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.

No one doubts that the proposal is directed at regular Mass-goer Joe Biden, the nation's second Catholic president.

More significant than the proposal itself, however, is the fact that the leadership of the bishops' conference has moved toward it in the face of Vatican opposition, expressed in a go-slow letter from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to the USCCB president, Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles, last month.

"The idea that very direct warnings and guidance from the Vatican would simply be seen as an advisory opinion was not part of my experience," John Carr, policy adviser to the bishops from 1987 to 2012, told the National Catholic Reporter's Christopher White, adding that for them, Pope Francis has become "just one voice among many" and now "the question is not whether I agree with the pope but whether the pope agrees with me."

In modern times, such readiness to dismiss papal teaching has indeed been extraordinary.

In his magisterial "Saints & Sinners: A History of the Popes," Eamon Duffy titles the section on the popes of the 20th century "The Oracles of God."

This oracular status was, ironically, the result of their loss of temporal power in the 19th century.

Forced to cede their lands and much of their income to the secular powers, the popes established a degree of control over the church that they had never before enjoyed — from the control of episcopal appointments to doctrinal authority that could rise to the level of infallibility.

Where once Catholic monarchs decided much of what happened in the church, by the 20th century the pope's "spiritual role and symbolic power" had grown, Duffy writes, "to dizzying heights."

Now that era appears to be coming to an end, for the U.S. bishops' proposal on the Eucharist is but the latest example of Catholic resistance to papal direction.

Conservatives in the church have been unsettled by Francis ever since his famous "Who am I to judge?" remark about gay people shortly after he assumed the papacy in 2013.

But outright resistance can be dated from his opening the door to Communion for the divorced and remarried, and specifically from the letter effectively charging Francis with heresy that was issued in 2016 by four semiretired cardinals, led by uber-conservative Cardinal Raymond Burke.

Similarly, after Francis revised church doctrine to deny the legitimacy of the death penalty under any circumstances, Burke (whom Francis had removed as head of the Vatican's top judicial body) put out a "Declaration of the truths relating to some of the most common errors in the life of the Church of our time," which insisted that capital punishment was licit under church law.

To be sure, Burke's position was not embraced by the U.S. bishops' conference.

But when Attorney General William Barr — past Knights of Columbus board member and recipient of the right-wing National Catholic Prayer Breakfast's 2019 "Christ's Lay Faithful" award — lifted the long-standing moratorium on federal death penalty executions that same year and ordered up one execution after another, the bishops' response was tepid.

Tepid also characterizes the bishops' response to "Laudato Si'," Francis' powerful encyclical on climate change.

Since it was issued in 2015, the number of bishops who have made climate a major part of their teaching and advocacy agenda can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

And let us not forget former U.S. papal nuncio Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò‘s discredited letter accusing Francis of covering up former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick's history of abuse and calling for Francis' resignation.

As the National Catholic Reporter's White points out, the same American bishops who spoke up for Viganò are the ones behind the current push for a Eucharist document.

Not that they are alone.

Behind the anti-Francis bishops is a media ecosystem ranging from websites like Church Militant and The Catholic Thing to the EWTN television network, whose lead anchor, Raymond Arroyo, is also a regular on Fox News. T

here are, as well, organizations like the Acton Institute and the Napa Institute, which serve to mobilize wealthy Catholics around conservative policy positions.

The moral and financial strength of the bishops has been severely weakened by the abuse scandal.

Money talks, and much of the money for the church and its institutions now comes not from ordinary parishioners but increasingly from rich conservatives.

The term for state control of the church in early modern times was Gallicanism, because it was in France that such control was most clearly articulated and most thoroughgoing.

The term for the new post-oracular papacy might be Americanism, because America is where the authority of the pope is now most seriously called into question.

In the late 1890s, Pope Leo XIII condemned as heretical an Americanism that embraced the separation of church and state and equal status of all religions — a position the church was still decades away from endorsing.

The new Americanism is manifested in libertarian capitalism and a narrow moralism that has little commitment to the common good.

Though progressive on economic policy (he favoured labour unions), Leo XIII was an authoritarian who believed in centralized, hierarchical control of Catholic life.

By contrast, Francis is advancing a philosophy of synodality, which looks to the entire body of the faithful to work out church policy country by country.

Thus far Francis has done little to rein in the Americanism of his time. But his patience may not last for long.

