Will Pope Francis Be Ready for His Reform Meetings with Cardinals ?

By Jerry Slevin
Christian Catholicism
September 30, 2013

http://christiancatholicism.com/will-pope-francis-be-ready-for-his-reform-meetings-with-cardinals/

[Does Pope Francis Understand What “Reform” Means ?]

The optimistic hopes of many Catholics about the upcoming meetings next week of Pope Francis and his eight man Cardinals’ reform committee are beginning to fade. Various new Vatican reports, leaks, etc., are playing down the meetings as very preliminary, only advisory and mostly secret. So what else is new?

Pope Francis has little time left to reform the Catholic Church. He cannot afford to procrastinate, in my considered view as an international lawyer. If he fails now , he also will likely be compelled to resign like his predecessor, ex-Pope Benedict, ignominousily had to. The Vatican’s “house of cards”, as Francis realistically described it, will then probably collapse. If that happens, Cardinal Rigali’s Secretary, Monsignor Lynn, may have some hierarchical company in prison before his sentence is completed. It’s that bad. Some hierarchs from outside Pennsylvania will likely find accomodations at their local jails.

Francis must promptly make the Church’s leaders accountable to the faithful, the Gospels and civil law, especially with respect to protecting defenseless children. He must initiate and enforce specific and effective policies to do this, before government prosecutors from Australia, Ireland, the Dominican Republic, the USA, Peru, Chile, Argentina, the Phillipines, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, or from dozens of other countries, do so for him.

Prosecutors dictated to Kansas City’s criminal, but continuing, Bishop Finn the specific policies he must follow, as nearby Federal prosecutors buried Finn’s protected pedophile priest with a 50 year prison term. Prosecutors eventually can be expected to dictate to other bishops and even to Francis himself, no matter what Francis may be advised otherwise. Government regulators are already dictating to Francis how he must manage the hierarchy’s finances. Government lawyers can, and I expect soon will, dictate to him how he must manage the hierarchy’s approach to predatory priests, if Francis fails to get effective control of the bishops’ flawed approach first. Priests may not be the pope’s “employees”; but bishops are another story.

Francis can no longer just hope to finess, spin and/or avoid addressing authentically, directly and effectively the obscenity of priest child abusers and bishops, like Finn and many others, who protected them. Francis seemed to have used this spin approach to some extent in Argentina and to have continued doing this mostly in his first six months as pope. He is almost out of time to be proactive, before he will likely be forced by civil and criminal laws to be reactive.

“Bait and switch” tactics undermine any successful strategy eventually. Francis appears to be well aquainted with these tactics, as was ex-Pope Benedict before him. Saying one thing and doing the opposite. Most Catholics like me are weaned on giving popes like Francis the benefit of the doubt. But even many “baby Catholics” eventually grow up and see reality as adults, especially when their children are put at risk. The clock is running out. Francis must act effectively, transparently and promptly, or else. I have few doubts about this.

Francis seems to have the intelligence, temperament and experience, and the incomparable resources of his Jesuit confreres to support him, to meet this challenge, if he also has the fortitude and really wants to do so. But does he? His Argentine history and first six months’ actual performance as pope, notwitstanding distracting public relations ploys, media hype and calculated spin, make this questionable. Can he recover?

Francis also needs very soon to change considerably the Vatican’s harsh tune and not just its shrill tone. For many adversely affected Catholics and their impatient political leaders, Francis needs either to put up some real reforms soon or just shut up and let civil and criminal proceedings resolve these longstanding and festering scandals. Francis is now the all-powerful boss; his earlier careerist choices, noble or not, are behind him. Will it matter?

Again, if Francis fails, Catholics will likely soon see both the second papal resignation in 600 years and the collapse of the Vatican’s “house of cards”. The significant current exodus of Catholics, especially younger ones, to the perceived promised land of other denominations or no denomination will then just accelerate. The lost contributions of exiting Catholics, and the unending and escalating costs of the current flawed policy for dealing with the child abuse scandal, will then steadily bankrupt even more than the dozen dioceses and religious orders bankrupted so far. And, as indicated above, Philadelphia’s criminal Monsignor Lynn may be welcoming new hierarchical pinochle players in the prison lounge.

I discuss below as a concerned Catholic why Francis may fail and how he might avoid failure. He needs to announce soon a specific vision, like the one suggested below, and then begin its implementation expeditiously. And he needs help from more than frightened and conflicted Cardinals. Making some Cardinals more powerful, without accountability to the faithful, will likely just shift more abuses of power and opportunities for greater corruption from Rome to the local churches.

My discussion is broken down into : (1) Preliminary Considerations, (2) The Current Situation; and (3) Some Essential Changes.

1. Preliminary Considerations: As an absolute monarch, Francis can adopt key reforms by his own authority, as he already has begun to do. He must, however, now set up a transparent reform process to have any chance of success. Secret deals will likely be leaked and will then fail. Francis does not have the time luxury that ex-Pope Benedict had, for example, in dealing secretly for almost a quarter century with the notorious ongoing sexual abuse allegations against Fr. Maciel, a significant donor to Pope John Paul II and close “friend” and emissary of Mexican billionaire plutocrats.

Some view the recent Vatican more as a criminal than a spiritual enterprise. Protecting child sexual abusers and facilitating money laundering are crimes, as well as sins. For some, Francis’ initial reform process that principally relies on meetings with conflicted Cardinals generates nightmares about headines such as–”Boss to meet with heads of ‘eight families’ to clean up the mob”. A miracle could happen, perhaps, but gatherings of foxes mainly rarely lead to safer chicken coops.

Pope John XXIII had a better idea that offers a promising model for Francis. No, not the calling of an unwieldly and time consuming Council, but the setting up an internationally representative committee of knowledgeable lay and clerical women and men, married and single. John in 1963 set up and named the committee, “The Pontifical Commission on Population, Family and Birth”. The population committee focused on a specific challenge. John’s idea succeeded. After careful research, much analysis and free discussions by the commission members, it resolved by 1966 the critical issue of contraception with a reasoned determination.

