NEW YORK (NY)
National Review
February 6, 2020
By Daniel Mahoney
In the first year or two of Pope Francis’s pontificate, conservative-minded Catholics made heroic efforts to place the perplexing ways of the new pope in continuity with the thought and deeds of his immediate predecessors. It was said that he had been a forceful critic of liberation theology, at least in its Marxist expressions, that he was a man of traditional piety, that he spoke about the machinations of the Evil One with surprising regularity, and that his style — brash, critical of established ways, anxious for dialogue with the modern world — was a refreshing way of bringing Christian orthodoxy to bear on the modern world. But there were early signs that challenged this reassuring consensus. Francis seemed suspicious of the most faithful Catholics — they were, in his estimation, rigid, obsessed with the evils of abortion and sexual sins, closed to the need for a Church open to humanitarian activism and a de-emphasis on dogma and even truth.
If Pope John Paul II stood up to Communist savagery and mendacity with a courage and integrity that helped ignite the revolutions of 1989, and if the immensely learned Pope Benedict XVI gave soft nihilism a remarkably descriptive and accurate name, “the dictatorship of relativism,” Pope Francis stood for nothing less than accommodating the world in the name of “change” and deference to the alleged “signs of the times.” As Cardinal Zen of Hong Kong once noted, Francis could see Communists as merely the victims of Latin American military dictatorship and lovers of the poor and thus more Christian than Christians in decisive respects. The gulags, and massive religious persecution, did not fit into this vision of relatively benign Communists.
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While the Church remains largely silent about (in the words of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI) “crimes and sins that cry out to Heaven” — the terrible clerical and episcopal sexual abuse and the hideous cover-ups that followed — Francis puts much of his energies into promoting ecological activism (with an apocalyptic edge) and any number of simplistic progressive causes. One sometimes hears the voice of a politically charged functionary of the United Nations more than that of the Vicar of Christ on earth. The institutional Church, meaning its assorted bishops and their conferences, responds to this revolution in the Church with silence, passivity, and those time-serving bureaucratic and self-protective habits that led the Church into crisis in the first place. The crisis is just that deep.
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