UNITED KINGDOM
The Spectator
Damian Thompson
The Catholic Church is this week in the biggest mess it’s been in since the Second Vatican Council, and Pope Francis is to blame.
The Vatican cardinals in charge of doctrine, finance and worship are believed to have written to Francis at the beginning of the Synod on the Family – now in its second chaotic week – privately warning him that it was likely to spin out of control. That’s because most of the world’s bishops don’t support any major change to the church’s rules on allowing divorced and remarried people to receive communion, or to the way it treats gay couples. You may think they’re wrong, but that is the situation. Also, the cardinals were exasperated by changes to the synod’s procedures that seemed designed to give undue prominence to liberal voices.
A version of the letter was leaked yesterday. There’s confusion over its wording and the names of the 13 cardinals who reportedly signed it, but we know roughly what it said and we can be pretty confident that it had the support of Cardinal Müller, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith; Cardinal Pell, Prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy; Cardinal Sarah, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship; Cardinal Dolan, Archbishop of New York; and Cardinal Napier, Archbishop of Durban. So there we have three out of the four most powerful cardinals in the Curia, plus the most important American cardinal. Sarah (who is from Guinea) and Napier are the two most influential African cardinals.
When the letter appeared, liberal Catholic journalists made desperate attempts to play down the story – making them look like idiots when, this morning, Cardinal Müller described it as ‘the new Vatileaks‘, referring to the revelations of Vatican skulduggery that probably triggered the resignation of Benedict XVI.
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