In September 2019, returning from a visit to Africa, Pope Francis reflected on the flight home to Rome on the tensions that were tearing at the unity of the church. “I pray that there will be no schism,” the pope told the Vatican press corps, “but I am not afraid.”
Since then, the threat of a formal split of dissident Catholics from the church or the creation of a separate sect has grown to be a major theme of Francis’ pontificate. Conservative and progressive Catholics alike have publicly challenged the authority of the pope and the Vatican, openly or implicitly hinting at an irreparable fracture in the church.
Recently the pope has moved against his critics on the right, excommunicating former U.S. papal nuncio Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò for the crime of schism, forcing Cardinal Raymond Burke, the informal dean of the dissident right, from his Vatican post and removing Bishop Joseph Strickland from his seat in Tyler, Texas, for his anti-Francis agitation, mostly on social media.
For these and other conservatives, the pope has done too much to reconcile the church with modern social trends: opening its doors to women who want leadership roles and the LGBTQ+ faithful, restricting the saying of the Old Latin Mass and accommodating Beijing’s influence on the church in China.
Liberal Catholics, meanwhile, claim Francis has done too little to promote inclusivity and accountability in the church, calling on him to allow women to become deacons and blessings for same-sex couples and to do more to solve the issue of clergy sexual abuse. These issues have motivated the German church’s Synodal Path, a yearslong movement to answer popular drift away from the church with progressive, and largely unsanctioned, reforms.
Schism is nothing new in the church, starting with the Great Schism of 1054, which created the divide between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism before the Protestant Reformation fragmented the Western church in the 16th century. The most recent faction to fall into schism was the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X, founded in 1970 by the French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who rejected the changes of the Second Vatican Council and consecrated his own bishops, for which he was excommunicated.
FILE – In this Nov. 16, 2015 file photo, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, Apostolic Nuncio to the U.S., at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ annual fall meeting in Baltimore.
Viganò is thought to come the closest to provoking a similar split. In 2019, as Francis addressed the disastrous aftermath of the clerical abuse crisis in Ireland, Viganò published a fiery document accusing the pope of covering up the abuse of minors by ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and calling for him to resign. Since then, he has called Francis “a heretic” and a “tyrant” and condemned the reforms of the Second Vatican Council while drawing closer to conspiratorial and radical wings of the church.
Setting himself up at the hermitage of St. Antonio alla Palanzana, about an hour from Rome, Viganò drew a crowd of discontented Catholics: evicted nuns, wealthy Italian aristocrats and reactionary priests. He created an organization, Exsurge Domine, with the goal of offering help and financial support to clergy who claim to have been persecuted for their traditionalist views.
But experts say Francis has skillfully dealt with critics on both sides by waiting for the right moment to act and by issuing documents clarifying his most controversial pronouncements. Massimo Borghesi, a philosopher and author of the 2022 book “Neoconservatism vs. the Field Hospital Church of Pope Francis,” Viganò can no longer be considered a representative voice of the conservative opposition to the pope.
“I don’t think that Viganò’s excommunication implies a schism,” Borghesi told Religion News Service on Monday (July 15). “It might still concern an absolute minority of traditionalists who believe that the church in Rome has betrayed the tradition of the church following the Second Vatican Council,” he said, but he has reached the apex of his following in the United States, where he had seen the most support.
“I don’t think this interests the majority of the American church,” said Borghese.
According to an April 2022 survey by the Pew Research Center, a three-quarter majority of Catholics in the U.S. view the pope favorably. Even though the country’s political polarization is a factor in their opinion — almost 9 in 10 Catholic Democrats support Francis, compared to 63% of Republican faithful — conservative Catholics recognize that the pope’s election was legitimate, even if they dislike his policies, Borghesi said.
“The conditions for the schism are not there. They are simply awaiting the next pope,” he said.
If Francis had gone after the archbishop in 2019 or 2020, Borghesi believes, he might have created a deeper split. Instead, he allowed time for tensions to pass and for many of his reforms to be assimilated into church life. In the meantime, Viganó’s increasingly radical positions have served to alienate his staunchest American supporters, who have stayed mostly quiet since the Vatican’s sentence in early July.
“These processes have cooled spirits and allowed more clarity within the church,” he said.
Similarly, Vatican chroniclers say, Francis has come through the direst threat from the left, as the German church’s Synodal Path has retreated from its most radical positions.
Dr. Katharina Westerhorstmann, German theologan and Professor of Theology and Medical Ethics at the Franciscan University of Steubenville.
In 2022, German theologian Katharina Westerhorstmann announced she was resigning from the synodal commission that was studying relationships and sexuality because the Synodal Path’s rejection of official Catholic doctrine had drifted dangerously toward schism.
“For me there were some discussions that crossed the line, especially the notion where they seemed to have already decided where this was going and that those opinions that didn’t fit into that direction, shouldn’t really count,” Westerhorstmann said.
She and a group of theologians believed that while reforms were necessary to ensure safeguarding for children and vulnerable adults in the church, certain doctrinal aspects should remain unchanged. Westerhorstmann told RNS that while a schism was a definite possibility between 2020 and 2021, that is no longer the case today, despite a flare-up last year, when priests in Germany began blessing same-sex couples in violation of Rome’s ban on the practice.
“Right now, it seems that the negotiations with the Vatican are going well; there is more openness maybe on both sides,” she said. “In fact, I would say that there is no risk of a schism in the German church anymore at all.”
Both extremes now await the next conclave and the future pope, where the future of the Catholic Church will once again be decided.
Some observers say the greatest threat to the church today is not passionate dissent but disinterest.
“Some Catholic circles, not just conservatives, are drawing away from the church” said Porfiri. “I would describe this as a schism of indifference, where some Catholics are leaving the church, not because they object to one particular aspect or issue, but because they are no longer engaged.”
Although credibility has been at stake since the sexual abuse crisis exploded, this is the first time a Vatican document officially admits its pervasive effects.
In Spain, the Catholic bishops announced a plan to offer reparations to victims of clergy sexual abuse, but it is not clear how they will do so.
This week the issue of clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church became a priority at the global scale and even more in Spain.
At the global scale, the most recent document of the ongoing Synod, a meeting of bishops and other church officials that has happened with certain regularity in the Roman Catholic Church since the early seventies, gave prominence to the issue when it acknowledged the risk of not paying attention to the causes and consequences of clergy sexual abuse.
In the Spanish-speaking world, the Conference of Bishops of Spain heralded a plan to compensate the victims of dead predator clerics and even the victims of crimes that have already prescribed there.
