— To be Christ we have to follow His Way, not have his male body
Supporters of the Women’s Ordination Conference demonstrate to advocate and pray for the ordination of women as deacons, priests, and bishops into an inclusive and accountable Roman Catholic Church, near the Vatican in Rome on Oct. 6, 2023.
By Virginia Saldanha
The publication of Pope Francis’ interview with CBS Television anchor Norah O’Donnell has sent shock waves through reform-minded women and men throughout the world.
When asked specifically about women deacons in the Church, Francis said, “If it is deacons with Holy Orders, No. But women have always had, I would say, the function of deaconesses without being deacons, right? Women are of great service as women, not as ministers… within the Holy Orders.”
The pope’s response is reminiscent of the caste mindset in India. Dalits or former untouchable people cannot enter temples because they are Dalits! Women doing ministry cannot be ordained ministers because they are women.
Women are shocked firstly, because the synodal process which Pope Francis himself initiated to gather voices from every person in the Church, has not yet concluded, and yet he gives a definitive answer to the question of ordination of women deacons in the Church.
“What is the point of synodality if the pope shuts down a major question in an interview talk show? How banal. Why waste our time with a process that gets settled in a sound bite?” asks noted Jesuit moral theologian, James Kennan.
The US-based Women’s Ordination Conference expressed “great disappointment at Pope Francis’ failure to recognize the depth of women’s vocations and the urgency of affirming their full equality in the Church. For centuries, women have served in the tradition of Phoebe [Rm 16:1]. Women of every generation have experienced and expressed their vocation from God to serve the Church in ordained ministry.”
“Women do all the work but are denied the recognition and authority that is their due”
Astrid Lobo-Gajiwala of Bombay archdiocese said, “What angers me is how the pope continues to trivialize the vocation of women to the priesthood. A vocation is a call from God. By denying women ordained ministry the pope is asserting that God can never issue such a call to women. And the reason? They do not have male body parts.”
“His remarks about women’s ministry are humiliating and typical of a patriarchal mindset. Women do all the work but are denied the recognition and authority that is their due. How can we reconcile his closed mind on this issue with his call to synodality? Women’s role in the Church has been one of the key issues across the world. Why bother with creating a commission to study the issue of women deacons when the outcome is already fixed?” she asked.
Raynah Braganza Passanha of Pune diocese asks, “Why we are waiting for the Church to throw crumbs our way? Expectations always bring disappointment.”
She suggests, “It is time to challenge ourselves to make real what we have been asking for since no one is listening. If we are serious about what we believe is our right, we need to make it happen. Maybe we need to think of moving out of this limited mindset and evolve a model that is inclusive, a Christ-like, Jesus-inspired community.”
Jesus proclaimed his Mission in Luke 4:18, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach the good news to the poor, He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives, recovery of sight to the blind and set free the oppressed.” His ministry involved working with the least, the lost and the oppressed.
Women have been anointed in Baptism and Confirmation with the Spirit of the Lord. Women, as Pope Francis admits render valuable service in the Church, yet the grace of the sacrament of Ordination is withheld from women because we are deemed second class to men. Is subservience our lot in the Church, because Pope Francis feels that women are not worthy of representing Christ?!
“Women with vocations to ministry deserve to be treated on the same basis as their brothers”
It is disheartening that in the 21st century, the Church has failed to recognize women’s equality with men. Something that Jesus had already given to women in his time. This equality was exercised in the early Church.
Women responded with dedication and love following Jesus through the streets of Palestine, ministering to him, mourning at his crucifixion, and the first to meet him at his Resurrection. Yet, the leadership in the Catholic Church in recent centuries has kept women from any leadership and decision-making, claiming that Jesus did not ordain women!
“Women with vocations to ministry deserve to be treated on the same basis as their brothers, and that includes sacramental ordination. If the Church is supposed to be a sacrament of God’s love to the world, the persistence of misogyny in its structures and practices is a scandal and undermines the Church’s witness to the Gospel,” points out Irish theologian Ursula Halligan.
Francis’ response begs the question, what really is ordained priesthood? Theologically men become ‘other Christs,’ but do they really? The sex abuse scandal and its handling have debunked that idea for many across the world, making the institution lose a lot of its credibility.
To be Christ we have to follow His Way, not have his male body!
Ultimately, ordination seems to be all about power. A power that is used over people. Women entering into that space would disrupt that power and even expose its misuse. Is this the real fear?
— During a meeting with priests directly under his care in Rome, Pope Francis used for the second time in less than a month, an Italian homophobic slur.
Emmanuel Macron, President of France and Pope Francis. Social media of the French Presidency.
