Lost Shepherd

by Philip F. Lawler

  True, the pope did not actually say that contraception could be justified. He simply said that “avoiding pregnancy is not an absolute evil.” But what other conclusion were reporters likely to draw from his statement? If you ask me whether it is justifiable to rob a bank, and I reply that bank robbery is not an absolute evil, haven’t I indicated that I am open to a discussion about whether bank robbery is licit in certain circumstances? Certainly I have not given the impression that I think bank robbery is always immoral.

  UN officials were suggesting that married couples should routinely practice artificial contraception because of the Zika epidemic. Nothing in the pope’s remarks suggested that there was a moral problem with that approach. Moreover the pope failed to point out the flaw in the major premise of the argument for routine contraception: the assumption that the Zika virus was responsible for microcephaly. But there was little scientific evidence to support that assumption, as the pope’s own representative highlighted in a presentation to the United Nations.

  How damaging was this papal interview? Loyal defenders of the pontiff said that his words had been taken out of context. But the problem was not sensationalistic reporting. Proponents of contraception and abortion had been exploiting the Zika epidemic to advance their cause. In his confusing statement, Francis had conveyed the impression that he was ready to discuss the morality of contraception in the context of the Zika epidemic.

  … And on Gender Ideology

  Later in 2016, the pope caused dismay with his statement on another hot topic: gender ideology. During an October visit to Tbilisi, Georgia, the pontiff had denounced gender ideology in ringing terms. “Today there is a world war to destroy marriage,” he said, and gender theory is an important part of it. He urged the people of Georgia to resist such “ideological colonizations which destroy—not with weapons but with ideas.” Strong words, these.

  But the very next day, in an illustration of what Sandro Magister had called the “two-step,” the pope undercut his own statement. In an exchange with reporters on his flight back to Rome—another airplane interview!—he showed himself willing to give gender theorists what they want most: the freedom to change pronouns.

  In answer to an American journalist’s question about his condemnation of gender theory, the pope delivered a convoluted yet revealing reply:

  Last year I received a letter from a Spaniard who told me his story as a child, a young man, he was a girl, a girl who suffered so much because he felt like a boy, but was physically a girl. He told his mother and the mom … [the girl] was around 22 years old said that she would like to do the surgical intervention and all of those things. And the mother said not to do it while she was still alive. She was elderly and she died soon after. She had the surgery and an employee of a ministry in the city of Spain went to the bishop, who accompanied [this person] a lot. Good bishop. I spent time accompanying this man. Then [the man] got married, he changed his civil identity, got married and wrote me a letter saying that for him it would be a consolation to come with his wife, he who was she, but him!

  Notice that last line: the pope’s reference to “he who was she, but him!” Those words were not included in the Vatican’s official summary of the interview, but the telling phrase was reported by other news agencies, with only small variations in the translations. The pope said that a “she” had become a “he.” Even according to the official Vatican summary, he introduced the individual, born female, as “a Spanish man.” He accepted the change of sexual identity as a fact.

  The pope went on to say that he had met with the Spanish couple, “and they were very happy.” Nowhere did he suggest that the “he who was she” was troubled or had done anything wrong. Indeed, the pope’s full response to the reporter’s question suggested only that it was wrong to teach gender ideology in schools, “to change the mentality” of students. In this case, the Spanish girl apparently made her own decision to manipulate her sexual identity, and the pontiff registered no objection. He applauded the Spanish prelate who “accompanied him greatly.” Did that bishop urge the girl not to disfigure herself, not to rebel against God’s plan for her life? If he did, Francis did not mention it.

  A young girl who is unhappy as a girl needs sympathy, support, and loving care. But if she thinks of herself as a boy, she should not be encouraged in that delusion. A girl is a girl, and a boy is a boy, and neither medical procedures nor hormone injections can change that reality. When God established the human race, the book of Genesis tells us, “male and female he created them.” The distinction between male and female identity is the great “given,” an integral part of God’s plan—not just for humanity as a whole but for each one of us. The notion that one can decide one’s own sex entails a rejection of creation. It is a claim that the individual can build his own reality, that there are no “givens”—in short a rejection of God’s sovereignty.

  So what happened in the case of that unfortunate Spanish girl? Did God create her in a way such that her body was in conflict with her soul? The suggestion is ludicrous if not blasphemous. Then did she rebel against God’s plan? If so, she needs pastoral help, not encouragement in her rebellion. And the same is true for other confused young people who might hear about this case, and conclude (mistakenly, no doubt, but understandably) that the pope would support their decision to change their sexual identity.

  “I wish to be clear,” the pope said. “Please don’t say, ‘The pope sanctifies transgenders’”—a line that was omitted, curiously enough, from the Vatican summary. Unfortunately, wishing to be clear does not guarantee clarity. Surely the Holy Father did not set up transgender people as models. And we can all agree that the pope did not endorse sex-change operations. But if a confused young person read through the pope’s answer, looking for some reason not to change his sexual identity, he would not find it. In the momentous battle between truth and falsehood, the defenders of truth had just been hit by friendly fire.

