Opposition to Pope Francis comes out of the closet

Dec 11, 2015

VATICAN: A recent spate of articles demonstrates that the opposition to Pope Francis is not exactly warming to the idea of the Jubilee Year of Mercy, still less to the Pope himself. The more I read the opposition, the more it becomes clear that Cardinal Donald Wuerl, during the Synod, was correct when he said of the opposition, “I wonder if some of these people who are speaking, sometimes surreptitiously, sometimes half-way implying, then backing off and then twisting around, I wonder if it is really that they find they just don’t like this Pope. I wonder if that isn’t part of it.” Not sure whether to file the following examples of disliking the Pope under the sad, funny or tragic categories, but they are all, in their different ways, undermining the Pope.

First up is Cardinal Raymond Burke’s recent op-ed in the National Catholic Register. The flamboyant cardinal uses the old trick of attacking someone close to the Pope, rather than the Pope directly, in this instance, Fr Antonio Spadaro, SJ. Fr Spadaro had written that the Synod opened a door toward the divorced and remarried. Cardinal Burke replies: “The fact is that the Synod could not open a door which does not exist and cannot exist, namely, a discernment in conscience which contradicts the truth about the supreme sanctity of the Most Holy Eucharist and the indissolubility of the marriage bond.” Who said anything about “contradicting” the truth? The contradiction — and it is only an apparent one to us poor humans who have more theological  work to do — is between “the truth” about marriage and the Eucharist and “the truth” about God’s mercy and, relatedly, “the truth” about the practice of our sister Churches of the East. But, Cardinal Burke expects everyone to use his lenses, his weighting of the issues, his sense of what is, and is not, possible. Someone needs to tell him that he was not elected Pope in 2013.

The First Things recently published a recent article on “What Really Happened at Synod 2015” that is an excellent example of the genre by George Weigel. Typically, he begins with his throat-clearing attacks on everyone in the media except himself: They simply traffic in gossip but he knows the real deal.

I will admit this: Weigel grasps the real deal as explained to him by his sources, but his sources were clearly in the minority at the Synod and are among those most opposed to the Pope. He repeats the conservative concerns about the Synod process and the personnel. He repeats the concerns about the Instumentum laboris. He discerns several “plans” by the Kasperites, although he does not provide any evidence for the existence of such plans, and I am guessing no one actually associated with Cardinal Kasper spoke to Weigel for his article. This is just a compilation of conservative fears and talking points pretending to be a report on the Synod, in which Weigel’s penchant for narrowing the scope of Catholic theology — and Church teaching — is on full display. -- NCR