various churches around the world have experienced the synodal process in very different ways due to their distinct national and continental characteristics.

But there have also been dissimilarities even with within the same nation.

Important issues that Catholics have been wanting to address for a long time will surface in one way or another at the Synod assembly in Rome.

That will be done with differing if not divergent expectations.

Catholics in some places are less patient than others.

Interestingly, many bishops seem fearful of what Catholics in countries other than their own (especially in Germany) might do in response to the Synod, even more than they fret about what might come from Rome during or after the two assemblies.

This is a remarkable sign of our ecclesial times.

Synodality relies on rules and procedures that are now in a transitional stage, in the process of being established and tried out.

The theological and magisterial tradition of synodality is being refashioned under our very eyes.

Synodality today cannot be an identical copy of synodality as it was in the early Church.

This moment is showing us the plasticity that exists in the ecclesial and ecclesiastical forms of the one subject the Church.

This is why the approach to this moment requires an unwritten wisdom for a synodal conversion that has to face a variety of obstacles.

Here I intend to propose five of them, in an effort to develop a synodal wisdom.

But first a word of caution: we are in for a long haul; synodality will not be a done deal after October 2024.

Polarisation

There is real challenge to being a synodal Church in our current climate of hyper-polarization.

The two-party mindset has become part of the cultural DNA, where everything is a contest or a choice between two — and only two — options that are mutually exclusive and where each side is tempted to excommunicate the other and win over the other.

In the United States, for instance, this has led to the formation of two ecclesial parties that mirror the country's two-party political system - not only in shaping orientations on social and cultural issues, but also in terms of style of communication, of ethics of belonging and relating to the other side.

This has created an almost automatic instinct to talk to the other side as a group that is different, rather than talk with those who — although they do not agree with you — are still part of the same family.

Dismantling this partisan way of understanding synodality is important at a moment in which listening to the voices of the people will have consequences on the representatives to the Synod.

Like never before, the members of the Synod assembly will have a sort of ecclesial mandate precisely because the listening period now is so central to the process.

Synodality as "paperwork Church"

Unfortunately, skeptics often see synodality as just another example of the "paperwork Church"; that is, an exercise that ultimately produces documents that will feed a bureaucratic ecclesiastical apparatus but have no impact (or perhaps a negative one) on the spiritual life of Catholics.

This is why is extremely important to see synodality in the context of the Church as "field hospital", to use Pope Francis' moving image. (I was recently reminded of this on the 40th anniversary of the final episode of the American TV series "MASH" about Army surgeons trying to save lives, while clinging to their own sanity, in a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean War)

Synodality is about rediscovering the inter-personal and relational experience of the Christian faith, where healing is never just the application of procedures and protocols but always has a human face.

Synodality in the Church as field hospital is an antidote to the temptation of lifeless, contactless Christianity.

An unreasonable desire for the spectacular

Synodality is a slow communal and spiritual process that requires patience.

It challenges the habits and expectations on our horizon, as well as our ecclesial expectations.

We live in a "society of the spectacle", which emphasizes the "groundbreaking event" or the "paradigm shift" at every moment, and where every election is "the most consequential election in our history".

But synodality is not the drama that puts the individual at the centre, the "homo faber" or maker of Promethean decisions that turn his fortune upside down.

Neither is synodality one more evidence of the theological tragedy of modern Catholicism; that is, the impossibility of Church reform, of the inevitable and inescapable fate of decline.

Risk of getting hung up on structures

Synodality will certainly have to find a structural way to favour new modes of participation.

But it is not only about creating new structures.

In some churches, the decision to revive (or give life for the first time to) structures of participation that should exist already — such as parish and diocesan pastoral councils, for example — would be a synodal event.

In many places, this would be like discovering Vatican II for the first time (or starting a reception of Vatican II that was interrupted many years ago). It would not simply be applying structures that were created almost sixty years ago to today. Rather, it would mean living them in a different way.

Wanting to decide everything all at once

This is probably the most difficult and unpopular obstacle of all.

There are issues that must be very present in the synodal process, like the participation of women in new roles in the life of the Church and the consequences of the abuse crisis.

But there are also issues that may be better addressed by postponing them, especially those do not require new legislation or do not rise to the level of doctrinal decisions.

Synodality has a long history in the Christian tradition, but it's a history full of interruptions, detours, and deviations.

The current synodal process is, by nature, experimental.

If our local communities develop a more synodal way of being, it's an energy that the Church — that is, the people of God, as well as the institutional Church — will not give up.

There are the synodal moments proper, but there are also "peri-synodal" events that can contribute to the Synod without having to be sanctioned by the hierarchy of the Church.

After the Synod assemblies take place, the Catholic Church is likely to look less monarchical and more synodal.

Nonetheless, a hierarchical structure will continue to exist.

It is important to remember that the lived experience of many Catholics is not and will not be involved in the synodal process.

This is fine: no one should wish for a synodal Jacobinism.

To paraphrase what Pope Francis says about holiness in Gaudete et Exsultate, there is also "middle class of synodality".

If we were to stake our staying or leaving the Catholic Church on the outcome of this two-year synodal process it would be a mortal risk.

• Massimo Faggioli is a Church historian, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University (Philadelphia) and a much-published author and commentator. He is a visiting professor in Europe and Australia.
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

And there are the books by those bishops and cardinals who refer to the late pope and former doctrinal chief in support of their views on the issues at the center of the ecclesial debate today.

Not to mention the flood of supposedly news-making interviews some of these prelates have been giving.

This publishing spree began with remarkable speed in the very first hours after Benedict's death, even before his funeral was celebrated.

This indicates how the media can dominate intra-ecclesial conversations - a point that Ratzinger understood and emphasized often, one that his followers should have received and applied to themselves.

In part, this is all about marketing. But it's also Church politics, vanity and personal revenge, although it's not clear which is more important.

Benedict XVI's death has marked the end of an era and has triggered a "jump start for the conclave", even though Pope Francis is still fully in charge of the Church's governance and shows no signs of slowing down or that he's ready to step aside, as his German predecessor did.

End of the first post-Vatican II era

The first post-Vatican II era has come to a definitive end with Ratzinger's death.

It marks another point of transition within the context of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), which was called by John XXIII.

When Pope John died in 1963, the papacy and the conclave were part of a larger ecclesial context dominated by Council.

The conclave that elected Paul VI (Giovanni Battista Montini) to succeed the "good pope" was part of the conciliar dynamics between primacy, conciliarity, and collegiality-synodality.

In some sense, the situation of Pope Francis' pontificate almost ten years on, which coincides with the beginning of the crucial phase of the synodal process (2023-2024) is similar to the one of the Catholic Church in 1962-1963 at the beginning of Vatican II.

But there is a big difference today.

It has to do with the way in which the synodal process could change the Church.

It is this, and not the bickering about Benedict XVI's legacy, that is the real target of the some of the statements that have from a number of prominent churchmen these last few weeks. One example was the late Cardinal George Pell's article in The Spectator, written shortly before he died, in which he called the synod a "toxic nightmare".

In a memorandum which he wrote and circulated under a pseudonym in March 2022 the same Australian cardinal warned that "if the national or continental synods are given doctrinal authority, we will have a new danger to worldwide Church unity" and that "if there was no Roman correction of such heresy, the Church would be reduced to a loose federation of local Churches, holding different views, probably closer to an Anglican or Protestant model, than an Orthodox model".

Council and Synod: same but different

The current situation is not the same as that preceding the opening of a new council like Vatican II, which would be impossible today with more than 5,000 bishops and superiors of male religious orders with the right to participate.

Then there is the problem of how representative an assembly of bishops and superiors of male religious orders would be for the Church of today.

Still, the prerequisites for a conciliar event or an ecclesial event with council-like consequences are there, where what has happened up to now in the councils precedes it.

