PopeWatch: Francis Fully Revealed

According to Sandro Magister Pope Francis is now free to take steps that he might not have take if Benedict were still alive:

The death of his predecessor Benedict XVI, at the end of 2022, was for Pope Francis like the passing of the “katéchon,” of the restraint that held him back from fully revealing himself.

Witness the acts of government that he has chalked up in recent months, in rapid succession.

The latest is the announcement of 21 new cardinals, 18 of whom are of conclave age. Neither the archbishop of Paris nor that of Milan appear on the list, despite the latter’s having been in office for six years. But absent above all is the major archbishop of the Greek Catholic Church of Ukraine, Sviatoslav Shevchuk, also guilty of having spoken openly of everything he judges to be wrong in Francis’s conduct regarding the ongoing war.

Two Jesuits appear on the list, Hong Kong bishop Stephen Chow Sau-Yan – back from an official trip to Beijing that for the pope outweighs the humiliations suffered at the hands of the regime with the recent installation of two bishops without the due prior consent of Rome – and the archbishop of Córdoba, Argentina, Ángel Sixto Rossi, a stalwart of Jorge Mario Bergoglio since the years in which the future pope was provincial of the Society of Jesus, in bitter conflict with the majority of his confreres.

Then there is the archbishop of Juba in South Sudan, Stephen Ameyu Martin Mulla, compensated with the purple for the attack he suffered when he was installed in the diocese in 2019, on the part of opponents from a different tribe, who also accused him of immoral acts.

And again there are two appointments deliberately contrary to the conservative leanings of the respective national episcopates: in South Africa the archbishop of Cape Town Stephen Brislin, white of complexion and with ideas similar to those of the German “synodal path”; and in Poland Grzegorz Rys, archbishop of Lodz, the same diocese from which hails the pope’s cardinal almoner Konrad Krajewski, his close friend. Rys is one of the rare progressive voices of the Polish episcopate, while Krakow remains without the purple, governed by a successor of Karol Wojtyla of opposite bent.

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But the most striking appointment is not that of the Argentine Victor Manuel Fernández (in the photo) as cardinal, seen as a matter of course, but the previous assignment to him of the post of prefect of the dicastery for the doctrine of the faith.

Here in fact Francis has done what he would never have dared to do while Joseph Ratzinger was alive. That is, the appointment in the key role that belonged to the great German theologian and later pope of a figure who is his complete opposite.

Suffice it to say that his penultimate predecessor in the same office, Cardinal Gerhard L. Müller, years ago accused Fernández of nothing more or less than “heresy,” for the incoherent theses he supported. But Pope Francis was not the least bit ruffled. He had indeed appointed to the office of prefect for the doctrine of the faith first Müller and then Luis Francisco Ladaria Ferrer, both of impeccable orthodoxy, but for him this was only a tribute to Benedict XVI while he was still alive. What they said and did mattered little to him, even, at times, blatantly contradicting their rulings, such as for example Ladaria’s veto on the blessing of homosexual couples. The writer behind the key documents of his pontificate, “Evangelii gaudium” or “Amoris laetitia,” has always been Fernández, even down to the duplication of whole passages from his previous essays.

And now it’s up to him, Fernández, to do “something very different” with respect to his predecessors, according to the unusual letter with which the pope accompanied his appointment: to have done with with the “times when, rather than promoting theological knowledge, possible doctrinal errors were pursued,” to let the Holy Spirit bring about the “harmony” of the most diverse lines of thought, “more effectively than any control mechanism.” In short, the triumph of that relativism which was enemy number one for Ratzinger as theologian and pope.

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Other significant appointments: those of the participants in the upcoming synod on synodality. Noteworthy among the bishops elected by the episcopal conferences are the five from the United States, all conservative in character, a move that Francis has however redressed by adding among his picks cardinals much closer to him: Blase Cupich, Wilton Gregory, Robert McElroy, Joseph Tobin, and Sean O’Malley, plus Archbishop Paul Etienne and the Jesuit activist James Martin, this latter the troubadour of that new homosexual morality which is also among the declared objectives of the true director of the synod together with the pope, Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, relator general of the assembly.

Among the “witnesses” without the right to vote Francis has also included Luca Casarini, the anti-globalization activist he has repeatedly praised as a hero of aid for migrants in the Mediterranean, most recently at the Angelus on Sunday July 9.

But in addition to those selected, those whom Francis has excluded from participating in the synod also make news, including the holders of all the Vatican offices that deal with the law.

The first of those excluded is Cardinal Dominique Mamberti, prefect of the supreme tribunal of the apostolic signatura and until recently, by statute, also president of the court of cassation of Vatican City State, together with two other cardinal members of the supreme court, all jurists and canonists of proven expertise.

But in the spring of this year Francis promulgated a new fundamental law of Vatican City State and completely changed the criteria for appointing the members of the court of cassation, reserving the selection of each one to himself.

And who are the four cardinals he has appointed? As president of the new court the American Kevin J. Farrell, and as members the Italians Matteo Zuppi, Augusto Lojodice, and Mauro Gambetti. None of whom has the slightest legal expertise. Gambetti, for example, has recently distinguished himself instead with the sensational fiasco of a pretentious show with singers and thirty Nobel prize winners brought from all over the world in the name of brotherhood, in a desolately empty St. Peter’s Square.

Go here to read the rest.  Pope Benedict’s resignation was a vast misfortune for the Church.  His death before his successor is shaping up to add to that misfortune.  Heckuva job Conclave of 2013, heckuva job.