ROME
The New Yorker
OCTOBER 16, 2015
BY ALEXANDER STILLE
The honeymoon for Pope Francis is over—at least in Rome. The first two weeks of the Synod on the Family have been characterized by open rebellion, corridor intrigue, leaked documents, accusations of lack of transparency, and sharp divisions among the bishops and cardinals. In the first real crisis of his papacy, Francis finds himself in the position of enjoying a rare degree of popularity among the public but facing an unusual degree of dissent within an institution generally so respectful of hierarchy.
There was some inkling of this during the Pope’s triumphant visit to the U.S. “If a conclave were to be held today, Francis would be lucky to get ten votes,” a Vatican source told me at the time. “He gets an A-plus on public relations, but an F on all the rest.” This statement was certainly an exaggeration, but it reflected genuine unease within the Roman curia. An obvious sign of trouble came when the papal nuncio in Washington arranged for the pope to meet Kim Davis, the Kentucky state employee who refused to grant (or to delegate others to grant) marriage licenses to gay couples. The move—by a monsignor who is no stranger to Vatican intrigue and power politics—embarrassed the Pope and scored a couple of points for Church conservatives on the eve of the synod.
Traditionalists in the Church were alarmed by some of the developments at the first session of the Synod, held last fall. Progressive cardinals and bishops—drawing on the work of the German theologian Walter Kasper—pushed an agenda that included the possibility of allowing divorced Catholics who had remarried to take communion, and a more open attitude toward both homosexuals and couples who lived together without marrying. They reintroduced the concept of “graduality,” so that unmarried, previously divorced, and gay couples, by demonstrating love and fidelity toward one another, could be seen as moving toward the gospel rather than simply “living in sin.” As the German cardinal Reinhard Marx put it, “Take the case of two homosexuals who have been living together for thirty-five years and taking care of each other, even in the last phases of their lives… How can I say that this has no value?”
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