But the "synodal process" now underway is taking place according to a completely different preparation compared to the one that took place between 1959 and 1962 to prepare Vatican II.

The synodal process is much more decentralized and is involving the entire People of God - at that those who could and desired to participate.

This process is also taking place in a Church where, compared to the time of Vatican II, the institutional loneliness of the pope is much more evident: for Benedict XVI when he resigned, for Pope Francis today.

The Catholic Church today needs new ways to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

That proclamation will have to be made more and more by the People of God and less by the clerical elites.

Those who appeal to Benedict XVI are understandably scared by the undeniable fact that the Church is trying to find those new ways and that will require a new form for the Church.

It's clear from the very title of the "working document for the continental stage" that general secretariat of the Synod has prepared: "Enlarge the space of your tent" (Is 54:2).

Attempts to reset the narrative

There are a number of key issues at stake: some kind of de-hierarchisation of the Church's government, a different role for the episcopate, and the relationship between unity and diversity in the one Catholic Church.

One of the questions is what kind of regulation will be part of this new form of the Church, given the highly pluralistic ecclesial system such as the one in which we are and will be part of.

Surely some of the movements of the last few weeks, for example the book-length interview by Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, former prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (2012-2017), are part of the attempts to accelerate and prepare the next conclave.

But no one (or perhaps only one) knows when the next conclave is going to be.

We all know that the Synod is underway and now entering the crucial stage. Cardinal Mario Grech, the Synod's secretary general, put it this way in a recent interview with the Italian Catholic magazine Il Regno:

"The Synod has already begun. According to a new experience. The Holy Father opened it in October 2021 and now there are various stages. The phase completed in August was not a preparatory phase for the celebration of the Synod, but is already part of the synodal process."

The immediate target of those who are trying to reset the narrative in post-Ratzinger Catholicism is not one particular issue or another.

The target is the Synod itself.

• Massimo Faggioli is a Church historian, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University (Philadelphia) and a much-published author and commentator. He is a visiting professor in Europe and Australia.

This could be simply a déjà vu, repeating what happened almost 18 years ago.

But looking at the larger historical context helps us understand the importance of this issue, in its similarities with the precedents and its unique characteristics for the Catholic Church and the papacy of today.

First of all, we should remember that proclaiming the sainthood of the men who are elected Bishops of Rome by a conclave of cardinals is at the same time old and recent.

Of the first 48 popes who died before the year 500, 47 are saints; half of them were martyrs.

The canonisation of popes who reigned in the following fifteen centuries was rare, but that has accelerated with vertiginous speed in the last few decades.

The real change began in the 19th century with what historians and theologians call the "Romanization" or "papalisation" of Catholicism, especially with (the First) Vatican Council (1869-1870) and its proclamation of papal primacy and infallibility.

This produced a more pope-centered way of governing the Church, but also new forms of devotion to the person of the Roman Pontiff.

The increased inclination to canonise popes accelerated under John Paul II, who canonised an enormous number of saints (including — to his credit — many laypersons, including women and people who were married).

He also shortened the necessary waiting period before opening the "cause" (or process) for beatification/canonisation from 50 years after the candidate's death to just five years. He completely waived that shortened period for Mother Teresa of Calcutta. And when John Paul died in April 2005, Benedict XVI waived the waiting period for him as well.

In the years spanning 2000 to 2022, three of the six popes from the post-Vatican II era — John XXIII, Paul VI and John Paul II — have all been canonised. And in September 2022 Pope Francis beatified the fourth — John Paul I, who was pope for 33 days only.

Since the election of Pius X in 1909 there have been 10 popes.

Four of them are already saints.

Excluding Francis and the recently deceased Benedict, that means half of the remaining eight are canonised and another (John Paul I) is on the way.

The last cause of the last four popes immediately preceding Benedict have been made saints almost by matter of course.

Now it has become almost automatic for the popes to be declared saints shortly after their death.

This was done at great speed for John Paul II especially, and the same could be done or attempted for Benedict XVI.

But it is my opinion that this trend, which was inaugurated in the 20th century, should be halted.

I offer three reasons why.

Canonising the papacy, playing politics and reckoning with abuse

First, canonising popes means canonising the papacy — by popes in the Vatican.

The Vatican used to have less control over the canonisation process (technically, a trial). But in the 17th century Church of the Counter-Reformation, the Roman Curia became much more in charge.

It was a time when canonising popes was an exception.

Now the papacy is canonising itself without any Churchwide and extended-in-time period of discernment on the wisdom of canonising a particular pope.

It can be seen as a way to shield the papacy from moral and historical judgment, something like boosting the claims made by Vatican I about the papacy.

At the same time, it seems to respond to a logic that is more media-driven than ecclesial: i.e. the need to confirm the media-friendliness of the contemporary papacy through the elevation to sainthood the person who is elected pope.

The second reason for a moratorium on canonising pope concerns Church politics.

The history of the post-Vatican II period is instructive.

John XXIII died in June 1963 between the first and second sessions of Vatican Council II, and there was a push by many Council Fathers to follow an ancient conciliar tradition of making him a saint by proclamation.

This triggered a series of countermeasures by conservative Catholics, which led to the adoption of counterbalances.

Alongside the beatification of the "progressive" John XXIII in 2000, the "conservative" Pius IX was beatified. And at the 2014 ceremony when John was canonised, John Paul II was also made a saint.

In the 19th century, the elevation of popes with primacy and infallibility was also a political act - in part against secular modernity, in part an appropriation of mechanisms typical of political modernity and of the modern State.

The difference with the 19th century is that now the very act of popes canonising previous popes has become part of internal ecclesial politics and it is not helping the unity of the Church.

The third reason for a moratorium on canonising popes is related to the clergy sex abuse crisis.

The papacy's handling of abuse is a controversial issue in the Church today, and it will remain controversial in the foreseeable future.

If the Catholic Church wants to grow in the discernment Pope Francis has called for in response to the abuse crisis, the institution must stop canonising popes.

This is important for the "purification of memory" that is now in order.

In the latest phase of this ongoing crisis, there has been a greater focus on how the Roman Curia — and thus the pope — has handled particular cases of abuse and the issue as a whole.

When a pope canonises his predecessors, the institutional Church appears to once again be defendant, judge, and jury all at the same time.

But those days are long gone.

The very reputation of John Paul II has become tarnished for his handling of cases of abuse both as a bishop in Poland and as pope.

Recently there have been calls to de-canonise him because of is mishandling clergy abuse cases and his theology on women and human sexuality.

Although I thought it was unwise wisdom to canonise John Paul II, I am against the idea of de-canonising him (even if that were possible at all with one single decision or act).

It would appear to be just as political as his immediate canonisation did.

We are now in new territory

With the recent death of Benedict XVI, there are also two distinctly new elements to consider.

First, the calls for John Paul II to immediately be made a saint upon his death in 2005 came from the Focolare Movement.

Its members made numerous "Santo Subito!" posters that they raised to accompanying chants during his funeral in Saint Peter's Square.

This eruption of devotion for the deceased pope was intended to be seen as an expression of the vox populi - albeit a movement very well integrated into the ranks of the institution.

This call for a quick canonisation was later well received and embraced by other movements and institutional voices, especially the cardinals, but most of all John Paul II's successor, Benedict XVI.

The current movement to declare Benedict "santo subito" is more muted compared to 2005.

Even before the January 5 funeral of the late German pope, his personal secretary — Archbishop Georg Gänswein — was part of a media blitz that created a peculiar and unusual mood in the very first hours after his death.

Even though in the tell-all book published together with Italian journalist Saverio Gaeta, and made available on January 12, Gänswein writes that he "will not take any steps to expedite a canonical process", would be instructive and a source of wisdom to compare Gänswein's behaviour — for example - to that of John XXIII's personal secretary, Mgr Loris Capovilla, who exercised discretion and prudence from the time Pope John died, right up to his beatification.

