By Daniel J. Mahoney
Thursday, February 06, 2020
In the first year or two of Pope Francis’s pontificate,
conservative-minded Catholics made heroic efforts to place the perplexing ways
of the new pope in continuity with the thought and deeds of his immediate
predecessors. It was said that he had been a forceful critic of liberation
theology, at least in its Marxist expressions, that he was a man of traditional
piety, that he spoke about the machinations of the Evil One with surprising
regularity, and that his style — brash, critical of established ways, anxious
for dialogue with the modern world — was a refreshing way of bringing Christian
orthodoxy to bear on the modern world. But there were early signs that
challenged this reassuring consensus. Francis seemed suspicious of the most
faithful Catholics — they were, in his estimation, rigid, obsessed with the
evils of abortion and sexual sins, closed to the need for a Church open to
humanitarian activism and a de-emphasis on dogma and even truth.
If Pope John Paul II stood up to Communist savagery and
mendacity with a courage and integrity that helped ignite the revolutions of
1989, and if the immensely learned Pope Benedict XVI gave soft nihilism a
remarkably descriptive and accurate name, “the dictatorship of relativism,”
Pope Francis stood for nothing less than accommodating the world in the name of
“change” and deference to the alleged “signs of the times.” As Cardinal Zen of
Hong Kong once noted, Francis could see Communists as merely the victims of
Latin American military dictatorship and lovers of the poor and thus more
Christian than Christians in decisive respects. The gulags, and massive religious
persecution, did not fit into this vision of relatively benign Communists.
As the estimable Father Raymond J. de Souza pointed out
in the November 28, 2019, issue of the Catholic
Herald, Pope Francis has a soft spot for leftist leaders who oppress civil
society in the name of social justice and solidarity with the poor. The
recently deposed Bolivian leader Evo Morales was, de Souza writes, “the Holy
Father’s favorite leader in the Americas,” which “was passing strange, as
[Morales] was a tyrant.” Francis met with the demagogic Morales six times in
six years and considered the man to be his friend. In an act never adequately
explained by the Vatican, de Souza notes, when the Argentine pope visited
Bolivia in 2015 he accepted from Morales a crucifix adorned with a hammer and
sickle.
All of this, alas, fits into a much broader pattern.
Francis genuinely esteemed Fidel Castro and told reporters after his visit to
Cuba in 2015 that he saw in Castro a strongly committed ecologist. He remained
silent publicly and privately about the sufferings and persecution of his
coreligionists in Cuba under Communism. Castro’s hideous despotism and
draconian restrictions on the Roman Catholic Church did not influence the
pope’s judgment of the man or the regime. In Venezuela, the bishops repeatedly
pleaded with the Latin American pope to speak out against the emerging
anti-Christian leftist despotism in Caracas; the best the pope could do was
call for “dialogue” between an oppressed and mutilated civil society and a
regime whose “socialism” he still seemed to esteem.
Carlos Eire, the great Reformation scholar at Yale
University, has described this pattern as Francis’s “preferential option for
dictatorship.” Brutally honest but not hyperbolic, Eire was himself a “Pedro
Pan” baby (a child refugee from Castro’s Cuba). This pattern of favoring
dictatorial regimes is not limited to Francis himself but includes many of his
closest associates. The head of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, the
Argentine bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, a close friend and acolyte of the
pope, has surrealistically declared the People’s Republic of China the country
that best embodies Catholic social teaching in action. What does Pope Leo XIII,
the initiator of Catholic social thought and a passionate critic of socialist
collectivism, have to do with the residues of Maoism in China?
Political correctness — and hostility to the West as the
West — pervades a good deal of what this papacy says and does. This is a papacy
that has been largely silent about the decimation of ancient Christian
communities in the Arab and Islamic Middle East. The Koran, Pope Francis
insists, is incompatible with “every form of violence.” This is false, and
everyone knows it. Where Bishop Sánchez Sorondo sees social justice and
Catholic social teaching at work in China, others, as Robert Royal has noted,
see intensified persecution of Catholics and other religious believers,
environmental damage that is unprecedented in the East or West, a cruel
forced-abortion policy, Orwellian surveillance of dissidents and of every
expression of independence in civil society, and the rounding up in
concentration camps of over 1 million Muslim Uighurs in the northwest. As
Royal, president of the Faith & Reason Institute and editor of The Catholic Thing, aptly observes, the
Vatican’s misjudgments are all too commonplace: “The Vatican currently pursues
a steady line of anti-Western criticism, against the alleged xenophobia,
rapacious economies, and environmental ‘sins’ of both Europe and North
America.”