• Mark Silk is Professor of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and director of the college's Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life. He is a Contributing Editor of the Religion News Service.
• First published in RNS. Republished with permission.
• Image: Salt Lake Tribune

A dramatic ending to the tale ensured its endurance: As the woman, masquerading as Pope Johannes Anglicus, led a religious procession through Rome during the mid-ninth century, she allegedly went into labour, exposing the fact that "Johannes" was actually "Joan. Continue reading

"I do not see myself as something special, I am a sinner and am fallible."

"We must not forget that the idealisation of a person is always a subliminal kind of aggression. When I am idealised, I feel attacked," he said in conversation with the German newspaper, Die Zeit, which took place in the Vatican at the end of February.

Speaking of the spiritual crises that everyone has in their lives, Pope Francis sees such moments as part of growing and maturing in the faith.

"A faith that does not fall into crisis remains childish…I have spoken of the dark moments... and the empty moments. I also know the empty moments."

And he offered some good spiritual advice on dealing with them: "You cannot grow without crises in human life."

Die Zeit asked Pope Francis about the appearance of posters in Rome accusing him of not being merciful toward his perceived enemies.

The pope laughed and noted that the posters were in the Roman dialect, the romanaccio that he describes ruefully as "beautiful."

He admitted that he prays every day for the ability to laugh, including a prayer by St. Thomas More to be granted a sense of humour.

The pope says the prayer every day and has recommended it to the members of the Roman Curia:

Prayer for Good Humor
by St. Thomas More

Grant me, O Lord, good digestion, and also something to digest.
Grant me a healthy body, and the necessary good humor to maintain it.
Grant me a simple soul that knows to treasure all that is good
and that doesn't frighten easily at the sight of evil,
but rather finds the means to put things back in their place.
Give me a soul that knows not boredom, grumblings, sighs and laments,
nor excess of stress, because of that obstructing thing called "I."
Grant me, O Lord, a sense of good humour.
Allow me the grace to be able to take a joke to discover in life a bit of joy,
and to be able to share it with others.

Source

• zeit.de
• rt.com
• ncregister.com
• Image: thetrentonline.com

This year Easter remains the spiritual linchpin, but in popular terms it's more like a warm-up act for next Sunday's double-play canonisations of Popes John XXIII and John Paul II.

This will be the first time two popes have been declared saints in the same ceremony, and although projections vary, well over a million people could turn out in Rome to watch history being made, with millions more following the event on TV or over the Internet.

Here are five things to know about the biggest Vatican happening of early 2014.

First, putting these two popes together amounts to a call for unity between the church's liberal and conservative wings.

In the Catholic street, John XXIII is an icon of the left, remembered as the pope who launched the reforming Second Vatican Council and opened the Church to the modern world.

John Paul II is a hero to the right, the pope who brought down Communism, who fought what he called a "culture of death" behind liberalising currents on abortion and other life issues, and who insisted on strong Catholic identity vis-à-vis secular pressures to water down the faith. Continue reading.

Source: The Boston Globe

Image: Jeunes-Cathos

Yet at his six-month mark, which falls today, Pope Francis is drawing better reviews on those five scores than anyone might reasonably have anticipated back on March 13, either in terms of the magnitude of the task or the background of 76-year-old Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

When he stepped onto the balcony overlooking St. Peter's Square, this was immediately a pope of firsts: the first pontiff from the developing world, the first from Latin America, the first non-European in almost 1,300 years, the first Jesuit and, of course, the first to take the name Francis. The new pope charmed the world that night by humbly asking the crowd to bless him before he blessed them and by referring to himself as "bishop of Rome" rather than more exalted titles.

Since that memorable debut, Francis over and over again has demonstrated a capacity to surprise.

He plunges willy-nilly into crowds, to the delight of the masses and the horror of his security team. He speaks his mind with sometimes startling frankness, such as his famous "Who am I to judge?" line with regard to gays. He makes phone calls to people out of the blue, including ordinary folks who've written him to share some personal struggle, and involves himself daringly in the issues of the day, such as his recent full-court press against military strikes in Syria.

This week, Francis was back in the headlines twice. On Tuesday, he visited a facility in Rome run by the Jesuit Refugee Service, where he proposed that unused convents and monasteries could be converted into housing for immigrants and refugees. On Wednesday, the Italian daily La Repubblica splashed a letter from the pope across its front page, written to a renowned leftist and atheist journalist, assuring him that God's mercy reaches nonbelievers, too.