This is important because calls to canonise Benedict XVI have been made at the same time when a particular agenda of doctrinal policy (especially on the liturgical reform of Vatican II and the theology of the council as a whole) has been advanced by the same voice, thus enhancing the ecclesiastical-political salience of a rapid canonisation.

It must be mentioned here that laments about the liturgical reform of Vatican II have made Pope Francis and his motu proprio Traditionis custodes a target in particularly bitter and divisive polemics (especially in the United States where I live, work, and go to Mass).

This intra-ecclesial feud was not yet manifest when the calls of "Santo subito" erupted at John Paul II's funeral in 2005.

The second new element that makes today different from back then is the new wave in the history of the Church's abuse crisis. During the Great Jubilee of 2000, the pope asked for forgiveness for the faults of the Church.

He did not ask forgiveness for clerical sex abuse and no one even noticed or complained.

That's because the global scandal erupted in 2002 with the Boston Globe "Spotlight" investigations.

At the time of John Paul II's death, there had been no requests from Church or secular jurisdictions for information about how he had acted in specific cases. Things were already different when he was beatified in 2011 when voices contested his saintliness, especially in light of the abuse crisis.

Since then the shadow of the that crisis has extended over the institution of the papacy.

The Vatican's efforts to be more transparent started only very recently.

We should remember that the report on the case of former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick was published by the Holy See only in November 2020.

Until the pontificate of Benedict XVI, no pope (living or dead) had ended up in the spotlight.

This has changed dramatically in the last few years.

Instead, the handling of the crisis is now part of the history of Benedict's pontificate (especially since 2010) and his life following his resignation (the report on the handling of abuse cases in Germany's Archdiocese of Munich and Freising, of which he was archbishop between 1977 and 1981, published in January 2022).

Restore the 50-year waiting period

Benedict XVI brought the fight against abuse in the Church to a new level by introducing tighter procedures and new laws.

He was the first pope to meet with survivors of abuse and to take some action against abusers. But before being elected pope, he had been an archbishop and was also cardinal-prefect of the Vatican Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) for more than 20 years.

That was also a very difficult time for Catholic theologians and religious women, many whom the CDF investigated and even silenced.

All this suggests extreme caution in approaching the issue of the canonisation of popes, also for those who do not want to damage the legacy and memory of Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI and do not want to give the impression of a whitewash.

I say this also as someone who in 2008 edited the Italian version of a volume of Benedict's essays.

I also teach theology courses where some of Ratzinger's texts are required reading.

This is not a judgement on Ratzinger-Benedict XVI's saintliness; it's a question of opportunity and the need to better understand the issue of canonising popes (not just Benedict XVI) in the current situation of the Church.

In the final analysis, we should cherish and appreciate the Church's traditional caution about the canonisation processes.

Almost four centuries ago, between 1628 and 1634, Pope Urban VIII decided that a 50-year period had to elapse after the death of the candidate before his or her canonisation.

It was Urban's reaction against a time when many novel devotions to new saints were being continually born.

It is necessary to rediscover the wisdom of that old norm, especially when it is about the beatification and canonisation of popes.

This is necessary to scale back the mystique of the papacy in contemporary Catholicism.

But it has to do also with the fact that the Church needs a long process of discovering facts surrounding the role of the papacy and of the Roman Curia in the sexual abuse crisis, which is the biggest scandal in modern Church history and the deepest crisis since the time of the Protestant Reformation.

• Massimo Faggioli is a Church historian, professor of theology in religious studies at Villanova University, and a celebrated La Croix International columnist who brings who his learning to contemporary issues facing the Church.
• First published in la-Coix International. Republished with permission.

It was a time when some feared for the Church's survival.

But back then, the Vatican enjoyed religious, moral, cultural and political legitimacy on the global and domestic political stage.

It was just a few years after the 1929 Lateran Treaty that Pius XI signed with the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini.

That pact cemented, for the remaining years of the regime, the consensus of most Italians around Fascism - until the disaster of World War II opened the eyes of those who had been blind to the real nature of Mussolini's authoritarian order.

For the papacy and the Vatican, the 1929 treaty had an effect that lasted much longer because it solved the "Roman question" and gave the papacy an institutional, legal, and diplomatic status that the Holy See still enjoys to this day.

This status protects the papacy symbolically, juridically, and politically in ways that we often take for granted.

It's one of the reasons why the Bishop of Rome has a different global profile than the (Anglican) Archbishop of Canterbury or the (Orthodox) Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople.

No more deference

But in the last twenty years or so, the Vatican has become more and more identified with scandal, especially related to the clergy sex abuse crisis and grave financial irregularities.

This coincided with the loss of deference that secular authorities (press, police, justice system) once showed to Church authorities when the Catholic press was still under the control of the hierarchy.

It was a time when, despite the fact that Church and State related to each other differently in the various countries of the West, there was a certain convergence between the two. It's enough to think about anti-Communism and the role of (traditional) marriage in society.

That relationship no longer exists. The end of the Cold War, secularisation and the emergence of a multi-cultural and multi-religious society have deprived the Church of the protection it needed when this new age of scandal came about.

It is true that the Church and nation-states are all suffering a crisis of legitimacy. And there is clearly a parallelism here. For the nation-states, it's the pervasive influence that transnational and global corporations and networks have gained in this stage of worldwide capitalism.

Then there are the world powers that have become increasingly unafraid of interfering in new ways (thanks to new technologies) with the internal order of other states.

These factors have impacted negatively on the Church, too. But there is also a new kind of pressure from within — it's from Catholics who, in different but similar ways, react against this new age of corruption as they await a reform (or a Reformation).

The difference is that the nation-states are reacting (case in point: the COVID pandemic) in ways that the Catholic Church is not able to replicate. The Church made consists of "believers without borders", a reality that makes the very idea of ecclesiastical power and jurisdiction in a territorial way largely a fiction.

Moreover, the abuse crisis has made clear to many Catholics that when it is about the abuse crisis, there is no legal recourse other than the secular justice system.

Credibility in question

Jonathan Laurence, a political scientist at Boston College, recently published a book that argues that one of the ways the Catholic Church has tried to cope historically with defeat has been to institutionalise and professionalise its elites.

It happened after the Protestant Reformation in the 16th and 17th centuries and after the impact of the liberal nation-state in the 19th century and in the age of mass migration.

But the impression one has today is that the Church is unable to follow that path.

On the contrary, it is on its way towards deinstitutionalisation, especially in the West.

This is one of the side effects of the emphasis on the necessary need to decentralise and relativize the role of the legal and institutional system in Catholicism.

Does this mean that the authority of the papacy will be over soon, in the sense of a disestablishment of the Vatican City State? No, but its legitimacy is in crisis. And this has and will continue to have consequences on its ability to operate.

It would be naïve to think that the pope's generous humanitarian and peace-making efforts for war-torn countries and areas of tension will solve this crisis of legitimacy.

Part of the reason is that, in order to deal with dictators and authoritarian leaders in today's world, the papacy needs a credibility that is stronger, not weaker, than that which Paul VI enjoyed when he addressed the United Nations in New York in 1965 and exclaimed: "No more war! War never again!"

The recent calls by Pope Francis and his Secretary of State (Cardinal Pietro Parolin) for a "new spirit of Helsinki" refer to a very different age when the Holy See had such prestige that it was invited to participate in the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe in the Finish capital in 1975 and allowed to sign its final declaration.

The threat from inside

Multiple crises have emerged and have come to light during the current pontificate. Also, thanks to Francis' lack of fear, they are putting in danger the legitimacy of the Vatican and its high moral sovereignty.

This might mean a Church that cannot resist the pressure, for example, to open its archives for investigations on high-profile cases of abuse. This could finally deprive some Church leaders of the illusion that this is a temporary crisis.

On the contrary, this is an epochal crisis that could seriously damage the Church's global efforts for good.

