The long read
The war against Pope Francis
His modesty and humility have made him a popular figure
around the world. But inside the church, his reforms have infuriated
conservatives and sparked a revolt. By Andrew Brown
Friday 27 October 2017 06.00 BST
Pope Francis is one of the most hated men in the world
today. Those who hate him most are not atheists, or protestants, or Muslims,
but some of his own followers. Outside the church he is hugely popular as a
figure of almost ostentatious modesty and humility. From the moment that
Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio became pope in 2013, his gestures caught the world’s
imagination: the new pope drove a Fiat, carried his own bags and settled his
own bills in hotels; he asked, of gay people, “Who am I to judge?” and washed
the feet of Muslim women refugees.
But within the church, Francis has provoked a ferocious
backlash from conservatives who fear that this spirit will divide the church,
and could even shatter it. This summer, one prominent English priest said to
me: “We can’t wait for him to die. It’s unprintable what we say in private.
Whenever two priests meet, they talk about how awful Bergoglio is … he’s like
Caligula: if he had a horse, he’d make him cardinal.” Of course, after 10
minutes of fluent complaint, he added: “You mustn’t print any of this, or I’ll
be sacked.”
This mixture of hatred and fear is common among the pope’s
adversaries. Francis, the first non-European pope in modern times, and the
first ever Jesuit pope, was elected as an outsider to the Vatican
establishment, and expected to make enemies. But no one foresaw just how many
he would make. From his swift renunciation of the pomp of the Vatican, which
served notice to the church’s 3,000-strong civil service that he meant to be
its master, to his support for migrants, his attacks on global capitalism and,
most of all, his moves to re-examine the church’s teachings about sex, he has
scandalised reactionaries and conservatives. To judge by the voting figures at
the last worldwide meeting of bishops, almost a quarter of the college of
Cardinals – the most senior clergy in the church – believe that the pope is
flirting with heresy.
The crunch point has come in a fight over his views on
divorce. Breaking with centuries, if not millennia, of Catholic theory, Pope
Francis has tried to encourage Catholic priests to give communion to some
divorced and remarried couples, or to families where unmarried parents are
cohabiting. His enemies are trying to force him to abandon and renounce this
effort.
Since he won’t, and has quietly persevered in the face of
mounting discontent, they are now preparing for battle. Last year, one
cardinal, backed by a few retired colleagues, raised the possibility of a
formal declaration of heresy – the wilful rejection of an established doctrine
of the church, a sin punishable by excommunication. Last month, 62 disaffected
Catholics, including one retired bishop and a former head of the Vatican bank,
published an open letter that accused Francis of seven specific counts of
heretical teaching.
To accuse a sitting pope of heresy is the nuclear option in
Catholic arguments. Doctrine holds that the pope cannot be wrong when he speaks
on the central questions of the faith; so if he is wrong, he can’t be pope. On
the other hand, if this pope is right, all his predecessors must have been
wrong.
The question is particularly poisonous because it is almost
entirely theoretical. In practice, in most of the world, divorced and remarried
couples are routinely offered communion. Pope Francis is not proposing a
revolution, but the bureaucratic recognition of a system that already exists,
and might even be essential to the survival of the church. If the rules were
literally applied, no one whose marriage had failed could ever have sex again.
This is not a practical way to ensure there are future generations of
Catholics.
But Francis’s cautious reforms seem to his opponents to
threaten the belief that the church teaches timeless truths. And if the
Catholic church does not teach eternal truths, conservatives ask, what is the
point of it? The battle over divorce and remarriage has brought to a point two
profoundly opposed ideas of what the church is for. The pope’s insignia are two
crossed keys. They represent those Jesus is supposed to have given St Peter,
which symbolise the powers to bind and to loose: to proclaim what is sin, and
what is permitted. But which power is more important, and more urgent now?
The present crisis is the most serious since the liberal
reforms of the 1960s spurred a splinter group of hardline conservatives to
break away from the church. (Their leader, the French Archbishop Marcel
Lefebvre, was later excommunicated.) Over the past few years, conservative
writers have repeatedly raised the spectre of schism. In 2015, American
journalist Ross Douthat, a convert to Catholicism, wrote a piece for the Atlantic
magazine headlined Will Pope Francis Break the Church?; a Spectator blogpost by
the English traditionalist Damian Thompson threatened that “Pope Francis is now
at war with the Vatican. If he wins, the church could fall apart.” The pope’s
views on divorce and homosexuality, according to an Archbishop from Kazakhstan,
had allowed “the smoke of Satan” to enter the church.
