The Tensions Mount between the Francis and the Anti-Francis Forces in the Curia

Cardinal Raymond Burke, the
most outspoken of Vatican critics
of Pope Francis, standing next to
Francis as the Pope receives
various bishops at the end of the
Wednesday Audience 

Here is a follow-up article to my last posting which comes as the same topic—Pope Francis and his efforts to bring the Church into a more open and pastoral response to the needs of 21^st century people—but this article in the Washington Post is from the perspective of Vatican intrigue rather than Father Santora’s wonderful essay written from the heart of a Shepherd.  As this article makes clear the opposition to Francis is well organized and with leadership from the highest ranks of the Church.  We can see how increasingly difficult it is for the whole thing to hold together.  Francis is likely to reign no more than another five years, seven at the most.  What will happen in the struggles to find a successor?  Will the Church survive the tensions of a rabidly divided conclave?  The vast majority of Catholics around the world are enthusiastic about Francis and his more “open style.”  Large numbers of clergy and of the hierarchy are far less enthusiastic.   It’s a recipe for all out civil war. 

Conservative Dissent Brewing inside the Vatican

By Anthony Faiola    September 7 at  7:33 PM

VATICAN CITY — On a sunny morning earlier this year, a camera crew entered a well-appointed apartment just outside the 9th-century gates of Vatican City. Pristinely dressed in the black robes and scarlet sash of the princes of the Roman Catholic Church, Wisconsin-born Cardinal Raymond Burke sat in his elaborately upholstered armchair and appeared to issue a warning to Pope Francis.

A staunch conservative and Vatican bureaucrat, Burke had been demoted by the pope a few months earlier, but it did not take the fight out of him. Francis had been backing a more inclusive era, giving space to progressive voices on divorced Catholics as well as gays and lesbians. In front of the camera, Burke said he would “resist” liberal changes — and seemed to caution Francis about the limits of his authority. “One must be very attentive regarding the power of the pope,” Burke told the French news crew.

Papal power, Burke warned, “is not absolute.” He added, “The pope does not have the power to change teaching [or] doctrine.”

Burke’s words belied a growing sense of alarm among strict conservatives, exposing what is fast emerging as a culture war over Francis’s papacy and the powerful hierarchy that governs the Roman Catholic Church.

This month, Francis makes his first trip to the United States at a time when his progressive allies are hailing him as a revolutionary, a man who only last week broadened the power of priests to forgive women who commit what Catholic teachings call the “mortal sin” of abortion during his newly declared “year of mercy” starting in December. On Sunday, he called for “every” Catholic parish in Europe to offer shelter to one refugee family from the thousands of asylum seekers risking all to escape war-torn Syria and other pockets of conflict and poverty.

Yet as he upends church convention, Francis also is grappling with a conservative backlash to the liberal momentum building inside the church. In more than a dozen interviews, including with seven senior church officials, insiders say the change has left the hierarchy more polarized over the direction of the church than at any point since the great papal reformers of the 1960s.

The conservative rebellion is taking on many guises — in public comments, yes, but also in the rising popularity of conservative Catholic Web sites promoting Francis dissenters; books and promotional materials backed by conservative clerics seeking to counter the liberal trend; and leaks to the news media, aimed at Vatican reformers.

In his recent comments, Burke was also merely stating fact. Despite the vast powers of the pope, church doctrine serves as a kind of constitution. And for liberal reformers, the bruising theological pushback by conservatives is complicating efforts to translate the pope’s transformative style into tangible changes.

“At least we aren’t poisoning each other’s chalices anymore,” said the Rev. Timothy Radcliffe, a liberal British priest and Francis ally appointed to an influential Vatican post in May. Radcliffe said he welcomed open debate, even critical dissent within the church. But he professed himself as being “afraid” of “some of what we’re seeing”

Rather than stake out clear stances, the pope is more subtly, often implicitly, backing liberal church leaders who are pressing for radical change, while dramatically opening the parameters of the debate over how far reforms can go. For instance, during the opening of a meeting of senior bishops last year, Francis told those gathered, “Let no one say, ‘This you cannot say.’ ”

Since then, liberals have tested the boundaries of their new freedom, with one Belgian bishop going as far as calling for the Catholic Church to formally recognize same-sex couples.

