In a veiled swipe at his two predecessors, Pope Francis told an interviewer that Vatican II had encouraged openness to “modern culture” and “dialogue with non-believers” but that after it “very little was done in that direction” in the Church. He promised to correct this shortcoming: “I have the humility and ambition to want to do something.”1
Close advisers to Pope Francis, such as Cardinal Kasper, have acknowledged the lack of continuity between this pontificate and past ones. The program of Pope Francis is “not to preserve everything as it has been of old,” according to Kasper.2
The liberal aides of Pope Francis speak of him as a revolutionary pope steadily working to liberalize the Church after a period of conservative retrenchment. To progressives concerned that the changes haven’t been quick enough, Archbishop Victor Fernández, one of the pope’s ghostwriters, offered words of reassurance: “The pope goes slow because he wants to be sure that the changes have a deep impact. The slow pace is necessary to ensure the effectiveness of the changes. He knows there are those hoping that the next pope will turn everything back around.”3
By laying the groundwork for change so methodically, “it’s more difficult to turn things back,” said Fernández. The pope is aiming for “irreversible” change and that even if some cardinals have “regrets” about electing him that “doesn’t change anything,” said Fernández.
It is now taken for granted in the press that Francis’s pontificate is a repudiation of the restorationist priorities of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. As the Wall Street Journal put it, Pope Francis is presiding over a “new Rome,” in which he “has effectively reversed course.”4
Where Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI tried to counteract the influence of liberal theology, Pope Francis is seeking to spread it, noted the Journal.
“Pope Francis’ immediate predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, devoted much of their pontificates to correcting what they deemed unjustified deviations from tradition in the name of Vatican II,” wrote Vatican correspondent Francis X. Rocca, while Francis “In word and deed… has argued that the church’s troubles reflect not recklessness but timidity in interpreting and applying the principles of Vatican II, especially the council’s call for the church to open itself to the modern world.”5
“Popes John Paul and Benedict, who had played key roles at Vatican II, concluded that the church had gone too fast and too far in innovations ranging from the abandonment of religious garb to the acceptance of liberal ideas on sexual morality,” Rocca continued. “In response, they issued the first universal catechism since the 16th century, systematically laying out the church’s fundamental teachings; they censured dissent among theologians and within religious orders; and they reversed moves to expand the role of bishops in the development of church teaching and practice.”6
Francis’s predecessors worried about liturgical looseness, but he shrugs at it. They resisted calls for reopening discussion on issues such as married priests and female deacons, but he signals an openness to it. At a time of rampant religious relativism, they revived a distinctive Catholic identity, but he downplays it. They acknowledged differences between Islam and Christianity; he blurs them. They upheld moral absolutes; he “discerns” exceptions to them.
Some apologists for the pope and his “mercy-over-morals priorities,” as the press has put it, have tried to pass off these and other differences as a mere change of style. But they go well beyond it, as manifest in his support for changing the Church’s sacramental discipline for the divorced-and-remarried. If anything, the changes of style are at the service of changes in substance. His deliberately “pastoral” style is tied to a progressive theology.
In 2011, Pope Benedict XVI delivered a speech to the Tribunal of the Roman Rota about the dangers of “pseudo-pastoral claims.” In retrospect, the speech reads like a warning of his successor’s pontificate, which has been nothing if not pseudo-pastoral. In the name of false pastoralism, Pope Francis pits canon law and doctrine against mercy and the Gospel. In this speech, Pope Benedict XIV takes direct aim at that distortion, arguing that canon law is not contrary to mercy but a safeguard of it:
Canon law is at times undervalued, as if it were a mere technical instrument at the service of any given subjective interest, even one that is not founded on truth. Instead, canon law must always be considered in its essential relationship with justice, in the recognition that, in the Church, the goal of juridical activity is the salvation of souls… It is necessary to note the widespread and deeply rooted, though not always evident, tendency to place justice and charity in opposition to one another, as if the two were mutually exclusive… One must avoid pseudo-pastoral claims that would situate questions on a purely horizontal plane.
Quoting Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict described this “misplaced compassion” as a counterfeit of charity, “sentimentality, pastoral only in appearance.” He called churchmen to courage, which becomes “more relevant the more injustice appears to be the easiest approach to take, insofar as it implies accommodating the desires and expectations of the parties or even the conditioning of the social context.”