  Many (including me) who were intrigued by Francis’s fresh new approach in the first two weeks of his pontificate were worried after the first two years and by the fourth anniversary of his ascent to the throne of St. Peter were thoroughly dismayed. Meanwhile another change had taken place, largely ignored by the secular media. The crowds that had thronged to the papal audiences of 2013 began to thin out. The energetic discussions of Catholicism petered out, too. The “Francis effect” was wearing off.

  Jean-Marie Guénois, the religion editor of the French daily Le Figaro, was probably the first journalist to spot the trend. In November 2014, when Francis traveled to Strasbourg to address the European Parliament, Guénois—who had been a member of the Vatican press corps for more than twenty years and been abroad the papal plane for more than fifty foreign trips—noticed that two things were different. First, the streets of Strasbourg were nearly empty as the papal motorcade traveled from the airport to the European Parliament. There were scarcely any people on the sidewalks to greet—or for that matter even to heckle—the pope. Second, the pope’s quick trip included no events, however brief, that were open to the public. Francis addressed the Parliament, spoke to the leaders of the European Council, and quickly hopped on a flight back to Rome. Guénois concluded sadly, “The Pope did not want to see the people of Alsace, and the people of Alsace did not want to see the Pope.”

  On other, later papal trips, the crowds were back. During his visit to the United States the following year, for instance, the pope spoke to impressive crowds in Washington and New York, and an audience estimated at several hundred thousand greeted him in Philadelphia. The tepid public reaction to that papal visit to Strasbourg may have been an isolated incident. Still, the quick trip to Strasbourg was an indication that initial public enthusiasm for the new pope was beginning to erode.

  1 Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, the chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, confused matters in December 2015 by stating at a conference that the pope’s judgment on climate change “must be considered magisterium [that
is, official Church teaching]—it is not an opinion.” The American Jesuit Joseph Fessio corrected that error in an interview with LifeSite News: “Neither the pope nor Bishop Sorondo can speak on a matter of science with any binding authority, so to use the word ‘magisterium’ in both cases is equivocal at best, and ignorant in any case. To equate a papal position on abortion with a position on global warming [as Bishop Sorondo had done] is worse than wrong; it is an embarrassment for the Church.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Stalled Reforms

  The College of Cardinals elected Pope Francis with a mandate to reform the administration of the Holy See. They wanted an end to the “Vatileaks” that had troubled the previous pontificate and tighter control over Vatican administrators. They also wanted the new pope to advance the reforms that Pope Benedict—not a strong administrator, as he himself would acknowledge—had begun in two crucial areas: the Vatican’s financial affairs and the handling of sexual-abuse complaints.

  Benedict XVI had commissioned three senior cardinals to investigate the Vatileaks scandal, and their report on the problems within the Roman Curia was the subject of intense speculation before the papal conclave. Did it confirm the influence of a “gay lobby” within the Vatican? Or the existence of a cabal that was obstructing Benedict’s reforms? Or financial misconduct that powerful prelates were eager to keep secret? Was the report discouraging enough to convince the aging pope that he did not have the stamina to attack the problems? All those theories were raised and discussed in the wake of Benedict’s resignation. Oddly, the subject was dropped entirely from public discussions after Francis was elected.

  It was Benedict who began the difficult but necessary financial reforms, installing a new management team at the troubled Vatican bank, formally known as the Institute for Religious Works, and establishing the Financial Information Authority to supervise all Vatican transactions. Against intense resistance from the Vatican bureaucracy, he allowed the Council of Europe’s anti-money-laundering agency to scrutinize the Holy See’s financial dealings—a decision that John Allen, the leading American Vatican-watcher, praised as “[p]erhaps the single most important” financial reform of his pontificate.

  It was on the issue of sexual abuse, however, that Benedict made the most determined strides. Dissatisfied with the disciplinary actions taken (or in many cases, not taken) by various Vatican offices, he had succeeded during the last years of the reign of John Paul II in getting the responsibility for dealing with priests accused of sexual abuse moved to his own office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. In a memorable statement before the conclave that elected him pope, Cardinal Ratzinger lamented how the face of the Church had been disfigured by the “filth” of clerical misconduct.

  After his election, Benedict escalated his campaign against abusive clerics. He instructed his subordinates that he should never be photographed alongside the influential founder of the Legion of Christ, Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, who had been accused of molesting his seminarians, and ordered a high-level investigation into the complaints that had been brushed aside for years by the Mexican priest’s powerful friends in the Roman Curia. As the damaging evidence mounted, Maciel was removed as head of the Legion, and in 2006 he was sentenced to spend the remainder of his life in “prayer and penance.” Benedict then ordered an investigation of the religious order that Maciel had founded, to determine how much its integrity had been corrupted by the founder’s double life.

  The Maciel case was only one of hundreds that were adjudicated by the Vatican during the pontificate of Benedict XVI. It is true that complaints of clerical misconduct continued to pour into the Vatican as the scandal that had erupted in the United States in 2002 now hit Europe. But the vast majority of those complaints involved incidents that had taken place long ago. And as the cases percolated through the Vatican’s system of justice, Benedict was unflagging in his determination to purge the “filth” from the priesthood. In 2011 and 2012 alone, he laicized (in journalistic parlance, “defrocked”) nearly four hundred priests.