Make no mistake: Francis is a phenomenon, a force of nature who's raised expectations, upset predictions, created a new sense of possibility, set tongues wagging and, in some quarters, sent anxieties soaring, all in the short span of half a year. Continue reading

Sources

• John L. Allen Jr. in National Catholic Reporter
• Image: Today's Catholic News

John L. Allen Jr. is NCR senior correspondent.

It's somewhat providential that the two stories have coincided, especially after a story was brought to my attention late last week about a possible correlation between the papacy and British royalty.

As I've written many times in the past four months or so, Pope Francis is a pretty beloved figure around the world, even by large portions of a mainstream media that is usually suspicious of — or even hostile towards — the Catholic Church, and in many cases with due cause.

But someone at CNN was thinking back to another figure in our not-too-distant past who was loved by the media and wondered "Is Pope Francis the Catholic Princess Diana?"

Eric Marrapodi was reflecting on Pope Francis's recent trip to Lampedusa in southern Italy, one of the closest parts of Europe to Africa and the hoped-for destination of many Africans trying to make a new life for themselves, often risking their lives in the pursuit of that dream. It reminded him of Princess Diana's efforts to cast a spotlight on humanitarian issues.

But watching Francis' first few months in office, it's hard not to notice that he seems to have taken a page from the late Princess Diana's playbook.

The Princess of Wales knew where she went, the media followed. Her activism brought global attention to homelessness, HIV/AIDs, and, most prominently, land mines. Continue reading

Sources

• Gavin Abraham, The Catholic Soapbox
• Image: CNN

Gavin Abraham, a journalist for more than a dozen years, has spent most of the last six years working in Catholic media.

Fondness and confessions

The wave of affection for the new Pope is undeniable, with requests to attend papal audiences skyrocketing. Bergoglio has made contact with the crowds a focal point of his papacy. He spends a great deal of time among the faithful in St. Peter's Square, getting out of the pope-mobile to greet them. During last Wednesday's General Audience he dedicated almost half an hour to talking about contact with people and faithful. Some are sceptical and even irritated by this "honey moon" between the Pope and the people, expecting things to turn sour any minute. This could happen for example if the Pope adopts a rigid stance in the field of sexual morality. It would be a mistake to believe that this new relationship is being blown out of proportion by the media. Pope Francis spoke of mercy right from the outset and this triggered something deeper than mere fondness in the hearts of faithful. So many approached the Catholic faith again after decades of estrangement from the Church and they themselves say Francis' words are to thank for this.

The Sanctae Marthae residence

Although he is now Pope, Francis has not really changed since his days as Archbishop of Buenos Aires. His style is still the same and this has contributed to alterations being made to the Vatican's set protocol. His personal style has been leading the Catholic Church in the direction of a sobriety and simplicity that faithful recognise and appreciate. Continue reading

Sources

• Deacon Greg Kandra in The Deacon's Bench
• Image: Catholic Herald

Deacon Greg Kandra is a Roman Catholic deacon serving the Diocese of Brooklyn, New York.

"It seems my brother cardinals went almost to the end of the world [to choose a pope]," he told the crowd in St Peter's Square in his first address, a joke which belied his image as the cardinal who never smiles.

Up until 13 March, he was Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires.

Pundits did not see him as a favourite for the job of succeeding Benedict XIV and his advanced age - at 76, he is just two years younger than Benedict at the time of his election in 2005 - may surprise those expecting a younger man as the 266th pope.

However, he appeals to both Church conservatives and reformers, being seen as orthodox on sexual matters, for instance, but liberal on social justice.

"We live in the most unequal part of the world, which has grown the most yet reduced misery the least," he was quoted as saying by the National Catholic Reporter at a gathering of Latin American bishops in 2007.

"The unjust distribution of goods persists, creating a situation of social sin that cries out to Heaven and limits the possibilities of a fuller life for so many of our brothers."

He was born on 17 December 1936 in Buenos Aires, of Italian descent.

According to his official Vatican biography, he was ordained as a Jesuit in 1969 and went on to study in Argentina and Germany.

A bishop from 1992, he became Cardinal of Buenos Aires in 1998, and at the 2005 conclave was seen as a contender for the papacy.

His election took many by surprise in his home city, where many had thought his age ruled him out, the BBC's Marcia Carmo reports from there.

But any surprise soon gave way to the jubilant blaring of car horns on the streets.

