PopeWatch: Pope Unbalanced

Sandro Magister takes a caustic look at the sloppy writing and thinking of our Pope:

Anyone who can understand this deserves a medal. Take a look:

“There are four elements: in learning reality there are the concept and the intuition, and in explicating reality there are the two terms of an antinomy. These four elements come into tension with each other. We cannot say that the sign of its effectiveness is the balance between reality and grasping it. We must look for a sign that, in itself, contains the tension of the four elements. In my opinion, this sign is consonance.

“The consonance that the subject who knows experiences in the self is, in this case, a reflection of the consonance that exists between the reality in itself and the known reality. Let me explain: the one who knows has direct experience of the consonance that exists between what he learns and what he expresses. On the basis of this consonance he can know when there is consonance between the reality in itself and the learned reality.

“St. Ignatius uses this experience to discern whether a spirit is good or bad: the consonance depicted in the falling of water on the sponge rather than on the stone. It is an ambivalent consonance as far as the identity of the spirits is concerned, because its positive or negative indication is to be taken from the habitual state of the subject, progressing from good to better, or falling from bad to worse.”

The passage just cited is the heart of a never-before-published text by Jorge Mario Bergoglio, with which “La Civiltà Cattolica” solemnly opened its latest issue, extolling its “style of argument:”

> Interpreting Reality

The text can be dated to 1987-88 and coincides with the apogee of the intellectual arc of the Argentine Jesuit now pope, when, in his early fifties, he was working on a doctoral thesis on the thought of the Italo-German theologian and philosopher Romano Guardini.

That thesis was never completed, in spite of Bergoglio’s trip to Germany aimed at doing so. But one of its chapters, according to its author, has been inserted root and branch into “Evangelii gaudium,” the agenda-setting document of Francis’s pontificate. And it is the chapter with the so-called “four postulates” so dear to the current pope, according to which time is greater than space, unity prevails over conflict, realities are more important than ideas, the whole is greater than the part.

Pope Francis has repeatedly acknowledged that he is indebted to Guardini and in particular to his 1925 essay “Der Gegensatz,” “Polar opposition.”

It is a debt that is also recognized by the best-equipped scholar of Bergoglio’s theological and philosophical thought, Professor Massimo Borghesi, instructor of moral philosophy at the University of Perugia and close to him for years, in two of his books dedicated to the subject: the first, from 2017, focused on the intellectual guides of the current pope, from Gaston Fessard to Henri de Lubac, from Erich Przywara to Alberto Methol Ferré, as well as Guardini of course, all great teachers but certainly assimilated in a very confused fashion by their disciple; and the second, from this year, in which he compares the vision of Francis – again associated mainly with Guardini’s thought – with the movement inspired by the American “theocons” Michael Novak, George Weigel, and Richard John Neuhaus.

Borghesi does not hesitate to argue that Guardini’s thought “is the theory that underpins the theoretical framework of ‘Evangelii gaudium,’ of ‘Laudato si,’ and of ‘Fratelli tutti’,” the three major documents of the current pontificate. “‘Catholic’ thinking based on the distinction between ‘opposition’ and ‘contradiction’.”

But once again, the distance between teacher and disciple here too is chasmic.

The polarity theorized by Guardini is that which holds opposites together without erasing them, which conceives of the Church as a “complexio oppositorum,” made up of both institution and charisma, mystery and word, interiority and public worship, history and eternal life.

In Bergoglio, however, this fruitful balance of opposites ends in gross contradictions, in which one of the two poles clobbers the other (like time, or the “process,” over space, the norm) or one is just as good as its opposite.

This is an imbalance in Bergoglio not only as a thinker but also as a man, one that has profoundly marked his personal saga, already in the eighties of the last century in which among other things he wrote the rambling notes now published in “La Civiltà Cattolica.”

No longer father provincial of the Argentine Jesuits but still with a party of ardent supporters, Bergoglio was in those years an incurable element of division in the Society of Jesus, and was judged as such not only by his Argentine adveraries but by then superior general Peter Hans Kolvenbach, to the point that neither did he want to meet him when he went to Buenos Aires, nor did Bergoglio set foot in the general curia when he went to Rome.

For him the 1980’s, as Bergoglio himself has described them as pope, were “a time of great desolation,” a “dark time” that followed the radiant years of his “omnipotence” as father provincial, during which he nonetheless felt an inner restlessness that in 1978 led him to put himself under the care of a Jewish psychoanalyst. The Society of Jesus ultimately sidelined him, exiling him to Córdoba with no role whatsoever. But from there he was miraculously recalled as auxiliary of then archbishop of Buenos Aires Antonio Quarracino, to later become his successor and a cardinal. In the conclave of 2005, the one that saw the election of Joseph Ratzinger as pope, he reached a peak of 40 votes, but even then Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, top Jesuit and top elector, harbored reservations about him and “was not in favor of the election of the Jesuit Bergoglio,” as he afterward confided to Andrea Riccardi, Church historian and founder of the Community of Sant’Egidio, who wrote about this in a book published a few days ago.

He became pope in 2013, still with his psychological concerns, as he himself has repeatedly stated. It was “for psychiatric reasons” that he explained his wish to live at Santa Marta instead of at the Apostolic Palace. It is “for mental health” that he says he does not want to read the writings of his opponents.

Go here to read the rest.  Heckuva job Conclave of 2013, heckuva job.