If the Spanish bishops are up to the task they have set, theirs would be a first in the Spanish-speaking Catholic world, where the Catholic hierarchy has been playing, since the 1980s, a game of hide-and-seek.
The overall assumption was that the issue only existed in the English-speaking world, despite the prominence of cases such as Marcial Maciel’s in Mexico, and Carlos Miguel Buela’s in Argentina.
Not that those are the only two cases, but those are two of the most prominent cases and where it is easier to trace links between the two sexual predators and the English-speaking world.
In Maciel’s case the links between him, his order, and the U.S. and Irish hierarchy have known since the late 1990s. It was because of the work done in the United States by Jason Berry, that in the Spanish-speaking world and more precisely in Mexico, it was possible to know what was happening in the so-called Legion of Christ in the United States and in Mexico.
Maciel had used the links between the Mexican elites and their U.S. counterparts to expand the reach of his order. First, in the diocese of Rockville Centre, in the state of New York, and from there to the U.S. Eastern seaboard, and other places in that country.
Maciel was able to do so because he recruited candidates to the priesthood in Ireland, where he also set up an English language school to train his own priests, and where—already in the 1980s—he was providing services to future Cardinal Angelo Sodano, who required some command of English when he left his position as nuncio in Santiago, the capital of Chile, in 1988 to become John Paul II’s secretary of the Roman Curia, then in 1989 secretary for the Relations with the States of the Holy See and, finally, in 1990, secretary of State.
Benedict XVI and Carlos Miguel Buela, from the Institute of the Incarnate Word social media.
In Buela’s case the story is less known and more complex. Buela followed Maciel’s blueprint, so his Institute of the Incarnate Word entered the U.S. in a similar fashion, in the Eastern seaboard, but without the support that Maciel was able to get from rich Mexican families.
Despite that and other absences, Buela was able to target Cardinal Sodano in Rome, and the then bishop of Brooklyn, N.Y. Thomas Vose Daily and James Hickey, then archbishop and Cardinal of Washington, D.C.
Buela’s ability to settle his order in the capital of the United States, would be key to develop a relation with now disgraced and defrocked former archbishop of that city Theodore McCarrick, who helped Buela open the doors of different dioceses in the United States, and who was an active advocate of the Argentine predator priest in the Roman curia.
In exchange, Buela assigned McCarrick seminarians from his order to be their personal assistants, as the report published by the Secretary of State of the Holy See in 2020 details in pages 200 and 363 through 365.
Footnote 1114 of the report talks about how McCarrick «provided $10,000 to the Rector of the Institute of the Incarnate Word House of Formation (in Mount Rainer, Maryland) for the “expenses of the seminary” and noted that he appreciated “that I have the special privilege of enjoying the help of the seminarians of the Institute in arranging my transportation and in so many other important parts of my responsibility. I know that this comes with a price tag in purchasing gasoline and in many other ways.” »
The Vatican’s 2020 report names Buela himself for having «engaged in misconduct with adult seminarians» (p. 364). The accusations against Buela are like those against McCarrick, which only emerged later in the second decade of the 21st century, after U.S. media published detailed accounts of abuse perpetrated by McCarrick, as chapters XXVI through XXVIII of the report state (pp. 433-42).
The Synod’s acknowledgement
As far as the official working paper, the so-called Instrumentum Laboris, of the Synod, that will come to some sort of conclusion next October, the Church acknowledges that the clergy sexual abuse crisis is linked, on the one hand to a culture of “clericalism” that has been denounced repeatedly by Pope Francis himself with little or no success in the Roman Catholic hierarchy.
The Synod’s document states:
«75. In our time, the demand for transparency and accountability in and by the Church has come about as a result of the loss of credibility due to financial scandals and, even more so, sexual abuse and other abuses of minors and vulnerable persons. The lack of transparency and accountability fuels clericalism, which is based on the implicit assumption that ordained ministers are accountable to no one for the exercise of the authority vested in them.
«76. If the synodal Church wants to be welcoming, then accountability and transparency must be at the core of its action at all levels, not only at the level of authority. However, those in positions of authority have a greater responsibility in this regard. Transparency and accountability are not limited to sexual and financial abuse. They must also be concerned with pastoral plans, methods of evangelization, and how the Church respects the dignity of the human person, for example, regarding the working conditions within its institutions».
However, far from prompting major changes, the Francis’s critique of clericalism has clashed with the idea that there is a way for the Church to resist what many clerics see as “attacks” on the institution, even if to do so they must destroy the reputation of the victims.
In recent weeks, Los Ángeles Press has published pieces comparing, on the one hand the extremely different approaches with which the Roman Catholic bishops of the sister cities of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, have dealt with clergy sexual abuse in their territories.
While in El Paso, as in the rest of the United States, bishop Mark Joseph Seitz actively acknowledges the reality of clergy sexual abuse in that territory, on the other side of the fence, bishop José Guadalupe Torres Campos, as most Mexican bishops, avoids acknowledging any malfeasance from his priests.
What is worse. Bishop Torres Campos uses the same repertory of chicanery and assorted legal tricks that one sees from the lawyers defending drug lords and leaders of criminal organizations in Mexico, to exculpate accused priests and even to actively discourage victims from reporting sexual abuse.
In a similar fashion, Los Ángeles Press has compared also what happens in the twelve Roman Catholic dioceses of California, United States, with the four dioceses in the Mexican Baja Californias.
What the comparison proved is that despite the alleged adherence to a similar set of principles and beliefs, the key to understand the response to clergy sexual abuse is the policymaking will of the State legislature in Sacramento, California to provide a solution to the damage brought by predator clergymen.
In contrast, on the other side of the fence, no similar approach exists in the States’ legislatures in Mexicali, Baja California, and La Paz, Baja California Sur. Quite the opposite, so the Mexican victims of clergy sexual abuse are alone in their plight.
And in that regard, Los Ángeles Press has proved how in Mexico less than half the Roman Catholic dioceses in the country have complied with the request made by Pope Francis to create in each diocese a commission to prevent, not even to solve, only to prevent, clergy sexual abuse.
Los Ángeles Press proved also how a similar pattern exist in the Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America, with some countries, like Colombia or Peru, having a national body while other follow a model similar to Mexico of diocesan commissions to deal with the issue.
However, the most populous country in the region, Brazil, the one with the largest population of Roman Catholics worldwide, does not have neither a national body nor diocesan commissions dedicated to preventing clergy sexual abuse.
It is unclear whether the synod will see the two paragraphs already quoted as relevant enough as to issue specific recommendations or statements on the clergy sexual abuse crisis at large.