  Reforms Derailed

  The need for reform at the Vatican—for a more responsive bureaucracy, for financial transparency, and for effective discipline of clerical misconduct—did not pit liberals against conservatives. Benedict, apparently concluding that he no longer had the strength to lead a major reform, stepped down to clear the way for someone more energetic. Francis assumed the papacy with this problem foremost in his mind, and to this day he is generally regarded as a reformer.

  Unfortunately, more than four years into his pontificate, Francis has failed to advance the cause of reform. On the contrary, after a promising start, he has derailed reforms that were begun under Benedict and even reforms that he initiated himself. His disdain for organization and his penchant for quick decisions have provoked several reversals of policy and heightened confusion within the Roman Curia.

  Most importantly, Francis has aborted the two most critical reforms. He established the Secretariat for the Economy, giving it broad powers, and then rescinded those powers, leaving it unable to bring the desired transparency to the Vatican’s finances. He set up a special panel to advise the universal Church on the handling of sexual abuse, but that panel’s recommendations have not been implemented, and frustrated members have resigned—disclosing as they did so that for three years after he established the panel, the pope never met with its members. Francis himself has overlooked the failure of some of his own favorite bishops to confront abusive clerics. His dramatic reform initiatives now appear to be empty gestures, and the unhealthy clerical attitudes that Francis himself has decried so energetically have been reinforced.

  The “Diseases” of the Roman Curia

  Consider first the reform of the Roman Curia: the “big-ticket item” in the new pope’s mandate. For more than a year after his election, Francis burnished his reputation as a crusading reformer, most notably with a stunning philippic against the failings of Vatican bureaucrats.

  The pope’s annual address to the Roman Curia, delivered sometime before Christmas, is usually understood as an exchange of holiday greetings and an occasion for the pontiff to share his top priorities with his closest associates. In 2005, for example, Benedict XVI used the occasion to give his famous talk against “the hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture” in the interpretation of Vatican II, a message that became a major theme of his pontificate.

  In December 2014, Francis delivered a searing critique of the “sicknesses” within the Curia, jolting Vatican-watchers (not to mention the Curia) and eliminating any possible confusion about his pastoral priorities. Reform of the Roman Curia would be his number one goal—for 2015 and probably for his entire pontificate.

  The previous year’s address had included a comparatively mild warning against gossip and intrigue. This time he returned to that topic but left subtlety aside as he tore into the familiar vices of bureaucracies: an inward-looking and self-important approach, careerism, pettifoggery, factionalism, and lack of a sense of humor. He spoke about the “existential schizophrenia” of Vatican officials who may be leading “a hidden, often dissolute life.” And he made it abundantly clear that he was not speaking in purely abstract terms—that he believed all these failings could be found within the corridors of the Vatican.

  At the end of his address the pope gave a nod to the faithful servants of the Church, mentioning that clerics, like airplanes, “only make the news when they crash.” But that quick word of praise came too late to soften the overall message. Photos of the meeting show a room full of long-faced prelates. Reports indicate that the pope received only sparse, tepid applause. The mood of the pre-Christmas meeting was anything but joyous.

  “I have to say, I didn’t feel great walking out of that room today,” one Vatican official told John Allen, who remarked that the pope’s confrontational approach might be a risky one. He may want to change the way the Vatican works, but he cannot afford to alienate his entire staff or destroy morale. He ne
eds someone to help him carry out his plans—even his plans for reform of the Roman Curia.

  Francis’s willingness to risk the anger of his staff, returning to the topic of the previous year’s gentle rebuke and escalating his rhetoric so dramatically, suggested that the iron had entered his soul: that he had encountered resistance and was determined to overcome it.

  New Offices with Unclear Powers

  Just a few days before that stunning Christmas address, Jean-Marie Guénois had presciently reported in Le Figaro (in an article headlined “Secret War at the Vatican: How Pope Francis Is Shaking Up the Church”) on a struggle between a pope determined to change the way the Vatican does business and entrenched officials equally determined to resist the changes. In a sense the Holy Father was addressing not only the Vatican staff but the Church at large, explaining to everyone why it was so important to reform the Roman Curia.

  To assist him in that crusade, Francis created a new Council of Cardinals, composed of nine prelates from around the world, to study the existing structures of the Vatican and examine proposals for reform. At this writing, more than four years into the pontificate, the Council of Cardinals has met nineteen times, usually sitting in three-day sessions, poring over countless reports and recommendations, yet the actual changes in the Vatican’s organizational chart have been minimal.

  Francis has established two new bodies—the Dicastery for Laity, Family, and Life and the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development—but neither was originally proposed by the Council of Cardinals. They developed instead from the suggestions of several cardinals in the general congregations before the conclave of 2013 and were formed by merging the duties and staffs of existing pontifical councils and commissions. Notice that both offices are designated as “dicasteries”—the blanket term for any office of the Holy See. They have no clear position in the Vatican’s organizational chart, their responsibilities have not been fixed, and their staffs have not been fully integrated.