Refuting the cardinals who oppose the Pope

Oct 21, 2015

How do you interpret these people who seem to imply that the Pope is somehow manipulating the Synod? It seems almost like a vote of no-confidence in Pope Francis.

I don’t know what would bring people to say the things that they are saying because we are all hearing the Pope, and the Pope is saying nothing that contradicts the teaching of the Church. He’s encouraging us to be open, to be merciful, to be kind, to be compassionate, but he keeps saying that you cannot change the teaching of the Church.

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.

Pope Francis is calling for a Church that, to my mind, is much more in contact with the Gospel, with the living out of the Gospel. Not just the articulation of the Gospel, the voicing of the Gospel, the proclaiming of the Gospel, but the personal living of it, and that seems to be what is the most attractive part of this Pope, why so many people find him inviting, why so many people follow him, why so many people are coming back to the practice of the faith. And for reasons known only to them, there are some who find this somewhat threatening.

Many now think that the thermometer of the success or failure of the Synod is how it will address three controversial questions: whether the divorced and remarried can be allowed to communion, what approach the Church will take to homosexuality and homosexuals, and how the Church looks at cohabitation and cohabiting couples.

I think what’s going to happen in the Synod is we’ll continue to talk about the teaching of the Church which remains unchanged, and we will continue to hear the Pope calling us to be compassionate, to be caring, to be open, to meet people where they are, to try to accompany them. Whether that will be clearly reflected in the Synod’s final document I can’t say, because one never knows what type of momentum building up under this proclamation that this is a rigged event, that this is being manipulated. But, in the long run, I think the voice of the Church’s openness to people in difficulty, and the Church’s caring embrace of people who are having difficulty in living up to the fullness of the Gospel will win out, it just may not make it into the final document of this Synod.

How did you interpret Pope Francis’ talk at the celebration for the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the Synod, which seemed to have gone down very well, earning him a standing ovation?

I thought the Pope’s speech focused exactly on where we need to be. The Church “with and under Peter” moves forward. There are always people who are unhappy with something that is going on in the Church, but the touchstone of authentic Catholicism is adherence to the teaching of the Pope. The rock is Peter, the touchstone is Peter and, as the Holy Father said, it’s the guarantee of unity, it is in no way suppression, any more than John Paul II was a suppression of freedom, or Paul VI was a suppression of freedom. They’re the touchstones of the authenticity of the faith.

So what is a realistic expectation from this Synod?
I think that right now there has been so much tainting of how the Synod is being seen. I don’t think the process has been tainted, I don’t think the Synod itself has been tainted, but the lens through which it is being seen by many, many people has been tainted, and so I suspect that that will have some impact. It’s not going to be a long term impact because you can only paint something in false tones and have it remain understood incorrectly for so long, after a while the Church wins out. The great maxim — magna est veritas et semper prevalebit — the truth is great and it always wins out, even with all of this propaganda and all of this distortion.

Are you expecting the Pope to publish a document after the Synod, given that he said that the synod journey culminates when the Pope speaks authoritatively?
I don’t know in what manner that will take place. I know that at the end of the Synod, as have always happened in recent years, the material of the Synod happenings will be turned over to the Pope who is asked to do something with it. Part of the tradition has been to do an apostolic exhortation, although it wasn’t always that way in the first synods. And it doesn’t have to be that way now; there’s nothing that says there must be an apostolic exhortation, but the Pope can speak on any of the material from the Synod that he chooses to. He has lots of different prerogatives, and there’s no one way in which the voice of Peter is to be articulated.

So you are very confident that even if in the short term there may be some cloud over the conclusion, that in fact the dawn will come rather quickly.

Well, as I said, there’s this tainted lens through which everything is being seen because there have been those that said, and set out to call into question the integrity of this Synod, but at the end of the day I think the truth is going to win out. -- America