By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez
Pope Francis’s use of the homophobic slur reveals the deep contradictions marring the Church’s understanding the clergy sexual abuse crisis.
The Pope’s new use of the homophobic slur happened before a meeting with comedians from all over the world, some of them with a known position regarding their own gender identity.
Despite the damage brought by his use of the Italian word frociaggine, a homophobic slur, during an allegedly private meeting with Italian bishops on May 20th, Pope Francis used it again, on June 10th, during a not so private meeting with priests in the diocese of Rome, the religious district directly under the Pope’s authority.
The meeting at the Salesian Pontifical University of Rome was with priests having between eleven and 39 years of service. It was a celebration of sorts, with an exchange of ideas between the Pontiff and the 160 priests or so in attendance, although there were questions about housing and sustenance issues it was the second pontifical use of the frociaggine slur what stole the headlines.
The Pope stuck to the approach already known by now that gained him sympathy in the civil and secular media of dismissing the more authoritarian and intolerant attitudes of his fellow Catholic clerics to offer a friendlier approach to human sexuality.
And yet, when dealing with the issue of the discipline of the clergy in his diocese, Francis went for the Italian slur that has turned into a sort of synonym for the many contradictions shaping the Catholic Church and the sort of civil war that said Church and Christianity at large lives now because of its understanding of sexuality.
The second rendition of the slur is harder to process because the Pope’s agenda was full of activities where Francis tried to display, once again, the “loving grandfather” attitude that he has tried to cultivate for the last eleven years.
On Thursday June 13th, before meeting with the leaders of the so-called G-7, the top global economies, he had a festive reunion with comedians. Although comedians such as Steven Colbert are known for his sympathy for the Pope, and how he “goes to war” defending the Pontiff on his show, in other cases, it was harder to understand the reasons behind the invitation.
Pope Francis and some of the comedians invited to Rome.
Why inviting comedians who have “come out of the closet” to the meeting? Was it to prove once again that he is not as intolerant as his predecessor? Francis had already established that before the first use of the slur, and yet the Pope was very willing to cross that line again.
And granted, the first time around, during the May 20th meeting with the Italian bishops it could have been a mistake, an honest mistake, from a male who grew up in Latin America in the 1930s and 1940s, when dismissing gay males was not only expected but even rewarded from Buenos Aires to Mexico City.
But then, why do it again? The second instance of the frociaggine slur is harder to understand when one takes into consideration that when he used for the second time he had been forced to issue, through an intermediary, an apology, and more so when considering that when he attended the meeting the Roman clergy, he already knew he was going to meet on Thursday, June 13th with comedians who have come out of the closet.
What lies behind
The issue gets harder to understand when one also takes into consideration how the Holy See’s media dealt with the second instance of the frociaggine slur. If on the first case it was up to La Repubblica and La Stampa, the Italian newspapers, to let the world know about the pontifical use of the slur, by Tuesday 11th the Vatican media had decided to let the Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and French worlds know about the new instance of use of the slur not as such, but as part of a broader message about religious life.
However, it decided to pretend that nothing happened in its English- and German-speaking websites, as can be see in the image immediately after this paragraph for English.
Vatican News story about Pope Francis’s meeting with Roman priests.
In the Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian editions, Vatican media excused the Pope’s use of the word as something private. Not part of a public or official address, something related to the internal discipline of the seminaries, as if in doing so the relevance of the slur, was somehow diminished.
In the French edition of Vatican News, the reference is as minimal as possible, only a subordinate phrase of a paragraph, while on Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian the reference shapes a full paragraph of the story, as can be see in the case of the Spanish edition immediately after this paragraph.
The story about Pope Francis’s meeting with priest of the diocese of Rome in Vatican News in Spanish.
Of the Italian major newspapers, only Il Fatto Quotidiano published a story with detailes of the new use of the slur on their June 12th, 2024 edition.
Il Fatto Quotidiano, an Italian newspaper. Tuesday, June 12th, 2024. Front page and page 15.
Main problem with this approach is that it reveals more about the Church’s understanding of the role of LGTBQ persons in the Church than the Church is willing to admit. It proves that the overall idea is that LGTBQ persons are fine if they do not attempt to become clergy or religious.
More specifically, it reveals that the hierarchy keeps blaming gay clergy for the troubles in the Church.
If that is the case, then the Church has learnt nothing from the more than 40 years of clergy sexual abuse crisis. In that regard, the second, most recent use of the frociaggine slur on June 10th, puts the Roman Catholic Church back in 2005, because it validates, once again, the ideas behind the document issued by Benedict XVI that year.
Pope Francis sports the basketball jersey of Fordham University team.