True Scale
Sadly, when dealing with the Roman Catholic Church, there is always the risk of their leaders exacerbating the alleged risk of acknowledging the true scale of the crisis.
As a consequence, it could be perfectly possible to have by November of this year some sort of boiler plate statement about the clergy sexual abuse crisis, with no real will to actually address the issue, because the bishop of some diocese alleges that “communists” or more broadly speaking “the enemies of the Church” will use it to try to destroy it.
Archbishop Bernardito Cleopas Auza, nuncio to Spain.
Even in the remote case that the Synod was willing to put aside other issues during the sessions in Rome in October, there is no clarity as to when and how will the bishops of each specific country deal with the crisis.
One must keep in mind that way before the publication of the working paper, the members of the so-called Tutela Minorum, the Commission set by Pope Francis to prevent clergy sexual abuse have repeatedly stressed the negative consequences that the Church’s attitudes toward the victims have had for the Church itself.
hat is why that commission saw original members as Irish survivor Mary Collins resign their positions there, tired of the inability of the bishops and cardinals to understand the extent of the damage done by clergy sexual abuse.
No wonder there has been little or no real change in the last 40 years. The changes that have happened in the English-speaking world came as the consequence of a more thorough law enforcement and the publication of the reports commissioned by the Canadian bishops in the late 20th century, by the U.S. bishops in the early Aughts, and the findings of commissions with a degree of involvement from the governments in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Australia.
More recently, a conscience of the true reach of the crisis have emerged because of the publication of reports in France (the so-called Sauvé Report) and Portugal, and the partial knowledge we have of what has happened in the German-speaking world.
In the German-speaking world, although there are reports released at the diocesan level in Germany, and a partial national report in Switzerland, we do not know yet the true reach of the crisis in that world.
In the Portuguese-speaking world, although the national conference of bishops in Portugal published in 2023 a report with valuable insights, we know little or nothing about the true reach of the crisis in Brazil and even less about its reach in the African Portuguese-speaking countries of Angola, Cape Verde, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe, where there are sizeable populations of Roman Catholics.
What is worst, even if the report by Pedro Stretch, a reputed Portuguese psychiatrist, provides valuable information, the website for the report no longer exists. The original URL is under attack, and the only way to retrieve the contents, including the documents in Portuguese and English originally published in February 2023, is through the Internet Archive (available here).
If it were not for the dedication of the Internet Archive, all the contents of that website would not exist by now, because the national conference of bishops of Portugal decided that it was not worth to keep them.
Hence the significance of the announcement made on July 9th by the national conference of Catholic bishops of Spain. Sadly enough, they were less than willing to request an independent report as the one commissioned by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to the John Jay College of Criminal Law (available here), or the Sauvé Report commissioned by the bishops of France.
Credibility
Back in 2022, the bishops of Spain decided that it was somehow good for their own credibility to request their first report from a lawyer’s firm specialized in corporate and private law (Cremades & Calvo Sotelo) whose main partner (Javier Cremades) is a “layperson” but who is also a member of the Opus Dei, a Roman Catholic “order” who was immediately suspect of bias by former members or sympathizers of that order, as this letter in Spanish proves.
Although the report published by Cremades & Calvo Sotelo (available here) offered nothing new, the conference of Catholic bishops of Spain dismissed the number of 1,383 victims estimated by that report.
According to a story published by El Debate (available here in Spanish) the bishops acknowledge a smaller number of victims, only 806.
However, when going over the data published by the bishops (available only in Spanish here), on the 21st of December 2023, there is no way to find that figure in the bishops’ report. The only mention of 806 as a number is the page with that number in the report.
El Debate and other media in Spain talk about a mere 205 “proven” cases; “70 unproven but credible,” and “280 unproven”. They also talk about twenty-four cases “excluded.” El Debate says that the bishops classify another seventy-five cases as “pending of resolution,” 13 more are “filed,” and three more cases are “false”.
These figures appear, however, on a separate summary of the report, available only in Spanish and only as a word document at a different URL. A PDF version of that file appears in the box immediately after this paragraph. I am unable to explain why the full report does not include these figures or how they get these numbers.
The bishops’ spokesperson Josetxo Vera, who appears in the message posted then at what used to be Twitter renders their report as a summary of data provided by the diocesan commissions in Spain, the ombudsman of Spain (Defensor del Pueblo) and by the report originally offered, at the bishops’ request, by Cremades & Calvo Sotelo.
However, the full bishops’ report states on page 343 that “is difficult to provide a closed number both of victims and of aggressors,” as can be seen here in their report titled in Spanish To illuminate (Para dar luz).
The bishops’ report cites repeatedly the report of the Spaniard ombudsman, issued back on October 27th 2023 (available here). Although this report is an official source of information, it is almost impossible to derive from it an estimation of the number of victims of clergy sexual abuse in Spain.
Magic numbers
From page 708 through 710 of the ombudsman’s report, it is possible to find the table 3.4 of the study titled “Number of victims and distribution by sex and age”. Although some dioceses as Astorga, provide a specific number of victims, others such as Albacete, Huelva, Huesca, Oviedo, and Vic, to name only a few, report no victims, dioceses such as Barcelona or Madrid, the two most populated metropolitan areas of the European country, provide only a number followed by a “V”.
The report states that the “V” stands for a “minimum number of victims” since there is no precision as to the number of total victims in that diocese. In that regard, the Archdiocese of Barcelona reports a total number of 47V, so the only thing we know for sure is that there have been at least forty-seven victims in the second largest metropolitan area of Spain.
The image that follows takes the tables as they appear, in Spanish, in the ombudsman’s report, so the reader can see what dioceses in Spain appear with a V in that table. A larger view of the table is available clicking with the right-button of your mouse on the image.
Table. Number of victims by age and sex distribution, Ombudsman of Spain.
Source: Report from the Ombudsman of Spain.
The archdiocese of Madrid reports 32V, so we know of a minimum of thirty-two victims, not an actual total number of thirty-two victims. Valencia, another major archdiocese in Spain appears in that table with 24V so, again, we know about a minimum of twenty-four victims, but there is no way to affirm that there are only twenty-four victims there.
Overall, as it is possible to see in the last row of the table there is a total of 509V; again, the V stands for a minimum of victims, not an actual total number of victims.
How would the bishops of Spain translate the data from the ombudsman or any other report into the numbers that some media in Spain reported back in December 2023, is pure alchemy, because there is no explanation for what they do.
