I figured there might be some interesting perspective on the papacy hereabouts. I won’t provide an obituary and to be perfectly honest I’m not sure I knew Francis’ birth name, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, until today. The hagiographies have begun in earnest. As has undoubtedly the closed door politics at the Vatican. Who’ll be next? This upcoming Pope will be my seventh. I was a babe in arms for part of John’s reign.
Am I cynical? Many conservative Catholics were flabbergasted by Francis. But he accomplished what seems to me to have been been his major goal. He changed the conversation and gave the Church a happy face. While addressing the deep seated issues not at all.
Having let off an opening salvo in another thread, I figure it’s time to return here and give my assessment of Francis.
I’ll start with a vignette: Francis was lauded for choosing to live in the Vatican guest house–Casa Santa Marta–rather than in the Papal apartments in the Apostolic Palace–it was broadly interpreted as a sign of humility, simplicity, frugality.
But those papal apartments–and the whole complex around them–had been developed to accommodate the practical needs of a pope. Not only did they have a living room, bed room, study, personal chapel for him, they had a suite with medical equipment, they had offices for his secretary, they had audience rooms where he could meet diplomats, heads of state, and other dignitaries. And they were located with easy access to the offices and apartments of other members of the papal household. It had windows looking directly out into St. Peter’s Square, which let the pope address the crowds (e.g., at the weekly Angelus) but also simply see them from his own apartment: the hoards of pilgrims streaming in and out of St. Peter’s reminding him of the universal Church he was leading (and for pilgrims there was something exciting in being able to look up and say that is the pope’s apartment, and trying to catch a glimpse of him looking out of his window). And the whole thing was designed to ensure security for the pope and his visitors; if you have ever been in the Palace of Sixtus you know it is locked down like Fort Knox: Every door, every gate, every elevator has a guard with keys who examines your credentials to determine whether to let you pass. In some respects it was like the White House–it was a residence, but, for practical reasons, it was also much more than that.
Now imagine what taking all of that and dropping in into a functioning guest house does. Security, logistics all become more complicated. And those who live and work in the guesthouse are hardly going to find the new arrangement convenient.
Did it save any money or resources, certainly not; it required extra resources and more work. Did the papal apartments, now freed up, get put to some other use? Serving the poor or housing other ecclesiastics working in Rome–no they sat vacant.
The whole thing stinks of videri quam esse. It looked humble and frugal, but in reality it just made a lot of work for a lot of people and didn’t actually do anything to help anyone.
Keep in mind the papal apartments are not opulent (The palace’s public areas are opulent; the private areas in the apartments are dignified but not opulent). If he had wanted to live in actual austerity–eating simple food, eschewing nice furniture–he could have done that just fine in the apostolic palace.
The same story plays out again and again over the course of his pontificate.
Another example: after his election, a paper opened its article on the new pope with the line, “Pope Francis put his humility on display during his first day as pontiff Thursday, stopping by his hotel to pick up his luggage and pay the bill himself . . .” Keep in mind this was a Vatican-owned-and-run residence (Domus Internationalis Paulus VI); Personally settling up was entirely performative. And I’m quite certain that it would have been easier and quicker for everyone involved to just have his luggage picked up. And if he really wanted to thank the staff, it would have been simpler and more special for the staff, if he had granted them an audience in the Vatican. But the trip did, as the paper notes, “put his humility on display.” Again: Videri quam esse.
