Pope Francis, Canonizations, Infallibility & Children

By Jerry Slevin
Christian Catholicism
April 23, 2014

http://christiancatholicism.com/pope-francis-canonizations-infallibility-children/

With all the problems the Vatican now faces, why are more “papal saints” being declared now, and what is the rush on Pope John Paul II? With almost a hundred popes already declared “saints”, do Catholics need more papal saints to pray to? What is really going on? Is Pope Francis’ “infallible” declaration of sainthood, or canonization, for Popes John XXIII and John Paul II part of a larger undisclosed strategy? It seems so. Despite the usual cheerleading from conflicted and opportunistic papal apologists, neither pope deserves to be declared a saint, for the reasons specifically discussed below.

Francis’ “divinizing” these two popes now, thereby seeking to enhance selectively Francis’ ability to capitalize on their individual moral influence over various Catholic groups, appears aimed at consolidating Francis’ papal power base and at maximizing his influence over a divided world Catholicism.

Francis’ strategy appears directed at both so-called “conservative” Catholics, who often favor John Paul II’s more dogmatic approach in his rigid encyclicals and self-serving Catechism, and “liberal” Catholics, who often favor John XXIII’s seemingly more pastoral approach in initiating the Second Vatican Council reforms. Since the Catechism contains many positions that support a dominant papacy that depends on a rigid sexual morality, Francis’ rushed and unsurprising “elevation” of the Catechism’s papal proponent, John Paul II, is both symbolically, practically and perhaps ominously significant for many key “doctrines” that Francis is purported by some to be reconsidering, such as women priests, contraception, divorced and remarried Catholics’ readmission to sacraments, and marriage equality.

As to the seeming rush to sainthood, maximizing Francis’ power over a less theologically divided Catholicism appears to be especially important to the Vatican currently. The Vatican now faces its greatest external threat since the loss of its extensive Papal States’ territory almost a century and a half ago. The democratically driven threat for the Vatican is the increasing pressure, including potential criminal prosecutions of the hierarchy, from powerful democratic governments over the Vatican’s mismanagement, especially of its bishops’ poor child protection performance. The Vatican over a 1,500 year period has eliminated democratic pressure internally, but is now paradoxically facing democratic pressure externally.

Outside governmental oversight is already well underway of the Vatican’s long overdue efforts to clean up the mismanagement of its corrupt finances. The Vatican has already lost badly under the ex-Pope and his key Vatican Bank director, the influential US Republican, Carl Anderson, its battle to resist accepting international financial accountability. The current media focus on bishops’ excessive mansions and clerical embezzlement is just a start on exposing hierarchical financial corruption, as independently audited financial statements eventually become the norm for Catholic Church finances.

The Vatican now has a single strategic option to try to meet this democratically driven threat. The Vatican can gain trust from democratically controlled governments only by curtailing hierarchical mismanagement by adopting fundamental internal structural reforms to assure that bishops, including the Bishop of Rome, are transparently accountable to independent lay oversight, as in other Christian denominations and as existed in the earlier Catholic Church. Without independent lay oversight, reforms can be rolled back by any future pope.

Alternatively, the Vatican can continue to try to resist more effectively outside democratically driven governmental oversight. Despite many hollow promise-s to reform internally, all modern popes, including Francis by his actions and inaction so far, have mostly chosen to resist outside government oversight. Popes have resisted mainly by playing politics to try to influence the governments that may press the Vatican. This is quite evident in the current US Congressional campaigns for November’s important elections, where the Vatican’s subordinate US bishops are pressing in opposition to President Obama and the Democrats.

The Vatican has reason to fear Obama, as evidenced by the following recent blistering remarks, of a Deputy US Attorney in Obama’s Justice Department, about criminally convicted Bishop Robert Finn and the Kansas City-St. Joseph Diocese’s handling of a predator priest’s case:

“When it becomes clear at the outset of the investigation that the entire hierarchy of a centuries-old religious denomination does not seem willing to recognize that the children depicted in the images are, in fact, victims of child exploitation, nor seem very willing to help establish the identity of the children depicted, and instead are spending millions of dollars on legal counsel in an ill-advised effort to avoid having the priest and bishop accept legal responsibility for their crimes, then you know, as an investigator, that your work is cut out for you …”

The priest is serving a 50 year Federal sentence and Finn barely escaped a prison term himself. Pope Francis, however, has continued Finn in office for over a year so far.

