The Pope is old and sick. Whatever time he has left, he reviews his years as pontiff and counts only the failures. What does he leave behind? Plummeting attendance, theological confusion, a few sentimental encyclicals and a positive encounter with Whoopi Goldberg. Francis called a synod and it brought him nothing. So, in a final throw of the dice, he declares that priests can bless same-sex relationships – sort of, sort of, maybe not.
It’s all a mess. The priest does not bless the relationship but the partners; there should be no ritual; marriages are excluded, because the teaching on marriage remains unchanged. To achieve this manipulation, Francis broke with the spirit of the Second Vatican Council by going over the heads of bishops to give priests the power to offer the blessing. Yet he also gave these clerics no text to recite, so how are they supposed to know what to say?
If only Francis had focused all his energy on the poor and marginalized, perhaps his papacy would be remembered fondly.
Some (Germans) will simply hold sham weddings. Parishioners will ask others to bless their arrangement, the priest will refuse, complaints will be raised – and the Church will be forced to clarify further, pushing Rome in an irresistible direction. Open a crack in the door marked “reform” and it will never remain a crack. It widens and widens until a storm rages, destroying the inner temple.
Conservatives insist the Pope is being misinterpreted by secular media – again! But the Vatican itself is sounding the trumpet for this change, condensing what should have taken theologians years to debate into a press release that essentially says “the Pope makes the rules.”
François believes he can tinker with the teachings. He did this on the death penalty, taking a nuanced position that it is possible but undesirable, and simply stating that in light of his personal reading of Scripture it is still wrong – suggesting that the Church got this question wrong, and who knows what else?
Traditionalists will point out that this is not any particularity of Francis, but rather the direction taken by the Church since the 1960s, when the hierarchy first dealt a stab at the beautiful liturgy and the universal language of Catholicism (Latin). Why get excited about the blessings of homosexuals when we have had communion on our hands, ecumenism, “religious freedom”, the watering down of moral teaching – for example on hell – and tolerance of with regard to the kind of fashionable narcissism from which François comes?
The answer is I’ve been watching this unfold for England, where the Anglican Church allowed itself to be torn apart and then redefined by an incessant debate over sexuality and gender. This blunted the gospel message and emptied the pews. For those of us who converted from Canterbury to Rome precisely because we sought a rock of stability in a sea of revolution, this smacks of déjà vu.
Anglicans might add that this is the problem with having a pope: investing power in one man leaves you vulnerable to the vicissitudes of personality. In the 19th century, Rome’s authority was strengthened in the hope that it would be the guardian of tradition – but the sword was turned against us. We were fortunate to be led by John Paul II and Benedict XVI, one charismatic and the other brilliant, both men who defied the spirit of the times and thus gave the Church a definition attractive. We are now led by a man of far less ability who is chasing the zeitgeist, thereby alienating the growing group of people who have remained faithful to the Church through scandals and pandemics because they believed that she unreservedly defended the Truth.
What are the options? Despair? Impossible. We cannot choose the times we live in or our battles; like Job, we cannot begin to understand the purpose behind it all. To accept the logic of faith, one must have faith – even if the faith of others seems to weaken and bend. As for the source of strength to endure the coming chaos, I felt a touch of divine providence on the day of Francis’ announcement. I happened to be meditating on 2 Corinthians, chapter 12, in which St. Paul says that to keep him from feeling complacent, the Lord placed a thorn in his flesh. Paul begged for it to be removed. The Lord replied, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. »
God’s love is certain, and there is a miraculous nobility and strength in weakness: what the false human world takes for defeat is the source of victory. The radical paradox of Christianity is that at the same time as we are invited to abandon our ego, we do so with the certainty that to God we are of vital importance – that the end goal is a selfless love that transcends all our worries. .
If only Francis had focused all his energy on the poor and marginalized, perhaps his papacy would be remembered fondly. Instead, by constantly talking politics and vandalizing tradition, he distracts from the harder, bigger work of becoming a Christian—of rolling up your sleeves and loving. His profession of open-mindedness led him to indulgent self-examination. Its quest for relevance makes the Church seem embarrassing and outdated. The secular world marries homosexuals left, right and center; we’re about to have a pointless argument about whether they could be blessed – with the confusing and condescending caveat that this little hand gesture is not an endorsement.
Well, that’s the cross of my generation: being led by old donkeys determined to destroy their heritage, to leave us a ruin and to say, with diabolical pride: “I built this.”
This article was originally published on The spectatorThe UK’s website.