The so-called Instruction concerning the criteria for the discernment of vocations with regard to persons with homosexual tendencies in view of their admission to the seminary and to Holy Orders, indirectly blame gay clergy for the sexual abuse crisis (available here).
The overall assumption, the working hypothesis of that document, and Benedict XVI’s policies and attitudes towards the LGTBQ communities, was that gay clergymen were the culprit for the clergy sexual abuse crisis.
Not a homophobe and yet…
If that is what the second use of the frociaggine slur reveals, then the last twenty years or so of research, probes, debates, commissions, and arguments about the clergy sexual crisis have been nothing but an exercise in spin and public relations.
His use of the slur, the apologies offered, are harder to understand when one takes into account how almost immediately, U.S. Jesuit priest James Martin, the odd American priest with a consistent track of respect for the LGTBQ communities, published a picture of him, on his knees, before Francis, who appears to be blessing Martin.
A post from James Martin SJ at Facebook, June 12th, 2024.
And, once again, it is not as if Pope Francis has a record of attacking LGTBQ persons. Quite the opposite, as the piece linked immediately after this paragraph proves. He has confronted the bishops and priests supporting the criminalization of gay behavior in Africa.
This was the pope who asked, “Who am I to judge?” in response to a question about gay priests in 2013. He announced last year that he would allow priests to bless same-sex couples, defying conservative critics in the Roman Catholic Church. And he apologized only weeks ago, in a statement from the Vatican, for using an offensive Italian term for gay men at a conference of bishops.
So reports that Pope Francis had repeated the slur during a meeting with priests in Rome this week set off a wave of confusion and hurt among some gay Catholics who have carefully parsed his comments over the years for signs of greater acceptance from the church.
In interviews and public statements, some supporters of more acceptance for L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics by the church said his remarks, made in reference to the presence of gay men in seminaries and the clergy, showed the limits of his tolerance. And some said they believed the pope may not have intended to convey bigotry, but that his pejorative language was jarring and unacceptable.
“I was experiencing a sense of whiplash,” said Michael O’Loughlin, the executive director of an L.G.B.T.Q. Catholic ministry based in New York, who, like many gay Catholics, has struggled with his relationship to the church. “Because I’ve been so used to covering some of these positive developments, and then when something like this happens, it’s like, ‘Whoa, what is this?’”
The Rev. James Martin, a high-profile supporter of making the church more welcoming to gay Catholics, said he met with the pope after the latest remarks at Casa Santa Marta, the Vatican guesthouse where the pope lives. “With his permission to share this, the Holy Father said he has known many good, holy and celibate seminarians and priests with homosexual tendencies,” Father Martin wrote on social media.
The pope had signaled support for reaching out to estranged gay Catholics, in part by meeting with Father Martin in 2019 after the priest’s book, “Building a Bridge,” had elicited criticism from conservative clergy members. Their recent meeting, which Father Martin said lasted for an hour on Wednesday, had been previously scheduled and, by coincidence, took place on the 25th anniversary of Father Martin’s ordination to the priesthood.
In an interview, Father Martin suggested that the pope, who is 87, had not fully understood the offensiveness of the slur, which he reportedly used jokingly. “To me, it’s clear that he understands now how much that word offended people,” Father Martin said. “And let me say, there is not an ounce of homophobia in Pope Francis. None.”
The Rev. James Martin supports making the church more welcoming to gay Catholics.
But the Rev. Bryan Massingale, an openly gay priest and theology professor at Fordham University in New York, said he was “shocked and saddened” by the pope’s words. The pope, Father Massingale said, bears responsibility for their far-reaching impact, regardless of his intent.
“Many gay people grow up all of our lives hearing various slurs and insults, and to say that you didn’t mean it maliciously doesn’t diminish it,” Father Massingale said in an interview. “Whether the pope intended it or not, the use of a derogatory slur, especially a second time, sends a message.”
Pope Francis was reported to have first used the anti-gay slur during a meeting of 250 Italian bishops late last month, when asked whether openly gay men should be admitted into seminaries. The bishops recently adopted new admission standards, which are awaiting Vatican approval. According to Italian news outlets, the pope replied that seminaries were already too full of “frociaggine,” an Italian slang term that translates to “faggotness,” and carries connotations of campiness and frivolous behavior.
The Italian news outlet Corriere della Sera reported on Wednesday that he used the term once again on Tuesday, when recounting the words of a bishop to a group of Italian priests. “A bishop came to see me and told me: ‘Here in the Vatican there is too much frociaggine,’” the news outlet reported the pope as saying.
