The occasion was the launch of the Italian-language edition of The Benedict Option, by Rod Dreher, a senior editor at The American Conservative magazine and a self-described “crunchy conservative.” In the book, Dreher praises the sixth-century monk St. He promoted Benedict’s vision for the Catholic Church. On the morning of September 11, 2018, Gänswein gave a talk in the library of Italy’s Chamber of Deputies before a gathering of policy wonks. He is popularly known as “Gorgeous Georg.” He is Benedict’s secretary and caregiver, and lives with the Pope emeritus in a renovated, multi-room former convent behind a thick hedge and high fences in the gardens of Vatican City. As Diarmaid MacCulloch, professor of Church history at Oxford, tells me: “Two Popes is a recipe for schism.”Ī key figure in the twin-Pope rivalry is a handsome archbishop, Georg Gänswein, known for his skiing, his tennis, and his sartorial bella figura. Instead, the rift between Francis’s loyalists and Benedict’s insurgents threatens to provoke the biggest split in the Catholic Church since the 16th-century Reformation, when Martin Luther and other pious reformers led the Protestant revolt against the Vatican. Loyalty through thick and thin to the single living Supreme Pontiff is the open secret of Catholic unity. Would the jolly John XXIII have initiated the reforming Second Vatican Council had Pius XII, his autocratic predecessor, been watching lugubriously from a neighboring window? And would John Paul II have shaken the rotting tree of the Soviet Union had the anguished, hesitant Paul VI, who had contemplated a Vatican accord with Moscow, been lurking at his elbow? Whatever the direction of the papacy, left or right, for better or for worse, it’s the unique, exclusive primacy of one Pope at a time that lends supreme authority and power to his office. The mere presence of a former Pope has been enough to test the mettle and independence of Francis from day one. Think King Lear, who gave all yet stayed to control, disastrously, or Hamlet’s Ghost. To what can this two-Pope circumstance be compared? We are in the realms of archetypes and myth. Earlier this year, Francis had rushed to the defense of Chilean bishops accused of covering up sexual abuse, only to reverse himself after a 2,300-page report he had commissioned painted an unmistakable picture of misconduct.ĭisentangling this legacy of shame would be challenging enough for a Pope who wasn’t looking over his shoulder at a predecessor. Francis responded by accepting Wuerl’s resignation, yes, but also praising Wuerl for his “nobility” and asking him to continue running his archdiocese until a replacement could be found. In August, a Pennyslvania grand jury reported evidence of a widespread cover-up of sexual abuse by Church leaders, including Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the Archbishop of Washington, D.C.
#POPE FRANCIS WAS A BAR BOUNCER AND SOCIALIST SERIES#
Still, Francis’s instinct for empathy-and, perhaps, his hatred of gossip-has led him to make a series of unforced errors. Francis has gone much further than John Paul II and Benedict ever did to acknowledge that the Catholic Church bears shameful responsibility for the sexual-abuse scandals that have erupted around the world in recent decades. It’s hard to blame Francis’s defenders for taking a skeptical view of conservative outrage over the papacy’s handling of sexual abuse. had dropped to 51 percent, 19 points below where it had been in January 2017. Michael the Archangel to “protect the church from the devil, who is always looking to divide us from God and from one another.” By the time the Vatican issued a statement condemning Viganò’s allegations as “false,” “blasphemous,” “abhorrent,” and politically motivated, Francis’s popularity in the U.S. (McCarrick denies this.) It took the Vatican six weeks to respond to the letter, though Viganò was sure Francis was talking about him when he asked Catholics to pray to Mary and St. Viganò’s most serious charge is that Francis reversed sanctions that Benedict had placed on the American cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who has been accused of sexually abusing adult seminarians as well as an altar boy. Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the formal papal nuncio to Washington, D.C., and a prominent conservative, issued a letter accusing Francis of turning a blind eye to sexual abuse and calling on him to resign as Pope. The hostilities reached new heights last August, when Francis was visiting Ireland. Photograph from Vatican Pool/Getty Images. Pope Francis and ambassadors to the Holy See at the Sistine Chapel, January 2017.
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