The Catholic church has spent much of the past century
fighting against the sexual revolution, much as it fought against the democratic
revolutions of the 19th century, and in this struggle it has been forced into
the defence of an untenable absolutist position, whereby all artificial
contraception is banned, along with all sex outside one lifelong marriage. As
Francis recognises, that’s not how people actually behave. The clergy know
this, but are expected to pretend they don’t. The official teaching may not be
questioned, but neither can it be obeyed. Something has to give, and when it
does, the resulting explosion could fracture the church.
Appropriately enough, the sometimes bitter hatreds within
the church – whether over climate change, migration or capitalism – have come
to a head in a gigantic struggle over the implications of a single footnote in
a document entitled The Joy of Love (or, in its proper, Latin name, Amoris
Laetitia). The document, written by Francis, is a summary of the current debate
over divorce, and it is in this footnote that he makes an apparently mild
assertion that divorced and remarried couples may sometimes receive communion.
With more than a billion followers, the Catholic church is
the largest global organisation the world has ever seen, and many of its
followers are divorced, or unmarried parents. To carry out its work all over
the world, it depends on voluntary labour. If the ordinary worshippers stop
believing in what they are doing, the whole thing collapses. Francis knows
this. If he cannot reconcile theory and practice, the church might be emptied
out everywhere. His opponents also believe the church faces a crisis, but their
prescription is the opposite. For them, the gap between theory and practice is
exactly what gives the church worth and meaning. If all the church offers
people is something they can manage without, Francis’s opponents believe, then
it will surely collapse.
No one foresaw this when Francis was elected in 2013. One
reason he was chosen by his fellow cardinals was to sort out the sclerotic
bureaucracy of the Vatican. This task was long overdue. Cardinal Bergoglio of
Buenos Aires was elected as a relative outsider with the ability to clear out
some of the blockage at the centre of the church. But that mission soon
collided with an even more acrimonious faultline in the church, which is
usually described in terms of a battle between “liberals”, like Francis, and
“conservatives”, like his enemies. Yet that is a slippery and misleading
classification.
The central dispute is between Catholics who believe that
the church should set the agenda for the world, and those who think the world
must set the agenda for the church. Those are ideal types: in the real world,
any Catholic will be a mixture of those orientations, but in most of them, one
will predominate.
Francis is a very pure example of the “outer-directed” or
extrovert Catholic, especially compared with his immediate predecessors. His
opponents are the introverts. Many were first attracted to the church by its
distance from the concerns of the world. A surprising number of the most
prominent introverts are converts from American Protestantism, some driven by
the shallowness of the intellectual resources they were brought up with, but
much more by a sense that liberal Protestantism was dying precisely because it
no longer offered any alternative to the society around it. They want mystery
and romance, not sterile common sense or conventional wisdom. No religion could
flourish without that impulse.
But nor can any global religion set itself against the world
entirely. In the early 1960s, a three-year gathering of bishops from every part
of the church, known as the Second Vatican Council, or Vatican II, “opened the
windows to the world”, in the words of Pope John XXIII, who set it in motion,
but died before its work had finished.
The council renounced antisemitism, embraced democracy,
proclaimed universal human rights and largely abolished the Latin Mass. That
last act, in particular, stunned the introverts. The author Evelyn Waugh, for
example, never once went to an English Mass after the decision. For men like
him, the solemn rituals of a service performed by a priest with his back to the
congregation, speaking entirely in Latin, facing God on the altar, were the
very heart of the church – a window into eternity enacted at every performance.
The ritual had been central to the church in one form or another since its
foundation.
The symbolic change brought about by the new liturgy –
replacing the introverted priest facing God at the altar with the extroverted
figure facing his congregation – was immense. Some conservatives still have not
reconciled themselves to the reorientation, among them the Ghanaian cardinal
Robert Sarah, who has been touted by introverts as a possible successor to
Francis, and the American cardinal Raymond Burke, who has emerged as Francis’
most public opponent. The current crisis, in the words of the English Catholic
journalist Margaret Hebblethwaite – a passionate partisan of Francis – is
nothing less than “Vatican II coming back again”.
“We need to be inclusive and welcoming to all that is
human,” Sarah said at a Vatican gathering last year, in a denunciation of
Francis’s proposals, “but what comes from the Enemy cannot and must not be
assimilated. You can not join Christ and Belial! What Nazi-Fascism and
Communism were in the 20th century, Western homosexual and abortion Ideologies
and Islamic Fanaticism are today.”