Its work for peace and inter-religious dialogue risks not being taken seriously anymore - not to talk about the Church's credibility in announcing the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

This is particularly true for this pontificate because Francis has chosen the risky but necessary path to dialogue and witness the Gospel with all world political leaders, no matter how inconsistent or embarrassing their record on democracy and human rights. It's more important than ever that the papacy keeps a certain level of credibility, especially internally.

This is one of the reasons that makes the abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, in our globalised world, a new global and ecumenical version of the articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae — the issue on which the Church stands or falls.

The problem is no longer whether the Cossacks might invade the Vatican and water their horses in the fountains of St Peter's Square.

And the contemptuous question that Joseph Stalin allegedly asked — "How many divisions has the pope?" — is no longer menacing. The Roman Church, after all, survived Communism.

No, the Church must now take a careful look at a more subtle yet no less insidious threat. And this time, it's coming from inside.

• Massimo Faggioli is a Church historian, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University (Philadelphia) and a much-published author and commentator. He is a visiting professor in Europe and Australia.

That will likely have a dramatic impact on how Catholicism may influence and interact with American social and political values.

The situation arises from the precipitous drop in vocations.

We still have bishops, priests, and deacons, of course, but there's no way to imagine a Church in which there's a priest for every parish—except by importing clergy from other countries.

Meanwhile, a recent study from the Catholic University of America shows a notable drop in the levels of trust and confidence that priests have in their bishops.

This "organisational" schism would be cause for concern in any organization, but especially in a religious one.

Almost two years ago, Pope Francis opened the instituted ministries of lector and acolyte to women, but that has failed to capture the attention of most women who already serve in the Church or would like to.

Among bishops, it has sparked even less enthusiasm.

The same could be said for the creation of the instituted ministry of catechist by Francis in May 2021.

In an evangelizing Church that wants to be all-ministerial, the very idea of ministry is still identified with ordination.

The predicament is even more pronounced for the ministry of bishops.

The post-conciliar crisis of the priesthood and religious orders is not surprising, given the perfunctory treatment Vatican II and its final documents gave to those ministries and their role in the Church.

But the bishop situation is surprising.

Vatican II was not just a council made by the bishops but also in some sense for the bishops: it offered them episcopal collegiality, a new language for local pastoral ministry, more control over diocesan clergy and, especially, over religious orders in their dioceses.

The very celebration of Vatican II was evidence that from thereon, the episcopacy would not only exist but matter.

The new USCCB leadership will be at the helm through the 2024 U.S. presidential election, when we may learn how much American Catholic support there is for American democracy.

Signs of an episcopal crisis are obvious:

• the high number of priests who are chosen to become bishops but who decline the appointment;
• the number of bishops resigning because of burnout;
• the cases of bishops quietly removed (and without any transparency, especially for the victims) by the Vatican over accusations or for being found guilty of abuse or cover-up.

This also all has significant impact on ecclesiology and Church governance—especially in the United States, as I've noted before, where the bishop's position has become more managerial and bureaucratic.

Functioning increasingly like the administrator of a mid- or large-sized firm, or even as a CEO overseeing legal, financial, and PR operations, the modern bishop is more and more at odds with the Patristic and Tridentine model that Vatican II had in mind when writing and approving the decree Christus dominus, as well as the constitution Lumen gentium.

Inspiring figures like St Charles Borromeo, bishop of Milan in the early stages of the application of the Council of Trent, commanded a degree of respect in the Church and in the public square that the Catholic episcopate cannot even imagine today.

In some cases, the job of bishop is interpreted to be more like an influencer selling products than a servant of Church unity as Vatican II imagined.

It further translates into a crisis of mission, something that's become clearer in the course of Francis's pontificate. Continue reading

Except that we're not talking about condemnations emanating from the pope. Instead, the condemnations found in world beacon of the liberal press are often hurled against the pope.

The latest instance was the October 12th column by Ross Douthat titled "How Catholics Became Prisoners of Vatican II".

Published for the 60th anniversary of John XXIII's opening of Second Vatican Council (1962-65), it offered the usual post hoc, propter hocnarrative on Vatican II that is typical of those who identify Catholicism with the trajectories of post-industrial, secularized Western societies and who completely ignore the global Church.

In keeping with his personal style, Douthat also made no effort to give a fair presentation of the Council's theology to readers of one of the most important newspapers in the world.

This particular column elicited very effective responses on social media, especially a sharp rebuttal on Twitter by David Gibson.

But a column published in print and online in the New York Times evidently carries some kind of journalistic infallibility, one that's even less subject to scrutiny than papal infallibility.

And the audience reached is infinitely larger than any twitter thread or blog post.

Due deference to the pope?

I once debated Ross Douthat in public.

It was in 2018 at Fordham University, a very interesting event followed by a cordial dinner together.

Trying to talk about theology with him was frustrating because his real expertise is American politics, culture, and society. And that is the filter through which he interprets anything that happens in the Church and in the Vatican.

But he also commits a fair amount of intellectual malpractice.

His book on Pope Francis (or rather against the pope) listed sources that would not be acceptable in an undergraduate students' term paper.

One of the genuinely humourous things was to see how Douthat characterized Cardinal Walter Kasper as a dangerous liberal whom Pope Francis was using to deviate from orthodox doctrine and break apart the Church through the Synod assemblies of 2014-2015 and the post-synodal exhortation Amoris laetitia.

I suggest Douthat ask German Catholics if Kasper is a dangerous liberal, especially in light of the cardinal's repeatedly stinging criticism of their "Synodal Path".

But Germany is a bit too far out of the way from the Connecticut-New York-Washington D.C. corridor, as we all know.

One of the most memorable moments in Douthat's pronouncements on the Catholic Church was during the television interview he gave to American journalist Charlie Rose in 2009.

When Rose asked him about his relationship with the papacy, Douthat replied that Catholics must have a certain amount of deference towards the pope.

Those were the days of Benedict XVI, of course. Douthat evidently forgot all about such deference when Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected to the papacy in 2103.

Indeed, during these last nine-and-a-half years, he has accused Francis of a number of theological heresies and canonical crimes.

In doing so, he has gone far beyond the criticism liberal Catholics levelled against John Paul II and Benedict XVI, popes that were closer to his theo-political views. But don't blame John Paul and Benedict for this.

Douthat's paeans to them should be taken no more seriously than his screeds against Francis.

Fellow travelers in the neo-traditionalist Catholic right in the USA

Here are just a few examples of titles his op-eds in the New York Times: "The Plot to Change Catholicism" (October 17, 2015), "Expect the Inquisition" (September 20, 2017), "Pope Francis Is Beloved. His Papacy Might Be a Disaster" (March 16, 2018), "What Did Pope Francis Know?" (August 28, 2018), "The Slow Road to Catholic Schism" (September 14, 2019).

Douthat's columns are not the only ones that have painted a certain image of Pope Francis and of the Catholic Church to the readers of the Times.

There are also articles by some of Ross Douthat's fellow travellers in the neo-traditionalist Catholic right in the United States.

For instance, there are Michael Brendan Dougherty and Julia Yost who have published, "The Pope Has Put Undue Political Spin on a Spiritual Message" (September 17, 2015), "Pope Francis Is Tearing the Catholic Church Apart" (August 12, 2021), and "New York's Hottest Club Is the Catholic Church" (August 9, 2022). Of course, to be published in the Times works like an ordination to the priesthood for intellectuals in the public square: it elevates the profile, confers authority, and opens other doors.

Pope Francis himself was published in the Times on November 26, 2020.

But that did not change the substance of what I believe is a disservice done to the readers — Catholic and non-Catholic, Christians and non-Christians, religious and secular — by the op-ed page articles on the Church.

Mainstream Catholic intellectuals have not been frequent guests of that opinion page in recent years and the lack of balance is evident (Garry Wills is in a category of his own, but also one more evident of the way the Times covers Catholicism).

