Who opposes Pope Francis?

Nov 03, 2017

By Robert Mickens
Pope Francis is facing a raucous and, at times, vicious opposition from certain groups of Catholics. The increasing hostility they are showing towards the Bishop of Rome is probably without parallel in the modern history of the Roman Catholic Church.

Now, there is actually good news, as well as bad news, to all of this.

The good news is that, as best as one can tell, those who are rowing against the current helmsman of the Barque of Peter are part of a very tiny, if noisy, minority.

The bad news is that they are mostly found among the Church’s ordained workforce — men who serve as priests and bishops.

The most recent Vatican statistics claim that there are some 1.285 billion members of the worldwide Catholic community.

Among them, nearly 416,000 are priests and another 5,300 are bishops — only about .03 per cent of all baptised Catholics.

And even in this subset, the number of those who actively oppose the Pope is, most likely, marginal. It is a minority within a minority.

It is impossible to state the exact numbers. However, we can identify certain discernible traits and trends. For example, opposition to Francis is emanating most energetically from the English-speaking world, certain parts of Europe and in areas of Africa where the Pope’s critics tend to be younger (under the age of 50), doctrinally rigid and liturgically “retrodox” members of the clergy.

People in the anti-Francis camp also show tendencies toward a very narrow understanding of the application of Canon Law, a slavish devotion to liturgical rubricism and an outdated Euro-centric view of the world that is rooted in classical Greco-Roman philosophical systems.

It would be troubling enough if the opponents of the Pope were only members of the clergy. However, that is not the case.

There are, also, small groups of the baptised faithful that are also highly critical and, even disparaging of him. They demonstrate similar characteristics of the rebellious clergy. They, too, tend to be younger, fundamentalists when it comes to Church teaching and promoters of a pre-Vatican II liturgy and ecclesiology.

These papal critics are loud and disruptive. They are also organised and tenacious. But let’s get something straight — they are also minorities within both the clergy and the laity.

But they’ve made themselves seem more representative of the overall Catholic population by capitalising on social media and using the large megaphone that cyberspace provides. In this way, they have successfully deceived far too many people (especially in the mainstream media) into believing that the Church is equally divided into two groups — one that loves Pope Francis and one that cannot stand him.

Massimo Faggioli recently described those who are angrily opposing the Pope and his moves to renew the Church as the “Catholic cyber militia.”

But there is something even more disturbing about these various groups of clergy and laity. They have tried to claim legitimacy for their blistering criticisms of Pope Francis by professing their allegiance to the writings and ideas espoused by his predecessor, the now-retired Benedict XVI. In doing so, they take the name (and theology) of Joseph Ratzinger in vain.

They oversimplify and even distort the more nuanced and complex thinking of the man who was a peritus at the Second Vatican Council, and then the long-serving head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith before becoming Bishop of Rome.

They read Ratzinger’s writings like they read everything else, with a dim and narrow lens.

These self-professed “Ratzingerian” critics of Jorge Bergoglio routinely turn the former pope’s more complex ideas (which are not all unquestionable, by the way) into facile and flashy catchphrases.

For instance, they’ve mischievously reduced Benedict XVI’s view that there are basically two competing ways of interpreting the implementation of Vatican II — a “hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture” versus a “hermeneutic of reform,” which he clarified as “renewal in continuity with the one subject-Church” — and turned that second interpretive key into the much more simplistic and erroneous “hermeneutic of continuity,” a phrase the former pope never uttered.

They have also hollowed out Ratzinger’s understanding of John Henry Newman’s notion of the “organic development of doctrine” (and its application to liturgical forms) to mean little more than simply adding, and never subtracting, from previous theological formulations.

Most of the opposition to Pope Francis is coming from Catholics who are devoted to celebrating the Tridentine Mass. And many of them are from fringe groups that Benedict, first as a cardinal and then as pope, moved persistently to bring into the mainstream of the Church.--NCR(used with permission)