Some observers of the popeinterpreted his remarks as allusions to priests whose traditionalist approach to both liturgical style and church teaching had been criticized by the pope before — some of whom are themselves gay, yet who may be among the most openly critical of gay sexuality. Others said he could have been suggesting that a large number of gay seminarians might inadvertently alienate heterosexual applicants to the seminary.
Some who have pushed for more acceptance of L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics saw in the pope’s remarks a reference to a concern he had shared before: that some clergy members were taking vows of chastity for which they were unprepared and ended up leading “double lives.” Others said the comments indicated the pope’s unwillingness to acknowledge the contributions of gay priests to the church, even as he has sought to be more welcoming of gay congregants.
All Catholic priests take a vow of celibacy. But in 2005, as the scope of revelations about the church’s sexual abuse crisis emerged, the church issued a document formally excluding most gay men from the priesthood, barring candidates “who are actively homosexual, have deep-seated homosexual tendencies or support the so-called gay culture.” Research commissioned by the church has shown that priests who have sexual experiences with same-sex partners are no more likely to abuse minors than others, yet L.G.B.T.Q. advocates say gay priests continue to be scapegoated and stigmatized.
Francis DeBernardo, the executive director of New Ways Ministry, a group based in Maryland that supports gay Catholics, said that one interpretation of the pope’s reported remarks was that he was making “an erroneous assumption that gay men are the priests that are going to be more sexually active than heterosexual men.”
“I wish he would use more precise language to say exactly what he means, because his recent words are puzzling to many,” said Mr. DeBernardo, who said he viewed acceptance of L.G.B.T.Q. people in the church as a matter of justice that sprung from his Catholic identity.
Mark D. Jordan, a professor at Harvard Divinity School who studies gender and sexuality in the church, said the ongoing efforts to interpret the pope’s remarks might be the result of a strategy of “deliberate ambiguity” on the pope’s part as he tries to balance the church’s political factions.
“Sometimes it seems as if the Vatican is saying, ‘It doesn’t matter what your orientation is, as long as you agree to be celibate,’” Dr. Jordan said. “Other times they seem to be saying: ‘No, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a celibate gay or not. If you’re gay, you shouldn’t be studying the priesthood.’”
He added: “I always liken it to reading ‘Pravda’ in the old days, where you had to read between the lines because what you were reading was a series of coded messages involving internal struggles in rooms that you could never reach.”
For Father Massingale, at Fordham, the pope’s remarks raised what he described in a recent essay as “the deepest question” facing the Catholic Church: “Are gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans and queer people fully equal members of the body of Christ?”
He said the remarks offered a more nuanced portrait of Francis, the Church’s 266th pope.
“People want to see him as either A or B,” he said. “He’s either a champion for the gay community or he’s a representative of a homophobic church. And what I’m trying to understand is that both things can be true.’’
— Pope Francis’s homophobic slur helped distract the attention from other sex-related blunders affecting the Catholic Church all over Latin America.
By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez
As with Pope Francis’s homophobic slur, Argentine archbishop Mestre’s sudden resignation reveals the many contradictions affecting the Catholic Church.
On top of the Roman and Argentine sex-related blunders, new details about clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church emerged in Ecuador and Bolivia in the first week of June.
News of Pope Francis’s using a homophobic slur during a meeting with Italian bishops, back on May 20th, stressed the contradictions in Roman Catholic doctrine and practice about sexuality.
Oddly enough, it also played well to hide another blunder made by two of the closest allies of the Pontiff both in Rome and back in Argentina, while hiding from view other attempts of the Church’s hierarchy in Argentina at making themselves relevant in the public sphere.
A few hours before the Italian newspaper La Repubblica’s social media accounts turned the internet into a burning prairie of sorts, news about the sudden resignation of archbishop Gabriel Antonio Mestre, shocked those of us who follow what happens in the Latin American Catholic leadership with news about his resignation.
At first, it was hard to understand what could force the resignation of a recent appointee to the Archdiocese of La Plata, the third or fourth most relevant see of the Catholic Church in the Pope’s country of origin.
Hard, but not unheard, as Los Ángeles Press proved a year ago when we published a full data base with the names of 110 early or unexpected resignations of bishops, a proxy of sorts for the depth of the clergy sexual abuse crisis in the countries where those resignations happen. Here you can download an updated version of the Data Base with the most recent resignations.
Although few noticed Mestre’s resignation outside of Argentina in the mess that Catholic Internet was on the last week of May, his case confirms, for the 111th time, how unwilling is the Church to provide information as to why its leaders resign their office. It also proves how unwilling are the global Catholic leaders to address the crisis of confidence undermining the foundations of Catholicism.
