Pope Francis embraces Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle of Manila before blessing a mosaic of St. Pedro Calungsod during a meeting with the Philippine community at St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican Nov. 21. St. Pedro Calungsod was a lay catechist from the Ph ilippines who was martyred in Guam in 1672. (CNS photo/Alessandro Bianchi, Reuters)
If your only source for news about Pope Francis is from usual
mainstream news sources, well, you won't be reading this post or this
website. That said, there have been a number of stories about the Holy
Father in just the past couple of weeks that likely have not or will not
get much air time on CNN or square inches on the printed page of the
Grey Lady or WaPo. One big reason is that many of these stories simply
do not fit with the "Pope Francis the Liberal" media meme, nor the
"Francis breaks radically from Benedict, John Paul II, the
Catechism, and Everything Else Catholic" media mantra.
Some
of the papal shifts, if that's the correct term (or: adjustments,
corrections, reassessments) were covered well by Italian journalist and
Vatican veteran Sandro Magister in his November 22nd column, "Even the Pope Critiques Himself. And Corrects Three Errors":
In
the span of a few days Pope Francis has corrected or brought about the
correction of a few significant features of his public image. At least
three of them.
The first concerns the conversation that he had
with Eugenio Scalfari, set down in writing by this champion of atheistic
thought in “la Repubblica" of October 1.
In sum, that controversial and curious interview has been removed from the Vatican website:
"It
was removed," Fr. Lombardi explained, "to clarify the nature of that
text. There were some misunderstandings and disagreements about its
value."
On November 21, interviewed at the Roman headquarters of
the foreign press, Scalfari nonetheless revealed more details of the
matter.
He said that the pope, at the end of the conversation,
had consented that it should be made public. And to Scalfari's proposal
that he send him the text beforehand, he had replied: “It seems like a
waste of time to me, I trust you.”
That trust, put bluntly, was
misplaced. Not because the agnostic/atheist Scalfari had some sort of
agenda (perhaps he did; that's not clear), but because the whole matter
was handled so unprofessionally and haphazardly. More details about that
story are available in this report from National Catholic Register.
The second matter has to do with the Holy Father's understanding and interpretation of Vatican II. In a letter sent to Abp. Agostino Marchetto
in October and made public earlier this month, Francis
praised Marchetto's work as a historian and interpreter of the Council,
notably in his book, The Second Vatican Ecumenical Council: A Counterpoint for the History of the Council:
"You
have demonstrated this love [of the Church] in many ways, including by
correcting an error or imprecision on my part - and for this I thank you
from my heart - but above all it has been manifested in all its purity
in your studies of Vatican Council II. I have said this to you once,
dear Archbishop Marchetto, and I want to repeat it today, that I
consider you the best hermeneut of Vatican Council II."
Marchetto's
interpretation of the Council, as a description of his 2010 book
indicates, is most certainly in keeping with the perspectives of John
Paul II and Benedict XVI: "Archbishop Marchetto critiques the Bologna
School, which, he suggests, presents the Council as a kind of
'Copernican revolution,' a transformation to 'another Catholicism.'
Instead Marchetto invites readers to reconsider the Council directly,
through its official documents, commentaries, and histories." This is no
small matter, as anyone who follows such debates knows well.
And
now another letter has come to light, this one from Francis to Card.
Walter Brandmüller on the subject of the 450th anniversary of the
closing of the Council of Trent, which is December 4th. After reflecting
on the great significance of Trent and its "rich doctrine," Francis
writes (this from the translation by Fr. Z):
Harking
closely to the same Spirit, Holy Church in this age renews and
meditates on the most abundant doctrine of the Council of Trent. In
fact, the “hermeneutic of renewal” [interpretatio renovationis] which
Our Predecessor Benedict XVI explained in 2005 before the Roman Curia,
refers in no way less to the Council of Trent than to the Vatican
Council. To be sure, this mode of interpretation places under a brighter
light a beautiful characteristic of the Church which is taught by the
Lord Himself: “She is a ‘subject’ which increases in time and develops,
yet always remaining the same, the one subject of the journeying People
of God” (Address of His Holiness Benedict XVI to the Roman Curia
offering them his Christmas greetings – 22 December 2005).