Conservatives counter that in the climate of rising liberal thought, they have been thrust unfairly into a position in which “defending the real teachings of the church makes you look like an enemy of the pope,” a senior Vatican official said on the condition of anonymity in order to speak freely.

“We have a serious issue right now, a very alarming situation where Catholic priests and bishops are saying and doing things that are against what the church teaches, talking about same-sex unions, about Communion for those who are living in adultery,” the official said. “And yet the pope does nothing to silence them. So the inference is that this is what the pope wants.”

A measure of the church’s long history of intrigue has spilled into the Francis papacy, particularly as the pope has ordered radical overhauls of murky Vatican finances. Under Francis, the top leadership of the Vatican Bank was ousted, as was the all-Italian board of its financial watchdog agency.

One method of pushback has been to give damaging leaks to the Italian news media. Vatican officials are now convinced that the biggest leak to date — of the papal encyclical on the environment in June — was driven by greed (it was sold to the media) rather than vengeance. But other disclosures have targeted key figures in the papal cleanup — including the conservative chosen to lead the pope’s financial reforms, the Australian Cardinal George Pell, who in March was the subject of a leak about his allegedly lavish personal tastes.

More often, dissent unfolds on ideological grounds. Criticism of a sitting pope is hardly unusual — liberal bishops on occasion challenged Francis’s predecessor, Benedict XVI. But in an institution cloaked in traditional fealty to the pope, what shocks many is just how public the criticism of Francis has become.

In an open letter to his diocese, Bishop Thomas Tobin of Providence, R.I., wrote: “In trying to accommodate the needs of the age, as Pope Francis suggests, the Church risks the danger of losing its courageous, countercultural, prophetic voice, one that the world needs to hear.” For his part, Burke, the cardinal from Wisconsin, has called the church under Francis “a ship without a rudder.”

Even Pell appeared to undermine him on theological grounds. Commenting on the pope’s call for dramatic action on climate change, Pell told the Financial Times in July, “The church has got no mandate from the Lord to pronounce on scientific matters.”

In conservative circles, the word “confusion” also has become a euphemism for censuring the papacy without mentioning the pope. In one instance, 500 Catholic priests in Britain drafted an open letter this year that cited “much confusion” in “Catholic moral teaching” following the bishops’ conference on the family last year in which Francis threw open the floodgates of debate, resulting in proposed language offering a new stance for divorced or gay Catholics.

That language ultimately was watered down in a vote that showed the still-ample power of conservatives. It set up another showdown for next month, when senior church leaders will meet in a follow-up conference that observers predict will turn into another theological slugfest. The pope himself will have the final word on any changes next year.

Conservatives have launched a campaign against a possible policy change that would grant divorced and remarried Catholics the right to take Communion at Mass. Last year, five senior leaders, including Burke and the conservative Cardinal Carlo Caffarra of Bologna, Italy, drafted what has become known as “the manifesto” against such a change. In July, a DVD distributed to hundreds of dioceses in Europe and Australia, and backed by conservative Catholic clergy members, made the same point. In it, Burke, who has made similar arguments at Catholic conferences, issued dire warnings of a world in which traditional teachings are ignored.

But this is still the Catholic Church, where hierarchical respect is as much tradition as anything else. Rather than targeting the pope, conservative bishops and cardinals more often take aim at their liberal peers. They include the German Cardinal Walter Kasper, who has suggested that he has become a substitute target for clergy members who are not brave enough to criticize the pope directly.

Yet conservatives counter that liberals are overstepping their bounds, putting their own spin on the pronouncements of a pope who has been more ambiguous than Kasper and his allies are willing to admit.

“I was born a papist, I have lived as a papist, and I will die a papist,” Caffarra said. “The pope has never said that divorced and remarried Catholics should be able to take Holy Communion, and yet, his words are being twisted to give them false meaning.”

Some of the pope’s allies insist that debate is precisely what Francis wants.

“I think that people are speaking their mind because they feel very strongly and passionately in their position, and I don’t think the Holy Father sees it as a personal attack on him,” said Chicago Archbishop Blase J. Cupich, considered a close ally of the pope. “The Holy Father has opened the possibility for these matters to be discussed openly; he has not predetermined where this is going.”

