Against Papolatry, Liberal and Illiberal

I pray for Francis every day. I pray that he will return to the Catholic Faith along with all those who have followed him into the darkness, but he's still the Pope.

From The European Conservative

By Alex Taylor

Our duty as Catholics is to pray for the Pope; but, to do so truly, we must not blind ourselves to his faults.

In this confused and ill-documented decade, the Catholics, left without effective leadership, appear to have been dealing with this problem of conformity, each in his own way.

Evelyn Waugh, Edmund Campion (1935)

Those who have been closely watching the Catholic Church during the last ten years of the present pontificate will not likely be surprised by Pope Francis’ recent carefully half-baked responses to the five dubia submitted and subsequently re-submitted to the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith by Cardinals Burke, Brandmuller, Iñiguez, Sarah, and Zen, later endorsed by Cardinal Gerhard Müller and Archbishop Athanasius Schnieder. This is the same pontiff who, as recently mentioned in First Things, exhorted young people at his first World Youth Day to “make a mess.” Since then, there have been years of news-cycles reporting his ambiguous utterances, making it harder to claim that the media has been distorting the Holy Father’s words. Even those who were amongst the first to raise that objection have begun to take seriously the idea that the man whose advice was to “make a mess” might be directing his own actions according to the same principle.

However, the tendency to exculpate Pope Francis (perhaps combined with a wariness both of conspiracy theories and sedevacantism among some groups of Catholics) still exists. Strangely, four years after “Against David Frenchism,” Sohrab Ahmari and Kayla Bartsch, a writer for National Review, find themselves in an alliance against those who are concerned about Pope Francis and his Synod on Synodality. Bartsch would like us to rest assured, based on an examination of Pope Francis’ recent responses to the dubia, that “no, the Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church does not support gay marriage.” Ahmari, calling the synod “an apostolic nothingburger,” prefers to lash out against the so-called “anti-Francis media.” The truth of the matter is a bit less clear-cut, if we recall the political nature of the papacy and consider not only the pope’s words but also his recent actions and inaction.

I was a college student studying abroad when, on a rainy evening in March of 2013, I found myself in St. Peter’s Square, seeing white smoke rising from the chimney adjacent to the Sistine Chapel, and hearing the heartwarming words, “Habemus papam!” For years afterwards, I had a personal loyalty to the pope whom I had seen immediately following his election, an affection which led me to mount a publicity campaign to invite the Holy Father to my university graduation. Clearly, I am not intrinsically “anti-Francis” or some kind of “hardcore traditionalist,” nor do I bear any ill will against Bartsch and Ahmari, both of whom I agree with on other issues. But they have mounted a papolatrous defense of a man who, while deserving the prayers of the faithful for his salvation, also deserves criticism for his mishandling of the keys of St. Peter.

One of the easier ways to defend the Pope, in the early days of this pontificate, was to claim that he had bad advisors. That was feasible after his off-the-cuff “who am I to judge” airplane remarks, but before the publication of Amoris laetitia (2016), which contained an extraordinarily controversial footnote suggesting that divorced and remarried people could receive communion while still in an adulterous state. The ‘bad advisors’ explanation has the weight of history behind it: monarchies are recurrently susceptible to this problem; a good counselor is hard to find, and when he is found, many bad counselors will vie for his position.

Consider the court of Henry VIII: it was Henry who, in 1521, authored a work called The Defense of the Seven Sacraments, for which Pope Leo X awarded him the title of Defender of the Faith. In his court of four Thomases (Wolsey, More, Cromwell, and Cranmer), only one was determined to tell the king “what he ought to do, but never what he is able to do.” The problem is that the monarch chooses his counselors such that, especially over time, the monarch reveals what sort of advice he desires. Consequently, we should scrutinize those whom Pope Francis has elevated to high places in the Church.

Among the most recent elevations to the cardinalate is Archbishop Victor Manuel “Tucho” Fernandez, who was first made prefect of the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly the Congregation of the same, prior to which it was the Holy Office). Upon his appointment to the Dicastery, Tucho was mired in controversy for his alleged cover up of sexual abuse; for his publication of a poetry anthology titled Heal Me with Your Mouth: The Art of Kissing,  including his own erotic poetry, which he defends as a “catechesis for teens”(in light of the allegations, this seems a suspect defense); and for his approval of same-sex blessings (precisely the issue addressed in Bartsch’s article). In fact, in the statement Tucho gave on the matter in July, there are echoes of the ghostwriter for Pope Francis’ response to the second dubium (potentially Tucho himself.

