ROME
The Times (UK)
Philip Willan, Rome
December 19 2016
The Times
The Pope is facing an unprecedented smear campaign designed to undermine his three-year pontificate. It has been orchestrated by cardinals angry about his sympathy for homosexuals and divorcees.
The campaign, spearheaded by conservative forces within the Vatican, amounts to “a subterranean civil war” within the church, Marco Politi, an expert on the Holy See, said. He added that the smear campaign included books, articles and letters contesting, in particular, the Pope’s teaching that divorced and remarried Catholics can “in certain cases” be allowed to take communion.
Mr Politi said that the criticisms of the Pope from within the Vatican constituted a direct and personal attack that was unprecedented in modern times. He cited the pontiff’s progressive reforms, including his advocacy of a more merciful approach to marital breakdown.
In an article published by Il Fatto Quotidiano newspaper to mark the Pope’s 80th birthday on Saturday, Mr Politi said: “It’s a systematic campaign of delegitimisation, which questions the very authority of the pontiff and the rightness of his guidance.”
Mr Politi, a veteran observer of Vatican affairs and author of the book Pope Francis among the Wolves, said that the ideological battle resembled the one fought over the modernising reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.
While Vatican factions have traditionally fought among themselves, they still accepted the role of the Pope as referee, he said. “It’s absolutely new that the attacks should be levelled directly at the Pope now.”
Last month four cardinals, including the conservative American Raymond Burke, wrote to the Pope asking him to clarify his guidance on this point, which was published in a footnote to Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love), a teaching document issued last April.
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