Here is another example: The ** you do not have permission to see this link **. Kissing a pope’s ring is the traditional sign of respect for the pope when meeting him. It is what you do instead of shaking his hand. It is not a sign of personal devotion to him, but a sign of respect to his office–his signet ring being a sign of his authority in the church. To a decent pope, people kissing his ring is a constant reminder of the responsibility he has. It should make the pope think, “I am not worthy of this” (remember the guilt and shame that the whiskey priest from The Power and the Glory feels when people ask his blessing and kiss his consecrated hands). It isn’t about the individual pope’s worthiness, and that is in some sense the whole point. Even people who think the pope is entirely unworthy of the authority he wields will also kiss his ring out of reverence for the office he bears. For a pope to think his personal worthiness has anything at all to do with why people want to kiss his ring is itself delusionally egotistical. And here we see him, with one pilgrim after another, gracelessly, classlessly turning their once-in-a-lifetime chance to greet the pope into a moment of embarrassment, maybe even humiliation, simply because they followed protocol, all the while he holds a plastic smile on his face. Again, as though his unofficial motto was videri quam esse. It is more important to look like a humble servant, than to act with humility and compassion. It is more important to maintain a fake smile while scorning the reverence the people pay than to humbly accept it even though it makes me uncomfortable.
Okay, one more story, this time quoted from a priest who worked with Francis:
Not long after his election, the newly elected pope came down the hall to visit the papal calligraphers, whose job it is to handwrite papal bulls and decrees on magnificent sheets of genuine parchment. Their office was not far from mine. Some of these artists come from families that have been doing this for three or four generations. They are proud of their craft, and rightly so. After the head calligrapher demonstrated for His Holiness the painstaking process of producing one of these treasures (which, of course, the pope himself would ultimately have to sign), Francis innocently and undiplomatically asked why these documents could not be produced using a computer and printer.
The priest’s ** you do not have permission to see this link ** in brief: “Francis could be judgmental and swift to anger. He didn’t always know what to say when. In fact, he didn’t seem to want to.”
I haven’t gotten to the big and actually important stuff. That will have to be left to another post.
Okay, let’s move on to something more accessible to the general readership of the blog: Francis as reformer.
Let’s set the stage: First in the year leading up to Benedict’s resignation there was the ** you do not have permission to see this link ** This involved confidential papers being leaked to journalists showing deep and widespread corruption, intrigue, and bribery in the Vatican. Eventually the leaks were traced to the pope’s personal butler, though he argued he was not acting in perfidy but trying to expose evil and corruption.
Benedict commissioned three cardinal to prepare a report (the ** you do not have permission to see this link **) on corruption in the curia. It was never made public, but we know it was big, roughly 2000 pages, and delivered to him in July of 2012. We also know that the three cardinals met with him in December to discuss it. In February Benedict announced his resignation. It was claimed that it extended beyond bribery, money-laundering, and kickbacks into organized sexual impropriety (among people under a vow of celibacy, mind you).
It was widely reported that Benedict had come to realize that the corruption was too deep for him to fight effectively (if true that says a lot–Ratzinger had spent years in the curia prior to being elected pope; if anyone should have know nasty curia politics, it was him).
At any rate that was the context in which Francis was elected. People widely thought he had been elected as a reformer. Someone brought in to clean up the mess.
I’ll let the following excerpt summarize how that turned out. It is from a ** you do not have permission to see this link **, one of the principal Cardinals that Francis had tasked with cleaning up Vatican finances:
The changing role of Pope Francis in the financial reforms (incomplete but substantial progress as far as reducing crime is concerned, much less successful, except at IOR, in terms of profitability) is a mystery and an enigma.
Initially the Holy Father strongly backed the reforms. He then prevented the centralization of investments, opposed the reforms and most attempts to unveil corruption, and supported (then) Archbishop Becciu, at the centre of Vatican financial establishment. Then in 2020, the Pope turned on Becciu and eventually ten persons were placed on trial and charged. Over the years, few prosecutions were attempted from AIF reports of infringements.
The external auditors Price Waterhouse and Cooper were dismissed and the Auditor General Libero Milone was forced to resign on trumped up charges in 2017. They were coming too close to the corruption in the Secretariat of State.
That’s the story. Bergolio was brought in to clean up corruption. He began the work. But as soon as his people tasked with rooting it out got on the trail, he stymied them. And the end result was that nothing significant happened.
