Pope
Francis is one of the most hated men in the world today. Those who hate him most
are not atheists, or protestants, or Muslims, but some of his own followers.
Outside the church he is hugely popular as a figure of almost ostentatious
modesty and humility. From the moment that Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio became pope
in 2013, his gestures caught the world’s imagination: the new
pope drove a Fiat,
carried his own bags and settled his own bills in hotels; he asked, of gay
people, “Who am I to judge?” and washed the feet of Muslim women refugees.
But
within the church, Francis has provoked a ferocious backlash from conservatives
who fear that this spirit will divide the church, and could even shatter it.
This summer, one prominent English priest said to me: “We can’t wait for him to
die. It’s unprintable what we say in private. Whenever two priests meet, they
talk about how awful Bergoglio is … he’s like Caligula: if he had a horse, he’d
make him cardinal.” Of course, after 10 minutes of fluent complaint, he added:
“You mustn’t print any of this, or I’ll be sacked.”
This
mixture of hatred and fear is common among the pope’s adversaries. Francis, the
first non-European pope in modern times, and the first ever Jesuit pope, was
elected as an outsider to the Vatican establishment, and expected to make
enemies. But no one foresaw just how many he would make. From his swift
renunciation of the pomp of the Vatican, which served notice to the church’s
3,000-strong civil service that he meant to be its master, to his support for
migrants, his attacks on global capitalism and, most of all, his moves to
re-examine the church’s teachings about sex, he has scandalised reactionaries
and conservatives. To judge by the voting figures at the last worldwide meeting
of bishops, almost a quarter of the college of Cardinals – the most senior
clergy in the church – believe that the pope is flirting with
heresy.
The
crunch point has come in a fight over his views on divorce. Breaking with
centuries, if not millennia, of Catholic theory, Pope Francis has tried to
encourage Catholic priests to give
communion to some divorced and remarried
couples, or to families where unmarried parents are cohabiting. His enemies are
trying to force him to abandon and renounce this effort.
Since
he won’t, and has quietly persevered in the face of mounting discontent, they
are now preparing for battle. Last year, one cardinal, backed by a few retired
colleagues, raised the possibility of a formal declaration of heresy – the
wilful rejection of an established doctrine of the church, a sin punishable by
excommunication.
Last month, 62 disaffected Catholics, including one retired
bishop and a former head of the Vatican bank,
published an open letter that accused Francis of seven specific counts of
heretical teaching.
To
accuse a sitting pope of heresy is the nuclear option in Catholic arguments.
Doctrine holds that the pope cannot be wrong when he speaks on the central
questions of the faith; so if he is wrong, he can’t be pope. On the other hand,
if this pope is right, all his predecessors must have been wrong.
The
question is particularly poisonous because it is almost entirely theoretical. In
practice, in most of the world, divorced and remarried couples are routinely
offered communion. Pope
Francis is not proposing a revolution, but the
bureaucratic recognition of a system that already exists, and might even be
essential to the survival of the church. If the rules were literally applied, no
one whose marriage had failed could ever have sex again. This is not a practical
way to ensure there are future generations of
Catholics. The Guardian.
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