Francis, Supreme Legislator? No, the Law’s Gravedigger

Like other tyrants throughout history, Pope Francis has a cavalier view of the Law.  Sandro Magister gives us the details. H/T to Donald R. McClarey @ The American Catholic.

From Settimo Cielo

By Sandro Magister

On October 10, Francis set in motion a mammoth synod on synodality, as if wanting for the first time ever to hear from the whole people of God. But he made it known right away - from the lips of synod secretary general Cardinal Mario Grech - that when the final document comes along it may not even be voted on. The counting of votes will be used only in extreme cases, “as a last and undesired resort.” In any case, to then deliver the document to the pope, who will do what he wants with it.

That this Leninist party practice is the synodality longed for by Jorge Mario Bergoglio comes as no surprise, given the unbridled monarchical absolutism with which he governs the Church, unrivaled by the popes who came before him.

There are at least two overwhelming proofs of this absolutism so far. The first is well known, the second less so.

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The well known proof is given by the way in which Francis steered the three previous synods and in particular that on the family, based in part on what was candidly revealed after the operation by the special secretary of that assembly, Archbishop Bruno Forte.

It was May 2 2016 and Forte, speaking in the theater of the city of Vasto, reported as follows the answer Francis had given him in the run-up to the synod, to his question on how to proceed in the assembly on the incendiary topic of communion for illegitimate couples:

“If we were to speak explicitly of communion for the divorced and remarried, you don’t know what a mess these [the cardinals and bishops against it - ed] would make for us! So let’s not talk about it directly, you make sure the premises are in place, then I will draw the conclusions.”

After that Forte commented, amid smiles from the audience: “Typical of a Jesuit.”

Bad move. That learned archbishop, who until then had been one of Pope Francis’s favorites and was on the way to the dazzling triumph of his career, from that day fell into disgrace. The pope dropped a cross on him. No more buddying up, no more insider roles, advisory or executive, gone as theologian of reference, no promotion as prefect of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith or president of the Italian episcopal conference, nor even, though a Neapolitan by birth, as archbishop of Naples and cardinal.

And that’s just for telling the plain truth, as reconstructed in more detail in this post from Settimo Cielo:

> Phony Synodality. It’s Just Francis In Charge, His Own Way

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The other proof, the less well known but no less serious one, of the monochromatic absolutism with which Francis governs the Catholic world, is given by the abnormal quantity of laws, decrees, ordinances, instructions, rescripts issued by him on the most disparate matters. Abnormal not only for the number of provisions - which in a few years ran to the dozens - but even more for how it is reducing the Church’s juridical architecture to rubble.

A methodical review of the legal babel created by Pope Francis can be found in an extensively documented recent volume, with an impressive array of notes, by Geraldina Boni, professor of canon and ecclesiastical law at the University of Bologna, a volume (readily available online) that already in the title expresses a severe judgment: “Recent ecclesial normative activity: ‘finis terrae’ for the ‘ius canonicum’?”

Professor Boni, already known to the readers of Settimo Cielo, does not belong to the opposing camp, far from it. She was appointed in 2011 by Benedict XVI as consultant to the pontifical council for legislative texts and “developed [this volume] step by step through a continuous dialogue with Professor Giuseppe Dalla Torre,” an outstanding jurist and one very loyal to the Church, her teacher and predecessor at the University of Bologna as well as president of the tribunal of Vatican City State from 1997 to 2019, who passed away prematurely on December 3 2020 due to complications from Covid.

Scrolling through the pages of this book, the picture one gets from it is of devastation.

The first blow is struck by the almost complete marginalization of the pontifical council of legislative texts from the tasks entrusted to it, in the first place that of “assisting the supreme pontiff as supreme legislator.”

Statutorily delegated to elaborate and supervise all new Vatican legislation and made up of ecclesiastics of proven canonical competence, with Pope Francis the pontifical council practically counts for nothing and learns of every new norm just like any ordinary mortal, after the fact.

The texts of each new norm are elaborated by ephemeral commissions created “ad hoc” by the pope, the components of which are almost never known, and when at times a name does leak out it is found to be mediocre or with no juridical background.

The result is that every new norm, greater or lesser, almost always causes interpretative and applicative confusion, which often gives rise to a disorderly sequence of changes and corrections, harbingers in their turn of further confusion.

One of the most emblematic cases is that of the apostolic letter in the form of a motu proprio “Mitis iudex dominus Iesus,” with which Francis intended to facilitate the processes of marital annulment.

