Interesting. Sandro Magister has a post up at Chiesa claiming that supporters of the late Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, long considered the leader of the liberal and heterodox opposition to Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI, are crowing that Pope Francis is Martini’s dream come true:
ROME, October 15, 2013 – Seven months after the election as pope of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the interpretations of the beginning of this pontificate are contrasting.
Within the Church the judgments most positive, if not enthusiastic, on the first acts of Pope Francis are coming from the supporters of the cardinal who for years represented, with great authoritativeness and widespread consensus, the most clear alternative approach to the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.
That cardinal was Carlo Maria Martini, a former director of the Pontifical Biblical Institute, archbishop of Milan from 1979 to 2002, who died on August 31, 2012 after having left his instructions in an interview that was also very critical, published immediately after his death as his “spiritual testament”:
> After Martini, the Fight Over His Spiritual Testament (6.9.2012)
This last interview was conducted by the Austrian Jesuit Georg Sporschill, the same who in 2008 oversaw the publication of the book most representative of Martini, also in the form of an interview, “Nighttime conversations in Jerusalem”:
> God Is Not Catholic, Cardinal’s Word of Honor (12.11.2008)
During the last years of his life, Cardinal Martini had accentuated his criticisms in interviews and books written together with “borderline” Catholics like Fr. Luigi Verzé and the bioethicist Ignazio Marino, in which he expressed his hope for a bringing up-to date-of the Church also on questions like the beginning and end of life, marriage, sexuality:
> Carlo Maria Martini’s “Day After” (28.4.2006)
In the conclave of 2005, Martini was the cardinal symbol of the failed opposition to the election of Joseph Ratzinger. And the votes of his supporters, together with others, converged at the time precisely on Bergoglio.
Eight years later, in March of 2013, it was again the “martiniani” who backed the election of Bergoglio as pope. This time with success.
And today they are seeing come true, in the first acts of Pope Francis, what for Martini was only a “dream.” The dream of a Church “synodal, poor among the poor, inspired by the gospel of the beatitudes, leaven and mustard seed.”
Go here to read the rest. Pope Francis has praised the late Cardinal Martini as a father for the whole Church. If you wish to see where Cardinal Martini, a Jesuit, wanted the Church to go, you only have to look at the dying Episcopalian Church in this country. Go here to read all about it. PopeWatch prays that Pope Francis does not share Martini’s ecclesiastical death wish.
Careful, Don, or the conservative Catholic Executioners of Doubt will have to pay you a visit.
No executioner here, just a bewildered Catholic that has to take this in slowly.
Infant bites I hate to admit.
Your case above and the chiesa claims are disconcerting. As always prayer and preparedness.
Scisim growing at brisk pace. It was predicted. I just don’t want to believe it.
I’m praying were all wrong and Pope Francis defender of the Truth drops his Martini….so to speak.
Dale,
At the risk of sounding naive: Who are the conservative executioners of doubt?
I mean, there’s Mark Shea and the Patheos set, but I mostly haven’t read them in years because conservatives like me who own guns and vote Republican and support the occasional war the pope doesn’t are public enemy #1 anyway.
From where I sit, it seems like most on the conservatives I read are freaking out about Francis. And then on the other side, there are the dissident leftie Catholics who have gone into total noise machine mode and are busy taking every Francis phrase they can and spinning it into “we won and he hates you” agit prop.
On the post, if I recall the inside stories on the previous election, the Martini set originally had their own candidate, but he was getting nowhere. Ratzinger and Bergoglio both got portions of the JP2 loyalist vote, with Ratzinger getting much more. Then the Martini folks panicked at the last minute in a desperate attempt to vote “anything but Ratzinger”.
The few remaining libs may have supported him this time around, but that’s partly because the lib wing barely exists anymore and had no real candidate.
It’s not you, Darwin. As always, you remain reasonable, and concede that the Pope has moments of imprecision and imprudence.
As to the rest, we seem to be traveling in different circles, as most conservative types I’ve encountered are in papal-maximalist, shoot-the-doubters mode. I think you’d have to admit the big voices of conservative Catholicism have gone into a full court press for the Bishop of Rome.
I think you’d have to admit the big voices of conservative Catholicism have gone into a full court press for the Bishop of Rome.