The self-consciously “pastoral” Catholicism to which Pope Benedict XVI referred is now on daily display under Pope Francis. A streak of antinomianism, the heresy that drives a wedge between divine law and mercy, runs through many of his speeches and serves as the subtext of his criticism of conservative Catholics.
“Among Catholics there are many, not a few, many, who believe to hold the absolute truth,” Pope Francis has said. “They go ahead by harming others with slander and defamation, and they do great harm… And it must be combated.”7
Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI exhorted Catholics to seek the truth, but Pope Francis makes them feel guilty for pursuing it. In his view, the crisis in the Church is due not to a betrayal of orthodoxy but to an emphasis on it. He rarely misses an opportunity to portray orthodox Catholics as unmerciful and unhinged. “It is amazing to see the denunciations for lack of orthodoxy that come to Rome,” he has said dismissively of Catholics worried about unsound catechesis in their dioceses.8
To the extent that Francis’s Vatican condemns anyone, it is conservatives. Stop objecting to heterodoxy, he has lectured them: “If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist, if he wants everything clear and safe, then he will find nothing. Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal ‘security,’ those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists—they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way, faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies.”9
By condemning these Catholics, Pope Francis is implicitly condemning his predecessors, who urged the faithful to cleave to orthodoxy and value Catholic tradition and doctrinal fidelity.
In a homily that almost perfectly anticipates Pope Francis’s caricaturing of orthodox Catholics as fundamentalists, Pope Benedict XVI said, “Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labeled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be ‘tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine,’ seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires.”
The St. Gallen group, the cabal of liberal cardinals who were instrumental in Bergoglio’s election as pope, had long groused about the “fundamentalist” views of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. They bristled when Pope John Paul II wrote in his encyclical Veritatis Splendor that situation ethics reinforces the moral relativism widespread in society. Said Pope John Paul II: “An attitude of this sort corrupts the morality of society as a whole, since it encourages doubt about the objectivity of the moral law in general and a rejection of the absoluteness of moral prohibitions regarding specific human acts, and it ends up by confusing all judgments about values.” References to that document have been conspicuously absent from Pope Francis’s writings.
Through Pope Francis, the St. Gallen group got its revenge in Amoris Laetitia, where the pope implicitly challenges Veritatis Splendor by stating that the avoidance of adultery is a mere “ideal,” which a Catholic can violate if he “discerns” that his circumstances and conscience justify it. “Hence it can no longer simply be said that all those in any ‘irregular’ situations are living in a state of mortal sin and are deprived of sanctifying grace,” Pope Francis wrote.
At the beginning of Francis’s pontificate, an unnamed Vatican diplomat was quoted in the National Catholic Reporter as saying, “The traditional Latin Mass brigade is finished.”10 The remark wasn’t far off. Unlike his predecessors, Pope Francis has shown no particular attachment to the Church’s liturgical traditions—his indifference to rubrics are visible during his papal masses—and views liturgical conservatives with contempt.
Under his pontificate, religious dedicated to the Church’s liturgical traditions have had to run for cover. One of Pope Francis’s first moves was to harass a growing traditionalist order in Italy called the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate, which had enthusiastically embraced Summorum Pontificum, Pope Benedict’s XVI order authorizing wider use of the traditional Latin Mass. Dismayed by the conservative direction of the order, Pope Francis authorized Vatican officials to meddle in the order’s affairs.
These Vatican officials decreed: “the Holy Father Francis has directed that every religious of the congregation of the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate is required to celebrate the liturgy according to the ordinary rite and that, if the occasion should arise, the use of the extraordinary form (Vetus Ordo) must be explicitly authorized by the competent authorities, for every religious and/or community that makes the request.”11
According to the Vatican correspondent Sandro Magister, this harassment of the order displeased Pope Benedict XVI. Magister reported that the “ban imposed by pope Bergoglio on the congregation of the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate against celebrating the Mass in the ancient rite has been an effective restriction of that freedom of celebrating in this rite which Benedict XVI had guaranteed for all” and that “It emerges from conversations with his visitors that Ratzinger himself has seen in this restriction a ‘vulnus’ [or wound] on his 2007 motu proprio Summorum Pontificum.”12
“What Pope Francis did to the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate is disgusting,” said a monsignor interviewed for this book. Another high-ranking Church official interviewed for this book said that the pope’s treatment of orders like the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate has “emboldened” liberal bishops to harass conservatives in their dioceses. “Liberal bishops know they have the upper hand now,” he said.