This determination was largely an unexpected and unwelcome surprise to Vatican Cardinals, childless and celibate “experts” on making love and raising children. Indeed, only a few decades before in 1930, Pope Pius XI had flatly condemned contraception, apparently mainly out of a geo-political fear that a rapidly diminishing post-World War I Western European population would be unable eventually to withstand Stalin’s growing atheistic threat. And so countless couples and children paid the price of this pernicious geo-political promulgation by childless Vatican celibates, including my devout Irish Catholic immigrant parents who had ten children between 1932 and 1944. The burdens of bearing and raising children have not generally been borne by Catholic clerics in a millenium. Most clerics are clueless when it comes to children and their unique value.

Ex-Pope Benedict, with neither children nor even nieces or nephews, similarly seemed obsessed more recently with the geo-political implications of Muslim population expansion in Europe and elsewhere. He apparently hoped Catholic “rabbits” in the Third World would “outbreed” Muslims. By then generating more candidates to be missionary priests, these ordained “baby boomers” would then, in the ex-pope’s delusions, “reChristianize” the West, armed with his skewed Catechism and arcane liturgy, and reinforced by his latest “designer saint”.

This strategy is currently still reflected in the Vatican’s continuing efforts, (1) politically, to deny access to contraception to desperate Filipino and uninsured American couples and AIDS victims in Africa; and, (2) internally, both (a) to escalate the transfers to the West of foreign seminarians and priests, even as their native lands need more priests, and (b) to accelerate the canonization of John Paul II, the Catechism’s sponsor. This misguided canonization, a seemingly done deal, may shamelessly occur despite John Paul II’s horrendous failures to curtail priest child abuse, still hidden partially in the secret Vatican archives that have seemingly been suppressed during the truncated and fast-tracked canonization process.

Foreign priests, despite many cultural and linguistic challenges, predictably also generate a better financial return for the West European and American Catholic hierarchy than they could in their native lands. It seems unimportant to this hierarchy that many local Catholics often cannot understand them, so long as the Catholics keep filling the collection baskets, as many docile Catholics still do.

The Catechism apparently aims to relieve some of the major papal discomfort with an historically critical reading of the New Testament, that sometimes undercuts key papal propaganda. The Catechism attempts at times to override, bypass and/or and just spin current biblical scholarship. Unfortunately for the Vatican, many Catholics can still read and think and are not so easily misguided. And much of the best Catholic biblical exegesis and historical research increasingly occurs at universities by competent scholars beyond the Vatican’s inquisitorial reach. Intimidating scholars, including some priests, is getting much tougher for the Vatican.

The Vatican inquisitors, including my very conservative Providence College classmate, Archbishop Gus DiNoia, cannot call Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, et al., and cancel speeches by scholars discussing gay marriage, as just happened at Providence College. Truth is bursting the Vatican dam at countless points and it will not be contained by foolish and feckless attempts to plug a few leaks at Catholic colleges run by some timid Dominicans. Perhaps, we now know at least one reason why Francis chose the name Francis and not Dominic. How incompetently ineffective, really! Has anyone in the Curia heard about the Internet yet? I am embarassed, but not surprised, by my alma mater.

The clear determination of the 1960?s birth control commission, set up by John XXIII and expanded by Pope Paul VI, was backed overwhelming by senior clerics and theologians on the committee, including the highly regarded Jesuit moral expert, Fr. Josef Fuchs. All for naught, outrageously, since the committee’s determination was undercut by Vatican Cardinals’ seeking apparently to preserve their access to the purported papal power implicit in the claim for infallibilty.

Papal approval of contraception a few decades after an earlier papal condemnation could have weakened the cornerstone of the new post-1870 papal geo-political strategy, the assumed power of purported papal infallibility. The last two popes, with their many fearful and counter-productive attempts to exploit this unhistorical doctrinal invention, have permanently undermined its geo-political utility, while brutally oppressing in the process many Catholics, including countless children, women and gay persons.

In any event, Francis bravely appears to have re-discovered the real source of Catholic power–the unique message of the loving mercy of Jesus. Neither Roman emperors’ protections nor papal meglomaniacs’ delusions are needed anymore.

With freedom of religion spreading generally worldwide, popes no longer need to play so many international political games. Anyways, the Vatican rarely played them well, at least since the French Revolution of 1789.

The pointless continuation of these games, including the legally absurd and politically unsustainable claim to UN membership for one religious group, Catholics, based in a 100 acre “country”, Vatican City, that denies others like Moslems and Hindus similar geo-political status, only forecloses real and better opportunities to spread Jesus message efficaciously. In any event, as international religious strife continues to increase, the UN’s major powers will not likely permit this religious favoritism much longer, whether or not Francis foregoes this absurdity voluntarily, as he should for the good of the Church.

How much longer does Francis think Moslems and Hindus, for openers, will accept this religious favoritism? Most importantly, this tiny country, Vatican City, with less than 1,000 mostly celibate residents, including less than a dozen children, continues to attempt to control the regulation of births and the policing of priest child abuse worldwide. This dominance, thank God, is ending rapidly. It is much overdue.

Paul VI had been elected following John’s death in 1963 with the Vatican Cardinals’ essential electoral support. Paul apparently buckled under these dominant Cardinals’ pressure and disregarded the population committee’s carefully deliberated determination. Francis, however, has a much stronger mandate and more decisive approach than Paul VI had.

I recommended this committee approach to current Church challenges to ex-Pope Benedict in 2010 by e-mail, based on a suggestion from a well regarded Jesuit. I never heard back from the ex-pope. To try to make sure he was apprised of my suggestion, I outlined the approach in a Washington Post piece that is linked below. I strongly believe, based on my decades of crisis management experience and reported papal developments, that the ex-pope’s resignation and his butler’s sacking could have been avoided if the ex-pope had followed my suggestion.