This continuing Vatican choice to resist this outside democratic pressure can succeed only if the Vatican can maintain sufficient influence over those groups that commonly control these democracies. To sustain that influence in any particular powerful democracy, such as the USA or Germany, the Vatican must appear to a specific ruling group in the democracy to exercise enough papal influence over critical Catholic voters and local financial elites in such democracy to warrant the ruling group’s taking a “hands’ off” attitude to the Vatican’s mismanagement problems.

In the USA, for example, the Vatican for three decades has assertively sought political allies, usually among right wing Republicans, like Carl Anderson, and their tax adverse billionaire backers. For their part, Republican political leaders, and their related conservative US Supreme Court majorities, have often supported Vatican positions more fully, including with respect to bishop accountability failures. The Vatican has attempted in recent elections, and as mentioned above, is currently attempting for the upcoming US midterm Congressional elections in November, to use “wedge issue crusades” opposing contraception, abortion, gay marriage, et al., to boost the campaigns of right wing political candidates by increasing voter turnout of conservative Catholic voters in key states.

To maximize this essential Vatican political influence, it appears that Francis decided he should try to reduce internal Catholic divisiveness symbolized by the split among John Paul II and John XXIII advocates. The Vatican’s strategy of resistance has already failed to deter outside governments from requiring the Vatican to comply with modern international banking and financial regulations, which the Vatican had successfully avoided mostly for over a half century.

Notwithstanding Francis’ canonization media extravaganza, Francis’ strategy of continuing to resist governmental pressure to hold bishops accountable will likely also fail. Outside governments will continue to press to require the Vatican to comply with laws aimed at protecting children, whether or not popes are opportunistically declared saints. At times, one gets the impression that Francis believes if he (1)continually changes the subject, (2) avoids talking about the abuse scandal and abuse survivors, and (3) keeps claiming he only rules about 100 acres with 1,000 subjects in Vatican City, he will be legally unaccountable. If his lawyers told him that, he should get another legal opinion pronto.

Given Popes John Paul II’s and John XXIII’s known and widely publicized failures, even without independent access to damaging material in the Vatican’s Secret Archives, to address seriously either the priest child abuse scandals or Fr. Maciel’s well known sexual excesses, as well as Francis’ continued stonewalling on curtailing abuse effectively, the current canonization maneuver will likely be counterproductive. The Vatican’s purported investigations of both popes’ records have been materially inadequate and evidently biased, and the claimed miracles in their name are embarrassingly insufficiently established.

For Francis to claim “definitively” that these two popes, with their evidently serious limitations even based on an incomplete investigation, are “saints”, just adds to the overall appearance of a massive Vatican cover-up of bishop accountability failures.

Francis has also further undercuts his already tenuous papal claim to infallibility. In 1998, the ex-Pope as a cardinal, with Cardinal Bertone, stated that a pope’s decision to declare a saint must be accepted by Catholics “definitively”, i.e., as infallible. If there is any papal decision that shows the lack of papal infallibility, it is the declaration now of these two popes as saints. Tens of thousands of Catholic children would likely have avoided priest sexual abuse if either of these popes did not behave as moral cowards, as they appear to have. What does it take to be disqualified as a saint?

The prospect of outside governmental oversight of bishop management has been most visible recently in the Australian Royal Commission’s gruesome grilling of Cardinal George Pell. Promptly following the long anticipated grilling, Pell was “promoted out” by Francis to the Vatican’s No. 3 position, the Vatican’s financial czar. The Royal Commission seems to be working its way up the Vatican hierarchical ladder, and plans to call Pell back in due course, assuming he waives any diplomatic immunity claim that may then be available.