More to come.
Of curse I’m on the outside looking in but I’ve read a great deal about the sexual abuse scandal(s). It’s astounding how little has actually been done to address this issue in a meaningful way. I try to imagine any business organization, corporation, foundation, etc etc that had been accused of what the church has been caught doing that would not have long since been litigated and prosecuted into oblivion, its management in shackles in some dungeon somewhere!
The only people who have any power over the church are the laity and they have the power of the purse. Until they come out of their stupor and denial, nothing will ever change. Everyone defers responsibility to the Pope. That’s what the top-down hierarchy gets you.
Okay, let’s talk about Francis and his handling of sexual abuse in the Church.
A a very brief overview of a few cases (you can ** you do not have permission to see this link **).
1) Now-disgraced Cardinal McCarrick had been (quietly but firmly) put on a short leash under Benedict, following credible allegations that he was abusing seminarians (indeed his exploits were something of an open secret). Under Francis he was free and back trotting around the world stage.
2) While bishop of Beunos Aires, Bergolio commissioned a four-volume investigation defending since-convicted priest Julio Grassi, and accusing his victims of lying. Somehow that report (allegedly for internal church use only) ended up in the hands of the judges on the case. When asked about commissioning the report, Bergolio–then pope–flatly denied any involvement, despite its having been established that he signed off on it.
3) Gustavo Zanchetta was one of Francis’s first episcopal appointments as pope. In 2015 sexual images were found on his phone–including images of “young people”. In 2017 Francis demanded his resignation but immediately created a post for him in the Vatican. In 2019 he was charged (in Argentina) with sexually abusing two seminarians. During the investigation he continued to work in the Vatican.
4) Rupnik–a celebrity priest-artist–was accused of grotesquely and sexually abusing nuns, but by the time the initial allegations were brought, the statute of limitations (under canon law) had passed. Then in 2019 it was discovered that he had violated canon law by absolving (in confession) an accomplice in a sexual sin (under canon law, that is automatic excommunication). During the canonical procedure, Francis invited him to to the Vatican to preach to the Papal household. Within weeks of the excommunication being declared, Francis lifted it. When Francis died, in his room hung a mosaic by the disgraced priest.
All this was foreshadowed when Card. Danneels was at his side when Francis first appeared on the loggia after his election. ** you do not have permission to see this link **.
Let’s turn to Francis’s attitude toward traditionalist Catholics. This is a bit of inside baseball, but if you approach it from the perspective of sincere traditionalists looking for a spiritual father, I think the case is clear.
A bit of backstory:
Vatican II, in the 60’s, authorized a number of changes to Catholic liturgy. It permitted the mass to be translated into the vernacular (though it also insisted that Latin, as the language of the Latin rite, should preserve pride of place). It permitted altars to be turned to face the people. It called for the rite to be revised to eliminate needless repetitions.
The group of liturgical experts tasked with revising the missal took this inch an ran a mile. What they eventually produced, while sharing some similarities with what they began with, was in many respects a rewrite from the ground up.
And when the new liturgical order hit parish life, priests ran with it. They saw in Vatican II a general license for liturgical experimentation (regardless of what the document explicitly allowed or called for). Many practices that had been forbidden, and that had never been authorized, became standard practice.
The overall effect was that the mass as seen in a typical parish in the 70s would be practically unrecognizable to a Catholic from the 50s.
Meanwhile the older way of saying mass was suppressed. Bishops didn’t let their priests continue the old ways.
It was in this context that Catholic traditionalism formed. Their basic view was that what had always been good and holy cannot suddenly be bad. The liturgy they saw in their parish was lawless and moreover utterly incongruous with what Catholics for centuries had experienced.
JPII gave the bishops permission to allow the old mass in their dioceses and asked them to grant such permission generously. Despite his request, the reality was that most priests were scared even to express interest in the old mass. Many bishops granted such permission, but it was usually for a single weekly mass at a single church, usually in an rough part of the dioceses in a dying parish. Rome was officially sympathetic to traditionalists, but on the ground, they were very much not in favor.