My brief 2010 Washington Post outline is available by clicking on the following link:

[]

Hopefully, Francis will be wiser and bolder than the ex-pope, his new next door neighbor, was. Most of the challenges now facing Francis have been well researched and discussed ad nauseum already by knowledgeable persons. Given developments in international video conferencing, e-mails, cell phones, etc., these challenges can now be addressed more efficaciously, more quickly and less expensively by such committees than was possible in the 1960?s. This technology is used effectively on a routine basis by multinationals, law firms, etc.

Francis could also join in any video conference whenever he wanted to or watch a “replay” at his convenience. Most importantly, he could then get some independent recommendations from persons uninvolved it creating and continuing the current crisis. Some earlier popes were not shy about seeking informed advice from multiple sources, and not just from conflicted and self-interested insiders with their own baggage. Francis should follow their example.

Cardinals, surely agitated and likely fearful, elected Pope Francis obviously for a reason. Their reason should not necessarily obligate the pope. Positively, Francis calls all people to refocus on following Jesus’ loving example of mercy. Negatively, Francis admits candidly that the Vatican structure, a “house of cards” he said, is teetering. More Cardinals appear at risk. Someone caused the crisis.

Francis initially is depending for help on eight Cardinals, most of whom, like Francis, have mixed records, and therefore potential conflicts of interest, on some critical matters Francis must address, especially dealings with some local predatory priests and related episcopal problems. Also, most of these Cardinals have been under seige for some time, and continue under seige, in their own archdioceses related to the sexual abuse, financial and/or other scandals, such as the Boston Cardinal’s aide’s recent criminal conduct with a hooker.

These Cardinals can hardly be expected realistically to have much free time to reform the Catholic Church, even assuming they want to and they survey others for advice. They have all been quite reticent about real reforms for many years. Indeed, they are all co-responsible for the current mess by commission or omission, or both. The Cardinal committee’s chairman, Cardinal Rodriguez, has recently signaled his reform efforts are being helped by the Holy Spirit. Really! Will he bring a ouija board to the meetings with Francis? Did he channel the Holy Spirit when he earlier, in effect, blamed Jewish owners of the NY Times for overstating the priest abuse scandal? Is this really the best Francis can do? Francis could get better help, it appears.

It is hardly a surprise, then, that the Vatican press office seeks to lower expectations about this group. Francis has touted for almost six months this meeting’s potential as evidence of his determination to make prompt changes. Now as the Cardinals are poised to perform, their efforts are being downplayed and, in effect, being cloaked in secrecy. Is this Cardinals’ committee just another ploy like the Jesuit interview appears increasingly to be?

Most importantly, Francis’ duty now is to God and His People, not to Cardinals. He has sufficient power to act alone as pope. The Catholic Church had no Cardinals for its first thousand years, while the Papal States’ kingdom disappeared almost 150 years ago. No other credible worldwide organization today uses a comparable life-tenured structure. Why don’t they?

Accountable local bishops should be able to provide enough of a management function in this digitally interconnected era, as they were able to do successfully in the “unconnected” early Church. Of course, that was before Constantine’s successors imposed, in effect, hierarchical centralization and imperial uniformity that is largely and sadly still in place today. By contrast, Jesus trusted his uneducated Apostles broadly and they trusted Jesus’ straightforward message fully, without canon laws and cell phones. Of course, the Apostles also did not take their followers for granted either.

The current hierarchical structure has for centuries failed Catholics badly, especially children and women, as biblical scholar and Jesuit Cardinal Martini finally observed. The current attempts, while predictable and pathetic, of the Vatican’s former highest officials to rewrite their personal history and finger point towards others cannot obscure this obvious fact.

Francis’ efforts to date to reorganize the “Curial choir” and soften the papal tone, without also changing fundamentally the rigorist papal tune, can only serve as appetizers. Gestures, symbols, sermons, tweets, etc., are certainly helpful, but where’s the beef? Most Catholics hunger for resolutions. Francis needs to be bold like Pope Gregory VII was a millenium ago. Tinkering around the edges will fail. Francis may make a few mistakes, but he could not if he tried create a bigger mess than ex-Pope Benedict left him. If he fails to act soon effectively and transparently, lurking government investigators will likely limit his options.

Given this urgency and despite lingering Vatican secrecy, however, all of the People of God must try, as their circumstances permit, to assess our Church’s current crisis, as I have tried to begin to do below.

For more information, Google News has reports on related matters easily seachable by using obvious keywords in the search box, and there is also related data in many books readily available and summarized in helpful reviews that are available for free on Amazon.com. The books can be found easily using obvious keywords in the search box. Also, much data, including the sorry records of some of the Cardinals serving on Francis new “Cardinals reform committee”, are readily accessible and searchable at BishopAccountability.org.

2. The Current Situation: It is clear to me as a retired Catholic international lawyer that some Cardinals, probably many, were and remain increasingly concerned about criminal and civil penalties for protecting priest predators and for facilitating financial felons. Cardinals had to have been shocked to see the previously unimaginable happen, the resignation of a failed pope after the imprisonment of Philadelphia’s Cardinal Rigali’s Secretary and Canada’s Bishop Lahey for child abuse related crimes, as well as the papal shaming of Scotland’s gay bashing, but promiscuously gay, Cardinal O’Brien and the public shaming of Los Angeles’ Cardinal Mahony reportedly for covering-up for predatory priests who sexually exploited many children, especially Latino immigrants.

Many Cardinals must have worried, and legally should still worry, who will be next. The latest revolting reported allegations of child sexual abuse crimes involving the Vatican’s Polish Archbishop and papal nuncio to the Dominican Republic and a bishop in Peru likely should only heighten the Cardinals’ anxiety. These Latino revelations are especially obscene. Desperate children, perhaps unplanned thanks in part to Vatican efforts to deny their poor parents access to contraception, are forced to sell themselves to bishops who, in effect, indirectly at least pressured their parents to bear more children without their parents having the adequate means to provide for all their children. Do hierarchs have no compassion or shame? It doesn’t appear so.

The steady stream of sexual scandals among the Catholic hierarchy is truly shocking. Indeed, suspicions about the contents of ex-Pope Benedict’s scandalous and secret “gay lobby” report likely prevented any Italian Cardinal from being elected pope. Even earlier confirmed reports of child abuse by a bishop in Belgium and one in Norway must also have weighed on some Cardinals’ minds, as well they should.