Moreover, the recent revealing and widely publicized videotape deposition of Minneapolis Archbishop Nienstedt, that indicated clearly the ongoing episcopal failures to monitor adequately suspected priest child abusers, just reinforces the need for greater bishop accountability that Pell’s disturbing testimony also recently indicated.

Francis is not likely to dig the Vatican out of this ever deepening hole with Hollywood-style spectaculars like these canonizations. Too many Catholics, and even non-Catholics, have lost trust in the Vatican. More are losing trust daily, as Francis evades taking real action to make bishops, and himself for that matter, more accountable.

Historians have shown clearly that Catholic popes, like absolute monarchs generally, have for centuries operated at times with secret geo-political strategies, using pious propaganda to obscure their real goals. This has just been shown thoroughly and indisputably for Pope Pius XI by award winning Brown University Professor David Kertzer in his extremely well documented book, “The Pope and Mussolini—The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe”.

When Popes John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis were young, Pius XI reigned firmly. Pope John XXIII served as a papal diplomat under both Pius XI and his Secretary of State and successor, Pope Pius XII. Pius XI and Pius XII pursued ultimately unsuccessful strategies to try to further Vatican interests by frequently cooperating with, and even at critical times politically supporting, dictators Mussolini, Hitler and Franco. It appears that Vatican strategic political thinking in several key respects has remained mainly unchanged since the youthful days of John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis under Pius XI.

Of further current relevance, Pius XI protected for years a top Curial cardinal with a reportedly continuous and perverse interest in boys. Pius XI also secretly ordered in 1922 that cases of priestly misuse of the confessional for sexual purposes be handled by all bishops secretly under threat of excommunication. This unusual order was likely precipitated to some degree by an increase in priest child sexual abuse cases that may have arisen during the prior decade following Pope Pius X’s unprecedented reduction in 1910 to seven years of age for normal First Confession and First Communion from the customary age of twelve or older.

In addition, Pius XI also condemned birth control in 1930, seemingly out of his excessive fear that atheistic Soviet communism would overrun a post-World War I depopulated Europe and destroy the Catholic Church in the process. More babies meant more docile Catholics and more potential soldiers, if needed. Whether couples could afford at the time during the Great Depression to raise all the children they bore, was evidently, then as now, not a significant concern of Pope Pius XI or other childless and celibate clerics.

As indicated, Pius X had in 1910 lowered the designated age for First Confession and First Communion to seven years old from twelve, thirteen or even older, as had been the Catholic custom for centuries. Obviously, this facilitated a papal goal of earlier and more effective indoctrination of young Catholics, especially on matters like papal infallibility, papal primacy and clerical privileges generally. It also, however, greatly increased the risks of sexual exploitation of especially vulnerable children by predatory priests, which apparently contributed to the need for the 1922 secrecy order particularly to protect priests. This was quite important, it appears, at a time when the Catholic hierarchy was under considerable external pressures following World War I, particularly in Italy.

John XXIII in March 1962, in his own name, reissued to bishops worldwide, secretly and seemingly unnecessarily, the outstanding 1922 confessional sexual abuse secrecy order of Pius XI that apparently was still in effect in 1962. John XXIII, of course, highlighted this secret order just several months before more than 2,000+ Catholic bishops were to arrive for the Second Vatican Council in Rome to discuss publicly pressing pastoral issues. The 2,000+ bishops apparently got John XXIII’s message and avoided any serious public discussion of (1) confessional misuse, (2) raising the age of First Confession, and (3) priest child abuse generally. If the Vatican II bishops had not earlier gotten the word on hiding priest child abuse, this reissued order made sure they did get it.

It is clear now from numerous investigations that priest child abuse, inside and outside the confessional, was a significant problem when John XXIII seemingly sought to keep the Vatican II bishops from addressing it. Had he asked, as he could and should have, the Council Fathers to consider the abuse scandal then, including reviewing the half century of evidence of the failed experiment of requiring very young children to confess privately, it seems likely worldwide that tens of thousands of Catholic children and their families could have been spared the horrific effects of priest child abuse.