As Cardinal Bergoglio, his sermons always had an impact in Argentina and he often stressed social inclusion, indirectly criticising governments that did not pay attention to those on the margins of society, our correspondent says.

Francesca Ambrogetti, who co-authored a biography of him, told Reuters news agency that part of his public appeal lay in his humble lifestyle. Continue reading

Sources

• BBC
• Image: The Guardian
  

See also:

• Politico
• Heavy
• The Telegraph

Calling for major decentralisation of Vatican and papal authority, he said this could be achieved through the creation of regional bishops' conferences and synods of bishops with decision-making authority.

Archbishop Quinn, who has often advocated reform of Church governance, said shared bishops' decision-making with the pope is urgently needed.

Such decision-making "is not the result of a juridical decree, not the result of the action of a council, and not the result of the decision of any pope".

Rather, he said, it is rooted in the ordination of the bishop and the doctrine that he is a successor to the apostles of Jesus.

However, he maintained, "a very large number of bishops are of the opinion that there is not any real or meaningful collegiality in the Church today".

The emeritus archbishop, who was speaking at a symposium on Vatican II at Stanford University, said local bishops "have no perceptible influence" in the appointment of bishops. Instead, appointments are made in Rome, often by men who do not adequately know local diocesan needs.

Introducing regional bishops' conferences and deliberative episcopal synods would involve separating two aspects of the function of the papacy — "the unity of faith and communion" and administration.

The pope would have "the burden of fostering unity, collaboration and charity", but Church administration would become more regional.

In such a reconfiguration, the appointment of bishops, creation of dioceses, questions of liturgy and other matters of Catholic practices would be up the regional bishops' conferences, he said.

In the case of Asia and Africa these would enable local churches to develop their liturgy, spirituality and practice in accord with their own cultures, He said there has been a long-standing complaint from both Africa and Asia that "they feel impoverished and constrained in not being able to integrate elements of their culture into Church life".

Source:

National Catholic Reporter

Image: Intermountain Catholic

Yet with the stunning announcement that he is resigning as the 264th successor to Saint Peter, Benedict may wind up fundamentally changing the way the church and the world view the papacy.

That's because the papacy has come to represent more than an office, and the pope more than just a higher-ranking priest or bishop who enjoys lifetime tenure, a nice Vatican apartment and the privilege of wearing a white cassock no matter the season.

Instead, the papacy is seen as a divine mission unlike any other in the church, and one that ends only in death.

"Christ did not come down from the cross," the late John Paul II, Benedict's immediate predecessor, would tell aides who wondered if his failing health and public suffering should compel him to relinquish his office. Continue reading

Journalist and historian Mario Dal Bello drew on documents from the Vatican Secret Archive to write his new book, I Borgia: La leggenda nera (The Borgias: The Black Legend).

He doesn't set out to "rehabilitate" the Borgias, but rather give a more "fair account" of this family that produced two popes, cardinals, poets and warriors.

The Borgias were certainly "no saints", he says, but they weren't that much different from other powerful families of the time.

In 15th century Italy, resorting to murdering one's political opponents — as Rodrigo Borgia, who became the second Borgia pope with the name of Alexander VI, did — wasn't that unusual.

Neither was keeping mistresses, even while rising through the ranks of the Catholic Church, or appointing sons and nephews to become cardinals.

But the Borgias were also accused of many criminal activities, including adultery, simony, theft, rape, bribery, incest and murder (especially by arsenic poisoning).

The reason the Borgias have gone down in history as a synonym for "abject crime and depravity", Dal Bello says, is that they were victims of an historic case of "bad press".

"They were foreigners and they were hated for this," he says.

According to Dal Bello, the difference between the legend and the truth is particularly vast in the case of Lucretia Borgia, one of the eight children of Pope Alexander VI.

She was accused of incest and poisoning — but she never did those things, he says. Rather, when she died in 1519 she was a devout woman beloved by the people of Ferrara, where she lived.

Dal Bello says her last words, when she died of complications from childbirth, were: "I belong to God forever... I rejoice in what he rejoices in."

Sources:

Religion News Service

Wikipedia

Image: Fanpop

Jeremy Irons is suitably ghoulish as Rodrigo Borgia, Pope Alexander VI and head of a vicious brood.

The Borgias, it goes without saying - this is historical drama with as much rumpy pumpy as pomp; the latter it does magnificently - will have plenty of silliness. And it has to because it is mostly populated by calculating old men in red frocks, so it requires rather a lot of sexing up to make it sexy viewing.