So the Cardinals picked Francis to protect them from potential prosecution and litigation. He seems to be viewed as a predictable and friendly Italian Latin American, a hierarchical team player with the required political experience. Cardinals apparently hoped and likely still hope Francis will be able to divert the public’s attention from the Vatican scandals and to retain continued political protection still generally available worldwide for the Cardinals. Cardinals know conservative Catholics have no choice but to support Francis, so they realize seemingly that he must at least have to appear to be progressive to attract at least some needed moderate Catholic support.

This political protection has until now been secured worldwide from politicians often by exchanging the hierarchy’s influence over key voter groups for tacit promises of no government investigations. The hierarchy’s political influence over docile Catholics is then magnified by election year voter turn-out crusades against contested matters like abortion, contraception and gay marriage. Tax avoiding billionaire plutocrats then fund the crusades in the hopes of electing tax-cutting politicians.

Francis followed similar scripts several times in Argentina and already knows how to play to play the game. Ex-Pope Benedict ineptly and unsuccessfully tried to play this political game last year in the USA, but he lacked Francis’ appeal to Latino voters. The Cardinals surely know the Vatican house of cards will almost certainly collapse if the USA undertakes a national investigation of institutional sexual abuse like the unprecedented one underway now in Australia. Many are already calling on President Obama to launch this overdue investigation. The Australian investigation alone may bring down the Vatican, but more national investigations are inevitable.

Friendly smiles and tweets and kissing babies are nice short-term, but not enough to regain Catholics’ trust long-term. Where, after six months as pope, are the specific reform proposals Francis plans at least to initiate? Catholics generally, and even many non-Catholics, are fed-up, even as some of Francis’ winning ways are sparking a little hope. They want, among other things:

(1) bishops to become accountable,

(2) children to be better protected and valued,

(3) women to be treated equally and fairly as adults, not as “almost, but not quite, reflections of Jesus’ mother”,

(4) couples to be responsible for their own loving intimacy, free of celibates’ uninformed and hypocritical rigorism,

(5) divorced couples to be offered the sacraments and welcomed back,

(6) priests to be available, accessible, secure and free of hierarchical manipulation and threats, and

(7) gay persons to be respected.

And a half century after Vatican II’s false start, they want it done now. If Francis fails to listen, Catholics will in some cases such as protecting children likely vote for leaders who will apply criminal laws against the Catholic hierarchy. In other cases, such as access to sacraments, increasingly more Catholics will continue to vote with their feet and find religious groups that meet their aspirations, values and needs.

It is time for Pope Francis to act decisively, prophetically and promptly. While rearranging the Curial chairs on the sinking titantic Vatican may be a good start, it will hardly be adequate to survive the gathering storm. Fundamental reforms are needed pronto.

Significantly, as noted above, Pope Francis has publicly acknowledged the worsening papal crisis. Ex-Pope Benedict had refused to address this squarely in his disingenious positive spin about the ever shrinking faithful, as Catholics were rushing for the exits from his mismanaged Church. In a carefully orchestrated and totally unexpected interview by Jesuit subordinates, Francis basically admitted that the Vatican’s almost 1,500 year old monarchical structure is now like a teetering house of cards battered daily by unending hierarchical scandals.

The ex-pope’s resignation alone had already proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the papal house of cards was teetering badly. In February, the King of Spades, Benedict, dropped out of the deck unexpectedly and unceremoniously, to the joy of many discouraged Catholics who were unable to find much of Jesus’ message at the Vatican. Will Francis now try to save most of the rest of the dysfunctional Vatican deck, including the jokers? Surely most of his Cardinal elector supporters must at a minimum have expected him to make it his highest priority to keep them out harm’s way for facilitating, in some cases, child abusing priests and criminal financial fixers. Can Francis really accomplish this? Will he really try to? Should he?

Or will Francis now try to replace the exhausted medieval Church structure and strategy that benefited a few princes with Jesus’ original lively strategy of love of God and neighbor– a strategy for a reborn Church like the one the Apostles left behind– one with clerics who strive to serve, rather than to be served, and who are accountable to the faithful?

But will Francis be able to change strategies in time before either current and new scandals or expanding and additional investigations (or both) bring down the papal deck? And does he really plan even to try to do this? What if he has other plans instead?

In Argentina’s Dirty War, earlier as Jesuit provincial, Francis apparently chose, ambitiously perhaps, to follow the pro-military approach of the Vatican’s rising careerist papal nuncio in Argentina, future powerful Cardinal Pio Laghi, a confidante of Pope John Paul II, in his dealings relating to his two former Jesuit teachers. These Jesuits were tortured by the military after Francis distanced himself from them. Francis apparently rejected the prophetic approach generally advocated by his revered Jesuit leader in Rome, to the dismay of many of his local confreres. Laghi likely advanced Francis’ career thereafter as a hierarchical “team player”. Yet Francis, by whatever means, has now reached the top of the ecclesiatical ladder with lifetime tenure. So ambition should be inoperative henceforth, and he should be able follow his conscience primarily without any concern for a future career.

Incidentally, the incomparable Jesuit order, which had for decades been ruthlessly overshadowed at the Vatican by Opus Dei, the Legion of Christ, et al., and had suffered its own child abuse and similar scandals, now appears reinvigorated by Francis’ election. Many Jesuits now seem ready, willing and able to serve again as this Jesuit pope’s elite force, a valuable resource. This is quite ironic, since ex-Pope Benedict had as a Cardinal ungratefully and shabbily chastised and humilated his former mentor, Karl Rahner, the Jesuit’s foremost theologian of the 20th Century. Rahner’s work will be studied and cherished long after the ex-pope’s inferior efforts, recently touted by the Vatican’s propaganda outlets, are justifiably forgotten.