More on Pope Francis' Critique of the Curia

Let’s get back to Pope Francis and his critique of the Roman Curia.  I want to finish this up and we still have several spiritual diseases to look at. 

But as we look at the Curia, its diseases, and its needed reforms, let me say that I am tired of reading that Cardinal Burke was “demoted.”  When a Congressman is reassigned by his party’s leadership from one committee to another, or when a Senator is removed as chairman of a committee because his party no longer has control of the Senate, he is not demoted.  He remains a member of the House or the Senate.  We expect a congressman who is not in line with his party to lose membership on a key committee and end up on one whose role is not as critical.  We expect the chair of a committee to change when the balance of power changes.  Why do we think an injustice or a humiliation was imposed on Cardinal Burke?  He remains a Cardinal.  He is not working with the administration in power; why would he not be removed from crucial committees or lose his prefectship of a dicastery?  They very people who are wailing about Cardinal Burke’s reassignment are the ones who had been calling for Cardinal Wuerl or Cardinal O’Malley or Cardinal Kasper to be removed from their positions.  Surely they understand that Cardinal Burke cannot be entrusted with responsibilities that he will not carry out according to the mind of the Pope.  And it could have been much worse as the Holy Father purges men whose intrigue, whose acceptance of “stipends” for favors or advancements, or whose moral character are at the root of these diseases he sees to infect the Curia.  Cardinal Burke escaped with his reputation intact; there are worse fates.  Now, on to the next two critiques with which the Pope has slammed the Curia.    

The disease of gossiping, grumbling and back-biting. I have already spoken many times about this disease, but never enough. It is a grave illness which begins simply, perhaps even in small talk, and takes over a person, making him become a “sower of weeds” (like Satan) and in many cases, a cold-blooded killer of the good name of our colleagues and confrères. It is the disease of cowardly persons who lack the courage to speak out directly, but instead speak behind other people’s backs. Saint Paul admonishes us to do all things without grumbling or questioning, that you may be blameless and innocent” (Phil 2:14-15). Brothers, let us be on our guard against the terrorism of gossip!

The Holy Father seems to keep coming back to this particular issue of the poisonous atmosphere in the Curia with priests and prelates competing with one another for advancement as they claw their way up the caterpillar pillar.  The competition leads to vicious gossip and the spreading of rumor and innuendo in order to destroy one’s competition.  The same disease is rampant in university faculties, the corporate world, the civil service and government workers and even garden clubs and volunteer associations.  It certainly can be found in Diocesan offices and in religious orders.  The Pope does well in tying it to Satan’s sowing of weeds among the good wheat (cf Matt 13:25).  While it is bad enough for Christians to engage in this sort of behavior in daily life, we have a right to expect more of the leaders of the Church.  The scandals that pushed Pope Benedict into resigning—the purloining of his personal papers by his butler and their release to a journalist—revealed just what a hotbed of intrigue, jealousy, and underhanded politics the Curia is.  This is nothing new—the stories of corruption and chicanery in the papal court can be found back into the early Middle Ages.  Systemic reform will be ineffective without personal conversion on the part of those who are part of the bureaucracy.  That sort of conversion has been rare over the centuries, but hopefully Pope Francis will encourage us all to take a long hard look at ourselves and how we, in our little worlds, fall into the same vices. 

The disease of idolizing superiors. This is the disease of those who court their superiors in the hope of gaining their favour. They are victims of careerism and opportunism; they honour persons and not God (cf. Mt 23:8-12). They serve thinking only of what they can get and not of what they should give. Small-minded persons, unhappy and inspired only by their own lethal selfishness (cf. Gal 5:16-25). Superiors themselves could be affected by this disease, when they court their collaborators in order to obtain their submission, loyalty and psychological dependency, but the end result is a real complicity.