Benedict completely changed the status. He declared that the old rite were never actually abrogated, and consequently, any priest of the Latin rite still had a right to use them without any further permission. Under Benedict Traditionalism went mainstream. It was no longer just a fringe thing that people had to seek out. To be sure it was still a minority of all Catholics, but it wasn’t just the handful of hardcore Catholics keeping their thing alive by driving two hours each way on Sunday to attend mass in a ghetto. Under Benedict, normal people were catching on. In fact, it thrived under Benedict. Catholics who were serious about being Catholic naturally flocked to the old mass wherever it popped up. In a Church that was, in many respect dying, the old mass was always a sign of life and youth.
I want to be clear: there were bitter Catholics among the traditionalists–people who had seen how the bishops tried to sideline them and ostracized them through the decades of Paul VI and John Paul II. (And you can hardly blame them. They were treated like crap.) But it was becoming more than that. There were lots of Trads who were just excited to find the old liturgy. To worship the way centuries of Catholic before them had worshiped. “Mad trads” were being outnumbered by “glad trads”.
Enter Francis. He suppressed the liturgy that these traditionalists loved. He went far beyond even the restrictions of JPII, and insisted that any traditional mass had to be authorized by Rome, and then only for a limited term (the express purpose was for this to be only a transition until the old mass could be totally abolished). While he insisted that he was not trying to ostracize traditionalists, he also forbade any traditional mass from taking place in a parish Church (how better could one remove traditionalists from the common life of the Church), and forbade traditional masses even from being listed in the parish bulletin.
Communities that had sprung up around the old mass suddenly had the life taken out of them. Places that had built churches in large part to accommodate the old mass suddenly had to leave that church and start having the old mass in school gyms, if they were lucky enough to get permission to continue temporarily.
This from a pope who never stops talking about pastoral accommodation and accompaniment.
Regarding the abuse scandal, there are more things that could be done under the current doctrinal position of the church, but for real and genuine long-standing progress, there needs to be some fundamental changes in church doctrine. Married priests, women priests, lesbian & gay married priests, celibate priests only in religious communities, and all with lay oversight. May never happen, at least not anytime soon. It would cause schisms and great turbulance, but I don’t think a complete solution is possible short of these far-reaching, fundamental changes.
Changes such as you suggest need to be made, and I certainly hope they will be, although I’m not holding my breath, as I treasure my life too highly.
What is the church’s reasoning behind celibacy for the priesthood in the first place?
I can’t for the life of me understand how someone who is supposedly in charge of people’s souls either is involved in abuse or does not do anything about it. What do you imagine is the reasoning involved in those who while not abusers themselves do nothing about the abuse?
There is no great love lost between the Orthodox and Catholics, so when I was married in a Greek Orthodox Church, they were none the too happy. Even my baptismal certificate would not convince them I was a Christian. What finally persuaded them was a letter written by a priest who was my dad’s best friend and who had officiated at my sister’s wedding, in which he wrote of what a good Christian I was, etc. Imagine my horror in reading the following about him a while back:
“It is with great sadness I must report two claims of misconduct have been made against a former priest…now deceased. The alleged misconduct in both cases occurred many years ago.
Our first response is to extend heartfelt prayers for those who have been affected, and for their families, as we work to help them heal.
It is our expectation that these claims will be resolved between the Archdiocesan bankruptcy proceedings and our insurance companies, along with the claims that have been made against other parishes. Because we are covered by insurance, we expect at this point that any financial ramifications for the parish would be minimal or nonexistent.”
Like all of it, it just leaves me speechless.
In the earliest centuries, east and west both had married priests, but–following the laws of the Jewish priests–they had to abstain from sexual relations prior to serving at the altar, but since they were regularly saying some sort of liturgy it quickly became effectively a total ban on sex.
