A Lone Man In Charge, To the Crowd’s Acclaim [Catholic Caucus]

Popularity and solitude are the two faces of the current pontificate, contradictory only in appearance.

An umpteenth proof of the popularity of Pope Francis came on February 17 with his visit to the university of Roma Tre, amid the rejoicing of teachers and students (see photo), a spectacular comeback over the ban that in 2008 prevented Benedict XVI from entering and speaking at the other university of Rome, the more noble and storied, that of La Sapienza, for the crime of having wanted to bring God and faith into the inviolable temple of the goddess reason.

At Roma Tre Francis did speak, and did he ever, off the cuff and interrupted dozens of times by applause. He spoke about dialogue and multiculturalism, migration and youth unemployment, with what stems from it according to him: “They say that the true statistics about youth suicide are not published; something is published, but not the real statistics.”

But in the 45-minute speech not even once did he utter the words God, Jesus, Church, faith, Christianity.

It is the same neutrality that Francis adopts when he enunciates for the “popular movements” his alter-globalization and anti-globalization political vision. Because it is in the people - “a mystical category,” as he calls it - that he sees the genesis of redemption. And it is to the people, Christian or not, that the pope appeals when he denounces the misdeeds of the world markets, of the economy that kills, of the anonymous powers that foster wars, as also of the antiquated, sclerotic, merciless ecclesiastical institutions.

But his is precisely the popularity of a pope who isolates himself from the institutions in order to contest them better, a fan favorite. It is no coincidence that he praises Latin American populism, as he did in a recent interview with “El País,” he who as a young man was a Peronist.

At the Vatican he has taken up residence in Casa Santa Marta, which is a guest house, precisely in order to distance himself as much as possible from that curia which he has never loved and has very little interest in reforming organically.

He prefers to select his closest colleagues himself. And he has taken one of them from the Catholic university of Buenos Aires: Víctor Manuel Fernández, his favorite theologian. Another from “La Civiltà Cattolica”: Jesuit confrere Antonio Spadaro. Not to mention monsignors Konrad Krajewski, Fabián Pedacchio Leaniz, Battista Ricca, Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo: the first his “almoner” and the second his personal secretary.

Each one of them, however, involved in only a sliver of the pope’s heap of activities and none able to get an overall view. Jorge Mario Bergoglio has always kept a personal calendar of his own that only he compiles and consults.

When it works, the curia does not obstruct the popes, it helps them. It tempers their absolute powers with “checks and balances” analogous to those of the modern democracies.

The congregation for the doctrine of the faith, in particular, should guarantee that all the acts of the magisterium are impeccable, inspecting them in advance word for word. This was what happened between John Paul II and the prefect of the congregation of the doctrine of the faith at the time, Joseph Ratzinger.

The current pope increasingly shelves his written speeches and prefers to improvise. And when he has to write an encyclical or an exhortation, here too he goes his own way, with the help of his ghostwriters Fernández and Spadaro, assembling as he pleases the materials made available to him.

And then, as a matter of routine, he sends the draft of the document to the congregation for the doctrine of the faith, and this sends it back to him with dozens or even hundreds of annotations. But he systematically ignores these.

This is what happened with “Evangelii Gaudium,” the agenda-setting document of his pontificate, and with “Amoris Laetitia,” the exhortation on marriage and divorce that is dividing the Church on account of the conflicting interpretations that it has unleashed.

It has also been discovered that entire paragraphs of “Amoris Laetitia” were copied from articles published ten and twenty years ago by Fernández. In whom Francis has by no means lost faith.

On the contrary. None other than Fernández is the most ferocious critic of Cardinal Gerhard L. Müller, the sidelined prefect of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith, against whom he levels the unheard-of charge of wanting to “control” the pope’s theology.

This commentary was published in "L'Espresso" no. 8 of 2017 on newsstands February 26, on the opinion page entitled "Settimo cielo" entrusted to Sandro Magister.

The speech of Pope Francis at the university of Roma Tre was not published - a rarity - in any official transcription. While on the contrary Benedict XVI made public the speech that he was not allowed to deliver at the university of Rome "La Sapienza" on January 17, 2008:

The complete visit of Francis is however available in a video produced by the Vatican Television Center:

"We are not baptized into the hierarchy; do not receive the cardinals sacramentally; will not spend an eternity in the beatific vision of the pope. Christ is the point. I, myself, admire the present pope, but even if I criticized him as harshly as some do, even if his successor proved to be as bad as some of those who have gone before, even if I find the Church, as I have to live with it, a pain in the neck, I should still say that nothing that a pope (or a priest) could do or say would make me wish to leave the Church, although I might well wish that they would leave" -- Frank Sheed

Found this quote on another blog and thought it was apropos.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.