AUSTRALIA
The Age
October 16, 2015
Michael Koziol
Journalist
Pope Francis is dealing with a Rats in the Ranks-style mutiny aboard the good ship Vatican. The right faction, led in this case by Australia’s penny-counting Cardinal George Pell, is rebelling against a perceived shift to the liberal left during a three-week meeting of theologians in Rome.
The Synod of Bishops, which is to determine the church’s policy and rhetoric on familial matters, is particularly vexed about whether to grant Communion to divorced Catholics who have remarried.
Punishing divorcees might be considered something of a breach of taste in some circles, but for conservative Catholics it is an article of faith. And like a disgruntled backbench, the cardinals weren’t content to sit around and watch history pass them by. So they reached for the oldest trick in the book – a polite but firm ultimatum to their leader, duly leaked to the media.
Veteran Vatican-watcher Sandro Magister reported that 13 cardinals had signed the letter to Pope Francis, including Pell, who delivered it. A version of the text, which may not have been the final composition, was published by the Italian magazine L’espresso, revealing that the disaffected group felt the synod lacked “openness and genuine collegiality”.
“A number of fathers feel the new process seems designed to facilitate predetermined results on important disputed questions,” they wrote. The fathers did not fail to note the “collapse of liberal Protestant churches” that had jettisoned too many hard-core Christian beliefs.
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