Since the death of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, criticism of Pope Francis has multiplied in the Vatican, where a climate of “civil war” that weighs on the current reflection that the Church is making about its future.
A few days after the death of the German pontiff, on December 31, his faithful private secretary, Bishop George Gansweinrevealed that the relations between the two popes were not so idyllic and that by having limited the celebration of the mass in Latin, rehabilitated in 2007 by Benedict XVI, the Argentine pontiff had “broken heart” to his predecessor.
Francis responded indirectly to these comments during a talk with the press on board the plane that took him last Sunday to Rome from South Sudan. “The death of Benedict XVI has been instrumentalized by people who want to bring water to his mill,” Francis said.
“People who exploit such a good person, a Holy Father of God… These people have no ethics: they are party people, not church people,” Francis added when speaking for the first time of the internal confrontations and the attacks of the most conservative sectors of the Church after the death, at the age of 95, of the German pope emeritus.
Eager not to create “martyrs”, Francis defends himself by supporting the so-called “freedom of expression”.
Authoritarianism, unfair decisions, favoritism… The call “Francis method” it unleashes hatred and reproaches, the majority coming from the conservative sectors of the Curia, the central government, who consider its doctrinal approach too lax.
In mid-January, following the death of the controversial Australian cardinal George Pellan Italian journalist revealed that the cardinal had been the author of an anonymous note that harshly attacked the head of the Catholic Church.
Pell, one of Francis’s closest aides, who did a great deal to bring order to Vatican finances, argued that the pontificate “it was a disaster in many ways” and that the recognized diplomatic capacity of the Holy See registered “serious failures” besides having gone out weakened for the war in Ukraine.
“Unstoppable Escalation”
The publication at the end of January of a book by the German cardinal Gerhard Mueller, former prefect of the influential Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, aggravated the situation. The theologian attacked the government and the style of the Argentine Jesuit, denounced the “magic circle” without theological preparation that surrounds him and lamented the “doctrinal confusion” of the papacy.
In the corridors of the Vatican the book fell like a bomb. “When you accept the title of cardinal, you agree to support and help the pope. Criticism is made in private, not in public,” a senior Secretary of State official commented indignantly.
For the Italian Vaticanist Marco Politi, That book represents “a new step in the unstoppable escalation of Francisco’s adversaries.”
“There is a civil war within the Church that will continue until the last day of the pontificate,” the expert maintains to AFP. Eager not to create “martyrs”, Francis defends himself by supporting the so-called “freedom of expression”.
However, these internal frictions could weigh heavily, since they are manifested in the midst of the “Synod on Synodality”, a vast world consultation called by the Argentine pope on the future of the Church, whose first phase closes in October in Rome with a general assembly.
The dialogue forum
This week, delegations from some forty countries met in Prague to discuss various topics of interest: the place of women in the Church, the fight against pedophilia, the situation of the divorced and remarried, the marriage of priests, homosexual people, etc.
With the world synod, “a kind of council, we will discover the weight of the different currents within the Church”, observes Politi.
According to him, criticism of the pontiff “serves rather to generate a current of internal thought capable of influencing the next conclave”, and by extension, in the future pontiff, he adds.
Despite the fact that there has been talk of an eventual resignation of the pope due to his health problems, which force him to use a wheelchair, Francisco, 86, is still safe at the helm of the church, especially after his trip to Africa, where he was acclaimed by the crowds.
“My health is not the same as it was at the beginning of my pontificate, my knee bothers me. But I’m improving little by little and we’ll see…”he acknowledged on Sunday. After adding ironically: “Weed never dies!”
* Clément Melki, AFP Agency
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