Royal refers to these juvenile ideological clichés, and
predictable policies, as manifestations of “simplistic progressivism.” This is
a Vatican that conflates the truth of Christ with a “religion of humanity” that
has become a substitute for a religion that affirms transcendence. Sober
political thinking is not much in evidence, nor even a modicum of realism and
moderation in human affairs. Love and charity have been hopelessly politicized,
confused with a sentimentality that excuses every excess carried out in the
name of a perfected “humanity.” When one sides with an atheistic and
totalitarian regime that endangers the children of God, one has entered into
morally and theologically troubled territory, indeed.
***
What is responsible for this steady evacuation of, this
open assault on, classical Christian orthodoxy and moral-political good sense?
To begin with, Francis and his cohort are partisans of a “new Christianity”
that pays insufficient attention to the horizon that Christians call
“eternity.” The Church is literally becoming secular, obsessed with political
and social matters far beyond its competence. As the courageous Kazakh bishop
Athanasius Schneider suggests in his new book, Christus Vincit: Christ’s Triumph over the Darkness of the Age,
Pope Francis mainly attends to secular issues — climate change, the environment
(right down to the proper disposal of plastic), immigration — and does so in an
“exaggerated manner.” This “frenzied activism,” as Schneider calls it, crowds
out concern for the life of the soul and the “supernatural realities” of grace,
prayer, and penance.
This pope proclaims mercy without a concomitant emphasis
on the need for repentance, or a fundamental reorientation of the soul. Compare
this with the first of the Gospels, that of Mark, in which Jesus repeatedly
cries out for repentance. There is no Kingdom of God without the penitential
turn of the soul to the grace and goodness of God. Nor does Francis seem to
believe in punishment, temporal or eternal, for grave crimes and sins. After
unilaterally changing the Catholic catechism to declare capital punishment
barbaric and illicit, he now suggests that life imprisonment is also
unacceptable from the Church’s point of view. He has a seemingly utopian
confidence in rehabilitation and no real sense of radical evil. His tendency is
to identify the “magisterium of the Church,” its settled and unchanging
teaching going back to apostolic times, with his own whims and ideological
preferences. This may be the most troubling aspect of his papacy.
At the annual meeting of the American bishops in
Baltimore this past November, the papal nuncio, Archbishop Christophe Pierre,
chastised the American bishops for not being on board with the “magisterium of
Pope Francis.” But this is not the way faithful Catholics talk. This is
evidence of a misplaced ultramontanism, allowing a single pope to alter
enduring Church teaching in the name of “change” or accommodation to the
zeitgeist and in obvious disregard of what is permanent in the natural moral
law. As Bishop Schneider suggests, there is something unilateral about Pope
Francis’s thinking on crime and punishment and the allegedly immoral and
illicit character of the death penalty. Francis almost carelessly partakes of
what C. S. Lewis called a “humanitarian theory of punishment” that, as
Schneider says, “in principle implicitly or explicitly absolutize[s] the
corporal and temporal life of man.” There is a blindness to the power of evil,
and to original sin, that informs this humanitarianism from beginning to end.
There is little or no talk about the need for penance and expiation for serious
sins and crimes, or even a recognition that “monstrous crimes” must be punished
by decent political communities that wish to safeguard the common good.
As Bishop Schneider is right to note, temporal punishment
has sometimes given rise to repentance and a radical transformation of souls:
Witness the “good thief” with Jesus at Golgotha who found expiation — and
eternal life — on the verge of his execution. Saint Thérèse of Lisieux did not
attend protest rallies demanding that the death penalty be abolished. Rather,
she prayed that hardened criminals, on the verge of execution, would respond to
the gift of grace and repent before a merciful God who is our father and
friend. This understanding of sin, crime, repentance, and responsibility is
alien to this papacy and the “progressive” wing of the Catholic Church, which
indulges in a humanitarian sentimentality that today too often passes for
Christianity.
On matters of war and peace, and immigration and the
integrity of borders, Francis has been guided by the same humanitarian moralism
that has informed his “frenzied activism” on other fronts. In a 2018 book of
interviews with the left-wing French sociologist Dominique Wolton, Francis
lightly dismisses the rich Catholic tradition of ethical and prudential
reflection on matters of war and peace. In the tone of a person with no
political responsibilities, and no sense of what they might be, he declares
that there is no such thing as a just war. If he means that no war is simply or
absolutely just, he is reiterating age-old Christian wisdom about the impact of
original sin even on decent political communities attempting to defend the
civilized patrimony of humankind. But this pope, abandoning equitable or
balanced judgment, declares that only with peace do you “win everything.” He
overlooks the fact that “peace” can also be a vehicle of mendacity, oppression,
injustice, violence, and genocide, as that proffered by totalitarian regimes.