In the years immediately after the council, nuns discarded
their habits, priests discovered women (more than 100,000 left the priesthood
to marry) and theologians threw off the shackles of introverted orthodoxy.
After 150 years of resisting and repelling the outside world, the church found
itself engaging with it everywhere, until it seemed to introverts that the
whole edifice would collapse to rubble.
Church attendance plummeted in the western world, as it did
in other denominations. In the US, 55% of Catholics went to mass regularly in
1965; by 2000, only 22% did. In 1965, 1.3m Catholic babies were baptised in the
US; in 2016, just 670,000. Whether this was cause or correlation remains
fiercely disputed. The introverts blamed it on the abandonment of eternal
truths and traditional practices; extraverts felt the church had not changed
far or fast enough.
In 1966, a papal committee of 69 members, with seven
cardinals and 13 doctors among them, on which laypeople and even some women
were also represented, voted overwhelmingly to lift the ban on artificial
contraception, but Pope Paul VI overruled them in 1968. He could not admit that
his predecessors had been wrong, and the Protestants right. For a generation of
Catholics, this dispute came to symbolise resistance to change. In the
developing world, the Catholic church was largely overtaken by a huge Pentecostal
revival, which offered both showmanship and status to the laity, even to women.
The introverts had their revenge with the election of Pope
(now Pope Saint) John Paul II in 1978. His Polish church had been defined by
its opposition to the world and its powers since the Nazis and the Communists
divided the country in 1939. John Paul II was a man of tremendous energy,
willpower and dramatic gifts. He was also profoundly conservative on matters of
sexual morality and had, as a cardinal, provided the intellectual justification
for the ban on birth control. From the moment of his election, he set about
reshaping the church in his image. If he could not impart to it his own
dynamism and will, he could, it seemed, purge it of extroversion and once more
set it like a rock against the currents of the secular world.
Ross Douthat, the Catholic journalist, was one of the few
people in the introvert party who was prepared to talk openly about the current
conflict. As a young man, he was one of the converts drawn into the church of
Pope John Paul II. He now says: “The church may be a mess, but the important
thing is that the centre is sound, and one can always rebuild things from the
centre. The point of being Catholic is that you’re guaranteed continuity at the
centre, and with that the hope of reconstitution of the Catholic order.”
John Paul II was careful never to repudiate the words of
Vatican II, but he worked to empty them of the extrovert spirit. He set about
imposing a fierce discipline on the clergy and on theologians. He made it as
difficult as possible for priests to leave and marry. His ally in this was the
Congregation for the Defence of the Faith, or CDF, once known as the Holy
Office. The CDF is the most institutionally introverted of all Vatican
departments (or “dicasteries”, as they have been known since the days of the
Roman empires; it’s a detail that suggests the weight of institutional
experience and inertia – if the name was good enough for Constantine, why
change it?).
For the CDF, it is axiomatic that the role of the church is
to teach the world, and not to learn from it. It has a long history of
punishing theologians who disagree: they have been forbidden to publish, or
sacked from Catholic universities.
Early in the pontificate of John Paul II, the CDF published
Donum Veritatis (The Gift of Truth), a document explaining that all Catholics
must practise “submission of the will and intellect” to what the pope teaches,
even when it is not infallible; and that theologians, while they may disagree
and make their disagreement known to superiors, must never do so in public.
This was used as a threat, and occasionally a weapon, against anyone suspected
of liberal dissent. Francis, however, has turned these powers against those who
had been their most enthusiastic advocates. Catholic priests, bishops and even
cardinals all serve at the pleasure of the pope, and can at any moment be
sacked. The conservatives were to learn all about this under Francis, who has
sacked at least three theologians from the CDF. Jesuits demand discipline.
In 2013, shortly after his election, while he was still
surfing a wave of almost universal acclaim for the boldness and simplicity of
his gestures – he had moved into a couple of sparsely furnished rooms in the
Vatican grounds, rather than the sumptuous state apartments used by his
predecessors – Francis purged a small religious order devoted to the practice
of the Latin Mass.
The Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate, a group with about
600 members (men and women), had been placed under investigation by a commission
in June 2012, under Pope Benedict. They were accused of combining increasingly
extreme rightwing politics with a devotion to the Latin Mass. (This mixture,
often seen alongside declarations of hatred of “liberalism”, had also been
spreading through online outlets in the US and the UK, such as the Daily
Telegraph’s Holy Smoke blog, edited by Damian Thompson.)