One of the most nauseating sights one can see in Rome is the gathering of the capella papale before a papal ceremony.  In the half-hour or so before the scheduled arrival of the Pope, the various officials of the Curia arrive to take their places in the Vatican Basilica.  There are usually about six to eight rows reserved for them.  The Cardinals sit in the first row on gold chairs with their individual pre-dieus.  Behind them there are two to three rows of bishops seated on benches.  Behind them are the benches for the monsignors and priests who work in the Vatican or who represent the religious orders.  As the various men (this is an all male club) arrive in the reserved area, you see the lessers courting the greaters.  Bishops search out the cardinals; priests search out archbishops.  There is much bowing and scraping, the occasional kissing of a ring, the empty laugh, the glad-handing and the distracted glances as the various priests and prelates select their next target for a suck-up. It all continues until the first notes of the processional start and it resumes as soon as the Mass is over.  The same scene plays out on a different scale in the restaurants of Rome, at parties and receptions, even on the street when one encounters a potential patron or ally.  The whole structure reinforces the tendency of men to see themselves as people of importance rather than as those who are called to be of service.  What does it profit a person to gain the whole world and lose themselves in the process?  It takes people out of contact with reality and reinforces a fantasy world of exaggerated egos and misaligned values. 

I think what this highlights is the need not just for structural reform but for personal conversion.  Leave it to a Jesuit to sound the call.  It is a gift that Ignatius left his sons from his own experience at Manressa; thank you Francis for sharing that gift with the rest of us.  

More on the Pope's Christmas Message--including the biggest bombshell.

I have noticed that whenever I dip into the past, readership goes down and when I deal with current issues, it springs back up.  So, while I am really enthused about this Church of England thing, I need to swing to the bleachers; consequently back to Pope Francis and his message to the Roma Curia.  But remember this is not just for us to gloat over the sins of the boys in purple (a sin itself under the wonderfully named category of morose delectation—the savoring of another’s faults or misfortunes), it should serve each of us as well as a measure for our own conscience.  You don’t need have a miter to chip away at the credibility of our Catholic faith.  So Pope Francis went after the boys for:

The disease of rivalry and vainglory. When appearances, the colour of our clothes and our titles of honour become the primary object in life, we forget the words of Saint Paul: “Do nothing from selfishness or conceit but in humility count others better than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others” (Phil 2:3-4). This is a disease which leads us to be men and woman of deceit, and to live a false “mysticism” and a false “quietism”. Saint Paul himself defines such persons as “enemies of the cross of Christ” because “they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things” (Phil 3:19).

The “Holy” See has long worked on the principle of rivalry and vainglory and now the Pope decides this is a “disease?”  I guess it is somewhat like smoking—for the longest time it was fashionable, a necessary social activity and all of a sudden someone decided that it wasn’t good for you—or for anyone within 100 feet of you.  Just as our eyes were opened to the dangers of tobacco, we should be grateful that this poison of pomposity and a zeal for its trappings has finally been called out.  Of course there are some—and we all know who don’t we—for whom it is still all about dressing up in more yards of silk than a Chinese empress ever dreamed of and parading around for people to kiss your ring and kneel for your blessing.  How much is a blessing from a self-idolater worth anyway?  I guess you need to go up to Gricigliano and ask the boys in blue.  And this is precisely the problem: how often do we fall for the bait represented by some grandiose prelate.  There is a saying that when a man becomes a bishop he has had his last bad meal and he will never hear the truth again.  How much to we get carried away in the moment fall all over the bishop or the Cardinal or whoever when they come to visit our parish.  We respectfully listen to what they have to say—whether it is worth listening to or not—and we bite our tongues rather than speak up and tell them what we believe.  Last November at their meeting in Baltimore, the American bishops showed a lot of hesitancy about the agenda for the family that clearly has the backing of Pope Francis.  They are not willing to go out on a limb and explore the possibilities to offer greater support to the non-traditional family structures that are very quickly becoming the norm in our society.  Yet the “Catholic in the pews” is supportive of Pope Francis.  The “Catholic in the pews” wants to see new pastoral approaches to the remarried, to same-sex households, to single parents, to couples who have opted for in vitro conception, and others who just don’t fit the traditional mold.  I am not saying that we want to abandon our traditional values, much less our moral heritage—but we do want to explore new ways to minister to those who feel themselves on the margins of the Church and we want ways to be more inclusive as a faith community.  Our bishops hesitate because we hesitate to speak up.  We are the fidelium (the faithful) of the consensus fidelium.  The deposit of the faith is held in our collective heart—not in some catechism or some tome of moral theology. 

I have no problem with bishops wearing red dresses, or even jeweled rings and crosses.  Granted some overdo it, but in principle I could care less.  I know good bishops who just like to dress up and I know sad examples of bishops who dress down in more functional attire.  What we need is to become a community of Truth where all can speak their mind (and their heart) and where we listen to one another and weigh carefully what each other has to say.  The real problem isn’t pomp; the problem is a hierarchical mentality.  Cure that and the pomposity will fall into line. 