Despite this and other issues, on July 9th, 2024, the bishops announced a new program called PRIVA, which stands for “Plan for the Integral Reparation of Victims of Abuse” (the full title in Spanish is Plan de Reparación Integral a Menores y Personas Equiparadas en Derecho, Victimas de Abusos Sexuales).
PRIVA was announced by the chair of the national conference of bishops, Luis Javier Argüello García, head of the archdiocese of Valladolid.
Luis Javier Argüello García, chair of the conference of Roman Catholic bishops of Spain. From their YouTube channel.
Argüello heralded PRIVA as a proof of how close they are to both Pope Francis and to the victims of clergy sexual abuse. However, he insisted during his presentation on the alleged need “to respect the autonomy” of the Church in Spain, as if the Catholic Church was under siege.
The day before the bishops’ announcement, the national government issued its own announcement regarding the clergy sexual abuse crisis there. Félix Bolaños, minister of the Presidency, Justice, and Relations with the Judiciary, held a meeting with survivors’ associations (a report from the Spanish national government is available in Spanish here).
The survivors were anxious about the announcement they knew the bishops were about to make the next day, as the government of Spain was. Hence Bolaños’s calling the bishops to address the survivors’ needs.
The minister framed his message as a continuation of a previous official announcement made on April 23rd 2024 (available in Spanish here) regarding a response to the ombudsman report of October 2023.
Bolaños said in April that the government’s plan would materialize a series of reforms from 2024 through 2027, but as the bishops’ announcement of PRIVA proves, there is now a certain urgency on the Church’s side to render the Church as active on the issue.
Meeting of Minister Bolaños with survivors of clergy sexual abuse. Palace of La Moncloa’s social media.
It could be that there is a real acknowledgment on the severity of the issue, but the plan itself is ambiguous. If bishops’ report is obscure regarding an estimate of the number of either victims or aggressors in the Catholic Church in Spain, the PRIVA plan is when providing an explanation of how will the bishops select whose victims deserve a compensation, what will be the amount of the compensation, and how they will give the compensation.
The PRIVA is laid out in three separate but rather short documents, with a total number 23 effective pages, available only in Spanish here.
Despite all these shortcomings and doubts regarding the true reach of the bishops’ calculations or how will they calculate the compensations for the victims, Argüello’s announcement of PRIVA was immediately greeted by the nuncio in Spain, the Filipino bishop Bernardito Cleopas Auza, who congratulated his fellow bishops on behalf of Pope Francis.
What is worse. The bishops and the media closest to them in Spain presented themselves as advocates of the survivors of clergy sexual abuse when there are no elements to support that portrayal.
Gamechanger?
Bishop Argüello offered an enthusiastic presentation of PRIVA as if it was somehow a gamechanger while Vida Nueva Digital, a Spanish-speaking Catholic medium, published last week an editorial calling to avoid playing games with “with the abuses” (available in Spanish here).
And the government’s attitude was not especially different. It is not as if the issue of sexual abuse, clergy or otherwise, was new in Spain or at a global scale. What is a fact, however, is that as the recent cases in Spain, Chile, and Bolivia prove, the laws and courts in the Spanish-speaking world are not ready to deal with the reality of sexual abuse.
Change has happened. In Mexico and Chile, sex-related crimes no longer prescribe as it used to be. However, in Chile, a proposal to go over the cases of sexual and other types of abuse ended up constrained to dealing with only the cases in the so-called Servicio Nacional de Menores, a national agency similar to the offices of Child Services in local governments in the United States.
For Chilean survivors of clergy sexual abuse, their government should launch a probe to go after predators in the Catholic and other churches there.
The cases emerging from Bolivia these days could end up implicating the Church in Spain. Luis Roma Padrosa, a now deceased Jesuit, identified through his own diary and statements he made before his death to his superiors in that religious order ended up in Bolivia, as other Jesuits from Spain for reasons that remain unknown.
However, there is a chance that Roma Padrosa’s superiors in both Spain and Bolivia were aware of the abuse he was doing in South America. Instead of reporting him to their superiors in the Church or to the civil authorities in Bolivia, they let him move around from parish to parish, as a super-predator of girls
If that was the case and the Church in Spain is ready to deal with the abuses perpetrated by already dead priests, then there would be necessary to discuss whether the Spanish province of the Jesuits should compensate the Bolivian victims of Roma Padrosa in South America.
What is clear is that there is no more room to accept the way bishops in Mexico and other countries of Latin America deal with this issue. Even if the bishops in Spain are dragging their feet and trying to reduce as much as possible the number of cases they accept as such, their attitude reflects awareness of the potential effect of the politization of the issue.
In Mexico and other Latin American countries, however, bishops are still betting on denying the very existence of cases. One can see priests acting out as trolls in social media attacking victims and their advocates, demanding full disclosure of extremely complex cases in the 160-character limit imposed by former Twitter.
Also, one can also find that the very few bishops willing to acknowledge malfeasance from clergy predators, try to force the victims to follow therapies chosen by the Church.
Said therapies seek to blame the victim and to provide the bishop and the predator priest with an easy way out of the situation, as long as the victims avoid a legal process, as the story linked immediately below, available only in Spanish, describes.
Miraculous catch?
If they choose a legal process, then the fury of the lawyers paid by the bishop falls upon the victims, with no will to even acknowledging the very possibility of abuse while launching character assassination campaigns against the victims, their relatives, friends, and even their employers as to chastise them. That is what explains the loss of credibility that the Instrumentum Laboris for the Synod acknowledges.
The loss of credibility goes hand in hand with the arrogance of clergymen, who are oblivious to the victims’ plight.
If one pays attention to the account in what used to be Twitter broadcasting the Spanish bishops’ messages one will notice that the account sports, as its cover picture art originally made by noted sexual predator Marko Rupnik.
The account of the national conference of Roman Catholic bishops of Spain at what used to be Twitter sporting one of Rupnik’s mosaics.
The mosaic is not from Fatima or Aparecida, two of the Roman Catholic basilicas where Rupnik’s art is in full display as if nothing ever happened between him and his victims.
The piece, titled “The miraculous catch” comes straight from the chapel of the conference of bishops of Spain in Madrid, as can be seen with great detail in the Centro Aletti’s webiste or in this story about the most recent meeting of the conferences of Roman Catholic bishops in Europe from March 13th, 2024, where the bishops of Spain talk about supporting with their prayers the victims of the war in Ukraine.
In that regard, the elaborated speech of archbishop Argüello about the victims of clergy sexual abuse, available in full below, seems almost impossible to reconcile with Pope Francis’s idea of a “spirituality of reparation” or with the most basic understanding of the victims’ plight.