Francis, at 76 years old, like elderly Pope John XXIII before him, has little time to make a real difference. Will he avoid John XXIII’s mistakes? Francis surely has enough time left to initiate at least new structures and permanent approaches, if he has the courage to follow his conscience. Paradoxically, the dysfunctional absolute monarchical structure Francis inherited, and many of the mystical smokescreens and arrogant usurpations of his recent predecessors, have placed Francis alone in the position to make needed and irreversible changes if he really wants to. John XXIII likely might have done so earlier, if his stomach cancer and resulting death did not intervene enabling ruthless Vatican bureaucrats to cut deals with his successors and regain their turf until now. So Francis cannot delay.

Clearly, the Catholic hierarchy’s sexual and financial scandals are not going away any time soon. This papal teetering likely will even increase, as many media reports suggest. A key question for some is whether Francis will be a real reformer, or just a new papal puppet elected to change the subject from (a) priests’ abuse of children with some bishops’ protection and (b) financial shenanigans of Vatican bureaucrats with some Cardinals’ connivance. Some worry whether Francis has been elected really to be the “Vicar of Christ” or merely to be the best new mythmaker that some corrupt Cardinals could elect when so many Italian Cardinals were under suspicions of scandals.

Francis, a student of classical Greek, seems with this clever interview gambit to be trying to use a form of Homer’s “Trojan Horse surprise tactic” to try to shore up the Vatican house of cards, at least short-term. An unexpected gift from the Greeks of a hollow horse so dazzled the Trojans, that they were lulled into casually accepting it without looking inside, to their eternal regret and misfortune.

So too, many in the pews and in the media so far seem to have been similarly lulled into wishful thinking merely by Francis’ siren call in his interview for less stridency on reproduction and gender matters, and for a more pastoral approach generally. Mere words without actions can never be enough, of course, especially given the proven proclivity of some popes in recent decades for “mental reservation” and “half-truths, while too often speaking out of both sides of their mouth.

The hierarchy has spent many millions of dollars on public relations and law firms to craft their message. Many “religion reporters” are similarly beholden to the hierarchy for continued access, etc. As someone who observed how some clients crafted messages, I know you must watch the hierarchy’s actions, not their words, to know what is really happening.

Indeed, just the day after the release of the touted Jesuit interview, Francis admonished before TV cameras a group of gynecologists never to perform abortions, castigating women who have abortions, in effect, as being part of the “throw away culture”! How pastoral was that? Francis then described unborn foetuses as having the face of Jesus, presumably from the moment of conception.

Diasappointlingly, Francis in this TV lecture neglected to address the matter of whose face “born children” have, especially the many tens of millions of unplanned and undernourished children born of impoverished couples denied access to contraception thanks to continuing and fierce Vatican opposition at the UN and various national governments to accessible family planning programs. Of course, Francis predictably also avoided putting any face on the estimated hundreds of thousands of “born children” sexually abused and “soul murdered” by Catholic priests with their bishops’ protection.

Some of these “faceless” children often end up as sexual “rent boys” like the ones who reportedly may have serviced the bishop in Peru, the papal nuncio in the Dominican Republic or the pope’s appointee to oversee the Vatican Bank when the appointee was earlier stationed in Uruguay.

Who is to judge these men, you may ask, Pope Francis? If you won’t and don’t, then please step aside promptly and appoint any mother as “adjutant pope”. She will not only judge these disgraceful men. She will punish them promptly and ban them publicy. Mothers and some lawyers call this fair and prompt justice, a necessary deterrent to protect other children from “soul murder”! Just think what your wonderful “abuela”, Grandma Rosa, would have done if someone sexually abused you as a child at your grammar school at Wilfred Baron de los Santa Angelos in Buenos Aires.

As the tenth child of my Irish Catholic parents and a parent of four, it never ceases to amaze me how wealthy celibates, who never raised children, are so quick to mandate that Catholic couples should breed like rabbits. It is really outrageous! While Catholic “rabbits” may at times have helped the Vatican gain both geo-political influence and economic power, considerations incidentally that likely still mainly underlie the papal ban on contraception, this ban is a shameless, insensitive and self-interested obsession of out-of-touch bachelors. Millions of couples and children have needlessly suffered for this perverse “dogma” that has no clear biblical or other valid theological or philosophical warrant.

As I write, Francis’ subservient bishops in the USA and the Phillipines are still continuing to exert their political power against making contraception accessible to poorer couples. Yet no “contracepted sperm” ever led to an abortion. What is really going on? Are abortion and contraception matters just “wedge issue” power levers that the hierarchy turns on in election cycles to “sell” to their favored political partners to attract some Catholic votes?

Since Francis’ well reported Jesuit interview, “Uber-Moralists”, Cardinal Dolan, and Archbishops Lori and Cordileone, have already been quick to deflect Francis’ admonitions as being inapplicable to the US bishops’ continuing and futile crusades against Obamacare’s contraception insurance provisions and legalization of gay marriage. Apparently, the Catholic hierarchy, led by a Latino pope, still hopes to preserve these issues, whether pastoral or not, to help elect right-wingers in the US Senate 2014 election campaigns already underway.

The hierarchy apparently wants to continue to have a “friendly” US Supreme Court majority to shield them from some financial liability for child abuse cover-ups by bishops, as the current right-wing Court majority recently did with the St. Louis Archdiocese, former home to Cardinals Burke, Rigali and Dolan and Bishop Finn, the convicted bishop inexplicably still “shepherd” in Kansas City.

Since Francis clearly knows right-wing Catholic voters generally have no alternative but to follow his lead no matter what he says in a staged Jesuit interview, it appears to some that his sudden “pastoral concern” may be mainly directed at voters in the middle or even on the left, especially Latinos. Politics 101, it appears. Even right-wing Washington Post culture warriors, who know how to count votes, are praising Francis for his “balance” in the Jesuit interview. “Balance” is rarely praised by right-wingers or left-wingers. The volume may be diminishing intermittedly on the Vatican’s loudspeakers, but is it really a new tune?

As explained below, this surprise strategy will likely fail Francis, if used longer term without related and needed substantive reforms soon. It may even increase many Catholics’ cynicism, it that is even possible.