As Vladimir Solovyov argued in his “Short Tale of the Anti-Christ” (1900),
there can be such a thing as an “evil peace” and a good or legitimate war (and
vice versa, of course). Francis’s conception in no way resembles the
“tranquility of order” so richly articulated in Book 19 of St. Augustine’s City of God. If only he would display
more deference to the rich theological and philosophical wisdom of the past.
Francis seems to believe, like the Leninists of old, that
wars are caused only by rapacious capitalists, discounting quests for power,
influence, glory, or fame, and never by totalitarian ideologues. Only the most
naïve progressive or humanitarian could see “money” — “Satan’s dung,” as
Francis rather colorfully calls it in his conversations with Wolton — as “the
greatest threat to peace in the world today.” Alas, such musings sound more
like the pronouncements of a secular progressive than the considered
reflections of a man of a Church “which knows the truth about man,” to cite the
great Pascal.
***
The silence of most of the bishops in the Catholic Church
on this embarrassing but destructive mixture of progressivism, reflexive
activism, and casual dismissal of the deepest wisdom of the Church is disconcerting.
There are exceptions. As Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the former head of the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, has repeatedly pointed out, the
Church must recover the clarity of true theology and the natural moral law.
“Spiritual and moral renewal in Christ and not the de-Christianization of the
Church or her transformation into an NGO” will point the way forward. If the
Church is nothing but a humanitarian NGO, she is nothing holy or enduring and
will be blown to and fro by various ideological winds. In his pre-Christmas
address at the end of 2019, Francis railed against “rigid” traditionalists who
will not accept “change.” He also quoted the late Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini
of Milan, who claimed shortly before his death in 2012 that the Catholic Church
was “200 years behind the times.” One must ask: When did the morally and
intellectually empty ideological standard of progress and reaction replace the
enduring distinctions between truth and falsehood and good and evil? Doesn’t
the Church aim to see and uphold the “timeless in time,” as T. S. Eliot so
eloquently put it?
Legitimate change presupposes a much deeper fidelity to
enduring truth. But Catholic progressives and humanitarians have historicized
the faith. They succumb to what the French Catholic political philosopher
Pierre Manent calls “the authority of the present moment.” Truth itself evolves
in this sad emasculation of the faith of our fathers. Love and charity take on
a wholly horizontal dimension, and old and enduring verities give way to “the
spirit of the age.” The good is historicized, becoming a new thing in every
epoch, if not every generation. Progressive Christians of the type that
dominate the Roman Curia have become fixated on an imminent transformation of
human nature and the world. We are faced with an existential choice of the
first order: a choice between what Eliot called the “Permanent Things” and a
facile, ideological appeal to “what is happening.” One hopes and prays that the
Holy Father comes to see just what is at stake when one aims to “change” the
Church so quickly and precipitously.
When the head of the Jesuit order, the progressive Arturo
Sosa, S.J., tells an interviewer that no one had a tape recorder when Jesus
Christ set forth his demanding teachings on divorce and remarriage, we are
dealing with open contempt for enduring truth and the divinely revealed Word of
God. None of this has anything to do with pastoral discernment, properly
understood, or Saint John Henry Newman’s “development of doctrine.” Doctrine
develops but it does not decisively change. The Trinitarian character of the
Godhead is amply present in the New Testament and was even prefigured in the
Old. But the doctrine reached its fullest and most complete articulation at the
Council of Nicaea in a.d. 325. The development of doctrine owes nothing to a
historicist denial of unchanging truth. That is a distortion of the Catholic
faith and the meaning of Newman’s famous concept.