Moreover, a more courageous approach by both or even either Pope John XXIII or Pope John Paul II, a Vatican Council II bishop, then or in John Paul II’s case, later, would likely also have enabled the Catholic Church to have avoided the billions of dollars in abuse related expenses, as well as the lost billions in contributions of disgusted Catholics who left the Church or reduced their contributions over the child abuse scandal. In the USA alone, the Church has spent over $3,000,000,000 in recent decades on the few thousand of the abuse survivors who have settled claims, out of the estimated 100,000 estimated USA survivors of priest child abuse, most of whom are, in effect, viewed almost as non-existent by the Catholic hierarchy, including Francis.

In Los Angeles alone, over 500 survivors received from the Archdiocese on average over $1,000,000 each for settling their claims. If all 100,000 estimated USA priest child abuse survivors had received similar justice that most of them were likely entitled to, the total would exceed $100,000,000,000 or over a hundred billion dollars.

The lifetime social costs, including health care and income maintenance, for most disabled US survivors of priest abuse, in the order of magnitude of many billions of dollars, has instead been shifted to US taxpayers, while many in the Catholic hierarchy live in mansions like princes, with little financial or other accountability for their management failures, or worse, that helped generate many of these unnecessary and cruel costs.

In addition to the multi-billion direct financial costs to the Catholic Church of the abuse scandal, the indirect financial costs are likely even much greater. Many former Catholics cite the abuse scandals as a key reason they stopped participating in, and/or contributing to, the Catholic Church. Polls indicate generally only two-thirds of US Catholics attend Church and they donate an estimated $8 billion annually, barely half the per capita rate of US Protestants. If all Catholics attended Church and donated at the same rate as Protestants, Catholic donations would be approximately $24 billion annually, or triple the current levels. That would feed and house a lot of the poor. The idea of canonizing two men who oversaw this shortfall, as well as the ruination of so many innocent children, apparently to protect their ecclesiastical positions, is shameful at best.

In contrast to this canonization public relations project aimed obviously at trying to enhance papal prestige and power by striving to glorify Francis’ “near-divine” predecessors, Francis continues with his low key, almost sheepishly muted responses to the Vatican’s biggest crisis, the scandal of failing to hold bad cardinals and bishops accountable for their longstanding and often continuing child protection failures.

Indeed, even Francis’ recent widely reported brief “off the cuff” remarks in a closed meeting with international child protection advocates are ambiguous and inadequate with respect to the key issue of imposing sanctions on bad bishops. As AP’s astute Vatican reporter, Nicole Winfield, honestly noted: “Though unclear, Pope Francis’ comments about the ‘sanctions that must be imposed’ could be a reference to the need to hold bishops accountable.” Could be? What is Francis problem with “straight talk” here? What are he and his cardinals afraid of?

Moreover, Winfield also noted, with respect to the highly touted Vatican media machine, the seeming effort of Vatican TV to avoid these off the cuff remarks. Winfield added: “Pope Francis’ comments during the closed audience were reported in part by Vatican Radio, and Vatican Television EXCLUDED THEM ENTIRELY in its initial edit of the audience. The full quote was obtained after The Associated Press requested video of the full comments from Vatican Television.” {Emphasis added}

One must wonder if Pope Francis was just embarrassed in the presence of so many advocates for children in a closed meeting, thus forcing him to blurt out his ambiguous remarks, especially on the day human rights lawyers filed their extensive “shadow report” with the UN Committee on Torture about the Vatican’s role in the priest child abuse scandal. The group Francis met with is associated with the UN Committee on the Child that recently blasted the Vatican for child protection failures, so Francis had reasons to be embarrassed. As the papal media extravaganzas make clear, the Vatican’s media machine can get out a message when it wants to.