When the commission reported in July 2013, Francis’s
reaction shocked conservatives rigid. He stopped the Friars using the Latin
Mass in public, and closed down their seminary. They were still allowed to
educate new priests, but not segregated from the rest of the church. What’s
more, he did so directly, without going through the Vatican’s internal court
system, then run by Cardinal Burke. The next year, Francis sacked Burke from
his powerful job in the Vatican’s internal court system. By doing so, he made
an implacable enemy.
Burke, a bulky American given to lace-embroidered robes and
(on formal occasions) a ceremonial scarlet cape so long it needs pageboys to
carry its trailing end, was one of the most conspicuous reactionaries in the
Vatican. In manner and in doctrine, he represents a long tradition of
heavyweight American power brokers of white ethnic Catholicism. The hieratic,
patriarchal and embattled church of the Latin Mass is his ideal, to which it
seemed that the church under John Paul II and Benedict was slowly returning –
until Francis started work.
Cardinal Burke’s combination of anti-communism, ethnic pride
and hatred of feminism has nurtured a succession of prominent rightwing lay
figures in the US, from Pat Buchanan through Bill O’Reilly and Steve Bannon,
alongside lesser-known Catholic intellectuals such as Michael Novak, who have
shilled untiringly for US wars in the Middle East and the Republican
understanding of free markets.
It was Cardinal Burke who invited Bannon, then already the
animating spirit of Breitbart News, to address a conference in the Vatican, via
video link from California, in 2014. Bannon’s speech was apocalyptic,
incoherent and historically eccentric. But there was no mistaking the urgency
of his summons to a holy war: the second world war, he said, had really been
“the Judeo-Christian west versus atheists”, and now civilisation was “at the beginning
stages of a global war against Islamic fascism … a very brutal and bloody
conflict … that will completely eradicate everything that we’ve been bequeathed
over the last 2,000, 2,500 years … if the people in this room, the people in
the church, do not … fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity that’s
starting.”
Everything in that speech is anathema to Francis. His first
official visit outside Rome, in 2013, was to the island of Lampedusa, which had
become the arrival point for tens of thousands of desperate migrants from north
Africa. Like both his predecessors, he is firmly opposed to wars in the Middle
East, although the Vatican gave reluctant support to the extirpation of the
Islamic State caliphate. He opposes the death penalty. He loathes and condemns
American capitalism: after marking his support for migrants and gay people, the
first big policy statement of his time in office was an encyclical, or teaching
document, addressed to the whole church, that fiercely condemned the workings
of global markets.
“Some people continue
to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged
by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and
inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the
facts, expresses a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding
economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic
system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting.”
Above all, Francis is on the side of the immigrants – or the
emigrants, as he sees them – driven from their homes by a boundlessly rapacious
and destructive capitalism, which has set catastrophic climate change in
motion. This is a racialised, as well as a deeply politicised, question in the
US. The evangelicals who voted for Trump and his wall are overwhelmingly white.
So is the leadership of the American Catholic church. But the laity is around a
third Hispanic, and this proportion is growing. Last month Bannon claimed, in
an interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes, that American bishops were in favour of mass
immigration only because it kept their congregations going – although this goes
further than even the most rightwing bishops would publicly say.
When Trump first announced that he would build a wall to
keep out migrants, Francis came very close to denying that the then candidate
could be a Christian. In Francis’s vision of the dangers to the family,
transgender lavatories are not the most urgent problem, as some culture
warriors claim. What destroys families, he has written, is an economic system
that forces millions of poor families apart in their search for work.
As well as tackling the old-school practitioners of Latin
Mass, Francis started a wide-ranging offensive against the old guard inside the
Vatican. Five days after his election in 2013, he summoned the Honduran
cardinal Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, and told him that he was to be the
co-ordinator of a group of nine cardinals from around the world whose mission
was to clean the place up. All had been chosen for their energy, and for the
fact that they had in the past been at loggerheads with the Vatican. It was a
popular move everywhere outside Rome.
John Paul II had spent the last decade of his life
increasingly crippled by Parkinson’s disease, and such energies as he had left
were not spent on bureaucratic struggles. The curia, as the Vatican bureaucracy
is known, grew more powerful, stagnant and corrupt. Very little action was
taken against bishops who sheltered child-abusing priests. The Vatican bank was
infamous for the services it offered to money-launderers. The process of making
saints – something John Paul II had done at an unprecedented rate – had become
an enormously expensive racket. (The Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi
estimated the going rate for a canonisation at €500,000 per halo.) The finances
of the Vatican itself were a horrendous mess. Francis himself referred to “a
stream of corruption” in the curia.