“Nobody wants to end up like the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate,” said a priest interviewed for this book. “Now is the time to lie low.”
In various interviews and speeches, Pope Francis has made it clear that it wouldn’t bother him if the traditional Latin Mass movement died. He has mischaracterized Benedict’s rationale for authorizing wider use of it as a “prudential decision motivated by the desire to help people who have this sensitivity.” In fact, Benedict had authorized wider use of the traditional Latin Mass both for the sake of older Catholics and for the sake of future generations of Catholics, whom he feared wouldn’t have access to the liturgical riches of the Catholic patrimony.
Pope Benedict XVI repeatedly spoke of the need to tighten up the liturgy after a period of liberalization in Vatican II’s wake. He called for a “reform of the reform.” Pope Francis is on record calling that movement “mistaken.”13
He doesn’t want a reform of the reform. He supports all of the changes made to the Mass in the 1960s. After a Mass in 2015 commemorating Pope Paul VI’s decision to replace the traditional Latin Mass with the vernacular mass, Pope Francis commented, “Let us give thanks to the Lord for what he has done in his church in these 50 years of liturgical reform. It was really a courageous move by the church to get closer to the people of God so that they could understand well what it does, and this is important for us: to follow Mass like this.”14
In his view, the interest among young Catholics in pre–Vatican II liturgical traditions constitutes empty nostalgia.
“When we were discussing those who are fond of the ancient liturgy and wish to return to it, it was evident that the Pope speaks with great affection, attention, and sensitivity for all in order not to hurt anyone,” Czech archbishop Jan Graubner said to Vatican Radio. “However, he made a quite strong statement when he said that he understands when the old generation returns to what it experienced, but that he cannot understand the younger generation wishing to return to it.”
Graubner quoted Pope Francis as saying, “When I search more thoroughly, I find that it is rather a kind of fashion. And if it is a fashion, therefore it is a matter that does not need that much attention. It is just necessary to show some patience and kindness to people who are addicted to a certain fashion.”15
This dismissive view contrasts sharply with the view of Pope Benedict XVI, who interpreted youth interest as a sign of spiritual health. “Young persons too have discovered this liturgical form, felt its attraction, and found in it a form of encounter with the Mystery of the Most Holy Sacrifice particularly suited to them,” he wrote in Summorum Pontificum. “What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred for us too.”
In 2016, Pope Francis gave an interview in which he reiterated his dim view of youth interest in the ancient liturgy, casting it as sinister: “I ask myself about this. For example, I always try to understand what’s behind the people who are too young to have lived the pre-conciliar liturgy but who want it. Sometimes I’ve found myself in front of people who are too strict, who have a rigid attitude. And I wonder: How come such a rigidity? Dig, dig, this rigidity always hides something: insecurity, sometimes even more…”16
Even when members of the current Curia give voice to the liturgical concerns of the previous pope, Pope Francis makes sure to undercut their comments. Consider the humiliation that Cardinal Robert Sarah, who is prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, suffered after he endorsed the liturgical views of Pope Benedict XVI. He received a widely publicized rebuke from the pope after merely suggesting at a conference in 2016 that “It is very important that we return as soon as possible to a common orientation, of priests and the faithful turned together in the same direction—eastwards, or at least towards the apse—to the Lord who comes.”
Sarah’s statement set off a panic among the liturgical liberals around Pope Francis, and within days Sarah had been called on the carpet. Francis-friendly bishops, such as Cardinal Vincent Nichols of the United Kingdom, instructed their priests to disregard Sarah’s suggestion. Nichols sent them a letter saying that this is no time to “exercise personal preference or taste.” That was followed up by a Vatican “clarification,” which indicated obliquely that Sarah had been confronted by Pope Francis over the matter. Sarah was in effect told to knock off his talk of a “reform of the reform.” According to the pope’s spokesmen, that phrase is no longer to be used, as it is the “source of misunderstandings.”17
According to the Tablet, a liberal Catholic weekly in the United Kingdom, “It is highly unusual for the Vatican to publicly slap down a Prince of the Church, yet not entirely surprising given how Cardinal Sarah has operated since his appointment to lead the Holy See’s liturgy department. There have been a series of incidents that reveal the cardinal is part of a faction making life difficult for this Pope: take, for example, the fact it took Cardinal Sarah’s department more than a year to implement Francis’ simple request that women should be included in the Holy Thursday foot-washing ritual.”18
In October 2016, Cardinal Sarah received a fresh snub: Pope Francis dropped all twenty-seven of his department’s members and replaced them with a roster of liturgical liberals, including Piero Marini, a prominent opponent of traditionalists and an advocate of liturgical dance.