And that is where any cleric willing to find the root cause of the loss of credibility should look.
Three years ago, the Vatican started a synodal process to “provide an opportunity for the entire People of God to discern together how to move forward on the path towards being a more synodal Church.”
In October, the findings will be discussed in Rome and the role of women is expected to feature prominently.
On The Pat Kenny Show, the former president predicted there would be little change in relation to the role of women in Church which she said “still inhabits that old world” in relation to matters of gender.
“Not that terribly long ago – probably a century ago – you would have found all sorts of reasons why they shouldn’t be, couldn’t be and can’t be lawyers, doctors, politicians when they hadn’t the right to vote,” she said.
“But those were all broken down – every one of those arguments was bogus.
“They were nonsensical, they were gender based and rubbish and they were all eventually broken down under the sheer weight of the fact that they were rubbish.”
Pope Francis at litergy.
Dr McAleese said the Church’s stance on women stands in contrast to the views of many Catholics around the world – particularly when it comes to the issue of women priests.
“Even though consultation all around the world showed that the people of God – the laity in particular – wanted change in relation to leadership roles for women, decision making roles for women, access to the diaconate and ordination … regrettably what has happened is that we now have, essentially, paralysis on that,” she said.
“The issue of leadership of women in the Church has been off the synodal agenda and sent off to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith for them to prepare a report.
“Which means it’s back in the hands of a bunch of men again – clerical men – who will then advise the Pope on the future leadership roles of women in the Church.”
The funeral of a priest, Holy Cross, Ardoyne, Belfast.
The funeral of a priest, Holy Cross, Ardoyne, Belfast. (Dermot Blackburn / Alamy Stock Photo)
Dr McAleese, who obtained a doctorate in canon law after her presidency, said the Pope’s own views mean the status quo is likely to prevail on the issue of ordination of women.
“Regrettably, the Pope himself in an interview just a few weeks ago with an American television channel, he ruled out the… ordained priesthood for women,” she said.
“So, he’s already made up his mind on those issues and I presume what the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith will do is simply give him a document that flatters the opinion that he already has – which is what we already have… The Church is regrettably in that 19th century mode.
“Everything that is said about women and priesthood sounds terribly like the reasons why women weren’t allowed to be students at Trinity College 100 years ago.”
Beatification of Pope John Paul II on St. Peter’s Square.
Dr McAleese said that, while many westerners disagree with the status quo, the retention of the ban on women priests would delight the many Catholics who still hold more conservative ideals about the role of women.
“The Church is dying in the liberal western world where women’s issues have consumed a huge amount of political dynamism,” she said.
“But in the very conservative global south where the Church is flourishing, the seminaries are full, this document [that will be published] in October shows quite clearly the influence of the global south.
Pope Francis holds rosary beads as he presides over the closing Mass at the end of the Synod of Bishops in Saint Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican, October 29, 2023.
The global Catholic Church is split on whether to allow women to serve as deacons, a Vatican document showed on Tuesday, just weeks after Pope Francis ruled out any opening on the issue.
Giving women a greater role in the male-dominated Church is one of the issues up for the debate at a summit of bishops known as the synod.
An initial, inconclusive session was held last year. On Tuesday, the Vatican released a working document due to inform discussions at a second and final session in October.
“While some local Churches call for women to be admitted to the diaconal ministry, others reiterate their opposition,” it said.
Noting that women deacons will not be on the synod’s agenda, it said “theological reflection (on the issue) should continue, on an appropriate timescale and in the appropriate ways”.
Priestly celibacy – another contentious area for potential reform – was not mentioned, while the document said African bishops are studying “the theological and pastoral implications of polygamy for the Church in Africa.”
The Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar (SECAM) will report on these issues at the October meeting, Cardinal Mario Grech, Secretary General of the Synod of Bishops, told a press conference.
‘FULLER RECOGNITION’ FOR WOMEN
Deacons, like priests, are ordained ministers and, as in the priesthood, must be men in today’s Church. Women deacons existed in early Christianity, but it is unclear what role they had.
Contemporary deacons may not celebrate Mass, but they may preach, teach in the name of the Church, baptise and conduct wedding, wake and funeral services and even run a parish.
The Vatican document stressed the need to “give fuller recognition” to women in the Church, saying that “by virtue of Baptism, they enjoy full equality”.
In an interview with the “60 Minutes” programme of U.S. broadcaster CBS recorded in April and aired in May, Francis responded with a flat “no” when asked if he was open to women deacons.
But he added that women were often playing deacon-like roles, without formally having that title. “Women are of great service as women, not as ministers,” he said.
Asked about the pope’s remarks, Cardinal Grech said: “As of now, it is a ‘no’ (to women deacons), but at the same time the Holy Father has said that the theological reflection and study must continue. For me this is not a contradiction.”
INCLUSIVITY
Known as “Instrumentum laboris”, the document was presented after consultations with national bishops’ conferences, theologians, Catholic institutions and associations from around the world.
Turning to another hot-button issue, the text did not include any specific references to LGBT people, but called for more inclusivity.
“A need emerges in all continents concerning people who, for different reasons, are or feel excluded or on the margins of the ecclesiastical community or who struggle to find full recognition of their dignity and gifts within it,” it said.
It also acknowledged calls for greater transparency and accountability of Church leaders, and greater involvement of lay Catholics in Church affairs, including in response to sex abuse and financial scandals, and on pastoral matters.
— Trouble is brewing in the very regions that cradled the 16th-century Protestant Reformation.
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By BEN MUNSTER
The events that sent the Catholic Church to the brink of a full-blown schism really got going just after lunch.
On a freezing afternoon last November in central Berlin, a few hundred German Catholic politicians, theologians and captains of industry piled into the grand chandeliered assembly hall of the Hotel Titanic Chaussee to put the final touches on an ambitious reform that would allow them to effectively overrule their own bishops — and by extension the Holy See.
During a rowdy assembly lasting several hours, with the wind whipping outside, the delegates complained that Pope Francis had let the German Church down on key issues such as clerical sex abuse, gay marriage and trans rights, on which the German faithful desperately sought progress.
“They found out, using human science, that there are more than two genders — and yet the pope rejects this!” the theologian Andreas Lob-Hüdepohl fumed from beneath a mushroom cloud of fuzzy red hair. “Nobody knows where he goes, he’s always changing his mind. There’s no throughline in his doings, no logic.’”