This became a source of constant scandal–when the priest’s wife starts showing, everyone knows that he hasn’t been following the canons. The east responded by throwing in the towel and allowing married priests to procreate; the West responded by doing away with married priests (that led to its own ongoing scandal that ran through the middle ages).
I’ve been advocate of married priests for a long time, but adopting it on a large scale in the west will require radically restructuring the Church. The church can’t very well afford to pay most priests a family wage, so most married priests would end up being part-time priests. And you can’t relocate a part-time employee every four years, so priest would have been be given much greater stability than they are now. What you end up with is a lot like what you see in the eastern rites: Clergy tend to be home-grown. Even when priests are moved, it is rare and they tend to stay in once place for decades.
What do you imagine is the reasoning involved in those who while not abusers themselves do nothing about the abuse?
That is an interesting question. I suspect it varies from case to case:
I suspect there is some naivete: Before we understood the psychology of paedophilia, I think ecclesiastics may have thought it was just a sin that one could repent of and move on. Keep in mind, they are in the business of dispensing mercy; not being judgemental and giving people a second chance without destroying their lives or ruining their reputations is what they are trained to do.
On the other side of being in the buisness of dispensing mercy is that nothing really shocks you. Priests say that all the time: from their time in the confessional, they have heard it all. They have a front row seat into just how morally weak and depraved humans are, so they may be inured to the normal shock we expect them to feel.
I suspect there was also a natural desire to protect the institution. It isn’t good for people’s faith to know that priests are engaged in sexual abuse. This could apply both to prelates who sincerely believed that the Church was the gate to salvation and wanted to save souls, but it could also apply to the cynical who just wanted to maintain their power and influence–you don’t want the donations to dry up.
In some cases you might have prelates who naively think the best of their priests–I know that man and he couldn’t do something like that. Or perhaps they know that false allegations are a thing and they err on the side of assuming innocence. I think this was a major factor in JPII’s treatment of Maciel: He was gullible and trusted Maciel’s public persona; he grew up under a communist regime that would discredit people with salacious calumny.
Some less savory motives could also play a part.
The prelate may be protecting his own–If he is also involved in such things, won’t want people to come asking too many questions.
Or perhaps he has simply, long ago, downplayed the significance of such failings and come to accept it. If you are a priest who came through seminary knowing that a sizable chunk of your classmates are sexually active and leading a double-life, even if you aren’t, you will still have reconcile yourself to being part of the institution that you know to be corrupt. There were a lot of open secrets in the Church. The kind of people who really didn’t want to be part of that would tend not to finish seminary.
Finally, it is possible in some cases someone used this as a means of control–essentially black-mail. “I can make this go away, but I can also make it come back. Now you are in my pocket.”
I’m interested in how this has played out over the centuries. We know that sexual misconduct among the clergy has been a problem in the west for a long time (I alluded earlier to the problems through the middle ages in having a celibate clergy; we have lot and lots of canons addressing priests taking up concubines). We have the writings of Peter Damian, attacking sexual activity in the clergy. We have the infamous case of Kleutgen–which the Vatican tried to cover up for decades. Just how bad was the problem historically?
I thought the Catholic law had always historically allowed Priests to be married but they, the Priest, had to have been married before Seminary school training? If not, then no, as in they get married before, during or after becoming a Deacon for so many years they cannot be later ordained as Priest?
Porphyry, am I correct that you generally view Benedict’s papacy favorably?
Yes, that is fair. Benedict was a complicated man–all the smart ones are. And my attitude towards him is similarly complicated (particularly by my no longer being Catholic, which he unquestionably was). But I think he was a good and sincere man, with reasonably good judgement and real principles. I think he had a genuinely pastoral heart. For just one aspect of his complexity, consider that he maintained a relationship with Hans Kung, long after Kung was formally censured.
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