“This almost total clean-out of an entire Congregation’s voting members in a single hit—unprecedented in Vatican history, so it seems—is also in effect a sharp rebuff to Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, the centerpiece of whose pontifical legacy was a restoration of tradition, dignity, and Latin in the Sacred Liturgy,” wrote Fr. Brian Harrison on the day it happened. “One is filled with a deep sense of foreboding as to what changes to the way we are expected to worship, and what possible undermining of Benedict’s liberation of the Traditional Latin Rite, are portended by today’s breathtaking papal purge.”19
According to the prominent German philosopher Robert Spaemann, churchmen connected to Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI have been rendered irrelevant by this pontificate. “He has excluded the Institute John Paul II for Studies on the Family from the pre-Synod consultations,” he said. “I wonder why he throws so many people out of the Vatican who had been called in by Benedict.”20 (In 2016, Pope Francis changed the leadership of the John Paul II Institute, telling its new leader to broaden the “life” agenda to include environmentalism.21)
“He has frozen out Benedict’s appointments,” says a Church insider, who asked to remain anonymous, in an interview for this book. “To the extent that they are still around, they are just figureheads at this point.” Indeed, Vatican observers speak of a “de-Ratzingerization” of the Curia, evident in Francis’s sacking of Benedict-friendly bishops from the crucially important Congregation of Bishops.
“Soon after his election, Francis removed two Americans—Cardinal Justin Rigali and Cardinal Raymond Burke—from the congregation. Both men were major players in constituting the American episcopacy during the papacy of Benedict XVI. Rigali also previously served as secretary of the congregation,” reported the National Catholic Reporter. “Many of the bishops appointed during that era formed the core of ‘culture warrior’ bishops who kept such issues as opposing same-sex marriage, the contraception mandate of the Affordable Care Act, as well as religious liberty foremost on the agenda of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The tone of the conference in recent years has become heavily legalistic both in terms of pastoral approach within the church and in battling in court over civil matters.”22
Pope Francis is stacking the Curia with determined progressives and giving plum assignments to dissenters who had been sidelined during Benedict’s pontificate. In 2015, Pope Francis made Fr. Timothy Radcliffe, one of the Dominican Order’s most flagrant liberals, a consultor to the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. Radcliffe had visited Bergoglio during his tenure as archbishop of Buenos Aires and then had a “long conversation” with him after he became pope. Radcliffe was pleased at his promotion “out of the blue.”23
Radcliffe is a perfect representative of the progressive ideology that Pope Francis seeks to normalize in the Church. Radcliffe is known for his open promotion of gay-rights ideology, his support for Communion for the divorced-and-remarried, and his insistence that the Church embrace female deacons and “loosen” its opposition to female priests and other feminist innovations. He has said that gay sex is “expressive of Christ’s self-gift.” He is heartened by the increasing support for gay civil unions under Pope Francis, and has urged Catholics to watch Brokeback Mountain and read “gay novels.” Catholics, he said, must “belong to each other across every theological boundary.” Gay priests, he argues, are among the “most impressive and dedicated” priests in the Church today and applauds Francis for appreciating their “gifts.”24
Many churchmen who hold the same views as Radcliffe have gone from the margins to the mainstream under Pope Francis.
“The liberals are in charge,” says a Church official interviewed for this book. Pope Francis is “like a low-level Argentinian pol” who surrounds himself with liberal cronies and refuses to brook dissent, he says.
“Discussions during the Synod on the Family revealed the determination with which a group of pastors and theologians do not hesitate to undermine the Church’s doctrinal cohesion. This group functions in the manner of a powerful, international, well-heeled, organized and disciplined party,” according to Monsignor Michel Schooyans. “The active members of this party have ready access to the media; they frequently appear unmasked. They operate with backing from some of the highest authorities in the Church. The main target of these activists is Christian morality, criticized for having a severity incompatible with the ‘values’ of our time. We must find ways which lead the Church to please, by reconciling its moral teaching with human passions.”25
“He has loosened the awful intellectual clamp imposed by John Paul II and Benedict XVI where people were afraid of being silenced,” Mary McAleese, the former president of Ireland, has said.26
That appears painfully true to conservative Catholics. In a sign of the free-wheeling atmosphere under Pope Francis, Johan Bonny, the bishop of Antwerp, explicitly citing the pope’s liberalism, has said that the Church should embrace gay relationships. “There should be recognition of a diversity of forms,” he said. “We have to look inside the church for a formal recognition of the kind of interpersonal relationship that is also present in many gay couples. Just as there are a variety of legal frameworks for partners in civil society, one must arrive at a diversity of forms in the church.”