Since the beginning of his papacy, Francis has faced attacks from conservatives worried he’s gone too far on issues like homosexuality, abortion and capitalism. But those gathered in Berlin were complaining of precisely the opposite: that he isn’t liberal enough.
“Francis was elected to renew the Catholic Church,” said Thomas Söding, the vice president of the Central Committee for German Catholics, the group that descended on the German capital in November. But the pope’s failure to bring about any meaningful change has left the Church archaic and unfixed, he said, forcing the Germans to try and beat their own path.
It would be wrong to say Francis has done nothing to earn his reputation as a liberal revolutionary. Since the start of his papacy, the pontiff has roiled the religious hierarchy with interventions in popular debates, not only on sexuality but also on the economy, immigration and climate change. He has introduced some genuine reforms, including opening high-level offices in the Holy See to women, and has famously embraced a tolerant, each-to-his-own philosophy, even declaring that heaven is open to atheists. Asked about gay priests during an exchange with reporters on the papal plane returning from his first foreign trip, the pontiff answered: “Who am I to judge?”
This has all been accompanied by a conspicuous effort to project holiness and humility. Francis decided early to settle into the Vatican’s cramped Santa Marta guesthouse instead of the opulent abode of previous popes, and he ditched the bulletproof popemobile for a navy Ford Focus. Just days after the conclusion of the conclave that elected him, the then-Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires was reported to have expected so little of his chances that he’d already booked a return ticket to Argentina.
But even as conservatives in the United States, Africa and the Vatican itself have fumed over Francis’s self-consciously populist approach, repeated right-wing attacks on his authority have fizzled. Instead, the more serious challenge has come from those who complain the pope’s liberal reforms have been half-hearted, stopping short of theological change while being overshadowed by scandal.
Last year, for example, a landmark declaration allowing clerical blessings for same-sex couples was diluted after a fiasco involving religious musings on the nature of orgasms. In late May, moreover, Francis’s own liberal bona fides were questioned after multiple reports that he had used a homophobic slur behind closed doors.
Driven to desperation, progressive Catholics in Germany and elsewhere have seized on an effort by Francis to inject a modicum of consultative democracy into the Church — an arcane initiative he has dubbed “synodality.” Since then they have used the process to seize powers normally reserved for the ordained and to steer their local branches in a direction more to their liking. Many, indeed, want to harness the synodal process to actually change Church law.
“Ninety percent of people who leave the Church say they are angry with sexual abuse, clerical corruption, that they are angry with the leadership,” Söding said. “There is this idea of holy men who are elected by God himself and have the position to lead the Church — even if the big majority of the faithful are not convinced that this is the right way.”
Since the beginning of his papacy, Francis has faced attacks from conservatives worried he’s gone too far on issues like homosexuality, abortion and capitalism.
For much of the past year, the German challenge has rippled through the Catholic Church, prompting dire warnings of a schism and calls for a conservative crackdown. It hasn’t gone unnoticed that the threat to clerical authority has erupted in the very regions that cradled the 16th-century Lutheran upheavals. Last year, one prominent archbishop described the events in the German Church as “the greatest crisis since the Reformation.” And though the uprising has recently been subdued, it shows no signs of ending.
* * *
Some revolutions are full of fire, rage and righteous oratory. The progressive revolt against Francis, however, has a more German hue, one of careful and piecemeal administrative reform.
The Teutonic rumblings began in 2018 with a landmark inquiry into Germany’s clerical abuse crisis. Commissioned by the country’s clergy to stem the exodus of jaded churchgoers, the resulting report recommended that priestly celibacy be questioned, that greater tolerance be shown toward LGBTQ+ people, and that lay Catholics have a greater say over the appointment of bishops.
In many places such suggestions could have been ignored, but in Germany that was less plausible. Unique among its counterparts, the German Church is funded by the taxes of its 20 million-odd members, making it sensitive to public opinion in a way most ecclesial bodies aren’t. In 2018 that sensitivity led to pressure on German bishops to enact the reforms concerning clerical abuse — even if many of them contravened Church law.
Ironically enough, the tool German Catholics have used to challenge the Vatican was one provided by Francis himself. Over the course of his papacy, the pope has rolled out several major, church-wide consultative forums known as synods, while expanding their scope to include laypeople and encouraging others to take cues.
While Francis’s allies say these synods are really only about “listening,” many in the German clergy, perhaps wishfully, viewed them as an endorsement of outright democratic reform. They soon found a willing partner in the Central Committee for German Catholics, the powerful lay pressure group that descended on Berlin last year. Representing the cream of the German Catholic elite — its ranks include Brussels politician Manfred Weber — the Central Committee naturally bends toward the political mainstream, and it seized the opportunity to drag the bishops into modernity.
And so Germany’s “Synodal Path” was born. Through a series of joint assemblies, the institutions worked briskly to put the recommendations of the 2018 report into practice, even if it made some of the bishops queasy. Where Church doctrine was immovable their proposals were rhetorical, but at times they explicitly defied Vatican guidance — approving, for instance, blessings for gay couples in 2023.
Last year, controversy erupted when the Central Committee pushed through a motion to weaken the voting power of the bishops, allowing them to be overruled by a simple majority. Ignoring the outcry from Rome, the Committee then pushed to make that arrangement permanent, with a “Synodal Council” that would forever bind the two parties together.
That was the goal of last November’s gathering in the Hotel Titanic Chaussee: to vote in that final reform and institutionalize the Germans’ pioneering Church democracy. The bishops, for their part, were expected to rubber-stamp the vote the following February.
The mood at the hotel resembled a party political conference. There was much grandstanding about Israel, while grievances with the pontiff ranged from clerical abuse to the minutiae of daily politics. Among those who gave impassioned speeches was Hildegard Mueller, president of the German Association of the Automotive Industry — not the most obvious authority on theology.
Inevitably, such scenes alarmed the Holy See. Francis and his allies concluded that the Synodal Path was an attempt to change Church law outright. The previous year, the pope’s top diplomat had warned the Germans that their initiative posed a “threat to the unity of the church.” Francis himself intervened in November, urging the German Catholics to stop “looking for ‘salvation’ in ever new committees,” and instead to “open up and go out to meet our brothers and sisters, especially those who are … on the thresholds of our church doors, on the streets, in the prisons, in the hospitals, in the squares and in the cities.”
The Germans largely shrugged off the criticism, outwardly playing down their aims while privately talking of genuine democratic transformation. The power-sharing reform sailed through the Committee with a decisive yes — with practically no dissent.
For much of the past year, the German challenge has rippled through the Catholic Church, prompting dire warnings of a schism and calls for a conservative crackdown.
