UNITED STATES
The New Yorker
By James Carroll
For readers consumed with the Trumpian chaos of the past ten days, images of a white-robed Pope Francis standing beside a man dressed like a nutcracker—the Grand Master of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, epauletted and festooned in red and gold—likely seemed absurd and irrelevant. The Pope, one might have read, had forced the resignation of the head of an ancient vestige of Catholic Europe’s cult of aristocracy. Headlines conveyed the impression of a bizarre Vatican dustup sparked by yet more conservative resistance to the liberalizing impulses of the Pope from Argentina. But the contest between Francis and the Order is more than an irrelevant mummers’ play. It is an emblem of the Church’s wider effort to embrace modernity. More than that—and here is the news—it is a front in the now urgent global struggle against all that Donald Trump has come so quickly to represent. Pope Francis is the anti-Trump.
The Sovereign Military Order of Malta is a small but powerful Catholic organization that traces its lineage all the way back to the Crusades. Its history consists of a bloody, centuries-long retreat forced by infidels, from the Levant to Rhodes and finally to the island-fortress of Malta, where, instead of disappearing, it underwent a metamorphosis. The Order’s creation myth combines military valor in holy wars with humanitarian virtue in maintaining hospitals for the war-ravaged, a tension that survives in the martial nostalgia of its uniforms and its significant charitable outreach. Now based in Rome, it counts more than thirteen thousand members—known as knights and dames—and engages more than a hundred thousand employees and volunteers worldwide. Its claim to be a sovereign national entity is bolstered by the passports it issues, the stamps it prints, and the more than a hundred nations with which it has diplomatic relations. That it is an expressly Catholic organization, holding no territory, with its leaders bound by a vow of obedience to the Roman pontiff suggests, however, that this is a sovereignty that genuflects.
Last week, the Grand Master knelt, symbolically yielding his sword to the Pope. Fra’ Matthew Festing, a Brit, had been embroiled in a nasty squabble with an underling, Grand Chancellor Albrecht Freiherr von Boeselager, a German, whom Festing fired for allowing the Order’s charity to distribute condoms in Myanmar—a violation of Catholic practice. The details of the dispute matter less than Pope Francis’s firm intervention on the side of Boeselager, who, after Festing’s resignation, was reinstated. Defenders of the Order objected to the papal intrusion, calling it a violation of sovereignty—and with condoms at issue, many also caught a whiff of the Pontiff’s liberalizing incense. Conservatives, as usual, gagged. (Ross Douthat, for example, saw a “characteristic move of the papacy” of which he famously disapproves.) Traditionalists have become increasingly peeved with Francis since last November, when he released the encyclical “Amoris Laetitia” (“The Joy of Love”), which seemed to provide an opening for divorced and remarried Catholics to be readmitted to the sacraments. The conservative Order of Malta is not to be confused with anything having to do with the actual island nation, a fact underscored last month when the Catholic bishops of Malta, appealing to “Amoris Laetitia,” declared that a separated or divorced person “at peace with God” cannot be denied communion.
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