The Trojan Horse worked overnight once for the Greeks. Francis’ battles will last more than one overnight news cycle, however. Many are already deconstructing Francis’ hollow horse and realize its gentle facade appears in key areas mainly to be a misleading veneer for the rigorist Catechism of his predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict, as Archbishop Chaput recently indicated.

Moreover, Francis has often in his first six months appeared in the views of some to be following the perilously slow and ultimately unsuccessful path of his purported model, John XXIII. Does he really expect to succeed with this hollow strategy? John XXIII knew World War II had rung the death knell in the West for absolute monarchs, and that mystical claims to infallibility and other smokescreens would soon be cleared away by critical biblical and historical scholarship. But John XXIII died before he could complete his reforms and Popes Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI apparently had their heads pushed into the sand by the corrupt Vatican bureaucracy that enabled them to win their papal elections.

Notwithstanding these verities, Francis is unlikely to pay my views any more heed than the ex-pope paid my accurate Washington Post predictions that I sent him over three years ago. Pity, really. Francis will nevertheless in such event then likely have to learn the hard way, as the ex-pope did—from government investigators, probing journalists and abuse survivors’ lawyers. If that’s what it takes to clean up the Catholic Church, so be it!

While touting the poor, Catholic hierarchs have already lavishly spent many hundreds of millions of dollars needlessly on lawyers worldwide. Such naivete! Many lawyers make their fortunes perpetuating, not solving, problems. In the USA, lawyers for both sides seem to have settled into a mutually profitable relationship that generates a lot of fees, while skirting the underlying causes. But this pay-as-you-go approach has kept Catholic hierarchs in power and out of jail, so far anyways. Apparently the hierarchy is content, as are their tax-avoiding plutocrat donors who need the hierarchy’s political clout to help elect politicians who keep high-bracket taxes low.

And millions of naive “average” Catholics continue to donate to benefit bishops and their lawyers, while these sincere Catholics’ churches and schools are arbitrarily and increasingly closed abruptly. Reportedly, some of these closings have even led to some profitable real estate deals for friends and families of some in the hierachy. Why are Catholics so docile and timid? A true puzzle, another pity and with defenseless children still at risk, a real disgrace, all at once!

Francis clearly seems to understand fully that the Vatican is presently losing its war for survival, due mainly to its continuing failure worldwide to hold bishops accountable honestly for their cover up of pedophile priests. Following the Homeric parallel a bit further, this failure is the Vatican’s “Achilles heel”, which will bring down the house of cards, if is not effectively and transparently addressed soon by Francis.

Francis’ Trojan Horse interview was surely soothing, but on closer scrutiny, it failed to address this major threat to Vatican survival. The Vatican, like the ancient Greeks, has this “Achilles heel”– enabling priest child abusers and their bishop protectors. Rapidly, and increasingly, unfolding revelations of priest child abuse abound from most continents. None from Antartica, yet!

The revelations come both from civil and criminal investigations (e.g., in Ireland, Australia, the USA, Germany, Belgium, the UK, , the Netherlands, Norway, Argentina, Chile, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Thailand, the Philippines, several African nations, et al.) and from unexpected insider leaks and disturbing journalistic reports. These revelations will likely completely undercut the Vatican’s teetering props soon if Francis is unwilling to address this failure effectively. The house of cards would then collapse, but Jesus’ Church will arise again without the hierachical medieval corrosion. Not such a bad prospect at that!

Millions of Catholics strongly object to the Vatican’s disregard of Jesus’ clear mandate to protect defenseless children, especially from trusted priests who try to hide their sexual perversions behind Jesus’ image. These Catholics, ever increasing in number and outrage, want real justice and effective reform, not clever distractions, disingenious excuses, smooth evasions or bullying threats.

Francis now certainly has the unique choice and adequate power, spiritually, politically and legally, as the last absolute Western monarch. He can either face successfully this failure honestly by initiating transparent and needed reforms promptly or he can compound it, like his failed predecessors did for centuries, by evasive distractions and slick rhetoric. This failed strategy has too often avoided the inevitable with political manipulations, including rigid sexual “dogmas”, like contraception and gender discrimination, to prod enough Catholics to support the Vatican’s political allies who reciprocated by overlooking the hierarchy’s crimes. Those days are over!

The Vatican, for centuries by skillful religious propaganda, has virtually branded young minds of Catholics like me to give the pope the benefit of the doubt. In the new Digital Age, however, the steady stream of revolting revelations of pervasive perversions, unimaginable immorality and financial corruption among many in the clergy and the hierarchy have irreversibly opened the minds of millions of Catholics despite the earlier branding.

“But the pope said…” just doesn’t count much anymore with more and more Catholics. The constant challenges to the profusion of mystical smokescreens since the First Vatican Council in 1869, such as unprovable infallibility, Marian mythologies, manipulative catechisms, arcane liturgies, suppressed scholars and punished prophets, are collectively dissipating the papal smokescreens worldwide daily. Vatican credibility continues to sink. Jesus wants his Church back. Can Francis deliver it?

As in the Wizard of Oz, the curtain has been lifted and the papal wizardry unvieled. Not by a cute dog named Toto, but by a brave butler named Paulo. So many investigations and leaks, some still ongoing and others beginning or in the wings, have opened widely a window for Catholics– a window that Francis cannot even dream of closing. Many Catholics have already seen enough. They have left the Church for good.

Like the ancient Greeks in Homer’s Iliad with their imaginative, but deadly, Trojan Horse, Pope Francis has suddenly issued his carefully crafted interview by friendly Jesuit subordinates. Will it be enough to save the Catholic Church, currently in his view a house of cards about to fall? On closer analysis, there is no chance, unless he also adopts needed fundamental reforms transparently initiated. The pope must confront the challenge head-on, and not again just try to brush it away and blame it on “secularism” or the “Devil”.

At 76 years old, Francis must act soon and pointedly. He must avoid John XXIII’s failures when terminal cancer prevented him significantly from avoiding the Vatican Cardinals’ snares leading to major failures at the Second Vatican Council that contributed to the Church’s current crises, including on priest child abuse, contraception, celibacy and structural decentralization.