Under previous popes, such a baldly heterodox claim would have generated a Vatican reprimand. In Bonny’s case, he not only escaped a reprimand but received a promotion. After his comments, he was given by the Vatican a position at the Synod on the Family. “Do not underestimate the significance of this,” said Professor Rik Torfs, a canon law expert and rector of the Catholic University of Leuven. “Bonny advocates a change from principles long held as unshakable, something no bishop could have done under the dogmatic pontificates of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI.”27
In 2016, Pope Francis entrusted the Pontifical Academy for Life to a social liberal, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, whose praise for the propagandistic television show Modern Family has confused Catholics.28 Under the direction of such worldly progressives, the Vatican has received criticism for its unreliable documents. Conservative Catholics, for example, protested the risqué and misleading content in sexual education materials that the Vatican distributed at World Youth Day in Poland in 2016.29 The materials encouraged the use of sexually explicit films as occasions for discussion and neglected to highlight Church teaching. “It’s bad enough when Planned Parenthood pushes perverse forms of sex education into our schools. For the Vatican to jump on that bandwagon is a nightmare scenario,” said Judie Brown, president of the American Life League.30
Pope Francis’s post-synodal apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia marked a theological reversal from Pope John Paul II’s Familiaris Consortio, which he wrote in 1981. That reversal may go down as one of the most historically significant moments of his papacy and is likely to reverberate through the Church for years to come.
In Familiaris Consortio, Pope John Paul II had explicitly rejected access to Communion for the divorced and remarried and reaffirmed moral absolutes against the objections of situation ethicists. Amoris Laetitia strikes at the roots of his work by encouraging the “help of the sacraments” for the divorced-and-remarried, by emphasizing conscience over magisterial teaching, and by obscuring the distinction between mortal and venial sin.
Cardinals who were close to Pope John Paul II have been dismayed by Amoris Laetitia. Cardinal Carlo Caffarra, the former archbishop of Bologna, has described the document as “objectively unclear” and bemoans that it has given rise to a “conflict of interpretations ignited even among bishops.”31
“What has been certain before has become problematic,” wrote Jude Dougherty, the former head of Catholic University’s philosophy department. “Pope Francis’ ambiguous teaching on marriage and the family as well as on other matters lends itself to interpretation by a secular media all too willing to promote a progressive interpretation of any document, indicating that the Church has changed its former teaching.”32
It is commonly said by the media that Francis’s pontificate is one of “mercy.” But in fact he is teaching Catholics that they don’t need mercy, for they haven’t sinned. Pope John Paul II had anticipated this problem when he wrote in Veritatis Splendor, “It is quite human for the sinner to acknowledge his weakness and to ask mercy for his failings; what is unacceptable is the attitude of one who makes his own weakness the criterion of the truth about the good, so that he can feel self-justified, without even the need to have recourse to God and his mercy.”
In other words, if living in a state of adultery doesn’t constitute “mortal sin” and doesn’t deprive one of “sanctifying grace,” as Pope Francis says in Amoris Laetitia, why would anyone need mercy?
“Proselytism is solemn nonsense,” Pope Francis said to the Italian atheist Eugenio Scalfari after reassuring him that he didn’t want him to convert to Catholicism. Pope Francis’s opposition to Catholic evangelization is impossible to square with the message of Dominus Iesus, the 2000 document issued by Joseph Ratzinger and approved by Pope John Paul II, which said “If it is true that the followers of other religions can receive divine grace, it is also certain that objectively speaking they are in a gravely deficient situation in comparison with those who, in the Church, have the fullness of the means of salvation.” That document also sought to “rule out, in a radical way… a religious relativism which leads to the belief that ‘one religion is as good as another.’”
