PopeWatch: l’eglise c’est moi

Sandro Magister notes that while the Pope talks of synods, he is a very autocratic Pope:

Much is happening that is contradictory, in the Catholic Church. On the one hand is the celebration of a synod on synodality, which extends participation in Church governance well beyond the pope and the bishops, to priests, religious and laity, men and women. But on the other hand one is witnessing an exercise of papal powers, on the part of Francis, authoritarian and monocratic as never before.

With an added extemporaneous innovation, announced on September 11 by the new prefect of the dicastery for the doctrine of the faith, the Argentine Victor Manuel Fernández, who, responding in writing to the questions of Edward Pentin for the “National Catholic Register,” ascribed to Francis “a particular charism for this safeguarding, a unique charism, which the Lord has given only to Peter and his successors,” but which no one had ever heard of until now.

This is a matter of “a living and active gift,”  Fernández explained, “which is at work in the person of the Holy Father. I do not have this charism, nor do you, nor does Cardinal Burke. Today only Pope Francis has it. Now, if you tell me that some bishops have a special gift of the Holy Spirit to judge the doctrine of the Holy Father, we will enter into a vicious circle (where anyone can claim to have the true doctrine) and that would be heresy and schism. Remember that heretics always think they know the true doctrine of the Church. Unfortunately, today, not only do some progressives fall into this error but also, paradoxically, do some traditionalist groups.”

It is difficult to think of a more sprawling extension of the pope’s infallibility in matters of faith, affirmed by Vatican Council I within extremely stringent boundaries. And in fact the new dogma unexpectedly voiced by Fernández immediately came under a barrage of criticism.

The most in-depth and scathing came from the conservative camp, on the blog “Caminante Wanderer,” by an anonymous and erudite Argentine scholar.

But also on the opposite side, the progressive, the very singular “charism” with which, according to Fernández, only Francis is endowed was rejected without appeal, precisely as being incompatible with the limits of papal infallibility reiterated by Vatican Council II in the dogmatic constitution “Lumen gentium.” Massimo Faggioli, a professor of theology at Villanova University, has written about this in “Commonweal.”

Remaining even more incomprehensible, therefore, is the contradiction between the boundless monocratic powers with which Francis more and more considers himself invested from above, complete with the stamp of his court theologian, and the contemporary “democratization” of the Church that he is after with the new synodality.

Also on this new form of the synod a change of stride has taken place with Francis, in the course of his pontificate.

Getting back to Vatican Council II, in “Lumen gentium,” the dogmatic constitution of Vatican II expressly dedicated to the Church, the word “synod” occurs just once and is synonymous with the word “council,” which brings together exclusively the pope and the bishops.

While in the rare pontifical documents of the following decades in which the word “synodality” occurs, it refers to how this is practiced in the Orthodox Churches, that is, to the college of bishops gathered with their patriarch or major archbishop to exercise hierarchical authority over the respective Church.

Peter Anderson, a scholar in Seattle who is an attentive observer of what goes on in the Eastern Churches and sends out in this regard the most detailed and well-documented factual reports, has ascertained that from the Council to the end of 2013 there were just twelve occurrences of the word “synodality”: six with John Paul II, two with Benedict XVI, and four with Francis.

From this it can be gathered that, still during the first year after his election as pope, Francis was by no means inclined, at least in his public statements, toward a “democratization” of the synods.

The first time he spoke about “synodality” was on June 28 2013, addressing the delegation of the ecumenical patriarchate of Constantinople. And he was referring to the “reflection of the Catholic Church on episcopal collegiality,” on account of which it was a good idea to “learn” from the “tradition of synodality so typical of the Orthodox Churches.”

The second time was in the homily of the following day, the feast of Saints Peter and Paul, to express the hope for “harmony” between the synod of bishops and the primacy of the pope.

The third time was in the September 2013 interview with the director of “La Civiltà Cattolica,” Antonio Spadaro. There for the first time he floated the idea that “perhaps it is time to change the methodology of the synod, because the current one seems static to me.” But to immediately repeat that it is “from our Orthodox brothers” that “we can learn more about the meaning of episcopal collegiality and the tradition of synodality.”

The fourth time was in the apostolic exhortation “Evangelii gaudium” of November 24 2013, the agenda-setting document of his pontificate, where however he again limited himself to saying that “in the dialogue with our Orthodox brothers and sisters, we Catholics have the opportunity to learn more about the meaning of episcopal collegiality and their experience of synodality.”

Go here to read the rest.  The Pope reminds me of one of Napoleon’s Marshals, Francis Joseph Lefebvre.  After taking over a town he told the inhabitants that they were free now.  He then told them that this should not go to their heads, because if they made a move without his say so, they would be shot.