As it happened with the Pope’s slur, Mestre’s sudden resignation stresses how opacity makes harder to take the Church’s words at face value; it deepens the crisis of confidence in an institution already facing the deepest crisis of trust in its history.
It is not as if Mestre was only one more bishop forced out of office in his prime due to bad choices or poor decision making. He was close to both Pope Francis and to the current chair of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith who was his predecessor at the archdiocese of La Plata, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández.
Perverse dynamics
Although it is clear that he had not been named a sexual predator, when looking at the silence, and the remains of his much-hyped appointment, it was clear that behind his sudden disappearance from the Catholic firmament is the reenactment of the perverse dynamics fueling the clergy sexual abuse crisis at a global scale.
Front page and page 14 of La Nación, a leading Argentine newspaper’s edition of Sunday May 26th, 2024.
What is worse. The toxic combination of the news about Mestre’s exit and the Pope’s slur scandal emerging in Rome the very same day made impossible to pay attention to the Argentine bishops’ attempt at confronting the deep political and economic crisis at their country.
On Saturday May 25th, less than 36 hours before the news of both Mestre’s resignation and the scandal regarding Pope Francis’s slur emerged, the current archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge García Cuerva, used his chance as the leading figure of the Te Deum at the cathedral in his country’s capital to stress the many contradictions of the current Argentine government.
Javier Milei and the archbishop Jorge García Cuerva at the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Buenos Aires, Argentina. May 2024.
Him and the rest of Argentine bishops had been preparing for their performance in the rituals around the so-called Fiesta de Mayo (May 25th), a precursor of their Independence from Spain. García Cuerva and his fellow bishops aimed at using the Te Deum and other associated public activities to make the Church’s position clear on the current crisis.
Ojea addressed one of Argentina’s hot topics, the destiny, uncertain for many reasons, of tons of foodstuffs that were supposed to be delivered by the government but, somehow, in a fashion that would only happen in Latin America, ended up “lost” in the shelves of governmental entities, unable or unwilling to deliver them.
Clarín, a leading Argentine newspaper, from May 28th, 2024.
The political situation in Argentina was so bad that on Monday May 27th, when Mestre resigned and news about the Pontifical slur emerged in Rome, the Nation’s Chief of Cabinet, Nicolás Posse, resigned his office after weeks of rumors about the bad relation he already had with Javier Milei.
On the afternoon of Tuesday June 4th. Cáritas Argentina, the equivalent of Catholic Charities USA, used the same cathedral where archbishop García Cuerva called for a restoration of political sanity to organize a massive meal (see, in Spanish here, here and here), as to send a clear, undeniable message about the depth of the crisis there and the non-partisan nature of the Church’s involvement.
Mothers of the Fatherland
The communal meal was the first of a series of activities linking the current crisis in Argentina with Cáritas Argentina yearly campaign seeking donations to fund the so-called “communal pots”, offering meals to families in need all over Argentina.
The bishops were even promoting the figures of the females running those “communal pots”, most of them lay persons, with families of their own, calling them in Argentine Catholic media and social media “Mothers of the Fatherland” (Madres de la Patria).
The activities around the so-called Mothers of the Fatherland will continue up until June 19th, with a mass at the municipality of La Matanza, as can the picture posted immediately after this paragraph shows.
The ad promoting a mass for the “Mothers of the Fatherland”, the women behing the communal pots in Argentina.
La Matanza is a stronghold of Peronismo. The former minister of Finance, Sergio Massa, the Peronista presidential candidate won 61.2 percent of the more than 781 thousand votes casted there in the ballotage of November 2023.
Even the top Catholic think-tank in the country, the Observatorio de la Deuda Social Argentina, a non-for-profit, originally launched by Jorge Mario Bergoglio during his tenure as archbishop of Buenos Aires and chancellor of the Universidad Católica Argentina back in the aughts, published new data about the extent of the current crisis in that country.
The report can be read in the box immediately below or can be downloaded here.
Had the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in Argentina been able to keep itself together, without any of the two scandals, the one at La Plata or the one in Rome, they would have come out with an advantage in giving some sense of order, of direction, in their country.
The multiple fiasco that has been Catholic communications over the last couple of weeks made that impossible. Despite García Cuerva’s best efforts to deliver a powerful yet respectful critique of President Javier Milei’s policies, the mess created by Mestre’s sudden resignation and Francis’s own mistake blurred García Cuerva’s Te Deum message.
Damaging policies
Even if some of the old Argentine media used García Cuerva’s message on their editions of May 26th to highlight their own angst with the uncertain future of the national government there, the Church’s critique of the damaging policies pursued by the Milei administration, had no chance to trump the combined effects of the slur and Mestre’s sudden and unexplained exit.