The members of the St. Gallen group disdained that document and pushed for the election of Bergoglio in the hopes of neutralizing it. Cardinal Walter Kasper openly criticized that document, calling it an “unfortunate affirmation.”33 Kasper now celebrates that under Francis the Church enjoys a diversity of belief and practice suppressed by previous popes and that Catholic evangelization no longer occurs. “So ‘the door is open’ for admission of the divorced and remarried to the sacraments,” Kasper has said. “There is also some freedom for the individual bishops and bishops’ conferences. Not all Catholics think the way we Germans think. Here [in Germany] something can be permissible which is forbidden in Africa. Therefore, the pope gives freedom for different situations and future developments.”34
Pope Francis’s decision in 2013 to establish a special Council of Cardinals to advise him was an implicit rebuke to his predecessors, who had been criticized by the Catholic left for “centralizing” the Church. Pope Francis found the idea for this council of cardinals in the work of the Milanese cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, who was one the chief critics of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI.
Martini was a loud supporter of “democratizing” the Church and proposed to further it by making the Church more “synodal.” Martini claimed that the Church was “200 years out of date” and that it should adjust its teachings to the philosophy and culture of the post-Enlightenment West.
Giving credit to Martini for the idea behind the Council of Cardinals, Pope Francis made a revealing comment about its significance: “This is the beginning of a Church whose organization is not only vertical but also horizontal. When Cardinal Martini spoke about this and emphasized the role of the Councils and Synods, he knew only too well how long and difficult the road ahead in that direction would be.”
Marco Garzonio, who is a biographer of Martini, has written that the liberal Church of Pope Francis represents the realization of Martini’s dream for a more temporally minded church:
Martini believed in and never gave up on the “dream,” which Bergoglio is now trying to get onto its feet so that it can be turned into reality.
In the interview of August 8, 2012, published in “Corriere della Sera” on September 1, the day after his death, Martini, with the grave tone of the testamentary bequest and the prophetic admonition, also indicated the practical means: the pope should surround himself with twelve bishops and cardinals if he wants the barque of Peter not to be submerged by internal waves and by a society that no longer believes in it, two hundred years behind as it is on issues like the family, the young, the role of women (this being a topic on which Pope Francis has promised to speak more).
Garzonio added that one of the pope’s comments—that God is not “Catholic”—comes straight from Martini’s work: “In 2007 Martini said in the book-interview ‘Nighttime conversations in Jerusalem’: ‘You cannot make God Catholic. God is beyond the limits and definitions that we establish.’ Many there were who tore their garments. In the Catholic world this seemed to some almost a blasphemy.”35
Pope Benedict XVI attempted to address the problem of politically and theologically liberal nuns in the United States. It has been an open secret for decades that American nunneries operate as centers of left-wing dissent. To take just one example, Sister Carol Keehan, who makes more than a million dollars a year as a health care lobbyist, helped Barack Obama pass Obamacare with its contraceptive mandate. Pope Benedict XVI had sent a team of Vatican officials to conduct a doctrinal investigation of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. The expectation was that that investigation would result in a serious orthodox reform of the organization.
No such reforms ever took place. In 2015, Pope Francis pulled the plug on the investigation and let it be known through his aides that he had no intention of arresting the liberalization of U.S. nuns. Churchmen around Pope Francis indicated their displeasure at the investigation, with Boston cardinal Seán O’Malley going so far as to call Benedict’s investigation a “disaster.”
The liberal media was thrilled by this turn of events. The New York Times ran a story in 2015 titled “Vatican Ends Battle with US Catholic Nuns’ Group,” with a picture of the nuns, bereft of habits, meeting with Pope Francis. The story noted that Francis had “abruptly” ended Benedict’s investigation.
“Under the previous pope, Benedict XVI, the Vatican’s doctrinal office had appointed three bishops in 2012 to overhaul the nuns’ group, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, out of concerns that it had hosted speakers and published materials that strayed from Catholic doctrine on such matters as the all-male priesthood, birth control and sexuality, and the centrality of Jesus to the faith,” it reported. “But Francis has shown in his two-year papacy that he is less interested in having the church police doctrinal boundaries than in demonstrating mercy and love for the poor and vulnerable—the very work that most of the women’s religious orders under investigation have long been engaged in.”