I also understand that “marriage” in the strict sense is only one thing: that stable union of two beings as different as man and woman, who in that difference are capable of generating new life. There is nothing that can be compared to that and using that name to express something else is neither good nor right. At the same time I believe that we must avoid gestures or actions that could express something different. That is why I think that the greatest care that must be taken is to avoid rituals or blessings that could feed this confusion. Now, if a blessing is given in such a way that it does not cause that confusion, it will have to be analyzed and confirmed. (Emphases mine)

What’s strange about this statement is that, like the responses to the dubia, it is oddly ambiguous and it lacks a sense of clear agency (note the passive voice in the final statement). Who will be ‘analyzing and confirming’ the blessings given to same-sex couples in order to ensure they don’t confuse the faithful about the nature of marriage (much less the immoral nature of sodomy)?

Such a question is of grave import following the German Synodal Path’s vote in March of this year to urge the creation of a rite of blessing for “couples who love each other but to whom sacramental marriage is not accessible or who do not see themselves at a point of entering into a sacramental marriage,” explicitly naming both divorced-then-remarried couples and same-sex couples. The reasoning for the latter is that “the response to the questionnaires in the context of the Synod of Bishops has shown that the view of homosexuality underlying [the 2021 explanatory note from the CDF on the subject of the blessings of same-sex unions] is not considered sufficient in many places and needs further theological development.”

Not only does the German Church (38 out of 58 German bishops voted for this motion) proclaim the need to bless same-sex couples “as a diocesan liturgy,” “in the context of services of the word or the Eucharist,” “analogous to other celebrations,” but it also insists on a need to discard the Church’s perennial understanding of sodomy as grave sin which (in the words of the 2021 document) God, and therefore the Church, “does not and cannot bless.” Lex orandi, lex credendi, after all. Such a rite is not what Bartsch claims Pope Francis endorses: the heartwarming cases of “patients coming to a doctor,” of Christ dining with sinners and speaking with the Samaritan woman. 

Such a rite is what the Belgian bishops created in the fall of 2022, which Bishop Johan Bonny of Antwerp claims is “in line with Pope Francis”—not from anything that has been written down (“The Pope also doesn’t have to record everything on paper,” he said), but from a private conversation with the Pope after the publication of the guidelines for such a rite. In March, some months after the ad limina visit of the Belgian bishops, Bonny told the German Synodal Path that “the Pope neither approved nor denied such blessings” during that visit. It certainly appears that, if such rites are to be “analyzed and confirmed” (rather than rejected outright as obvious parodies of the marriage ritual), then that action is not being taken by Rome, whether by the Pope himself or the head of the DDF. As Stephen White has said recently, it’s not hard to “find instances where Pope Francis has said ‘no’ in principle to what he has permitted in practice.” 

Ambiguity in a ruler suggests several things: a lack of courage to speak and act in harmony, invincible ignorance, or duplicity. While it’s up to each of us to decide for ourselves which interpretation seems most plausible, it’s worth noting that these ambiguities are greater than those which Bartsch finds in the Pope’s response to the dubia and deems intentional. In discussing these intentional ambiguities, she may agree with Emily Zanotti, whom she favorably cites as calling the pope’s relativization of doctrine to pastoral prudence “an exceptional cruelty.” Exceptional cruelty is what many faithful Catholics have come to expect from Pope Francis, as he marginalizes those who love the Church’s liturgical tradition (which extends back to Pope St. Gregory the Great), while seeking to extend pastoral care to manifestly unrepentant sinners who do not recognize the sinfulness of their way of life, whether in the person of errant priests such as Fr. James Martin, S.J., whom he personally appointed to the synod; Marko Rupnik, a fellow (albeit former fellow, now that he has been expelled from the order) Jesuit, credibly accused of numerous decades of sexual abuse, whose artwork was used on the website for the Synod on Synodality as late as September of this year; or pro-abortion Catholic politicians such as then-speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who received communion in Saint Peter’s Basilica, and President Joe Biden, who says the Pope told him to “keep receiving communion” despite his promotion of abortion and gender ideology. While Joe Biden’s word may not be particularly trustworthy, the fact that there was no correction issued by the Vatican is telling.

The governing practice of Pope Francis calls to mind a clever distinction made by a figure popular on the Left some decades ago. In an essay published in 1965, the one-time Frankfurt School theorist and grandfather of the American New Left, Herbert Marcuse, spoke of the distinction between repressive tolerance and liberating tolerance. The former was a neutral attitude, tolerating arguments and even the existence of factions on both the Left and Right, but such an attitude, according to Marcuse, can and does contribute to the “inequality of freedom” in a society. Better, then, is liberating tolerance, which “would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.”

Although mercy is supposedly a pillar of this pontificate, one might well speak of the ‘liberating mercy’ exercised as Pope Francis’ attitude of listening to the dissenting bishops of Germany and Belgium, as well as in his attitude of criticism of bishops and laity in America, who tend to be more orthodox. Pope Francis’ criticism of the so-called “backwardness” (indietrismo) of faithful Catholics echoes Marcuse’s criticism of those who oppose him as “demonstrably ‘regressive’ and imped[ing] possible improvement of the human condition.” 