I do not know if this is also happening to other Christian denominations and religious traditions, but it's clear that, if one does not know anything about Catholicism and happens upon these columns in the New York Times, they will find a very eccentric and idiosyncratic view of the Francis pontificate and the Church he leads as Bishop of Rome.

A change in the way mainstream media has traditionally covered religion

Now, we must distinguish between the Times' reporting on religion, which is mostly thorough and fair, and its opinion page. Indeed, most of its op-ed pieces on Catholicism illustrate some important things.

The first observation is that journalistic coverage of the Catholic Church has changed in ways that are more profound than the mere fact that the current pope gives frequent interviews to the media (most of the time, secular media).

Mainstream journalism, with its shrinking readership, is more influenced by political agendas and money in our polarized democracies. And the Church is more influenced by journalism, but it no longer has any control over it.

Also gone is the era when religion reporters and columnists in mainstream media were intellectuals with whom one could discuss — and read about in their columns — the great theologians and philosophers.

This made Catholicism intelligible beyond the very narrow parameters of politics.

In the US, one remembers the Times' Peter Steinfels and Newsweek's Kenneth Woodward, whereas in Italy there was Luigi Accattoli, who wrote for Il Corriere della Sera.

We are now in a more global Church, but one that is also more parochial and short-sighted at the same time.

The theological ignorance feeding the negative view of Vatican II

The second observation is the de-theologising of the debates concerning religion.

In the United States, especially Catholic public intellectuals and politicians, as well as the business world and philanthropic circles, are increasingly represented by neo-traditionalist Catholics with a markedly negative or derisive view of Vatican Council II.

This is usually due to minimal knowledge of what the Council was about theologically: Scripture, liturgy, ecumenism, religious liberty, inter-religious dialogue, and missionary activity.

The theological concept of "Catholic tradition" as a living tradition has become subservient to a political concept of tradition as something to take back from the party on the other side of the aisle.

Theologians (like me) are also to blame because we failed to engage these voices, being prisoners of an academic environment where diversity has often become the mission.

The paradoxes of the liberals' emphasis on diversity — a largely de-theologized and big-business-like idea of diversity — has helped skew the Times' view of Catholicism, which then echoes the preferential option for the exotic that is currently found in academia.

Thanks to this appeal to ideological "diversity", anti-Vatican II and anti-liberal Catholic voices have gained access to liberal mainstream media. Ironically, they have found in the New York Times the American liberal equivalent of L'Osservatore Romano — a platform that is denied to those who are identified as mainstream, liberal "Vatican II Catholics".

Catholics reinforcing anti-Catholic bias

The final observation is that this image of a Church in disarray, with a "liberal" pope under assault by neo-traditionalists, fits a certain established image of Catholicism the New York Times has held for a very long time.

In these last twenty years, the tragedy of the sex abuse crisis has reinforced certain stereotypes of a bigoted Church of the Crusades, the Inquisition, and of Pius XII who is portrayed as Hitler's lackey.

The ongoing opinions that are expressed in the daily bible of American liberalism by Catholics who attack the pope are perversely reassuring for a certain kind of Times reader.

They serve less as interpretations of Catholicism than as specimens.

It is like looking through a keyhole and seeing this weird world of Catholicism vie with itself, where devout believers try to take down the pope as if they were students in a graduate seminar trying to impress the professor.

There are Catholic ways for Catholics to disagree with the pope in public. But this is obviously not something they teach in Ivy League universities.

This approach to Pope Francis and Catholicism echoes what Zena Hitz wrote about a certain academic culture in her recent book Lost in Thought. She describes it as a blood sport, a battle of ideas interpreted as gladiatorial contests where celebrity is the currency of success.

It's no wonder that these kind of Catholics, my brothers and sisters in the faith, are so afraid of Francis and the currency in which the Church under his guidance is so clearly trafficking.

It's called the Gospel.

• Massimo Faggioli is a Church historian, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University (Philadelphia) and a much-published author and commentator. He is a visiting professor in Europe and Australia.
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

This was only the second time that Francis has convened the entire College of Cardinals for a discussion on a specific topic. The first gathering was an extraordinary consistory in February 2014 at which Cardinal Walter Kasper delivered the opening presentation.

It was part of preparations for the Synod of Bishops' extraordinary general assembly on family and marriage (October 2014) and the ordinary general assembly on the same topic that was held a year later (October 2015).

Cardinal Kasper's thesis, which advocated some changes in the way the Church deals with divorced and remarried Catholics, did not go unchallenged. A good number of cardinals harshly criticized his position, and indirectly the pope's as well.

Looking at Roman Curia reform

This is one of the reasons Francis waited eight years before again calling together all the members of the College of Cardinals.

The topic of the August gathering was quite different from the one in 2014: the reform of the Roman Curia, which Francis unveiled on March 19 with the publication of the apostolic constitution Praedicate Evangelium.

More than a consultation, which should have happened before the promulgation of the constitution, the meeting was meant to prepare the cardinals for what is already codified in law.

Nonetheless, some further modifications are still possible, given the pope's incremental way of implementing reforms.

Not all the cardinals agreed with important parts of the apostolic constitution, especially with Praedicate Evangelium's passage that separates the exercise of Church governance from sacramental ordination.

This introduces "lay governance" on a theological foundation that contradicts the ecclesiology of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) as spelled out in Lumen Gentium.

No high drama this time

But there was no high drama at this meeting as there was at the extraordinary consistory of 2014.

There are three reasons why.

The first is that the reform of the Roman Curia is something quite technical and juridically complex. Its results are yet to be seen and will largely depend on the top personnel Francis appoints, especially the new prefects of the dicasteries.

The cardinals discussed the separation of the power of governance from that of Holy Orders (and so lay people being given senior positions in the Roman Curia), as well as the question of what it means to be a synodal and hierarchical Church. They also focused on the issue of Vatican finances.

These are all important topics, but they were always unlikely to stir strong emotions in many cardinals (and in some quarters of the Catholic Church, especially in the United States) in the same way family and marriage did eight years before.

Outdistancing the opposition

The second reason there was little drama is that, after nine-and-a-half years as pope, Francis has outlived and overcome many of his opponents.

Some of them have died, while many others have marginalized themselves by expressing embarrassingly extreme views on certain political and ecclesial issues.

Since 2014, Francis has created many new cardinals who lead dioceses around the world, and this also influenced the mood of the August meeting.

But there is also a third and more important reason that there were no real fireworks this time — the dreaded "paradigm shift" in doctrine did not take place and those in opposition to Francis have since become convinced that anything the pope has done can be quickly reversed.

The thesis put forth by Cardinal Kasper (not a liberal by any means, judging by his recent criticisms of the German "Synodal Path") was that doctrine is not set in stone.

In his opening presentation at the 2014 extraordinary consistory there was this passage, for example:

"The doctrine of the Church is not a stagnant lagoon, but a torrent that flows from the source of the Gospel, into which the faith experience of the people of God of all centuries has flowed. It's a living tradition that today, like many other times throughout history, has reached a critical point and which, in given the 'signs of the times', it needs to be continued and deepened."

Pastoral practice vs doctrine

Eight years after the 2014 Synod assembly on family and marriage, it's fair to ask whether there has been a recalculation in Francis' roadmap, or what that roadmap was in the first place, or if there has been a lack of theological backing of Francis' pontificate.

"For years, in fact, a theological populism has spread in the Church which claims to defend Francis from the reactionaries by repeating that the pope 'does not touch doctrine', it's only about 'pastoral practice'," Church historian Alberto Melloni so accurately put in an August 26 article in the Italian daily La Repubblica.

"This is an offense against doctrine (which is not a monolith, but a hierarchy of truths), against what is consider 'pastoral' (which is an adjective of the way of being Jesus and not the marketing of the sacred for fools), and against the successor of Peter (who is a teacher of the faith and not a security guard placed in front of a vault)," Melloni wrote (translation mine).