The putrid state of the curia was widely known, but never
talked about in public. Within nine months of taking office, Francis told a
group of nuns that “in the curia, there are also holy people, really, there are
holy people” – the revelation being that he assumed his audience of nuns would
be shocked to discover this.
The curia, he said “sees and looks after the interests of
the Vatican, which are still, for the most part, temporal interests. This
Vatican-centric view neglects the world around us. I do not share this view,
and I’ll do everything I can to change it.” He said to the Italian newspaper La
Repubblica: “Heads of the church have often been narcissists, flattered and
thrilled by their courtiers. The court is the leprosy of the papacy.”
“The Pope has never said anything nice about priests,” said
the priest who can’t wait for him to die. “He’s an anti-clerical Jesuit. I
remember that from the 70s. They’d say: ‘Don’t call me Father, call me Gerry’ –
that crap – and we, the downtrodden parish clergy, feel the ground has been cut
from under our feet.”
In December 2015, Francis gave his traditional Christmas
address to the curia, and he pulled no punches: He accused them of arrogance,
“spiritual Alzheimer’s”, “hypocrisy that is typical of the mediocre and a
progressive spiritual emptiness that academic degrees cannot fill”, as well as
empty materialism and an addiction to gossip and backbiting – not the sort of
thing you want to hear from the boss at the office party.
Yet four years into his papacy, the passive resistance of
the Vatican seems to have triumphed over Francis’ energy. In February this
year, posters appeared overnight in the streets of Rome asking, “Francis,
where’s your mercy?”, attacking him for his treatment of Cardinal Burke. These
can only have come from disaffected elements in the Vatican, and are outward
signs of a stubborn refusal to yield power or privilege to the reformers.
This battle, though, has been overshadowed, as have all the
others, by the infighting over sexual morality. The struggle over divorce and
remarriage centres on two facts. First, that the doctrine of the Catholic
church has not changed in nearly two millennia – marriage is for life and
indissoluble; that’s absolutely clear. But so is the second fact: Catholics
actually get divorced and remarried at about the same rate as the surrounding
population, and when they do so, they see nothing unforgivable in their
actions. So the churches of the western world are full of divorced and remarried
couples who take communion with everyone else, even though they and their
priests know perfectly well it is not allowed.
The rich and powerful have always exploited loopholes. When
they want to shuck off a wife and remarry, a good lawyer will find some way to
prove the first marriage was a mistake, not something entered into in the
spirit the church demands, and so it can be wiped from the record – in the
jargon, annulled. This applies especially to conservatives: Steve Bannon has managed
to divorce all three of his wives, but perhaps the most scandalous contemporary
example is that of Newt Gingrich, who led the Republican takeover of Congress
in the 1990s and has since reinvented himself as a Trump ally. Gingrich broke
up with his first wife while she was being treated for cancer, and while
married to his second wife had an eight-year affair with Callista Bisek, a
devout Catholic, before marrying her in church. She is about to take up the
post of Donald Trump’s new ambassador to the Vatican.
The teaching on remarriage after divorce is not the only way
Catholic sexual teaching denies reality as laypeople experience it, but it is
the most damaging. The ban on artificial contraception is ignored by everyone
wherever it is legal. The hostility to gay people is undermined by the
generally acknowledged fact that a large proportion of the priesthood in the
west is gay, and some of them are well-adjusted celibates. The rejection of
abortion is not an issue where abortion is legal, and is in any case not
particular to the Catholic church. But the refusal to recognise second
marriages, unless the couple promise never to have sex, highlights the
absurdities of a caste of celibate men regulating women’s lives.
In 2015 and 2016, Francis convened two large conferences (or
synods) of bishops from all around the world to discuss all this. He knew he
could not move without broad agreement. He kept silent himself, and encouraged
the bishops to wrangle. But it was soon apparent that he favoured a
considerable loosening of the discipline around communion after remarriage.
Since this is what goes on in practice anyway, it is difficult for an outsider
to understand the passions it arouses.
“What I care about is the theory,” said the English priest
who confessed his hatred of Francis. “In my parish there are lots of divorced
and remarried couples, but many of them, if they heard the first spouse had
died, would rush to get a church wedding. I know lots of homosexuals who are
doing all sorts of things that are wrong, but they know they should not be.