Recently, in response to Pope Francis’s latest call for
“change” and admonition against “rigidity,” his ill-advised urging of the
Catholic Church to catch up with the modern world, George Weigel asked the
pertinent question: What are we supposed to catch up with? The dictatorship of
relativism, the cult of the autonomous imperial self, a culture “that detaches
sex from love and responsibility”? This is what Jacques Maritain had already
described as “kneeling before the world” in The
Peasant of the Garonne, his prophetic 1966 lament, in the days after
Vatican II, that a great opportunity for spiritual, theological, and cultural
renewal was already degenerating into a capitulation to the nihilism that had
come to define modernity in its least sober and most extreme forms: wholesale
emancipation from tradition, culture, the moral law, and authority in the
Church. But Weigel ended his reflection, published in First Things, with an excellent observation that is well worth
pondering. The old secularism of, to use Weigel’s example, Albert Camus was
decent, humane, and struggling to reaffirm moderation against both ideological
fanaticism and the not-so-slow drift of Western culture into a debilitating
moral nihilism. Weigel rightly added, however, that the new
secularism-cum-nihilism, already raising its ugly head in the mid 1960s, had
nothing but contempt for transcendent truth: “The new secularism was
embittered, aggressive, and narrow-minded,” and “it is now firmly committed to
driving the Catholic Church out of public life throughout the Western world.”
This is the spirit of the age, a barely concealed nihilism, with which the
Franciscan revolution mistakenly thinks it can make its peace. At some level,
Pope Francis, a son of the Church, must appreciate this.
During the lamentable Amazon synod, held in October 2019,
genuflections before a statue representing an Incan fertility goddess (the
so-called Pachamama) took place in the sacred churches of Rome. In this,
Cardinal Müller sees idolatry and a satanic desecration. For his part, Pope
Francis can see nothing but ecological solidarity and respect for other
“cultures.” From time to time, Francis makes a clarion call for evangelization.
But at the same time, he warns against efforts at conversion or proselytization.
One suspects the evangelization he has in mind is a largely secular affair at
the service of the “humanitarian values” that define the new Christianity. How
else does one explain the pope’s call for a “Global Education Alliance” to
promote humanitarian values and activism that will culminate in a summit in
Rome on May 14, 2020? This has less to do with the Christian proposition and
more to do with a modish and unthinking progressivism. I do not doubt the
integrity of the Holy Pontiff. But he is a half-humanitarian who confuses the
Christian faith with a secular religion of humanity. A faithful Catholic is
obliged to point this out for the sake of the truth and the good of the Church.
While the Church remains largely silent about (in the
words of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI) “crimes and sins that cry out to Heaven” —
the terrible clerical and episcopal sexual abuse and the hideous cover-ups that
followed — Francis puts much of his energies into promoting ecological activism
(with an apocalyptic edge) and any number of simplistic progressive causes. One
sometimes hears the voice of a politically charged functionary of the United
Nations more than that of the Vicar of Christ on earth. The institutional
Church, meaning its assorted bishops and their conferences, responds to this
revolution in the Church with silence, passivity, and those time-serving
bureaucratic and self-protective habits that led the Church into crisis in the
first place. The crisis is just that deep.
The religion of humanity, and the accompanying
dictatorship of relativism, are deeply ingrained in the Church of Rome, and at
the highest levels of the Church at that. Providence may save the Church from
becoming a branch of the religion of humanity at prayer, but only if faithful
Catholics allow themselves to become righteous and truth-telling agents of our
loving and provident God. Saint Thomas Aquinas reminds us, in question 91 of Summa Theologiae, that human prudence
and virtue are crucial means through which divine Providence does its work.
Passivity and silence before the excesses of the Franciscan revolution, before
the transformation of Catholic Christianity into a new, humanitarian
Christianity (already proclaimed and outlined by Saint-Simon in Nouveau Christianisme in 1825), will be
the end of the Catholic Church as we have known it. When the “present moment”
becomes one’s authority, one has effectively repudiated the Lordship of Christ
for the “Lord of the World” (the title of a dystopian novel about the
Antichrist that Pope Francis, rightly, admires). This is precisely what is at
stake in the effort to create a “new” Church that burns bridges with the past
and takes its bearings from a groundless notion of moral progress.
***
Cardinal Robert Sarah, the African-born bishop who heads
the Congregation for Divine Worship, shows the way to faithful witness in this
time of troubles. He does not attack the pope by name and never ceases to
proclaim his (genuine) filial devotion to the Holy Roman Pontiff. But at every
step, loyal to the apostolic inheritance, he exposes the fatuousness of the new
Christianity. In The Day Is Now Far Spent,
a collection of his conversations with the French journalist Nicolas Diat that
was published by the invaluable Ignatius Press in 2019, Sarah eloquently and
faithfully pleads for a Christian witness in which prayer is not eaten away by
reckless activism, in which true charity is not confused with humanitarian
ideology, in which the liturgy evokes the sacred presence of Our Lord Jesus
Christ, and in which theology is not transformed into politics (I am
paraphrasing a crucial passage in the book). Sarah came of age in Sékou Touré’s
Guinea, so he experienced Marxist-Leninist fanaticism from the inside. He saw
doctrinaire egalitarianism at work, the atheistic persecution of religion, the
cruel and sadistic ravages carried out by the government police. He adamantly
rejects the “preferential option for [left-wing] dictatorship” that has sadly
marked the Franciscan pontificate, as well as its lamentable indifference to
“Islamist fanaticism, which kills to establish a reign of terror.” Sarah loves
political liberty rooted in personal responsibility and “joyous
self-limitation.” (You will recognize the influence of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
whom Sarah quotes in the book as much as he quotes Benedict XVI.)