You did not ask for a piece of advice, but perhaps you should tune them out and read The Latin Mass. It is the finest Catholic publication out there and written and edited by people who are fairly weary with the mess in the contemporary Church and elect to focus their attention elsewhere.
Just a thought.
1. Loyalty is generally a good thing, as is the impulse to put the best construction you can on someone’s remarks. It can be taken too far, of course.
2. About a dozen years ago, Christopher Ferrara offered that he was a lawyer and read Sacrosanctum Concilium the way a lawyer looking at a contract would, asking the question, “what does it allow the other guy to do to you?”. Waal, you and Mr. McClarey are lawyers and you notice the smelly little rabbit doots the rest of us miss. Personally, I gave one of His Holiness’ prizes a cursory reading and said, “Ach, much ado about nothing”. It did not occur to me that phrases which could be misconstrued by reporters did not break in a random way.
Pope Francis does not want to act as an absolute monarch, and is prepared to listen to synods (rather unwieldy bodies which take a year to set up and whose conclusions only cover areas of agreement). Good news for us traddies.
It comes down to this. Are people reading Pope Francis in a hermeneutic of continuity or rupture. What we are witnessing are groups both liberal and conservative who are delighting in (liberal) or tearing their hair out (conservative) because they read the Pope with the hermeneutic of rupture
Botolph,
I think you are partly right, but I would add that most conservatives are tearing their hair out not because they are reading the Pope with the hermeneutic of rupture but because the Pope’s imprecision is allowing liberals to do so and thereby misinform the masses.
Mike, thanks for the response. There is no question, that Pope Francis’ interviews ( on the airplane after World Youth Day, the “Jesuit interview”, and the secular Scalafari interview) were a new experience for Catholics. With John Paul and Benedict, interviews were either more ‘controlled’ or became books themselves- especially true of Joseph Ratzinger first as Cardinal, then as pope. I believe a couple of issues were at play with Pope Francis: because he did not like to give interviews when in Argentina, he lacked any real experience in giving interviews. Because of the nature of it, I believe the best interview was the Jesuit interview ( organized questions prepared ahead of time; done over period of three distinct days; carefully recorded and later translated by Jesuits who are believers and really cared about the interview for Moore than a ‘news story’. One of the clear messages that Pope Francis was sending, was a message to the Curia- that he would not be managed or controlled by them. One can legitimately say that we wish there had been some control, however, the recent Conclave sent a clear message to the next pope, whoever he would be: reign in and transform the Curia. They were the ones, not everyday Catholics, whom the pope was criticizing. I also think it is at least interesting to note that no interviews have taken place since his three day meeting with his eight member Council of Cardinals.
When I speak of a hermeneutic of continuity I am speaking of making sure “I” don’t isolate one statement or comment from other statements Pope Francis has made- for example, his real pro- life position manifest several times. His statements concerning the centrality of the Kerygma: the core message of our Faith, is not new, and has been made by every pope but especially John Paul and Benedict. Other comments were almost verbatimm quotes from the Aparecida Statement of the Latin American bishops ( partly repeated at the beginning of George Weigel’s excellent book Evangelical Catholicism). Finally I use hermeneutic of continuity in same way Pope Benedict does/did, seeing things within the continuity of Tradition. The Holy Father has not denied, or changed any teaching of the Church: he cannot (something that some don’t seem to grasp). I sense there were a lot of assumptions made by some during the ministry of Pope Benedict ( for example, that he was moving the Church toward a point in time when the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite would become the real Ordinary Form-yet when did Benedict celebrate the Extraordinary Form at the well televised public Masses? Certainly no one could really claim Benedict was moving the Church to a position of Pre-Vatican II, or to a situation in which Vatican II was relativized, etc.
There is a new sense of direction in Pope Francis, just as there was with Blessed John XXIII and Blessed John Paul II. No one would deny the new sense of direction. Again however, is it due more to Pope Francis who now in charge is delighting in doing things his way? Or is it more accurate to see much if not most of what he is doing in continuity of the ‘job description’ the conclave gave to whoever would be the successor of Benedict.
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Sad to say alot of us feel this way….we know Card. Martini was a contender in 2005 or so it is rumored….and so was Bergolio……Thank GOD Pope Benedict was elected….what is worrisome is going forward with the Reform of the Reform and the Mass in the E.F…..
Just can’t get that feeling we had with Benedict…lets pray for Pope Francis….