Revealed: the Pope's War with the Vatican

By Damian Thompson
Spectator
August 21, 2014

http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9292592/the-popes-war/

[with audio and video]

If you want to understand how Pope Francis is planning to change the Catholic church, then don’t waste time searching for clues in the charming, self-effacing press conference he gave on the plane back from South Korea on Monday.

It’s easy to be misled by the Pope’s shoulder-shrugging interviews and impromptu phone calls. On his return flight from Rio last year, he said, ‘If a gay person seeks God, who am I to judge?’ What did that mean? Then there was that mysterious telephone conversation with an Argentinian woman apparently telling her it was OK to receive communion despite her irregular marriage. The media has concluded that Francis wants the church to change its stance on divorcees and same-sex couples.

But the media are wrong. Neither of these subjects is high on Francis’s agenda — and, even if they were, he wouldn’t alter Catholic teaching on sexuality.

The first non-European Pope was elected to do one thing: reform the Roman Curia, the pitifully disorganised, corrupt and lazy central machinery of the church. He is determined to pull it off — but he’s 77 and has part of a lung missing. When he looks at his watch during long Masses in St Peter’s, it’s not just because elaborate services bore him. He knows he may not have much time. ‘Two or three years and then off to the house of the Father,’ he said this week. Was he serious? You can never tell.

Jorge Bergoglio has little in common with Joseph Ratzinger apart from an intense, orthodox Catholic faith and a love of classical music. Like many Jesuits, Francis isn’t interested in liturgy. This is actually good news for traditionalists, because it means he won’t clamp down on the Latin Mass (with one baffling exception: the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate, a new order whose use of the Old Missal has been brutally restricted).

But there is one big difference. To quote a senior bishop: ‘Benedict allowed the Roman Curia, and specifically the Italians in it, to kill his pontificate. Francis will not permit that to happen.’ He will strike first.

The Pope has declared a spiritual culture war on the bureaucrats who forced the resignation of his predecessor, the most intellectually gifted pontiff for 200 years. Cardinal Ratzinger was once known as ‘the Rottweiler’. How ludicrous that nickname seems in the light of his eight years as Pope, during which he allowed curial officials — including his incompetent secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone — to plunge the church deeper into financial and sexual scandal while they fought their own factional battles. Benedict was too old and too kind to knock heads together.

Pope Francis is far more of a rottweiler. He became a Jesuit because he wanted to be ‘in military terms, on the front lines of the church’. As superior of the Argentine Jesuits, Bergoglio expected instant obedience. He still does, much of the time, even though he has moved to the left and become a ferocious advocate of social justice for the poor.