Pope Francis don’t answer the cardinals

Dec 19, 2016

By Austen Ivereigh
The anti-Francis revolt spearheaded and legitimated by four mostly retired cardinals has acquired a newly vicious tone. A line was crossed when the four cardinals made public their letter challenging Francis’ apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia, and threatening him with a kind of public censure.

Since then, the tone of disrespect and contempt of some writers who back them has plumbed to shocking new lows. But far more important than tone, the critiques have crossed a frontier into a territory marked “dissent”.

Dissent, to be clear, is not the same as disagreement. Catholics often disagree with this or that decision or statement of a pope, object to his theology, or don’t share his priorities.

And Pope Francis is not only relaxed about disagreement, but positively encourages it.
Dissent is different. Dissent is to disagreement what disbelief is to doubt.

Dissent is, essentially, to question the legitimacy of a pope’s rule. It is to cast into doubt that the development of the Church under this Successor of St Peter is a fruit of the action of the Holy Spirit.

Dissent is nothing new. At the time of the Second Vatican Council, the dissenting party set its face against its pastoral direction, as well as key developments in liturgy, religious freedom and ecumenism.

Under John Paul II, on the other hand, the dissenters were convinced he had betrayed the Council. They argued for women priests, an end to mandatory celibacy and an opening in areas such as contraception.

Now, under Francis, the dissenting party opposes the synod and its major fruit, Amoris Laetitia.

Because dissenters almost always end up looking and sounding like each other, the four cardinals and their supporters look everyday more like those lobbies under the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI calling for liberal reforms.

Catholics know that going against the pope is a serious matter, and when they dissent, they adopt a regretful, pained tone that stresses conscience and the impossibility of betraying whatever they have absolutized.

Some will break off, claiming the one true Church lies elsewhere or nowhere, but most resentfully stay, “clinging onto my faith by my fingertips” as they like to say, or “still a Catholic — despite the Pope’s best efforts to drive me out.”

Clinging to the pain of their betrayal, they take refuge in their traditionalist liturgies and incandescent websites, firing off letters and petitions from lobbies and associations, vainly demanding, as “faithful Catholics,” that the pope do this, that, or the other.

But even as they insist that there is a debate to be had, a case to answer, a matter to be settled, the train is leaving the station, and they are left on the platform, waving their arms.

Most Catholics understand the synod, and Amoris Laetitia, as an inspired response to our times, a means both of rebuilding marriage and of helping to bandage those wounded by the failure of marriage.

This is why Francis can no more respond to the cardinals’ dubia than Benedict XVI could answer a petition to ordain women as deacons: because the Catholic Church has its own mechanisms of development, based on consultation and spiritual discernment.

Put another way, whether it is a conclave or a synod, the Catholic Church likes to lobby-proof its deliberations, precisely to allow the Holy Spirit space to breathe.

Francis cannot answer the cardinals directly! Everything in Amoris Laetitia — including the controversial Chapter 8 — received a two-thirds majority in a synod that was notoriously frank, open and drawn out.

Roma locuta, causa finita, as Catholics used to say. And the case is even more closed this time, because it is the Universal Church which has spoken, not just the Pope. --Crux