* * *
The uprising against clerical authority hasn’t been confined to liberal circles in Berlin. Earlier this year, bishops in Belgium unveiled a “Synodal Manifesto” that called for many of the same reforms as the Germans. To be sure, the Belgians were more careful, agreeing to go ahead only with Vatican approval. But the development showed the extent to which public outrage was spreading at a regional and even sub-regional level.
To take a more extreme example, not long after the Germans voted to defy the Holy See, Bishop Felix Gmür welcomed POLITICO to his beleaguered alpine redoubt in the town of Solothurn in northern Switzerland, the seat of the diocese of Basel. Under a pale January sky, with snow falling on the gray fir trees surrounding his palatial headquarters, the bespectacled bishop described the fiasco engulfing his own small, cold corner of the Church.
The revolution had come to Gmür’s doorstep in November, when churchgoers from one of the cantons under his watch presented him with four demands pertaining to the handling of child abuse by the Swiss Church. Switzerland, too, had been roiled by a series of horrifying revelations, and the Lucerne “Synod” — a parliament of laypeople tasked with collecting and disbursing tax revenues for the diocese — wanted Gmür to set up an external body to investigate abuse, as well as an archive to prevent the destruction of documents.
As in the German case, the events illustrated the deteriorating relations between the clergy and the faithful; the difference here, however, was how far the parishioners were willing to go. They were not advocating a new, benign power-sharing arrangement — they were threatening to withhold some half a million francs from Gmür should he not meet their demands.
To some, that was a terrifying precedent: “If you have the money, you now have the power against the bishop,” said Urs Corradini, a Swiss deacon who works for Gmür’s diocese and has publicly defended the bishop. “This is really dangerous. The power has to be with the pope, the bishops, the priests.” Otherwise, he said, matters of faith risk becoming subject to democratic decision-making — “and then the group decides if you want to believe in Christ or not.”
While the dispute may still be resolved amicably, Gmür was scandalized that it arose in the first place. “I said, you’re not my superiors. That’s not the way it works!” he said.
“It’s a war,” he added, only partly joking.
St. Ursus Cathedral in Solothurn, Switzerland. The city is the seat of the diocese of Basel and home to the beleaguered bishop Felix Gmür.
To be sure, committee meetings and checkbooks aren’t pitchforks and torches, but the events roiling Central Europe have alarmed the more conservative Church leaders, who worry that efforts like those in Berlin, Brussels and Basel could impose political, secular directives on weakened bishops.
As the Germans gathered in Berlin, Stanislaw Gadecki, the powerful former Polish archbishop of Poznan, gave an interview to the Catholic World Report in which he likened the debate in Germany to the Protestant Reformation that tore the church apart in the 16th century. “The documents [the Germans were voting on] draw profusely from Protestant theology and the language of modern politics,” he said.
Others have suggested that the Germans are playing with fire in their mistaken view that the 2,000-year-old Church, with its fundamentally authoritarian hierarchy, can ever function like a modern democracy.
“They have misread the pope, the pope is not liberal,” Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, a close ally of Francis, told POLITICO. He said the German Church was the victim of “aggressive lobbying” and U.S- style culture war polarization. Such politicking, he added darkly, “destroys the unity of the Church.”
* * *
While the pontiff has poured cold water on the German effort, he has refrained from a definitive crackdown. Indeed, as pope, he’s all too aware how precarious a position the European Church is in, with worshippers leaving in droves. “Faith in Europe and in much of the West is no longer an obvious presumption but is often denied, derided, marginalized and ridiculed,” the pontiff said in a speech to prelates in 2019.
Francis has tried to push the envelope on what flies in the Church, but he keeps colliding with the rigidity of its culture and of scripture — or tripping over his own scattered approach to theological policymaking. There’s a familiar rhythm to the pope’s scandals: He casually floats a progressive idea, draws vicious pushback from the right and then retreats, angering the left. Days, months or years later he reintroduces a diluted version of his mothballed proposal, only to generate greater pushback and deeper confusion.
What often results from this chaotic process is a precarious “two-speed Church” in which Francis tries to appease both sides by leaving the application of his diktats to the discretion of local priests — an idea as revolutionary as it is indicative of increasing desperation in the Vatican. While there has always been a degree of to-each-his-own permissiveness regarding major regional differences, rarely has it come so explicitly from the top.
Illustrating this approach was the surprise publication in December of Fiducia supplicans, a papal declaration affirming the right of priests to give simple blessings to same-sex couples. At first it looked as if the pope was changing his mind following years of equivocation, in which he had embraced gay Catholics on a personal level while cracking down on independent efforts to move ahead with blessings — most notably in Germany in 2021.
But the initial excitement of liberals soured to disappointment when Francis downplayed the significance of the declaration following fevered backlash from conservative Catholics, most prominently in Africa. A rare top-down clarification explained that Fiducia supplicans referred only to rote, cookie-cutter blessings, of the sort a priest could offer an unscrupulous businessman if he wanted — as Francis himself later put it.
Rites for gay couples ought to last no longer than 10-15 seconds, the Holy See said, adding the practice could be ignored entirely in regions where it would be considered “imprudent.” What was certainly not on offer was a formal, doctrinal recognition of same-sex unions per se. Those, the clarification made painfully clear, were still sinful.
The pope’s allies would say this fudge was by design, and that Fiducia supplicans was rooted in the same philosophy that underlay Francis’s “Who am I to judge?” comments from 2013. Sure, it didn’t rewrite Church law, but it was a call for priests to fixate less on sin — especially sexual sin — and to refrain from subjecting churchgoers to “exhaustive moral analysis.” After all, priests sin as much as the next man — and sometimes more.
Still, nobody was satisfied. Conservatives complained that the declaration amounted to a kind of moral relativism imposed from above without warning. For liberals, meanwhile, it was a reminder that the pope was at heart a conservative, and that his support for LGBTQ+ causes had a hard limit (a sense that was reinforced by his reported use of the homophobic slur “frociaggine” last month when discussing the possibility of gay priests).
Worse yet, reports circulated that the document’s author, newly appointed Cardinal Victor Fernandez, had written graphic books as a young priest exploring kissing and orgasms. Fernandez was a longtime Argentine protégé of Francis who had that year been made head of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, the revered Vatican ministry tasked with defending Catholic dogma. Fernandez soon became the target of a conservative outcry, and while Fiducia supplicans wasn’t officially rolled back, for conservatives in particular it was as if it had never existed.