We’re all sinners. But we’ve got to maintain the intellectual integrity of the
Catholic faith.”
With this mindset, the fact that the world rejects your
teaching merely proves how right it is. “The Catholic Church ought to be
countercultural in the wake of the sexual revolution,” says Ross Douthat. “The
Catholic church is the last remaining place in the western world that says
divorce is bad.”
For Francis and his supporters, all this is irrelevant. The
church, says Francis, should be a hospital, or a first-aid station. People who
have been divorced don’t need to be told it’s a bad thing. They need to recover
and to piece their lives together again. The church should stand beside them,
and show mercy.
At the first synod of the bishops in 2015, this was still a
minority view. A liberal document was prepared, but rejected by a majority. A
year later, the conservatives were in a clear minority, but a very determined
one. Francis himself wrote a summary of the deliberations in The Joy of Love.
It is a long, reflective and carefully ambiguous document. The dynamite is
buried in footnote 351 of chapter eight, and has taken on immense importance in
the subsequent convulsions.
The footnote appends a passage worth quoting both for what
it says and how it says it. What it says is clear: some people living in second
marriages (or civil partnerships) “can be living in God’s grace, can love and can
also grow in the life of grace and charity, while receiving the Church’s help
to this end”.
Even the footnote, which says that such couples may receive
communion if they have confessed their sins, approaches the matter with
circumspection: “In certain cases, this can include the help of the
sacraments.” Hence, “I want to remind priests that the confessional must not be
a torture chamber, but rather an encounter with the Lord’s mercy.” And: “I
would also point out that the Eucharist ‘is not a prize for the perfect, but a
powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak’.”
“By thinking that everything is black and white,” Francis
adds, “we sometimes close off the way of grace and growth.”
It is this tiny passage that has united all the other
rebellions against his authority. No one has consulted laypeople to find out
what they think about it, and in any case their opinions are of no interest to
the introvert party. But among the bishops, between a quarter and a third are
passively resisting the change, and a small minority are doing so actively.
The leader of that faction is Francis’s great enemy,
Cardinal Burke. Sacked first from his position on the Vatican court, and then
from the liturgy commission, he ended up on the supervisory board of the
Knights of Malta – a charitable body run by the old Catholic aristocracies of
Europe. In Autumn 2016, he sacked the head of the order for supposedly allowing
nuns to distribute condoms in Burma. This is something that nuns do quite
widely in the developing world to protect vulnerable women. The man who had
been sacked appealed to the pope.
The outcome was that Francis reinstated the man Burke had
sacked, and appointed another man to take over most of Burke’s duties. This was
punishment for Burke’s quite untrue claim that the pope had been on his side in
the original row.
Meanwhile, Burke had opened a new front, which came as close
as he could to accusing the pope of heresy. Along with three other cardinals,
two of whom have since died, Burke produced a list of four questions designed
to establish whether or not Amoris Laetitia contravened previous teaching.
These were sent as a formal letter to Francis, who ignored it. After he was
sacked, Burke made the questions public, and said he was prepared to issue a
formal declaration that the pope was a heretic if he would not answer them to
Burke’s satisfaction.
Of course, Amoris Laetitia does represent a break with
previous teaching. It is an example of the church learning from experience. But
that is hard for conservatives to assimilate: historically, these bursts of
learning have only happened in convulsions, centuries apart. This one has come
only 60 years after the last burst of extroversion, with Vatican II, and only
16 years after John Paul II reiterated the old, hard line.
“What does it mean for a pope to contradict a previous
pope?” asks Douthat. “It is remarkable how close Francis has come to arguing
with his immediate predecessors. It was only 30 years ago that John Paul II
laid down in Veritatis Splendor the line which it seems that Amoris Laetitia is
contradicting.”
Pope Francis is deliberately contradicting a man who he
himself proclaimed a saint. That will hardly trouble him. But mortality might.
The more Francis changes his predecessors’ line, the easier it becomes for a
successor to reverse his. Although Catholic teaching does of course change, it
relies for its force on the illusion that it doesn’t. The feet may be dancing
under the cassock, but the robe itself must never move. However, this also
means changes that had taken place can be rolled back without any official
movement. That is how John Paul II struck back against Vatican II.
To guarantee Francis’ changes will last, the church has to
accept them. That is a question that will not be answered in his lifetime. He
is 80 now, and only has one lung. His opponents may be praying for his death,
but no one can know whether his successor will attempt to contradict him – and
on that question, the future of the Catholic church now hangs.
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