I think you pick up on the spiritual hazards to situations like this one. And that’s probably half the battle of keeping one’s spiritual sanity in a church with a stiff institutional hierarchy. If the high officials of the church would concentrate more on helping their church’s Christians be more Christian, they wouldn’t need to be advising the world on what to do. Their laypeople would be advising the world and making it credible because Christ’s spirit would be rendering the advice through them. I have no doubt Francis means well, but he’s not in a place that most of the world can easily relate to. If Francis advised the lay members of the church how to live the life of Christ, then THEY would in turn show the real stuff to the world.
This is exactly, precisely right. Exactly, precisely right. Even "canonically" right. I mean right all the way through.
That's why, for example, the USCCB should be disbanded. The "political policy" part has largely cannibalized the rest of it, and it's a particularly irksome form of clericalism.