“Read the document,” said a Vatican official who was granted anonymity to speak openly about a pope he described as vindictive toward critics. “It says: well, obviously you cannot bless a homosexual relationship, because from a Catholic point of view, it’s sinful. However, we will invent a new form of blessing. It’s not a sacramental blessing, it’s a ‘fracramental flessing.’ It looks almost like a blessing, and if you run sideways, and do it in under ten seconds, and keep it totally spontaneous…”
The chief problem, the official added, is that the pontiff has an overriding need to do everything his way, often at the expense of ideological coherence. “Most of his energy goes into hiding what he thinks, hiding who he is, and hiding what he’s going to do, in an almost neurotic way,” the official complained. “He keeps what he wants to do even from himself as long as possible, in order to be totally unexpected in what he does.”
To illustrate, the official relayed an unfiltered comment Francis had made to a person who met him in the 2000s when he was still archbishop of Buenos Aires. The person was new to Argentina and wanted to get a sense of the locals.
Francis’s response was telling. “With the Argentinians, you have to be careful,” he said. “What they say, what they do and what they think are totally different things.”
He may well have been talking about himself.
Pope Francis, then Argentina’s cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio at St Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City in 2005.
* * *
It doesn’t help that, in all likelihood, the Pope is not long for this world. At 87 and with only one intact lung, he struggles to breathe, suffers bouts of pneumonia, and is perennially in and out of hospital. Every public cough generates macabre headlines. Meanwhile, he has largely failed to appoint enough allies to the College of Cardinals to guarantee a like-minded successor, and liberals wonder whether he will leave any progressive legacy at all.
Caught between a liberal Europe and a predominantly conservative global south, Francis is in a bind. He is largely preoccupied with reining in — or appeasing — breakaways and rebels on all sides; for his right flank that means withholding reform, while for his left it means dangling promises he’s unlikely to keep.
A prime example of this tightrope act has been the most ambitious of the pope’s much-ballyhooed consultative “synods,” which followed two that took place in 2015 and 2018. The “Synod on Synodality” kicked off in 2021, culminating in a month-long forum in Rome last year in which around 450 delegates (including laypeople and women) debated major issues from different cultural perspectives. This grand international exercise in cultural bridge-building concludes in October; as with previous synods, the findings can make it into canon law, if the pope so chooses.
Gmür, the beleaguered bishop of Basel, was among those in attendance. He recalled a discussion in which African bishops sought allowances for polygamy — asking, in particular, whether a man would have to leave all his wives in order to convert — while some European participants sought canonical recognition of LGBTQ+ rights. “We did conclude that polygamy is not an idea of the bible,” Gmur said. “And certainly not [of] the New Testament.” On LGBTQ+ rights, “even the word was a problem,” he added. “That’s why in the document we call it, ‘With different personal sexual identity and orientation’.”
The current synod has invariably stoked the fears of conservatives who see it as a Trojan horse for an insidious woke agenda. As if in confirmation, the synod’s own leaders have cast it as the last great hope for introducing real structural reform: “If we miss this experience, we will not be effective in our mission,” Cardinal Mario Grech, the Synod on Synodality’s secretary general, told POLITICO in his Vatican office, a portrait of the pontiff smiling down from the wall behind him. “And then the future will be bleak.”
As usual, however, the prevailing view is that little will change. Grech’s comments notwithstanding, the pope has deferred many of the more touchy issues to Vatican-controlled “working groups,” such as the ordination of female priests and lay influence over the appointment of bishops. While that could mean Francis wants to repeat the same chaotic approach of Fiducia supplicans and roll out the big changes on his own terms at some unplanned date, it’s more likely that they’ve simply been put on ice. Tellingly, when the pope was asked by the 60 Minutes program in May whether little girls could ever dream of becoming deacons, a kind of priest, his answer was a decisive “no.”
Cardinal Hollerich, the Synod’s relator general, acknowledged that the goal of the synod is rather more aspirational — to seed a culture of inclusivity and dialogue that could, perhaps, lead to doctrinal reform, somewhere down the line. Holy See spokesperson Matteo Bruni said its core aim was to foster “greater involvement of the people of God” in pastoral and administrative Church matters, pointing to early successes in the Eastern Church. But he emphasized that it wouldn’t delve into the other big questions — the Synod on Synodality, as its name suggests, would be entirely self-referential.
This all bodes ill for the Germans, whose options are now seriously limited following some 11th-hour papal maneuvers. Last February, as the German bishops were gathering in the city of Augsburg to ratify the final decisions of the Synodal Path, they received a scathing letter from Francis’s deputies. When a smaller delegation later went to Rome to resolve the matter, they ultimately agreed, in a humiliating climb-down, to pursue their scheme only within the strict bounds of canon law, checking each new development with Rome — just as Belgium’s bishops had agreed to do.
As a result, the Synod on Synodality appeared to be the last channel through which the Germans could air their domestic grievances, though even that forum was already being closed off to them, according to one person familiar with the proceedings. Ecclesiastically outgunned, the Germans’ grand democratic experiment looked stone dead.
And yet, hope abides among Germany’s layfolk, many of whom remain defiant. Central Committee Vice President Söding told POLITICO he was confident the Synodal Path would go ahead, while a mid-June gathering of the Synodal Path participants proceeded just as planned — with zero papal intervention.
The German cause would seem to have gained an unstoppable momentum. Even if the Holy See does try to curb their efforts, Söding said, the Church is now too fragmented to forestall them indefinitely. “They would like to have control from the center — but they do not have this control,” he said.
More importantly, the Germans seem to have received a boost from figures behind the Leonine Walls. According to two people familiar with the Rome discussions, the bishops negotiating the future of the Synodal Path had an ally in the increasingly influential — and controversial — Cardinal Fernandez. As the author of the declaration on same-sex blessings, Fernandez is a prominent exponent of the “two-speed Church” compromise, an idea that is becoming, if partly by accident, de facto Vatican policy, as a way to bridge the Church’s yawning disparities.
As an idea it could literally tear the institution apart, introducing a new kind of Catholicism in which moral judgments are increasingly subject to regional interpretations, making the whole affair look rather Protestant. In practice it would be a way, as with Fiducia supplicans, for Francis to give the Germans what they want — albeit with delayed effect, and on his own obscure and disappointing terms.
It is whispered that Francis himself privately revels in this prospect, viewing it as a way to rid the Church of its sexual obsessions and return it to a grassroots approach that puts power in the hands of local priests. Certainly, in his efforts to please everyone, he has given up on trying to impose a cohesive, universal morality. At this point, if the Germans or others do opt to split irreversibly with Rome, who is Pope Francis, of all people, to judge?
