Vatican City, Oct 26, 2023 / 06:55 am (CNA).
Pope Francis denounced clericalism and called it a “scandal” to see young priests buying lace vestments at tailor shops in a strongly-worded speech to the Synod on Synodality on Wednesday.
Speaking to an assembly of hundreds of Synod members on Oct. 25, the pope said that when clerics overstep their roles and “mistreat the people of God, they disfigure the face of the Church with macho and dictatorial attitudes.”
Pope Francis described the faithful people of God as “patiently and humbly enduring the scorn, mistreatment, and marginalization of institutionalized clericalism.”
“It is enough to go into the ecclesiastical tailor shops in Rome to see the scandal of young priests trying on cassocks and hats, or albs and lace robes,” he added.
“Clericalism is a thorn. It is a scourge. It is a form of worldliness that defiles and damages the face of the Lord’s bride,” he said. “It enslaves the holy, faithful people of God.”
The pope made his speech during the final week of the nearly month-long Synod assembly, where he listened to the interventions of cardinals, bishops, priests, religious sisters, and lay people speaking about “synodality” and their experiences in the Church.
Pope Francis cited only one delegate’s intervention in his speech — that of Sister Liliana Franco, a Colombian religious sister who was one of 42 women who participated in the Amazon Synod, where she spoke at a controversial tree planting ceremony in the Vatican Gardens.
In his speech, Pope Francis praised the female intuition that led women to approach Jesus’ empty tomb after the Resurrection. He noted that many members of the Church hierarchy received their faith from their mothers and grandmothers, adding that the faith is often transmitted “in a feminine dialect.”
Much of the pope’s speech focused on “the scourge” of clericalism and worldliness, a theme that the pope has been focused on since the start of the Synod.
During the first week of the Synod assembly, Pope Francis gave each participant a copy of a book that he wrote titled, “Santi, non mondani: La grazia di Dio ci salva dalla corruzione interiore” (“Holy, not Worldly: God’s Grace Saves us from Interior Corruption”).
The book is a compilation of a text published by Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio when he was archbishop of Buenos Aires in 2005 called “Corruption and Sin” and a strongly-worded letter that Pope Francis wrote to all priests in the diocese of Rome on August 5.
“How naturally we speak of the princes of the Church, or of episcopal promotions as getting ahead career-wise … the worldliness that mistreats God’s holy and faithful people,” Pope Francis said in his Synod speech.
The pope added that he was pained to find that some parish offices offer a “price list” for sacramental services, like a “supermarket of salvation” where priests act as “mere employees of a multinational company.”
“Either the Church is the faithful people of God ‘on the way,’ — holy and sinful — or it ends up being a business offering a variety of services,” Pope Francis said.
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“Clericalism!,” said the pot calling the kettle black, about which the earliest appearance of this idiom is in Thomas Shelton’s 1620 translation of the Spanish novel Don Quixote…
And, applicable to today’s pseudo-theology and “laced” synodal punch bowl, Benedict concluded his “Principles of Catholic Theology” with this analogy to Don Quixote:
“The arrogant certainty with which Cervantes burned his bridges [“backwardists”!] behind him and laughed at an earlier age has become a nostalgia for what was lost. This is not a return to the world of the romances of chivalry but a consciousness of what must not be lost and a realization of man’s peril, which increases whenever, in the burning of the past, he loses the totality of himself” [….]
“…we must be ready to reflect anew on that which, in the lapse of time, has remained the one constant. To seek it without distraction and to dare to accept, with joyful heart and without diminution, the foolishness of TRUTH—this, I think, is the task today and for tomorrow: the true nucleus of the Church’s service to the world, HER [italics] answer to ‘the joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the men of our time” (Gaudium et Spes, 903)” (Ratzinger, “Principles,” 1982/Ignatius Press 1987, pp. 392-3).
Socio-economic security in the Church and in the institutions under the Church umbrella, directly contribute to several forms of clericalism. It was no different in the time of Jesus. The Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Levites, and the Tax Collectors through their costumes, body language, words, thoughts, and actions contributed a lot to the weakening of the spiritual facets of fellow mortals in search of solace, peace, dignity, mercy, compassion, and solidarity.