The disease of existential schizophrenia. This is the disease of those who live a double life, the fruit of that hypocrisy typical of the mediocre and of a progressive spiritual emptiness which no doctorates or academic titles can fill. It is a disease which often strikes those who abandon pastoral service and restrict themselves to bureaucratic matters, thus losing contact with reality, with concrete people. In this way they create their own parallel world, where they set aside all that they teach with severity to others and begin to live a hidden and often dissolute life. For this most serious disease conversion is most urgent and indeed indispensable.

This is the real bombshell in the Christmas address.  I remember when I was living in Rome being invited to a Diplomatic Reception in Lateran Palace.  It was one of those scenes like you see in a movie with everyone dressed to the hilt—men in evening dress, women with their jewels, prelates in full peacock glory, waiters with trays of champagne and hors d’oeuvres, tables piled with pastries and all the empty chatter.  I was in the company of a priest friend, a chaplain in the Canadian military, and a handsome man.  There was a long line of prelates—including two cardinals—waiting to speak with him and invite him to dinner.  As he remarked to me afterwards: “the expectation is that I will be the dessert.”  The double-life of many in the Curia is a matter of open knowledge and frequent gossip in Rome.  And you know, it could to a certain extent be forgiven if it wasn’t so hypocritical with everyone posing as the paragon of moral virtue.  Francis’ “Who am I to judge” should be the blazon on every prelate’s coat of arms.  We all need to keep in our moral eye our own failures and sins and realize that none of us is in a position to judge—much less to condemn—others.  Francis defined this particular fault as a “schizophrenia” and so it is as so often we are able—all of us from the boys in the red dresses down to little old lady from county Monaghan who is daily at the communion rail—we are all able to compartmentalize our lives and put a fire wall between our own sins and our public persona.  Psalm 50 is my favorite prayer perhaps simply because it calls me to face my sins honestly and keeps me truthful to myself.  At least I hope it does. 

The disease of gossiping, grumbling and back-biting. I have already spoken many times about this disease, but never enough. It is a grave illness which begins simply, perhaps even in small talk, and takes over a person, making him become a “sower of weeds” (like Satan) and in many cases, a cold-blooded killer of the good name of our colleagues and confrères. It is the disease of cowardly persons who lack the courage to speak out directly, but instead speak behind other people’s backs. Saint Paul admonishes us to do all things without grumbling or questioning, that you may be blameless and innocent” (Phil 2:14-15). Brothers, let us be on our guard against the terrorism of gossip!

 This gossiping, grumbling, and backbiting has long been part of the Vatican culture.  You can go back to the very dirty papal elections of the 16^th century where cardinals knocked out their rivals—or at least attempted to—by circulating the most scurrilous of rumors.  What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul in the process?  But again, the fight to the top of the caterpillar pillar is so vicious and it brings out the worst.  Unfortunately the Vatican runs on gossip: if you could turn it to energy you could light and heat all of Italy.  The nasty little comments that are slipped in between the primo piatto and the secundo at Abruzzi on the Piazza SS Apostoli, or La Sagrestia over near the Pantheon are legendary.  Just grab a table anywhere in the Borgo during lunch and you will overhear some nasty remark or another from a fellow in a soutane about one of his co-workers. 

Francis comes from a very different tradition.  I understand that Jesuits take a vow never to speak ill of another Jesuit.  Of course, like other vows people take the rate of keeping doesn’t match the rate of taking.  Nevertheless, it does create a certain culture in which you learn to be careful of speaking ill—especially when untrue—of others.  We could all benefit from that consciousness.  People can be just as vicious in staking out their niche in the local parish as some desk-jockey Monsignor in the Vatican in his battle for the purple.  Or it may not even be in the Church that we fall into gossip and undermining the reputation of others.  It might be in our Knights of Columbus Council or even the local swim club.  It might be at our job.  In whatever situation we find ourselves sinking to this low, we need to remember that it reflects very poorly on us as Catholics.  This is an area where you and I can do as much damage, and maybe even more, to the credibility of our Faith than any Cardinal or bishop ever could.