“He met with them himself for almost an hour, and that’s an extravagant amount of papal time,” Eileen Burke-Sullivan, a feminist theologian at Creighton University said to the Times. “It’s about as close to an apology, I would think, as the Catholic Church is officially going to render.”36
“Radical Nuns Okayed by Pope Francis” was among the headlines Francis’s whitewash of the group had produced. Officials under Pope Benedict XVI had spoken about the “doctrinal errors” and “secular mentality” of U.S. nuns. But the final report on them produced by Francis’s Vatican muted these criticisms and ended up praising their political liberalism, likening it to Francis’s. U.S. nuns, according to the report, “resonate with Pope Francis’ insistence that ‘none of us can think we are exempt from concern for the poor and for social justice.’”37
It is no accident that Pope Francis in 2016 made a critic of Benedict’s investigation of U.S. nuns, Archbishop Joseph Tobin, a cardinal, a promotion not lost on the liberal Catholic press, which warmly recalled Tobin’s role in protecting the nuns.
“Tobin is a former superior general of the worldwide Redemptorist religious order, who served from 2010 to 2012 as the number two official at the Vatican’s Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, better known as the ‘Congregation for Religious,’ during the time when the Vatican was conducting two separate investigations of American nuns,” wrote John Allen. “Tobin was publicly critical of those probes, suggesting they had been launched without dialogue or consultation with the women religious, and behind the scenes that didn’t always sit well with some of the prelates who had pushed for them in the first place. Many observers believed at the time his 2012 transfer to Indianapolis, before the usual five-year term in a Vatican office was up, reflected some unhappiness with his more conciliatory line.”38
A Church insider interviewed for this book called the Tobin promotion “a direct poke in the eye to Burke,” a reference to Cardinal Raymond Burke, who had disagreed with Tobin’s opposition to the investigation.
While keeping his hands off orders of politically liberal nuns, he is seeking to “reform” orders of contemplative nuns. In 2016, he issued a binding document governing their orders. Conservatives balked at it, seeing it as an attempt to force traditional houses of contemplative nuns to conform to the liberal regime of Francis.39 “This is a scary document. It could kill off the lifeblood of the church,” said a priest interviewed for this book.
Pope Francis appointed the liberal Brazilian João Braz de Aviz to head up the Vatican’s congregation for religious life. Oblivious to the fact that liberal religious orders are dying, Braz de Aviz has lectured formation directors obtusely, “Do not distance yourself from the great lines of the Second Vatican Council.” He holds that “those that are distancing themselves from the council to make another path are killing themselves—sooner or later, they will die. They will not have sense. They will be outside the church. We need to build, using the Gospel and the council as a departure point.”40 In fact, the religious orders most suspicious of the liberal interpretation of Vatican II favored by Pope Francis and his aides are flourishing.
On matters both doctrinal and political, Pope Francis is breaking with the direction of his predecessors. In the area of diplomacy, Pope Francis is pursuing policies of pacifism and appeasement, which represent a significant departure from the policies of the John Paul II era. As Pope John Paul II biographer George Weigel has written, “the contemporary Vatican seems to have forgotten some crucial lessons from the teaching and diplomacy of the saint who came to Rome from Cracow and became the most consequential pope of the second half of the second millennium.” Francis’s Vatican, wrote Weigel, has embraced the appeasement policies of Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, who served as a leading diplomat during the Cold War and favored “détente” with the Soviet Union:
Those guiding the Holy See’s interface with politics today were born and bred in the Casaroli School. And they are busily replicating Casaroli’s accommodationist (or, if you prefer, less confrontational) formula. This seems clear, if unfortunately clear, in the Vatican’s diplomacy with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and in the Holy See’s refusal to describe what is afoot in Ukraine as a gross violation of international law: an armed aggression by one state against another. It seems evident in the welcome that was afforded Raúl Castro in the Vatican several months ago. Now, to judge from the just-concluded papal visit to Ecuador, Bolivia, and Paraguay, Casaroli 2.0 seems to be informing the Vatican’s approach to the new authoritarians of continental Latin America.41
Even Pope Francis’s canonization of Pope John Paul II, a movement which began under Pope Benedict XVI, was seen as “manipulative,” according to German philosopher Robert Spaemann, insofar as Francis combined it with the canonization of Pope John XXIII in an attempt to pacify liberals in the Church.