Mestre was not a minor figure in the Argentine Roman Catholic hierarchy. The archdiocese of La Plata is, on its own a very powerful position, held up until 2018 by conservative Héctor Rubén Aguer, the main rival of Jorge Mario Bergoglio when both were auxiliary bishops at Buenos Aires, and a key supporter of sexual predator Carlos Miguel Buela, as the story available only in Spanish linked after this paragraph describes.
If I was asked to rank the top archdioceses in Argentina, La Plata would come fourth, only behind Buenos Aires, Córdoba, and Rosario. The city of La Plata, whose downtown is more French inspired than the city of Buenos Aires. It is the capital of the province or state of Buenos Aires (not to be confused with the eponymous city, the national capital). Mestre got the job when Pope Francis made Víctor Manuel Fernández a Cardinal and head of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.
To think that Mestre’s choice to become Tucho Fernández’s heir could be an improvised decision would be preposterous.
Before taking over Fernández’s see, he was bishop in the suffragan diocese of Mar del Plata, a city and port on the Argentine Atlantic coast, 330 kilometers or 200 miles South of La Plata and 375 kilometers or 234 miles South of Buenos Aires, as can be seen in the map immediately after.
A map of the City and Province of Buenos Aires, with the cities of La Plata and Mar del Plata, in Argentina.
Pope Francis appointed him back in 2017 and remained for little more than six years, until Fernández got his own promotion, so there is no way to claim that there were not enough chances to vet Mestre’s appointments as bishop of Mar del Plata and later as archbishop of La Plata.
Hermetic silence
To make matters worse, Mestre’s own heir at Mar del Plata, from November 21st, through December 13th of 2023, bishop José María Baliña, a former auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires, also resigned in the middle of the most hermetic silence.
Despite the silence regarding Baliña, Argentine local media published reports where his successor was supposed to be Gustavo Manuel Larrazábal. Catholic Hierarchy, the website this series uses as the base for these reports on the Catholic Church at a global scale, actually has Larrazábal as bishop of Mar del Plata for little over a month, from December 13th, 2023 through January 17th, 2024, when he resigned that position and went back to act as auxiliary bishop of San Juan de Cuyo.
La Nación from May 28th, 2024. On the front page and page 13 provides some details about Mestre’s resignation.
He went back to the position he was appointed back on June 2022, despite news published in local newspapers at Mar del Plata that were confirming on January 9th, 2024 that Larrazábal was about to take over as local bishop (see here in Spanish and here also in Spanish), although it was clear by January 11th, that Larrazábal new appointment was not going to come through (see in Spanish here).
Larrazábal’s appointment fell apart because of accusations of sexual abuse. It is not possible to say the same of either Mestre’s or Baliña’s, but the Church itself, either in Rome or at the offices of the Argentine Conference of Catholic Bishops in Buenos Aires, is unwilling to provide information on any of the three bishops involved in this fiasco.
As far as it is possible to know, Mestre’s fate was cast after a group showed up during mass to protest for his handling of the case of a priest under his care who left Mar del Plata for the diocese of Jujuy.
The group asked archbishop to stop the transfer of priest Luis Damián Albóndiga to Jujuy, a province or state in the Argentina Northern, on the other side of the country, near the border with Chile, more than 1,700 kilometers or more than 1,050 miles Northwest from Mar del Plata.
It is not clear what are the reasons behind the mobilization to reject Albóndiga’s transfer to the other extreme of Argentina, what is clear is that something damaging had to be at stake for Rome to react as it did.
What Mestre’s sudden resignation and the effects it had on the chances of the Catholic hierarchy to deliver a consistent message in the middle of the political and economic crisis in Argentina is that there is no cure for the propensity to sexual-scandal related blunders, as this was one of many during the month of May in the Catholic Church at a global scale.
May opened at a global scale with the faux pas of the Mexican Catholic hierarchy that first talked about the disappearance of Salvador Rangel, the emeritus bishop of Chilpancingo, Mexico, the story linked immediately after this paragraph that reveals how frail is the position of the Catholic Church in Mexico.
More geographic “solutions”
If that was not enough, in Ecuador, the local hierarchy there and their peers at Colombia got themselves into a mess of their own making when news erupted about how priests with credible accusations of sexual abuse move from one country into the other.
Previously on this series Los Ángeles Press has dealt with the use of the so-called geographic solution to clergy sexual abuse; that is to say, to move around predator priests from one country to other.
Unlike what happened with priest from Paraguay who was about to resume his career in Oaxaca, Mexico, neither the Ecuadoran nor the Colombian bishops seem to be interested in preventing the Ecuadoran priest from going to Colombia to “reinvent” himself as a priest there.