Otherwise, the Vatican’s continuing failure generally to hold worldwide bishops accountable for covering up for priest child abusers will bring the house of cards down, sooner rather than later. Protecting children matters greatly to most Catholics and everyone else who cares about children. The childless celibates better wake up or else.

Authenticity and transparency alone can save the Catholic Church, but cute public relations ploys cannot. While the media under deadlines may only skim the Jesuit interview now, the media, prodded by Internet bloggers and informed Church observers, remain to analyze and report the vacuity and even seeming duplicity in some parts of the interview.

Like the Trojans who fatefully looked the other way after a brief glance at this deceptive gift, apparently Francis hopes the media and worldwide Catholics will not look too closely at his interview either. No way! Inside the hollow horse were Greek soldiers who stealthily overtook their opposition. Inside the interview is the rigid Catechism Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI mandated to filter the “radical” New Testament through a Vatican sieve. In simple terms, the last two popes apparently decided that if they couldn’t follow the Gospels, then they could try to rewrite them via the Catechism. Who are they kidding?

While Francis in the Jesuit interview seems to proffer pious platitudes about women, gay persons, et al., Francis’s soft lyrics are accompanied by the deep bass of the Catechism in the background. Francis may be preserving harsh, unnecessary and continuing objections to contraception, women priests and homosexual morality only in cute asides and oblique references to the Catechism, but preserving them he clearly is. New tone, but an old tune sadly, it appears.

3. Some Essential Tasks: Francis needs, for his own sake as well as all Catholics’ sake, to outline publicly soon, while he is still able, a specific reform vision for the Church organizationally and pastorally. He can implement his vision over the next year or two, making adjustments where justice or practicalities require.

The more specific Francis’ vision is the better, as John XXIII learned the hard way. John’s Vatican Cardinals outlived and outfoxed him, by delaying key reform decisions until these Cardinals had in place new popes who did their bidding as the price of being elected. Francis’ ad hoc homilies, staged interviews, tweets, etc., while edifying at times, are not adequate to set forth the needed specific vision.

Francis has only a short time to offer a specific outline or agenda before events beyond his control set his agenda. He found time to rewrite the ex-Pope’s encyclical, which was not a priority; now he must focus on a specific program. If Francis fails to address seriously and soon the matters suggested below, in a specific and transparent manner, Catholics and political leaders will then have to face reality. They will have to draw the necessary inference that Francis was elected by the Cardinals only to change the subject and tone, but not the tune; and otherwise, it is business as usual at the Vatican.

Among potential organizational matters needing Francis’ careful and prompt consideration, Francis should pursue the following suggestions:

1. Eliminating respectfully the College of Cardinals as superfluous, outmoded and counter-productive. Periodic and useless parades of red dresses and similar pomp are an embarassment to modern Catholics and symbolize a monarchical and patriarchical past that has been sensibly rejected long ago by free societies. St. Peter’s Spiritual Disneyland, with its unique history and art, would do just as well financially without the parades. And I am sure someone on E-Bay would love to buy and wear such pretty custumes, such as Cardinal Burke’s reported $30,000 outfit. Most Catholics are tired of hypocritical spiritual slapstick in any evevt.

Similarly, the special committee of eight Cardinals should be replaced by one or more committees like the one John XXIII set up to address the challenge of contraception. These committees would be more independent, unbiased and efficient, without conflicts due to prior deeds and misdeeds. If Francis or any committee wants any Cardinal’s views, they can call him at will or accept his written submission.

2. Replacing the Curia and diplomatic corp in toto, including the ineffective Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, as outmoded, counter-productive, and/or inadequate to the current tasks. Recent history proves this fully. The Papal States are gone. The Vatican is not really a country and should not try to be a geo-political player in international politics any longer. Where Jesus’ message of peace, justice and mercy is needed, it can be voiced from Rome or by a local bishop as appropriate.

A new competent Vatican management team needs to be established, with a suitably sized staff of women and men professionals, both lay and religious, married and single, who would have appropriate employment rights and mandatory retirement dates. Overall, they would cost less than at present, after factoring in the costs of corruption and scandals.

Alternative Catholic scholarly viewpoints prospectively need to be tolerated and addressed, not suppressed by secret proceedings, intimidation and threats, but fairly responded to publicly by scholars in the academic marketplace of ideas.

Scholars previously mugged by Vatican bullies should now be publicly welcomed by Francis and should receive apologies and other merciful recognition for the pain they suffered unjustly. They should not have to wait 400 years for this like Galileo did.

Claims to papal infallibility need to be retired. Whether Jesus’ mother was immaculately conceived or assumed into heaven is ultimately inconsequential for Jesus’s main message. These “doctrines” were declared in contingent historical settings mainly to enhance papal geo-political power when the Vatican was in great peril, as well as to keep “human women” in their comparatively unequal place. Time to move on and to get back to Jesus’ message, Pope Francis. If some Catholics object, they must be overruled. The Church cannot be permitted to collapse to preserve some delusional Catholics’ myths.

And most importantly, popes no longer have the luxury of consciously making a bad decision to avoid varying from some earlier papal mistake. As Paul VI, and even John Paul II and Benedict, must have seen, at least on occasion, the power of the papacy has diminished, not increased, by their unwise decisions to try to conform to Pope Pius XI’s desperate decision to jam through the papal infallibilty decision in 1869 at the First Vatican Council.

The Church has surely lost more than it has gained as a result of Pius IX’s error. It will continue to lose if Francis fails to act to retire that failed attempt to make popes divine.

3. Enabling the local faithful, including priests, to have a major role is selecting their bishops from among local priests. The bishops should be financially accountable to, and removable for cause by, the faithful, and must be subjected to sensible term limits and mandatory retirement at 65 years old. Local bishops should be enabled and encouraged to move quickly and definitively against bad priests without Vatican meddling.