“It was already apparent that Francis views his predecessor Pope John Paul II from a critical distance when he canonized him together with John XXIII, even though a second required miracle was not attributed to the latter,” Spaemann has said. “It seemed as if the Pope wanted to relativize the importance of John Paul II.”42
The Polish Church remains upset about Francis’s slighting treatment of John Paul II. “It is spoken about openly in private, but rarely in public,” writes Fr. Raymond de Souza. “If ever there was a contemporary Cause that deserved, as it were, a solo canonisation, it was that of John Paul, perhaps the most consequential historical figure of our time. Had Providence brought the two Causes to maturity at the same time, that would have been one thing, but it was altogether different to waive the requirements for John XXIII in order, it appeared, to diminish or to balance out the attention given to John Paul.”
At the actual canonization ceremony, Pope Francis appeared indifferent. “It was conducted in such an understated fashion as to come off rather flat, despite the enormous number of bishops who came from all over the world. Pope Francis said next to nothing about John Paul, and nothing about Poland at all, despite the immense number of Poles in Rome,” according to de Souza.43
Respect for worldly opinion and secular prestige have also figured far more into this pontificate than the two previous ones. Pope Francis has accelerated canonization movements his predecessors stalled while blocking politically incorrect causes they supported. Croatian Catholics, for example, were disappointed to learn that the canonization cause of Cardinal Aloysius Stepinac has been suspended by Pope Francis out of fear of offending the Serbian orthodox. The victim of a Soviet disinformation campaign, Stepinac has long been the subject of smears. Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI rejected this communist-inspired propaganda. But Pope Francis is taking it seriously, telling Orthodox clerics that he is no “rush” to canonize Stepinac.44
Meanwhile, his support for the canonization of Óscar Romero continues to win him points from the liberal elite. In El Salvador, supporters of Che Guevara call Romero the “saint of America,” but many conservatives feel ambivalence toward the pope’s drive to make him a saint.45
Pope Francis is also winning praise for his “modernizing” of Vatican operations. Reporters walking around the Vatican have spoken of the rise of “God’s consultants,” a worldly group of advisers that Francis has hired. Vatican correspondent John Allen says Francis’s reliance on these advisers “represents a clear break with the Vatican’s traditional ambivalence about relying on secular expertise, on the grounds that secular values are inevitably part of the package… In the past the Vatican [showed]… an instinctive distrust of claims to specialized expertise from people who don’t share the moral and metaphysical worldview of Catholicism. They fear that while they might build a better mousetrap, they also might smuggle alien values and ways of doing business into the Church.”46
The reliance on these experts backfired in the case of Francesca Chaouqui, a public relations consultant whom the Italian press dubbed “pope’s lobbyist” after Pope Francis handpicked her to work on a Vatican financial commission. In 2015, she was arrested by Vatican authorities after she was accused of leaking, in violation of Holy See laws, financial details to the Italian press.
Traditionalists had protested her appointment, pointing to her lewd Facebook selfies and outré tweets. Francis, in “who am I to judge?” mode, ignored these complaints, and Vatican officials extolled “her authoritative leadership based on strong relational and communicative endowments.”
Previous popes weren’t so easily impressed by the “communicative endowments” of a prospective Vatican employee. They were more interested in orthodoxy. But that is now the last, not the first, consideration at the Vatican. In the course of her Vatican trial, she was accused of trying to seduce a Vatican monsignor, a charge that she has vehemently denied.47
In 2015, the Vatican hired PricewaterhouseCoopers to help reform its finances, but then mysteriously pulled its contract the following year, leading some to wonder if the talk of reform under Francis had been overblown. After some bad press, the contract was later renewed.48
Some Vatican employees have complained about the unfair labor practices of a “social justice” pope. He tends to romanticize the sufferings of the proletariat, whom he calls the “pueblo.” “The word ‘people’ is not a logical category, it is a mystical category,” he has said. But as Crux reported, “some of the Vatican’s own lay employees would like to ask him, ‘What about us?’”
“Most lay workers in the Vatican who spoke to Crux did so on background, because they’re not authorized to give interviews and also for fear of consequences on the job,” it was reported. “‘If it was up to Pope Francis, we’d all work for free,’ one Vatican employee said.”49
On matters both large and small, Pope Francis has deviated from the path of his predecessors. His program has been not to complete their projects but to derail them and pursue his own. Like many priests of his generation, he had chafed under the conservative remnants in the post–Vatican II Church. As pope, he saw his chance to wipe them out. Whether he will succeed remains an open question. “While Pope Francis has had a great acceptance in milieus which otherwise have little to do with the Church, there exists a polarization within the Church,” allows Cardinal Christoph Schönborn.50