That
alone should give pause to all those progressives who have been claiming
that Francis is a torch bearer for the "spirit of Vatican II". In fact,
the two letters are something of a "one-two" combo to the jaw of that
less-than-sacred "spirit".
Third, there is the recent homily,
given on November 18th, that contained some rather startling
language--even for a pontiff who has often been startling in his
language. As reported by www.news.va:
And
referring again to the passage in the Book of Maccabees, in which all
nations conformed to the king’s decree and adopted customs foreign to
their culture, the Pope pointed out that this “is not the beautiful
globalization, unity of all nations, each with their own customs but
united, but the uniformity of hegemonic globalization, it is – he said -
the single thought: the result of secular worldliness”
And Pope
Francis warned that this happens today. Moved by the spirit of
worldliness, people negotiate their fidelity to the Lord, they negotiate
their identity, and they negotiate their belonging to a people that God
loves.
And with a reference to the 20th century novel “Lord of
the World” that focuses on the spirit of worldliness that leads to
apostasy, Pope Francis warned against the desire to “be like everyone
else” and what he called an “adolescent progressivism”. “What do you
think?” – he said bitterly – “that today human sacrifices are not made?
Many, many people make human sacrifices and there are laws that protect
them”.
It's nigh impossible to say (at least with any sense of
integrity or seriousness) that such language comes from "Francis the
Liberal." As I noted in my most recent CWR editorial,
the rhetoric of "right" and "left", "conservative" and "liberal" is
loaded with serious problems; it most certainly causes plenty of
confusion here in the U.S.:
Suffice
to say, the die has been cast for many journalists, and thus for their
readers, when it comes to framing stories about the good Pope Francis
and the evil “right-wingers” who oppose him. It's not that some writers
go to elaborate and sophisticated lengths to make dubious connections
and render outrageous assertions; rather, they often demonstrate an
intellectual laziness that is alarming and a crude simplicity that is
exasperating, at best.
One example (out of countless possibilities) was a recent New York Times' piece, "Conservative U.S. Catholics Feel Left Out of the Pope’s Embrace” (Nov. 10th) by Laurie Goodstein,
a reporter who consistently and constantly pits "liberals" (the caring,
loving good guys) against "conservatives" (the dogmatic, heartless
jerks). The piece is par for the course. Of more interest to me was the Times' posting of seven letters to editor a
few days later—six of them prime examples of the mindless, rote
"left-right/liberal-conservative" blathering that is like a suffocating
fog obscuring the actual religious, cultural, and social landscape. A
couple of snippets will suffice:
The
Catholic bishops of the United States, one hopes without guile, in
their exaggerated emphasis on abortion and same-sex issues over the last
20 years, created among conservative Catholics a ready electorate for
Republican politicians whose real agenda was not social issues. Pope
Francis only proves that point.
His own emphasis on the poor, the
disenfranchised (documented or otherwise), and the ill and disabled
flies in the face of the political agenda of Catholic Republican
stalwarts like Paul Ryan, Rick Santorum and others who vote consistently
to cut the social safety net in the United States by describing such
programs as economic leeches on American society. ...
But Pope
Francis, whose liberal views appeal to the younger generation, is
keeping Catholicism from becoming a thing of the past.
Heh.
Adolescent progressivism, anyone? (The last letter, by Fr. Michael
Orsi, is the lone exception to this nonsense. Another, later letter,
given the caption, "Conservative View of Pope",
does not use the words "conservative" or "liberal". Again, it's all
about framing the discussion so that no discussion actually takes
place.)
It's not that labels are bad, of course, but
that when labels become lazy, self-assuring, tribal code words, they
undermine any meaningful discussion or healthy argument. They also
distract from the real issues at hand: the nature of truth, the actual
teachings of the Church, the basic principles of Church social teaching,
and so forth. Francis, for his part, is going to continue to confound
the label makers. He may also have some more missteps. But he seems to
be settling in and better hitting his stride of late, and his soon-to-be
release Apostolic Exhortation will be another major indication of how
he wishes his pontificate to proceed.