Francis appears intent on preserving the rigid papal sexual policies that have come to underpin the papal mythological ideology of an “infallible pope” that Catholics have been weaned on since 1870. The mythology of a “near-divine pope” is fundamental to the Vatican’s geo-political strategy as the canonizations further indicate.

This papal ideology may be reinforced, Francis seems to believe, by the “contrived canonizations” of Popes John Paul II and John XXIII, notwithstanding their seemingly indefensible records on covering up priest child abuse and Vatican financial corruption, including with respect to Fr. Maciel, among other apparent shortcomings.

These significant subjects appear to have been carefully avoided in the seemingly rigged canonization preliminaries that lack the “devil’s advocate” investigation that had been used in many earlier canonizations. Ironically, Pope John Paul II, a prodigious and profitable “saintmaker”, had earlier eliminated the devil’s advocate position.

Meanwhile, the Vatican Archives that might shed some light on these two popes’ seemingly already obvious weaknesses remain secret, which further undercuts their claim to sainthood. It is really questionable whether this rush to sainthood will increase or decrease interest in these two popes’ evident shortcomings, while surely contributing to many Catholics’ growing cynicism about saint making and about the “real Francis”.

Pope Francis is still pushing policies that hurt many in the USA and worldwide, including children and women, especially poor ones. Francis’ strategy, evident by clear actions and pregnant inaction that belie his carefully orchestrated public gestures, is evidentally aimed mainly at protecting the cardinals who elected him from potential criminal accountability for facilitating predatory priests and financial felons, among other misdeeds.

Central to the Vatican’s protective strategy for over three decades, as mentioned above, has been to ally itself to right-wing conservatives like Ronald Reagan and the George Bushes in the USA, the world’s most powerful country. Consistent with this strategy, the ex-Pope, through his US bishop subordinates and US papal nuncio, tried unsuccessfully to help defeat President Obama in 2012.

This papal protective strategy continues today apparently under Pope Francis with contrived “wedge issue crusades” over Obamacare contraception insurance mandates, gay marriage and immigrant deportation policies.

The current papal US political strategy appears to be to help right-wing conservatives win in less than six months control of the US Senate and thereby to maintain conservative control of the US Supreme Court. Control of the Supreme Court is essential to maintaining the right-wing’s “0.01% billionaires” dominance of US national politics, Federal low tax policies and most media access. A key factor in the final weeks of the election campaign will likely be Pope Francis’ push to influence conservative US Latino voters in the key US Senate swing states.

Francis’ Synod on the Family in October, with no women or married fathers as full participants, appears likely to reaffirm the Vatican’s regressive policies on human sexuality as set forth in the ‘new saint’s” Catechism. This would set the stage for Francis to make a final targeted push for conservative Latino voters on the aforementioned wedge issues.

To avoid undercutting Francis’ US election effort, it appears that Francis must continue to dodge as best he can the issue of bishop accountability until after the election in less than six months. He is well on the way to doing this, having effectively already dodged the issue for over 13 months as pope.

Francis’ illusory advisory commission on child protection still needs more members and an agenda, among other necessary features, and will likely not weigh in meaningfully before November. An initial meeting of the European members named so far with Cardinal O’Malley of the advisory commission is likely before May 5th, when the Vatican is scheduled to appear before the UN Commission on Torture. Typically under Pope Francis, there is a well publicized flurry of motion on curtailing priest child abuse before anticipated public events that likely could embarrass the Vatican on the priest child abuse scandal, with little evident follow up thereafter until the next public event.

A likely objective now for Pope Francis is to avoid having President Obama call before the November US elections for an Australian style national investigation commission into child sexual abuse by US institutions like the Catholic Church. Francis has already seen how the Australian Royal Commission shredded the legacy of Cardinal Pell, whom Francis had just promoted to the Vatican’s no. 3 position as finance czar.

Obama obviously would like for political reasons to avoid challenging the popular Francis. Indeed, Obama has recently accepted the resignation of his HHS Secretary who served as the lightning rod for Obamacare, including its contraception insurance mandate.