And, as the Spanish website Religión Digital stresses, archbishop Alfredo José Espinoza Mateus, originally a priest of the Salesian order, offered his priests as advice that if they were going to do “something stupid” they should do it in such a fashion that they would not bring about scandal.
The archbishop words are somehow troubling in Latin America where “pendejadas”, here translated neutrally as something stupid or something done by a child, could turn into an even worse scandal in Mexico and Central America where “pendejadas” has a ruder meaning, similar to “dumb shit” or something along those lines.
To make matters worse, in the early days of June, out of Bolivia further details emerged of the scale of clergy sexual abuse happening at the flagship institution of the Jesuits there in the last decades of the 20th century at the Colegio (school) Juan XXIII. Now the number of victims could be of at least four hundred males who were then minors.
Adding insult to injury, there is no indication as to whether the Spanish or the Bolivian provinces of Pope Francis’s religious order of origin, the Jesuits, will be willing to face the consequences of the behavior of members of that congregation, as can be read in this story from Bolivian media or, if you are willing to pay for a subscription, on this one from El Periódico de Aragón, a newspaper from Spain, whose most recent story on the issue appears as an image next.
Pages 28 and 29 from El Periódico de Aragón, Spain, June 7th, 2024.
What all these stories have in common is the perverse confluence of a religion that pretends to be rigid about sexuality, living a civil war of sorts because of the conflicting views about sexuality hold by their leaders, but that is unable to figure out a consistent, livable, solution to its own theology of sexuality.
The very archdiocese of La Plata offers various perfect examples of the contradictions marring the fruits of Catholic theology of sexuality. Back in 2023, in a story only published in Spanish, we offered an account of how a predator cleric in that district of the Argentine Roman Catholic Church ended up committing suicide after a judge issued an arrest warrant.
Although the abuse happened before Víctor Manuel Fernández’s time there, during Aguer’s tenure as archbishop Fernández was already there when parents of Catholic schools in the archdiocese asked him to avoid giving him a new assignment. What is worse, Fernández, publicly expressed support for the predator priest and even after his suicide, he had few words to offer to his victims.
And yes, Fernández’s writings on sexuality are not as affected by contradictions as the behavior of many predator priests, and there are no claims about Fernández abusing people under his care, but the very reactions Fernández faces because of his old writings about sexuality prove how marginal he is within the context of contemporary Roman Catholicism and its theological understanding of sexuality.
Two of those books are available here at Los Ángeles Press, in Spanish in the entries linked immediately before and immediately after this paragraph. Moreover, it is hard to say if current Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández would be willing to issue the Nihil Obstat for the publication of what priest Víctor Manuel Fernández wrote back in the 1990s.
The Catholic hierarchy, Argentine and global, would do itself a favor were they willing to accept how damaging the sudden resignation of archbishop Mestre and bishops Baliña and Larrazábal were, even in the absence of the pontifical slur.
Finally, it must be noted that to replace, at least for the time being archbishop Mestre, Pope Francis appointed auxiliary bishop of La Plata Alberto G. Bochatey.
Originally an Augustianian Friar, Bochatey has been an auxiliary since the days of Archbishop Aguer as head of the Archdiocese. As such, he was involved in Aguer’s faulty probes of sexual abuses cases in that diocese, including the one that ended in the 2019 suicide of predator priest Eduardo Lorenzo.
On his own, back in 2017, he was appointed by Pope Francis in charge of the probe regarding one of worst scandals in the history of clergy sexual abuse in Argentina and Latin America at large: the so-called Próvolo case.
As such, that case would require a full entry and perhaps a full book. Suffice to say at this point that it was a school for deaf boys and girls, and at least two priests, two nuns, and several employees of the Instituto Próvolo were originally charged with various forms of sexual abuse.
Sadly, the Argentine system of justifce found a way to exonerate some of those accused of sexually abusing students attending that school, originally located in the city of Luján de Cuyo, province of Mendoza.
In that regard, even if temporary, Bochatey’s appointment as head of the archdiocese of La Plata exacerbates the negative perception of how the Catholic Church deals globally with the effects of the sexual abuse crisis.
Bishop Bochatey, now in charge of La Plata, Bishop Ojea and the ambassador of Israel in Argentina,
Finally, there is a link to last week’s story, where I trace the origins and effects of the Pope’s homophobic slur during a private meeting with the Italian Roman Catholic Bishops.
— The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith has been grappling with fallouts from allowing same-sex pastoral blessings
Pope Francis meets with members of Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith in this file image.
By Catholic News Agency
Pope Francis has appointed three new members of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith as the Vatican’s doctrinal body grapples with fallouts from a declaration allowing pastoral blessing for same-sex couples, says a report.