Whenever the pope touched some critical issues for a certain kind of reactionary Catholicism in the West, the pushback from some influential cardinals, bishops, and the Catholic media system has been substantial. They have essentially argued that "no one can change doctrine, not even the pope".

And they have even leveled the subtle, yet unmistakable, accusation that the Jesuit pope is bordering on heresy.

Is it enough to change the pastoral approach without changing doctrine?

This pushback continues every time someone, even from one of the Pontifical Academies in Rome, tries to say something that might be seen as a crack in the doctrinal dam for the post-Vatican II — such as revisiting the meaning of Humanae Vitae.

On the other side of the spectrum, there are some overzealous defenders of Pope Francis who have fallen into that same trap.

For instance, there are those who retreat to the last line of defense in their uncoupling of pastoral and doctrinal change and deny that a Church more welcoming of LGBTQ Catholics implies changes in previous theological and magisterial statements.

The unaddressed — and therefore unanswered — question remains whether it is possible to be a more welcoming Church without a doctrine that leaves no doubt about such acceptance.

We have seen that Francis is not afraid to defend Vatican II from neo-traditionalists, on not just liturgical reform.

But the overall message has become, indeed, defensive. Hence the temptation has been to reduce what Francis does as pastoral, but not doctrinal, especially on intra-ecclesial issues dealing with ministry.

Some of the changes he has made, such as in his decision in January 2021 to open the stable and institutionalized ministries of lector and acolyte to women, are not being enthusiastically implemented throughout the Church — not even in Rome.

Downplaying expectations for change

This question of the relationship between pastoral practice and doctrine does not concern only our understanding of Francis' pontificate, but also the "synodal process" now that it enters its crucial phase, in the next 12 months leading up to the next assembly of the Synod of Bishops in October 2023.

Will the synodal process bring about change in language and style or even a change in substance on some issues? We will have to wait and see.

Two cardinals who have major roles in overseeing the 2023 gathering — Cardinal Mario Grech, secretary general of the Synod of Bishops, and Cardinal Jean Claude Hollerich SJ, the papally-appointed general rapporteur of the assembly — seemed to downplay expectations for major changes during an August 26 press conference at the Vatican.

But in the last few months these two cardinals have defended the freedom and orthodoxy of people to make suggestions in the local synodal process, especially the Germans' "Synodal Path".

In doing so both men have kept a healthy distance from other cardinals and Roman Curia officials that have an interest in silencing the hopes of those Catholics who responded to the synodal consultation.

A false dichotomy

Historians know that it takes a long time for change to come about in the Church.

Francis' pontificate is far from over, and in some sense we are only now beginning to see more support for him in the College of Cardinals, from its members in Rome and those around the world. This was evident from the August meeting.

But the question now is whether the much-needed change, on those issues where the tradition and the magisterium clearly need aggiornamento, will be supported by the courage to refuse the false alternative between pastoral practice and doctrine.

The temptation is to do with Francis' pontificate what has already been done many times with Vatican II — neutralize him by opposing pastoral practice to doctrine.

The problem is that, during this pontificate, those who strongly disagree with Francis — and even those who support him — have repeated this slogan: "pastoral change, yes; doctrinal development, no".

But no one can explain precisely what this means because it is a false dichotomy.

In the history of the Church, pastoral change has always implied and caused doctrinal development and vice-versa.

This caesura is not only tied to his decision in 2013 to voluntarily resign the papal office but even more so to the fact that he has now been retired longer than he actually served as Bishop of Rome.

This has marked an extraordinary moment in the life of the Church and now Benedict's recent penitential letter concerning historical cases of sex abuse in the Munich archdiocese he briefly led (1977-1982) must be added to the picture.

The letter was in response to a report on clergy abuse cases between 1945-2019 that said the former pope mishandled at least four such cases during his tenure as head of the Bavarian archdiocese.

Benedict's letter has been received in different ways in different countries.

Some have criticized the former pope's attempt to shift his own direct or indirect involvement in criminal actions to the spiritual dimension, and to make personal conscience decisive in a twist that makes a crime a moral fault to be confessed before God - and God alone.

Echoing the ways German Catholicism has dealt with guilt

As in everything that has been published under Benedict XVI's name in the last few years, we cannot be sure about the true authorship of this letter. We do not know if he really wrote this, or maybe just part of it, or if he is fully aware of what is published with his signature.

But the letter echoes the ways in which German Catholicism has dealt with its historical responsibilities over this past century.

During the years the young Joseph Ratzinger was studying for the priesthood in Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's Germany, there was "collective silence" on the German Church's participation in the Nazi regime.

Not all Germans were silent, however. In 1946, immediately after World War II ended, the German-Swiss philosopher Karl Jaspers published a collection of the lectures he gave at the University of Heidelberg between the end of 1945 and the beginning of 1946.

The book, which was called The Question of German Guilt (Die Schuldfrage), examined the culpability of Germany as a whole in the atrocities of Hitler's Third Reich.

Jaspers, who had to leave his university post in 1937 mainly because he was married to a Jewish woman and was subject to a publication ban, distinguished between four different kinds of guilt.

From criminal to moral guilt

There is criminal guilt, where "jurisdiction rests with the courts". There is political guilt which "results in me having to bear the consequences of the deeds of the state whose power governs me […] jurisdiction rests with the power".

There is moral guilt: "I am morally responsible for all my deeds […] jurisdiction rests with my conscience". And finally, there is metaphysical guilt: "jurisdiction rests with God alone".

Despite the obvious and enormous differences between the culpability of Germany and of German Catholics as a whole in the Nazi regime on one side and of Catholics in the abuse crisis in the Church on the other side, there are lessons to be drawn which has not escaped German theologians. See, for example, a recent book by Julia Enxing.

Benedict's letter can be seen as an attempt to reduce the question of guilt to sin, and therefore to metaphysical guilt.

This fits a certain pattern, not just of the German Catholicism in which Joseph Ratzinger grew up, but also of institutional Catholicism as a whole in dealing with the revelations of abuse.

In the Church's relationship with the public square in the context of the abuse crisis over the past decades we have seen

1.) the dominance of criminal guilt (the legal strategies and courtroom approach) and

2.) especially after the shift of 2017-2018 (from Australia to Chile, to the McCarrick case, to Germany), the rise of political guilt (given the consequences of the nationwide investigations on the relationship between Church and State).

What is still largely missing is moral guilt, because it is something that involves a much larger number of Catholics.

Germany's fundamental contributions to dealing with abuse

The history of abuse in the Church is not just a history of the small number of perpetrators and Church leaders who knew about the abuse, covered it up and protected criminals from justice.

It's also the history of the much larger number of Catholics who for a long time knew something about the problem of abuse in the Church, but only much later became touched by those stories and decided to become part of the solution.

German Catholicism has, since 2010, become a model of constructive response to the abuse crisis. Look, for instance, at Germany's fundamental contribution to the creation in 2012 of the "Center for Child Protection", now "Institute of Anthropology: Interdisciplinary Studies on Human Dignity and Care" at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.

Led by the German Jesuit Hans Zollner, it is the most important centre for forming the future generations of Catholic leaders in best practices for dealing with the issue of abuse.

This initiative happened during the pontificate of the German pope, Benedict XVI. And, to a certain extent, it is fair to say that was also thanks to his pontificate.

German history is instructive in helping us understand the trajectory of the Church's reckoning with the abuse crisis.

The ways in which Catholics have dealt with the Holocaust are distinctly different from the ways in which they are dealing with the abuse crisis, given the uniqueness of the Shoah. But there are parallels that can teach us a few important lessons.

Lesson No. 1

The first is that the process of elaborating collective responsibility in tragedies involving the Church is a long one, with different phases, and with temporary setbacks due to the tendencies of the institution to defend itself.

A case in point is the major statement the Holy See's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews issued on the Holocaust in 1998.