The distinction between ‘liberating mercy’ and ‘repressive mercy’ is supported by the parallel distinction, often made throughout Francis’ pontificate, between doctrine and pastoral practice. Several years before he was elected pope, Joseph Ratzinger spoke strongly against this divorce, clearly understanding the Marxist impulse behind it:

Marxism’s great deception was to tell us that we had reflected on the world long enough, that now it was at last time to change it. But if we do not know in what direction to change it, if we do not understand its meaning and its inner purpose, then change alone becomes destruction – as we have seen and continue to see.

Ratzinger strongly contrasted the Marxist elimination of doctrine with the Christian integration of doctrine and life, arguing that “For the early Christians, there was no difference between what today is often distinguished as orthodoxy and orthopraxis, as right doctrine and right action.” In the church of our day, he noted, describing his successor to a tee, “When this distinction is made, there generally is a suggestion that the word orthodoxy is to be disdained: those who hold fast to right doctrine are seen as people of narrow sympathy, rigid, potentially intolerant.” One thinks of the many times Pope Francis has described as “rigid” those who try to follow God’s law, especially those young people who like the Latin Mass.

One could be forgiven for thinking that Evelyn Waugh was writing about our time when, in Edmund Campion, he described the new attitude evinced by Queen Elizabeth I and the Cecils to a resurgent English Catholicism:

Now the old faith was being restated in new and persuasive terms, applicable to a generation who had grown up without the heritage of instinctive respect for tradition, terms of reason and research. It would have been easy to show lenience to a moribund suspicion, the sentimental regrets of an old generation that was rapidly dying out; here was something unexpectedly vigorous and up to date, which must either suffer decisive and immediate defeat, or conquer.

In fact, it was to the Elizabethan Age that Cardinal Ratzinger turned, almost 46 years ago, when he was seeking to understand the papacy as a martyrological structure, designed to witness to the truth of the Gospel to the whole Church. Summarizing Reginald Cardinal Pole’s argument against Henry VIII and Cranmer, Ratzinger writes that, “The martyrs who countered national Christianity subject to the crown with their faith in the supranational unity of the universal Church and her tradition were the guides who showed where the Christian had to stand, as a Christian, in this conflict.” 

If the Synod on Synodality is to be a proper exercise of the papal primacy, one would imagine that the pope would likewise counter the dubious ‘national Christianity’ proclaimed by the Belgian and German bishops, witnessing to the Church’s perennial teaching on not only the complementarity of the sexes in marriage, but also the scriptural teaching on the immorality of sodomy. All of the evidence suggests that these hopes are in vain, but perhaps this moment in history is one among the many which demonstrates the need for all Christians to pray for the pope—that he be protected from error and scandal and that he might courageously proclaim the truly liberating truth of the Gospel, even against those that he has placed in authority.

The synodal report, while a disappointment to Fr. James Martin for failing to include the term LGBTQ+ or an explicit statement about same-sex blessings, does proclaim a need, following Amoris laetitia, to overcome exclusion of and encourage “the participation of men and women who live complex affective and conjugal vicissitudes.” It has been noted in these pages that the synod’s relator-general, Belgian Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich (who does not view the 2021 CDF note on same-sex blessings as decisive), is not discouraged, and that this report (criticized elsewhere as a “program of subversion”) “will simply be the basis for another Synod on Synodality meeting in October 2024,” despite widespread synod fatigue. Meanwhile, the German bishop of Speyer has issued a letter to his priests with instructions giving the go-ahead to bless same-sex couples (English here, German here). Already the term ‘synodality’ is being bandied about as the new equivalent of the ‘Spirit of Vatican II,’ and one wonders how such pernicious nonsense will be rooted out of the body of Christ.

What Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago is true also of the Church: “the line dividing good and evil runs through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” That includes the heart of the Roman Pontiff himself, who, rather than depending on his own habits of governing, must turn to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of his Blessed Mother if he is to govern the church right and well. Our duty as Catholics is to pray for the Pope; but, to do so truly, we must not blind ourselves to the faults of the Holy Father. A quotation from Sigrid Undset’s novel Kristen Lavransdatter about the titular character’s husband aptly describes the Holy Father’s conduct, with only minor modifications: “You know yourself, [Christian], that no one should rely too heavily on what [Francis] says; he must be judged by what he does.” What remains our task, as was Kristen’s in the novel, is to pray courageously to our Father in Heaven that He might heal the one to whom we are bound and who possesses power over us—that His Church might be in the hands of a wise steward, rather than one who does not prepare well for the return of the King.