St Thomas More, pray for us.
St John Fisher, pray for us.
From Edward Pentin’s, “The Rigging of a Synod”:
On Friday, October 3, (2014) two days before the opening of the synod, this scholar received a call directly from Cardinal Erdö to come and meet him the next day. “I said: ‘Sure, when would you like me to come, maybe 4 or 5 P.M.’ ”, reported the scholar, thinking he would prefer to meet after a siesta after lunch. But the call was more urgent than that. Erdö wanted to see him at 1:30 P.M.
When he arrived at Cardinal Erdö’s office, the Hungarian cardinal was “ashen faced”. He had just come from Cardinal Baldisseri. Erdö had read to Baldisseri the Relatio that he had written, and the synod secretary general had picked it apart. “He’d just brow-beaten him into submission”, the scholar said.
Cardinal Erdö had, it seems, drafted the document with the opening line beginning with “Jesus Christ is our Master before all others and our only Lord”, and had stated, in an allusion to 2 Timothy, that the faithful owe obedience to Him whether it is convenient or not convenient.
“We’re sitting across the table from another, and he says with a tortured expression on his face: ‘Cardinal Baldisseri wants me to
change that.’ “
“I said ‘Why?’ ” “
He said: ‘It’s negative’ and that I should I begin with the ‘Joy of the Gospel’ [Pope Francis’ 2014 apostolic exhortation]33 and quote Pope Francis. Before Jesus Christ.”
Erdö asked the scholar: “Do you think I should quote Pope Francis first?”
The expert had been told by someone who knew Cardinal Erdö well that, although solidly orthodox, he would be liable to backtrack under pressure.
“You could have knocked me over with a feather”, the scholar told me. “Here we are, two days before the opening, there’s the Mass, two days before, and he’s asking me if we should start with Jesus Christ? I said, ‘Eminence, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. He is the Alpha and the Omega. We start with Jesus Christ.’ He left it in. You’ll see it, it’s still the first line.”
But the cardinal was not so successful with the second line. In his draft, Cardinal Erdö had wanted to move from Jesus Christ to Pope Paul VI, Evangelii nuntiandi (his 1975 apostolic exhortation on evangelization in the modern world), and from there to Pope Saint John Paul II with Familiaris consortio and then Benedict XVI and finally Pope Francis.
But Cardinal Baldisseri said, “No, invert the order.” He wanted the opening Relatio to begin first with Francis and Evangelii gaudium and then cover the other popes. The scholar reminded Erdö that it was common to start with the earlier popes and follow through, in chronological order, to more recent popes, because that is how doctrine develops.
Despite this, Cardinal Baldisseri got his way. According to the scholar, after pushing Erdö to make several rewrites and appealing directly to the pope to have contributions from Forte and others reinstated that Erdö had removed, the text was accepted..