The conservative Roman Catholic bloggers hate Pope Francis. They hate the fact that people like him, they particularly hate the fact that non-Roman Catholics like him, because that isn't the business of a Pope. A Pope is supposed to be a mixture between a tribal war-leader and a tribal battle-totem, who encapsulates the sense they want to have of being in a war against a Satanic world. This is why they've been rejoicing over what looks like Francis's humiliation at the weekend when the special Extraordinary Synod on the Family refused to endorse the draft document the Vatican had prepared stating that the Church 'respects and welcomes' homosexual people. You can go to Rorate Caeli if you want this kind of thing, although be warned, it's horrible and depressing.
Of course in fact the Synod didn't actually vote down the draft document, it merely declined to endorse it by a sufficient majority for it to pass, although you could be forgiven for drawing the conclusion from Rorate Caeli that something entirely different had happened. There is every likelihood that when Francis has another go next year he will get his way.
You will recognise a certain pattern here which mirrors the Anglican Church's anguished attempts to sort out how to ordain women to the priesthood and episcopate; the pattern of it being very clear indeed which way things are going to go, but there being not quite enough enthusiasm for it to happen in one go, instead inaugurating a lengthy process of to-ing and fro-ing until the vote manages to get over the Church's traditional two-thirds-majority hurdle. Anglican Archbishops are used to sitting in Synods watching their opinions being thrown back at them and votes mounting up to achieve a lack of decision yet again. Anglican Archbishops are used to it; Popes aren't. The Roman Catholic Church isn't. The Roman Catholic Church is far more used to telling itself a completely fantasised story about magisterial consensus and Spirit-guided authority which completely ignores the way structures composed of human beings actually work.
The abiding significance of these gatherings, and of Francis's pontificate as a whole, is the destruction of this fantasy. Francis has gathered a group of people who haven't taken the decision that he very clearly wanted, although diplomatically he refrained from stating too openly that that was what he wanted. Familiar though this way of working may be to the likes of Rowan Williams and Justin Welby, for a Pope, in the context of Roman Catholicism, this is an act of almost incredible boldness and hope. This is the end of the dream world trad Roman Catholics live in, and the irruption of reality, not in terms of gays, not in terms of admitting divorced people to communion, but simply in terms of the way things really are, and always have been. It's the end of fear, the end of control, the end of power, of a certain conception of auctoritas. It's a revolution that potentially puts Vatican II in the shade.
No wonder the conservative bloggers hate Francis: it's a bit like the disorientation that must have befallen Japanese nationalists at the end of World War Two when the Emperor renounced his own divinity. What do you do when the centre of absolute authority refuses to play that role any more? When they get down off the pedestal? Do you try to find someone else? But it's too late. The spell is broken. The old world ain't coming back.
There's an important internal distinction between parties known as "conservatives" (sometimes "neoconservatives") and trads on this and other issues - though the lines between the parties are sometimes unclear - JPII is often linked with the conservatives as opposed to BXVI and the trads, though I think that's oversimplifying both men.
ReplyDeleteBasically the trads (particularly liturgical trads) never really did fall into that kind of ultramontanism. (I hasten to add I am talking about trads who remained in full communion with Rome, albeit grumbling and seeking out an indult mass whenever they could, not the lefebvrists, sedes and fellow travellers).
There are various points in the writings of BXVI (and of Joseph Ratzinger) where he talks of the problems with the idea that the pope on his own could do - ie had the authority to do - literally anything (in Spirit of the Liturgy I know but also elsewhere) and wonders aloud about how we can rethink the office. One thing I really want to track down is a speech I remember reading - or maybe it was an interview (the last Seewald book-length interview perhaps, or one of those q&as he did with the diocesan priests of Rome) where he speculated that he would be the last of the "old kind" of pope.
Rather than descend into the fetid swamp that is Rorate I think there's something more productive to be got from reading Joseph Shaw of the Latin Mass Society and Fr Hunwicke of the Ordinariate on this stuff - whether or not one agrees with them either on papal authority or the particular issues emerging from the synod.
- R. James
Thank you for that. Yes, the lines of division are clearly many and various and I only linked to Rorate because that was the first link that came up with a quick Google; Joseph Shaw I don't know but I can imagine Fr Hunwicke will have a very different view. I think that, while many point to the differences between BXVI and FI (to the extent of turning them into totems of entirely divergent ideals of Catholicism), in fact Benedict understood far more about what had to happen to papal authority than he usually gets the credit for - had he not done so he would never have resigned. Certainly in some ways the leap from JPII to BXVI is greater than that from Benedict to Francis.
ReplyDelete