Progressive groups are now also going after bishops’ mansions, like Newark’s Myers’. Given, however, that the pundits’ current predictions are that the Republicans appear poised to win control of the US Senate in less than six months, Obama may be quite imprudent by deferring announcing an investigation into institutional child sexual abuse. Moreover, the steady flow of troubling media disclosures from the Minneapolis Archdiocesan scandals relating to Fr. Kevin McDonough, brother of Obama’s Chief of Staff, may force Obama’s hand. Time will tell.

Most Catholics, like myself, have experienced papal indoctrination efforts since childhood, in confessionals and classrooms, to overlook blindly Vatican misdeeds and to just “pay, pray and obey”, no questions asked. This childhood indoctrination strongly influences many Catholics throughout their lives, which is likely why the Vatican seems determined to retain First Confession for seven year olds.

Consequently, many Catholics, and many in the media, overlook Francis’ unambiguous actions and inaction that contradict his pleasing public pontifications. They, instead, choose to continue to be fooled by Pope Francis’ well orchestrated charm offensive, that is both comforting to them and relieves them apparently of guilt about not resisting the Vatican’s evil misdeeds.

Catholic intellectuals and media figures mostly are silent, often co-opted by hierarchical “bribes or appointments” or beaten down by decades of papal intimidation. Even some purported Catholic reformers accept insincere and often unbelievable and/or false excuses from the hierarchy, rather than calling a spade a spade.

Francis has served in a major city for over a quarter century as either a bishop or a Jesuit provincial, and over a dozen years as a cardinal. He must know the score on the Vatican’s long standing failure to hold bishops’ accountable for protecting predatory priests.

Will Francis in fact now take a step forward and hold bishops accountable — that is the fundamental issue he has been ducking for over a year as pope. He has finally announced recently in general terms an advisory commission with a vague mandate and neither a specific schedule nor a clear agenda. Meanwhile, Francis recently in effect approved of permitting Italian priests to continue to avoid reporting abuse cases to the police.

Francis volunteered to be Pope. As part of the control group now, he like the ex-Pope and Cardinals Bertone, Sodano, Levada, Parolin and Mueller are all subject to the long arm of the International Criminal Court. The Court avoided, at least for the time being, taking action against the Vatican hierarchy; a prosecution of Vatican leaders still remains legally feasible. Moreover, the Vatican remains subject to the UN committee on the Child and the UN Committee on Torture under the treaties to which the Vatican is bound. Francis is running out of time.

Award winning reporter, Jason Berry, recently noted in an article some of the earlier bad experiences with hierarchical abuse commissions had by key Catholics, including Illinois Supreme Court Justice, Anne Burke, and Duquesne Law Dean Emeritus and canon lawyer, Nicholas Cafardi, with the US bishops’ commission.

Justice Burke even flew to Rome in a futile effort to try to convince then Cardinal Ratzinger (now ex-Pope) to make bishops really accountable. Cafardi, a legal expert on clerical child abuse crimes, interestingly relates his recent unsuccessful effort to try to assist at his own expense Fr. Hans Zollner, S.J., a key member of Pope Francis’ promised advisory commission. See Berry’s article here:

http://ncronline.org//news/accountability/advisers-saw-advice-spurned-past-members-abuse-commissions-tell-struggles

To appreciate how far Pope Francis’ latest rhetoric on the abuse scandal is from the actual reality of the Vatican’s ongoing failure to address this scandal effectively and transparently, please review the recent reported remarks below recently made to a US Catholic reform group by Fr. Thomas Doyle, O.P.

Fr. Doyle has been the leading worldwide advocate for over a quarter century of securing justice for priest abuse survivors. During the 1980′s Fr. Doyle had futilely advised Pope John Paul II’s US representative, Cardinal Pio Laghi, on priest child abuse curtailment policy. Laghi had earlier finished overseeing the Argentina Catholic Church’s self serving cooperation with a brutal military in the “Dirty War”, in which Pope Francis indirectly assisted Laghi, as the local Jesuit provincial, by trying to suppress prophetic local Jesuits who challenged the military.