The text, called We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah, included some problematic declarations that undercut a clear affirmation of the Church's responsibility for some of what occurred during the Nazi era.

Cardinal Edward Idris Cassidy, the commission's president, was well aware that some of the additions that that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — then led by Cardinal Ratzinger — insisted be added to his text as a condition for its release were inaccurate, if not outrightly false.

Cassidy decided wisely that the value of that document outweighed the inclusion of what he knew were misleading assertions.

The process of the Catholic Church dealing with its responsibilities in Nazi anti-Semitism has continued. There are setbacks in the Church dealing with the scandal of abuse, but it is no longer possible to go back to the denialism that was typical up until a few years ago.

Lesson No. 2

The second lesson is that the Church dealing with the abuse crisis must take into account different dimensions of guilt.

For Catholicism today, the most difficult is the moral guilt, which must be translated in changes in theology and doctrine. It is the most difficult because it is not something that can be outsourced to the mass media, the police and justice system, or the power of states and governments.

It is something Catholics must do themselves, listening to the victims and survivors, their families, and outside experts (historians of psychological and social sciences, of medicine, of mentalities etc.).

This breadth of expertise is necessary to develop a deep theological comprehension of the phenomenon of abuse in the Church as something that is common to all human communities, but with distinct features in terms of institutional failures and spiritual consequences.

It takes time but this is the right path.

Lesson No. 3

The third lesson is a disturbing difference from the post-World War II period.

Now the question of guilt is not just about what happened in the past.

It is also something like proleptic guilt for what we fear or know is about to happen: more scandals and revelations of abuses in the context of the apocalyptic mood of contemporary culture — especially the looming environmental disaster.

Now the dominant disposition is existential anxiety about the future — not just the future of the Church, but also the future of the world. Vatican II was intent on reading the "signs of the times", but we are now intent on reading the signs of end times.

Catholics must reject shallow optimism and instead look for hope.

Christian hope recovers the tragic dimension of history, in a deeper appreciation of the past - looking at the past as suffering seeking redemption.

We have barely started to recognize that the tragedy of abuse in the Church is a locus theologicus, a key source for the development of the Christian tradition.

• Massimo Faggioli is a Church historian, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University (Philadelphia) and a much-published author and commentator. He is a visiting professor in Europe and Australia.
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

One of them, for instance, was the "Chinese rites" controversy in the 17thand 18thcenturies. This would influence the way the Church approached Chinese traditions and cultures, as well religious pluralism, right up until at least the dawn of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65).

We are at a similar juncture in ecclesiology — i.e. the way we conceive of the Catholic Church.

Catholic politicians and abortion

Take the recent controversy surrounding Catholic politicians in the United States and the reception of the Eucharist. It has pitted a "party" within the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) against President Joe Biden and has again revealed that the USCCB is out of step with the pastoral approach of Pope Francis.

This situation is worrying for more than just those who are directly involved because the way this issue is played out will have consequences on the future of the Church and its self-understanding.

Many US bishops have been urging the USCCB to release a document that would bar — or at least intimidate — Catholic politicians who favour the current laws that legalize abortion from receiving Holy Communion at Mass.

This is something that has already affected the liturgical habits of some prominent Catholic politicians, as a US senator revealed in a recent interview with the Jesuit-run magazine, America.

At the USCCB summer gathering last June, some 73% of the bishops voted in favour of drafting such a document.

The proposal was backed by 168 of the 273 prelates eligible to vote. Only 55 opposed the plan, while another six abstained. (The 160 retired bishops in the conference cannot cast a ballot.)

A document on the Eucharist

After the vote in June, a special commission got busy drafting a document on the Eucharist, which the bishops will vote on this week as they gather in Baltimore for the USCCB's annual "fall meeting".

The document does not mention the issue of politicians and Communion. But the character of the discussion that takes place this week and in its aftermath will have an impact on the Church, no matter what the text's final version or whether it is approved by the necessary two-thirds majority.

The bishops have never threatened to deny Communion to conservative politicians who approve of other laws that are in clear contrast with the Church, such as the death penalty.

William Barr, a Catholic who actively promoted capital punishment as attorney general under Donald Trump, was never subjected to the sort of treatment the bishops are displaying towards Biden and other Democrats.

Still, there is no question that the way the United States has gone about legalising abortion, very differently from the approach most countries in Europe have taken, is highly problematic for Catholic teaching, to say the least.

And, certainly, the Church's pastors have a duty to teach on the subject.

The sacraments and the "culture wars"

But the problem is that the entire effort to penalize politicians of one political party is not just an accident. It is a feature of contemporary Catholicism's "culture wars", which began in the United States in 1980s and continued to spread in the 1990s.

The decade that began with the fall of Communism was marked by a search for a new identity and meaning, a separate new symbolic universe. Then in 2001 the 9/11 attacks sparked the globalization of these American culture wars.

The tension that currently exists between the Vatican and the contingent of US bishops over the issue of Biden and the Eucharist signals a further escalation of the Catholic culture wars, which have now invaded the field of the Church's sacraments.

This is a new phenomenon.

While in the past century some in the Church have politicized certain popular devotions (e.g. to the Virgin Mary or the Sacred Heart), the sacraments were never politicized per se.

Indeed, the Holy Office did excommunicate Communists in 1949, during the pontificate of Pius XII. But this is not a fitting example, because it is the story of a failure.

When the then-Cardinal Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli's private secretary told him that some overzealous Catholics had complained about seeing Communists receive Holy Communion during a Mass at his Sotto il Monte birthplace, the future John XXIII explained:

A person comes to the confessional, not the party or an ideology. This person is entrusted to our catechesis, our love, and our pastoral inventiveness.

It is necessary to proceed on a case-by-case basis, with extreme caution. If you force something on them drastically, they will not understand you, or they will understand backwards; if you reject them, they will go away and never come back.

What's happening to Catholicism in the United States?

Pope Francis and his Vatican aides are trying to protect Joe Biden's access to the sacraments.

This was made especially clear in a letter that Cardinal Luis Ladaria, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, send to the USCCB president last May.

The pope's concern is not so much about Biden, but about what is happening to Catholicism in the United States.

What is at stake here is the catholicity of the Catholic Church — in the sense of non-sectarian and non-partisan.

This is not only a problem of the Church's credibility, but also of its self-understanding as a sacrament of salvation, as stated in the first chapter of Lumen Gentium, the Vatican II constitution on the Church.

The Catholic Church is currently living a moment that is the closest we can get to the time of the Council.

John XXIII called Vatican II in 1959 and published his most important encyclical, Pacem in Terris, in April 1963, a few months after the Cuban missile crisis.

The context was the Cold War, and the pope's intention was not just to contribute to world peace, but also to protect the Church from the all-absorbing ideological clash between Communism and the "free world".

A battlefield for the culture wars

In a similar way, Pope Francis has reintroduced a synodal culture in the Church and has opened a worldwide "synodal process" in the context of the culture wars.

He is trying to rescue the Church's capability by rebuffing the constant calls to align with a single "us vs. them" civilizational and political identity - calls that are especially loud within US Catholicism.

A clear example of what the pope is up against was manifest recently by Archbishops José Gomez, the USCCB president, while delivering a deeply divisive address via video to a conference in Spain. Gomez shocked many Catholics by attacking movements of "social justice", "wokeness", "identity politics", "intersectionality" and "successor ideology", calling them pseudo-religions.

This blatant case of the USCCB's politicization comes at a time when the Church can least afford it.

As Archbishop Mark Coleridge, president of the Australian Bishops' Conference, tweeted on November 12, "If the Eucharist is made a marker of difference (hence exclusion) rather than a sacrament of communion (hence inclusion), we have the second rather than the first."

The whole question is whether we see the Church as "a field hospital", as Francis defined it in his September 2013 interview with Antonio Spadaro SJ, or whether we see it as a battlefield for the culture wars.