Francis appointed Portuguese Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, Italian Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, and Archbishop Bruno Forte as new members of the dicastery, says a report from the Catholic News Agency (CNA).
The dicastery is tasked to oversee matters of doctrinal orthodoxy throughout the global Catholic Church as well as the investigation and processing of sex abuse allegations against clergy.
The dicastery’s prefect since 2023, Argentine Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, has recently traveled to Egypt in order to ease tensions after the Coptic Orthodox Church suspended its dialogue with the Catholic Church amid concerns over the same-sex blessings declaration, the report stated.
Reportedly, there has been unease among some Catholic and Protestant Church leaders since the dicastery published the document, Fiducia Supplicans, (Supplicating Trust) on Dec. 18, 2023, which for the first time allows Catholic priests to offer non-liturgical blessings to same-sex couples.
Liberal groups as well as LGBTQ activists have welcomed the declaration as a welcome step to promote inclusivity within the Catholic Church.
The new members of the dicastery are among the top-ranking clergy in the Catholic Church with expertise in theology and are known for their liberal views on Catholic doctrines like Pope Francis.
The 58-year-old Cardinal Mendonça is the head of the Vatican Dicastery for Culture and Education. An expert in the relationship between literature and theology, he has published poetry as well as academic theological articles.
He was the archivist and librarian of the Holy Roman Church from 2018 to 2022.
Before moving to Rome, Mendonça was a professor in Portugal and Brazil and spent one year at the Straus Institute for the Advanced Study of Law and Justice at New York University.
Mendonça also served as the rector of the Capela do Rato, a private chapel in Lisbon known prior to the cardinal’s arrival for its ministry with people with same-sex attractions, CNA reported.
“I don’t choose the people with whom I have to walk. Since I don’t choose, I don’t judge. The attitude of the Church has to be one of welcome, of a normal accompaniment of what people live and are,” he said in an interview in 2015.
Mendonça wrote a preface to a book on feminist theology by Benedictine Sister Maria Teresa Forcades i Vila, who has advocated for a theological case for abortion rights that is “compatible with the Gospel,” which praised the sister for “courageously pointing out contradictions and looking for alternatives of interpretation that support a break in meaning and civilization.”
Pope Francis chose Mendonça to preach the Lenten spiritual exercises for the Roman Curia in 2018 and made him a cardinal in 2019. He has been a member of the Third Order of St. Dominic since 2020.
“Whether remarried Christians, those wounded by the experience of marital breakdown, or the reality of new [irregular] families, or homosexual people, the Church must find a space for listening,” Mendonça said in 2016.
Cardinal Semeraro is the prefect of the Vatican Dicastery for the Causes of Saints.
The 76-year-old cardinal served as bishop of Albano, a diocese located about 10 miles from Rome. He holds a doctorate in theology from the Pontifical Lateran University.
Prior to being made a cardinal in 2020, Semeraro acted as the secretary for Pope Francis’ council of cardinal advisers for seven years.
Semeraro wrote the preface to Father Aristide Fumagalli’s book “Possible Love: Homosexual Persons and Christian Morality” in 2020.
In an interview with Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera in 2016, Semeraro said that he had “no objection” to the legal recognition of civil same-sex unions as long as they “were not equated with the reality of marriage.”
The cardinal has also spoken publicly about his views on divorce and remarriage.
“I say that if divorced people want to remarry this is even a good thing: It means that they have not lost faith in marriage. And today the Church is very attentive to the subjective aspect of the issues, so it must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Times change. …The parent who always punishes is as ineffective as the parent who never punishes,” he told the Quotidiano di Puglia in 2018.
Archbishop Forte is a theologian who has served as the archbishop of Chieti-Vasto in eastern Italy since 2004. The 74-year-old archbishop is the author of numerous publications on theology, philosophy, and spirituality, CNA reported.
John Paul II asked him to preach the spiritual exercises at the Roman Curia’s Lenten retreat in 2004 after Forte helped to oversee the preparation of the Vatican document “Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past,” which preceded Pope John Paul II’s apology for historical sins by the Church in 2000.
Forte was also responsible for sections on homosexuality in the interim document for the first session of the Synod on the Family in 2014, according to National Catholic Register correspondent Edward Pentin, who wrote a book about the synod.
“The Church does not believe that the term ‘family’ can be used to refer both to a union between a man and a woman that is open to procreation and a same-sex union. Having said this, it seems obvious to me that humans have different experiences and have rights that must all be protected. The issue here, therefore, is not equating the two in all senses, including in terminological terms,” Forte said during the synod in 2014, according to La Stampa.