A first oddity is the date of the motu proprio, published as a surprise on August 15 2015, during the interval between the first and second session of the synod on the family, as if to intentionally give the go-ahead to an almost generalized practice of declarations of nullity regardless of what the synod might have said on the matter.

A second negative element is the large number of material errors in the versions of the motu proprio in the national languages, in the absence of a base text in Latin, “not available until six months after the law went into effect.”

But the disaster was above all of substance. “Together with the initial panic of ecclesiastical court personnel,” writes Professor Boni, “a truly disreputable confusion has spread. Legislative acts with ‘addenda’ and ‘corrigenda’ of equivocal legal value, coming from various Roman dicasteries - even circulating clandestinely - and some attributable to the supreme pontiff himself, as well as being produced by atypical organisms created for the circumstance, have crisscrossed with the result of aggravating the already chaotic situation. […] A hodgepodge in which even the apostolic courts have ‘recycled’ themselves as authors of sometimes questionable norms, and organisms situated a few dozen yards from each other in Rome have issued conflicting instructions.”

What arose from this  was a thicket of conflicting interpretations and verdicts, “to the detriment of the unfortunate ‘christifideles,’ who if nothing else have the right to a fair and just trial.” With the disastrous effect that “what is sacrificed is the achievement of authentic certainty by the judge on the truth of the marriage, thus undermining that doctrine of the indissolubility of the sacred bond of which the Church, headed by the successor of Peter, is administrator.”

Another disorganized bundle of rules has had to do with the fight against sexual abuse, which by yielding to “truly obsessive media pressures” has ended up sacrificing “inviolable rights such as respect for the cornerstones of criminal law, the non-retroactivity of criminal law, the presumption of innocence and the right to defense, in addition to the right to a fair trial.” Professor Boni cites in her support another important canonist, Bishop Giuseppe Sciacca, secretary of the supreme tribunal of the apostolic signatura, the Vatican supreme court, who has himself denounced the yielding in this matter to “a summary justice,” if not to “de facto special tribunals, with all the consequences, sinister echoes, and sad memories that this entails.”

It is a normative disorder that here too threatens to undermine the cornerstones of the Catholic faith, for example when it makes it obligatory to report certain crimes against the sixth commandment to the state authorities. Badly formulated and badly interpreted, this obligation appears to be difficult to reconcile “with the ties of secrecy that bind clerics, some of which - and not only the one attributable to the sacramental seal - are absolutely unbreakable.” And this “at a peculiar historical moment, in which the confidentiality of disclosures to priests is fiercely brought under siege in various secular systems, in violation of religious freedom.” The cases of Australia, Chile, Belgium, Germany, and most recently France are proof of this.

The volume examines and thoroughly criticizes numerous other normative acts produced by the current pontificate, from the ongoing reform of the Roman curia to the new rules imposed on monasteries for women or on the translations of liturgical books. In particular, it denounces the very frequent recourse by this or that dicastery of the Vatican curia to the pope’s “specific approval” of every new norm issued by the same dicastery. This clause, which excludes any possibility of recourse, has been used in the past “very rarely, and for cases marked by the utmost gravity and urgency”. While it now enjoys widespread use, “inducing an appearance of unjustified arbitrariness and jeopardizing the fundamental rights of the faithful.”

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In short, the whole volume is worth reading and meditating upon, as was done recently in four dense pages in “Il Regno” by Paolo Cavana, professor of canon and ecclesiastical law at the Libera Università Maria Santissima Assunta in Rome and himself also a disciple of Giuseppe Dalla Torre, who was rector of this university.

It should be noted that “Il Regno” is the noblest of the progressive Catholic magazines published in Italy, not suspected of aversion to Pope Francis.

Yet here is what Cavana writes, at the conclusion of his review of Professor Boni’s volume:

“One wonders what may be the deep reasons for such a tendency, which appears completely unusual in the Catholic Church, which has always known anti-juridical tendencies within it, but not at the level of the supreme legislator,” meaning the pope. “In the legislative production of this pontificate, law tends to be perceived mainly as an organizational and disciplinary factor, that is, as a sanction, and always in an instrumental function with respect to certain choices of government, not as a basic tool for guaranteeing the rights (and observance of duties) of the faithful as well.”

The monarchical absolutism that marks the pontificate of Francis could not be better defined, in spite of the flood of words on synodality.