UNITED STATES
Christian Catholicism
Jerry Slevin
Pope Francis must know well by now that escalating Vatican scandals involving child sex abuse and rampant financial corruption present an unprecedented crisis. These scandals are rapidly reducing papal moral authority and Vatican wealth, while papal rigidity on sexual morality is straining belief in papal infallibility, all together diminishing papal power and influence.
These accelerating challenges have already led to the sudden and first papal resignation in 600 years and to the unexpected and “engineered” installation of an elderly replacement with limited international experience. Will a rapidly aging and potentially unsuccessful Francis soon be the second pope to resign in 600 years?
Indeed, the Archbishop of Malta, a decade younger than Francis, has just unexpectedly resigned early for “health reasons”, reportedly related to “earlier exhaustion” from his unsuccessful “culture war” against divorce in Malta. This is also especially timely and ironic as German bishops relentlessly pushed this week at the Synod to welcome divorced and remarried Catholics and their families back to the German Catholic Church. Of course, German bishops also seek to regain the related and very generous automatic per capita government tax subsidies for German bishops that is not paid with respect to divorced Catholics who elect to be exiles from the German Catholic Church.
Pope Francis also seemed focused at the Synod on stressing topics that attracted desired US media coverage likely to draw out more fundamentalist right wing voters, like “almost welcoming” gay Catholics, while avoiding topics, like removing the contraception ban and affirming women’s equality, that may draw out opposing US voters, in critical US Senate elections in barely two weeks. Francis’ US billionaire allies must be pleased.
While Pope Francis may have a broad smile, a warm heart and a Jesuit’s shrewdness, by his own admission, he is a “son of the Church” and may be permanently handicapped by his own history in making the changes needed. And he is running out of time. As reported, he has exhibited earlier in Argentina, at least as early as his failed approach to saving two of his former Jesuit teachers from torture by military thugs, an overconfidence in his ex-bouncer propensity to “bull” ahead, beneath his disarming smiles, with imprudent solutions to tough problems.
Pope Francis has failed so far to even control at the Synod his own Cardinals, like Burke and Pell. Moreover, over 15 % (32 of the 190) of the prelates who attended the Synod even voted against or failed to vote on the “soft-style” and “lyrical” Final Message of the leaders of the Synod. Who knows whether, or when, the final report will by published given the hundreds of proposed amendments and divergent viewpoints of many bishops, as the papal press officer, Fr. Lombardi, keeps revising his “expectations’.
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