Instead of kneeling before the world and succumbing to
the allure of a late modernity that has no place for elevating conscience and
binding truth, Cardinal Sarah calls on the Church to fearlessly witness to the
truth about man. It must witness, with evangelical zeal and fidelity to the
natural moral law, against the terrible perversions that are gender theory and
transhumanism. They are the “pernicious face” of totalitarianism in the 21st
century since they, too, “hope to mutilate and control [human] nature.” The
Church now should have one paramount mission: to defend human nature, moral
responsibility, and a conscience informed by natural and divine truth (not
pernicious self-will) as precious gifts that come from the Lord of Hosts. Sarah
puts it so well: Men and women of good will would respond with enthusiasm and
gratitude to a “splendid act of courage by the Church” to recover the true
sources of human liberty, dignity, and responsibility. Without such an act of
courage, the progressives will lead the Church of Christ down a path of gradual
renunciation of everything that defines the Christian Church as a vehicle of
divine truth, of the moral law, and of liturgical fidelity to the worship of
the Most High. And as he argues in a new book, Des profondeurs de nos coeurs (From
the Depths of Our Hearts), written with a contribution by Benedict XVI, the
new Christianity undermines an authentic and faithful understanding of celibate
priesthood, of priesthood truly sanctified by God.
By becoming shrill, dogmatic, and moralistic
practitioners of a politically correct religion of humanity, the Church follows
the path of perdition. The political philosopher Leo Strauss, speaking in 1964
at the University of Detroit, a Jesuit institution, said that the Roman
Catholic Church was the last remaining spiritual body or institution to truly
appreciate all the pitfalls of a modern project that openly and
self-consciously rejected natural right in the classical and Christian senses
of the term. Strauss made that remark at the very moment when important
elements within the Church were succumbing to modernity at its least wise,
least sober, least admirable. This is what the political philosopher Eric
Voegelin so aptly called “modernity without restraint.”
For generations to come, the Catholic Church will bear
the shame of its capitulation before a totalitarian regime in Beijing, a regime
that demands loyalty to state power and Communist ideology before fidelity to
the saving grace of Christ. An atheistic state now essentially controls all
episcopal appointments in China. The sacrifices of the underground Church,
whose adherents have remained faithful to Rome since 1949, are apparently of no
major concern to Vatican secretary of state Cardinal Pietro Parolin and Pope
Francis. And one should not underestimate the ideological sympathies for
Chinese tyranny that predominate in some circles around the Argentine pope. The
same mistakes, but even worse, that drove the Vatican’s policy of barely
concealed appeasement of Eastern European Communist regimes (the so-called Ostpolitik of the 1960s and 1970s) are
being made again, with no evidence of lessons learned. As Bishop Schneider
points out, the great Hungarian cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty, who adamantly opposed
the Vatican’s policies toward his country’s Communist regime and was summarily
dismissed by Pope Paul VI, has now been declared worthy of veneration for his
“heroic Christian virtues” in witnessing to the faith and in fighting Communist
totalitarianism. Can no one in Rome connect the dots and see that history is
repeating itself?
A preference for left-wing dictatorships is not simply
evidence of change in a change-obsessed papacy but a sign of foul moral
corruption, part Machiavellian and part ideological, in the upper echelons of
the Church. This moment calls for fidelity to enduring moral and theological
truths, faithful adherence to the magisterium understood as the full weight of
Catholic wisdom, and a firm rejection of the historicized and politically
correct substitution for the magisterium that is evident in some curial
circles. And we must stand up fearlessly for our coreligionists who continue to
suffer under Islamist and Communist violence and tyranny. Let us uphold true
Catholicism and not a mawkish substitute that owes more to the religion of
humanity than to the faith of the martyrs. Let us hope that Pope Francis comes
to see the need to uphold authentic continuity in the Church — fidelity to her
old wisdom — and not a frenzied chasing after change for change’s sake. This is
a hope that is fully in accord with the filial respect that faithful Catholics
owe the Holy Father.
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