The battlefield is all about separating those who are friends from those who are the enemies.

Paraphrasing Carl von Clausewitz's famous dictum about politics and war, it could be said that in the Catholic Church the extension of the battlefield mentality to the sacraments is the continuation of the culture wars by other means.

• Massimo Faggioli is a Church historian, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University (Philadelphia) and a much-published author and commentator. He is a visiting professor in Europe and Australia.
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

Pope Francis launched the project at the Vatican on October 10 with a Mass in St. Peter's Basilica and bishops around the globe (though not all of them) inaugurated the process at the diocesan level the following Sunday with celebrations in their local cathedrals.

The Synod of Bishops' secretariat in Rome has put extensive emphasis on listening — to God in the Holy Spirit and to one another.

But in the Christian tradition, the act of listening is always connected to reading: not just Scripture, but also whatever is conducive to listening to the revelation of God in history and our lives in order to discern the ways God speaks to us today.

The problem is that there are new forms of illiteracy and ignorance today that affect the Church, and this is a key element in understanding why a number of Catholics seem indifferent to or uninterested in the "synodal process".

Some of the reticence is rooted in an opposition to Pope Francis or the Second Vatican Council. But the problem is actually much deeper.

From the printing press to social media

The Reformation and the Council of Trent (1545-63) took place in the 16th century during the age of the printing press, and books made an important impact on the religious culture and theological debates of that time.

The First Vatican Council (1869-70) was held in the 19th century during the age of newspapers, magazines, and the emergence of public intellectuals.

When Vatican II (1962-65) rolled around, we were already in the age of television and mass media.

And now we have the synodal process 2021-2023, the biggest consultation of the People of God in Church history. It is taking place in the age of digital and social media, a phenomenon that has shown the Church to be deeply divided along generational and cultural lines.

Many who belong to the Catholic gerontocracy are digitally illiterate, while people in other sections of the Church are illiterate in a more traditional sense of the word.

Even in Catholic institutions of higher education, we have many people who are "graduated but not literate".

There are disturbing signs of a plummeting cultural level among today's Catholics. In Europe and the Western world, many Catholic newspapers, magazines and publishing houses have shut down over the past few years.

The end of an era

After nourishing the intellect of Catholics for generations, especially during Vatican II and the first decades following the Council, there are now fewer avenues for the cultural production and consumption of writing that can help believers make sense of the signs of the times.

One of the latest examples is the shocking news of the bankruptcy and closure of one of Italy's most important Catholic publishers, Edizioni Dehoniane.

Based in Bologna, it has produced many essential volumes over the years, including the Italian edition of the much-acclaimed Jerusalem Bible.

The closing of this publishing house marks the end of an era for Catholic culture in Italy and raises serious concerns about how believers will continue to be intellectually engaged in the future.

The Roman Curia, the Vatican and the pontifical universities and academies in Rome were once centres of cultural production and consumption, but today this is no longer the case or at least not to the same extent it once was.

I have lost count of how many religious bookshops in the Eternal City have closed over the past few years and I wonder how many more will be shuttered. The problem is not just the emergence of e-commerce, digital libraries, nor the pandemic.

What we are witnessing is a substantial change in the culture of Catholics compared to the expectations raised by the reforms of Vatican II.

Devotionalism is overtaking intellectual rigour

The question is whether Catholics still read about religion and the Church; and, if so, what they are reading.

High school and college professors are used to dealing with the declining level of literacy among their students — the ability to read critically, write intelligibly, and orient oneself in the cultural canon required not only of a professional but also of a citizen.

Theology is not exempt from this trend.

In the last few years, a return of devotionalism (something different from devotions) has taken the place of intellectual rigour.

In seminaries, there is a new emphasis on the basic human formation and psychological screenings, which has been made necessary by the sex abuse scandal, as well as by the difficult family and personal backgrounds from which many priesthood candidates come.

But, unfortunately, human formation — as essential as it is — has often come at the expense of historical, philosophical and theological formation.

This is not only a problem that affects seminarians and the young clergy. It is also a problem of ideology in the Catholic Church at large.

Books are not just objects, but also companions

The consumption of content provided by religious blogs and websites has further pushed pre-existing currents of devout anti-intellectualism. The so-called "proud ignorance" is not unknown in militant Catholic circles, where Vatican II theology is bashed as a sellout to secularism.

If one looks at the militant Catholic websites favoured by many seminarians, young priests and various ecclesial activists, it is easy to understand why Catholic publishing is in crisis - especially for the kind of books and magazines that one could loosely call "Vatican II Catholicism".

However, on the neo-traditionalist and anti-Vatican II side of the spectrum, there seems to be an energy that liberals are ignoring at their own peril.

The crisis of Catholic publishing is not just a problem for those who directly or even indirectly work in this industry.

Books are not just objects: they are an emanation of a personality and can be good companions and friends that chase away moments of solitude and sorrow. They provide a kind of companionship that persons of faith cannot find in digital or social media.

There is a kind of militant anti-intellectualism that is truly a disaster, and it is truly anti-Catholic without knowing it.

The most important Church document on listening and reading is Dei Verbum, the Vatican II Constitution on Divine Revelation. It offers an understanding of the faith that is not intellectualistic, while also rejecting anti-intellectualism.

Intellectual disarmament before huge cultural challenges

Self-abandonment in faith is not without direction. It necessarily includes a commitment to the Word, which must be listened to and read.

Reading the Scriptures is not just a Protestant thing. And Christianity is not a "religion of the book", in the sense that it is not bound to a literalist reading of the Holy Writ.

We believe the Scriptures have emerged under the influence of the Holy Spirit. And reading and interpreting them includes an intellectual process, without which there is no tradition of the Church.

But there seems to be intellectual disarmament before the huge cultural challenges facing the Church in the global world of today.

It's a disarmament that affects different ideological corners of Catholicism in different ways.

Some of the Church's "cultural warriors" understood before and in a better way than most progressives that this is not the time to divest from theological culture.

The crisis of Catholic culture has an impact on the synodal process 2021-2023 and on Pope Francis' pontificate.

A Church that invites people to listen must invest in culture

Catholics who have kept alive the theology of Vatican II over the last few decades have been better equipped to understand the link between the pope's synodality and the tradition of the Church.

That's because they are part of a generation of avid readers. Unfortunately, it is an ageing generation and most of those who belong to it are already retired.

Church leaders are eager to emphasize that synodality is not a political mechanism, but a spiritual process. This is true, but that spiritual process relies on basic skills that we learn from the humanities and liberal arts.

There is a contradiction between a Church that invites Catholics to listen and at the same time does not understand the necessity to invest in culture.

The need to address ignorance among Church leaders

In ancient culture, during a time when the biblical canon was formed and for many centuries afterwards, learning happened largely by listening. In an oral culture, the act of reading was not essential.

Then in the Middle Ages and the early modern period, we moved to a visual culture where religious content was dominant.

In this age of digital and social media, we are bombarded with ubiquitous images freed from the monopoly of art (especially religious art).

In previous centuries when the religious message reached Christians through different channels, illiteracy was not such an impediment to growth in faith.

But today the inability to read critically has more serious consequences for the life of the faith.

Not all Catholics are expected or required to be bookworms or to own a library - literally or figuratively. But the expectations must be higher for the Church's ordained and lay leaders.

Being a "listening Church" does not mean just listening to one another or listening to the Holy Spirit. It also means listening to what culture - religious and secular - has to say to the Church.

The Council of Trent tackled the problem of ignorance among the clergy.

Today, some 450 years later, there are signs that the Catholic Church is once again facing that same problem again, at a moment when its leadership is or should no longer be identified only with the clergy.

The assumption that Church leaders can afford to be ignorant is just another form of clericalism.

• Massimo Faggioli is a Church historian, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University (Philadelphia) and a much-published author and commentator. He is a visiting professor in Europe and Australia.
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.