Despite Francis’ smooth spin about dialogue and listening to the faithful, most of his episcopal appointments so far have been dictated secretly from the top down, with little or no meaningful local consultation. Most of Francis’ Curial appointments as well, have not been pastoral shepherds who smell like their flocks, but bureaucratic diplomats in cufflinks, mostly Italians. And all male, except for the inexperienced tweeter on the finance committee. So what else is new?

4.Expanding the priest candidate pool quality and quantity by enabling women and married men to be ordained. The weight of current biblical and historical evidence favors female ordination, the aberrational theologies and selective exegisis of recent popes notwithstanding.

A larger pool of candidates, especially some carefully vetted candidates who have children, will substantially reduce the incidence of abuse. Most childless celibate men will never understand or truly appreciate children. The pervasiveness of priest child abuse could not have happened if some fathers and mothers served as priests nearby.

Priests’ productive lives can also be increased by eliminating excessively long academic requirements, such as Jesuits and Dominicans have. Most of this course work is barely relevant to their pastoral work.

Priests should no longer prospectively be able to pursue non-pastoral activities, such as teaching non-religious subjects and overseeing social or financial services. There is available a surplus of qualified lay women and men who can perform these tasks, at least as well in most instances.

Seminarians should be able to elect up front to serve for a limited term, say ten years, with the right to renew at the end of the term. How long did Apostles really minister, as far as we know?

The resulting increase in available priests should relieve the pressure on bishops to retain predators and also lead to happier priests and parisioners. It will also reduce the untenable trend of paying bounties to obtain foreign priests and seminarians, who are often needed more at home, and are too often ineffective and unhappy abroad.

5. Moving forward expeditiously with real religious unity efforts, with other Christians and non-Christians as well. Cardinal Kasper knows well what can and should be done sooner rather than later, but appeared stymied by the turf-protecting approaches of the last two popes.

Among potential pastoral matters needing prompt and careful consideration, Francis should pursue the following suggestions :

1. Protecting children better by requiring all bishops to report promptly to the police all claims of clerical child abuse, whether or not required by local law or desired by the abuse claimant. The hierarchy has failed and will always fail in trying to police itself, resulting in countless negative consequences for the Church, including the loss of billions of dollars in direct expenses and many more billions in lost contributions from Catholics who have left the Church in disgust and outrage.

Bishops who fail to adopt and enforce this and/or related child protection rules, must be removed promptly, if active, and at a minimum shamed by the pope, including Cardinals Law, Rigali, and Mahony, and Bishops Mueller (Norway), Vangelhuwe, Finn, Myers, and the many more reported on BishopsAccountability.org.

All bishops must be audited by independent competent auditors who are rotated frequently and given unfettered access to all relevant files and reports. The audit reports should be released promptly and regularly to the faithful, who should be able to question the bishops directly and publicly about them.

Bishops must be promptly directed to cease all wasteful and insensitive legal maneouvers and legislative lobbying that denies survivors full justice. In particular, Francis should promptly call former Jesuit seminarian, Gov. Jerry Brown of California, and tell him to sign the new statute of limitations extension law approved already overwhelmingly by the California legislature.

Francis should promptly and publicly revoke all vestiges of the child abuse secrecy order, “Crimen Solicitationis” signed in 1962 in secret by John XXIII shortly before the bishops arrived to begin the Second Vatican Council. Presumably, John wanted to make sure no bishop raised the subject. Was John really a “Good Pope”?

Francis should also cease the insincere “zero tolerance” spin he inherited from the ex-Pope, at least until Francis really proves he supports zero tolerance of abuse. He certainly has not done this yet. His pulling of the Polish nuncio secretly back to Rome to avoid Dominican Republic prosecutors is even worse than Cardinal Law’s flight to Rome. To say that the nuncio will go back if the law requires it seems very disingenious, since it is not clear the law requires it.

This slick “sleight of hand” is reminiscent of the ex-Pope’s directives to bishops to report priest abusers to the police if the law required. The ex-Pope knew the law rarely required this, so he was signaling the bishops it was OK not to call the police. Enough with the verbal games, please. Children remain at risk.

(2) Taking the following additional specific and effective actions:

(a) Appoint women promptly to key positions and stop treating them mainly as breeding machines;

(b) Proclaim contraception as morally acceptable and get the childless and celibate hierarchy out of loving couples’ sex lives;

(c) Stop meddling in politics, including at the UN and especially lately in the USA and the Philippines over contraception and gay marriage and in Africa and elsewhere over condom distribution to prevent AIDS;

(d) Proclaim homosexual activity in an authentic loving relationship as not different morally from hetersexual activity in an authentic loving relationship;

(e) Welcome divorced Catholics back to the Eucharist;

(f) Stop harassing the American nuns, Irish priests, including Fr. Tony Flannery, and Austrian priests, including Fr. Helmut Schueller, and apologize to them for the injustices the Vatican has visited upon them;

(g) Turn off the idolatrous saint-making machine, which the last two popes turned into a combination source of revenues and instrument of propaganda;

(h) Retire the Catechism, the New Testament is still good enough;

(i) Permit local bishops to adopt their own liturgical forms and formulae;

(j) Grant the People of God freedom of information and open all Church archives and files, in Rome and worldwide, subject to reasonable privacy exceptions;

(k) Respect Mary, Marian devotions and all peoples’ religious traditions, but cease actions that tend to deify Mary and diminish other women by comparison;

(l) Sell the Vatican Bank and use commercial banks; and

(m) Disband the various groups like the Knights of Malta and Papal Foundation, that are directed at wealthy Catholics, and let them donate to the Church’s charitable agencies, without the concomitant political influence peddling that these group’s too frequently entail.

If Francis follows the above suggestions, the contributions from the Catholics who return to the Church will very likely more than offset any contributions lost by departing plutocrats or schismatic medievalists, should any of them decide to leave.

The above suggestions are also the Christian thing to do, which is most important.

Francis now answers only to his conscience. Hopefully, he will follow it. I believe if he elects not to, government prosecutors may press him to do so. And in that event, I hope they do. Innocent children are at least as important in God’s eyes, and certainly in my eyes, as any in the hierarchy.