Synod. the “conspirator” Who Does Everything in the Light of Day
By Sandro Magister
In the uproar unleashed by the publication of the letter of the thirteen cardinals to the pope, the Vatican authorities who manage communication - from Santa Marta more than from the Apostolic Palace - have in fact fomented attacks not so much against the one responsible for the publication, but much more against the synod fathers who signed the letter. And yet these are personalities of the highest rank, archbishops of important dioceses like New York, Toronto, Houston, Utrecht, Bologna, Durban, Nairobi, Caracas. Not to mention three pillars of the Roman curia old and new like George Pell, Gerhard Muller, and Robert Sarah, themselves bishops in the past of dioceses like Sydney, Regensburg, and Conakry. There was so much aggression in the media against this towering and tightly knit representation of the worldwide hierarchy - accused of “conspiring” against the pope even before the letter was published - that it brought up another unresolved question on top of those raised in the letter: concerning the management of the communication of what happens in the synod. It is enough to see how Fr. Thomas Rosica, the official media liaison at the synod for the English-language media, has immediately circulated with his own enthusiastic approval the most virulent and authoritative attack against the thirteen signers of the letter, made by Washington archbishop Donald Wuerl, one of Bergoglio's preferred cardinals, in an October 18 interview with "America," the magazine of the "liberal" New York Jesuits: > Cardinal Wuerl Calls Out Pope’s Opponents The fact is that, in spite of these reactions, the letter of the thirteen cardinals has gotten results. And it got them above all after its publication, which allowed a larger number of synod fathers to become acquainted with it and recognize themselves in it, and therefore to exercise firmer pressure on those who govern the synod, in order to obtain answers more satisfying than the ones given until then. This has been confirmed by Pell, the cardinal who delivered the letter to the pope on the morning of October 5, in a conversation on October 16 with the vaticanista John Allen, reported on “Crux” as follows: “Among other things, Pell said that Italian Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, the synod secretary, has stated from the floor of the synod hall that voting on a final document will take place ‘paragraph by paragraph,’ providing a clear sense of where the bishops stand on individual issues. “He also said that members of a drafting committee for the final document have vowed to be true to the content of the synod’s discussions, rather than using the text to promote their own views.” Many synod fathers still view the composition of this committee, not elected but entirely appointed by Pope Francis, as unsatisfactory, remembering the disappointment they suffered in the 2014 synod, but it is evident that the members of the committee now feel much more closely monitored in their work, thanks precisely to the cry of alarm raised by the letter of the thirteen cardinals. As for whether or not to publish the final document of the synod - a decision that is up to the pope - Pell said he believes it should be released, among other reasons because “it’s destined to leak out anyway.” “That’s all we want – he added – for whatever the synod says, whether it’s good, bad, or indifferent, to be represented.” The organizer of the letter from the thirteen cardinals was Pell. And archbishop of New York Timothy Dolan was the one who associated himself with it most enthusiastically. In the conclave of 2013 the North American cardinals, including Dolan himself, were among those who voted for Jorge Mario Bergoglio. Dolan certainly cannot be classified as a “liberal,” but not as a rigid conservative either. He is an expression of a Church adamant in doctrine and unswayed by the sirens of worldliness in pastoral care, but in many other aspects very “open” and “modern.” It is no coincidence that he is among the protagonists of this synod. The following is a compelling portrait of him, published on October 17 in the Italian newspaper of opinion “Il Foglio” and written by its correspondent in the United States. WATCH HOW DOLAN PLAYS THE GAME by Mattia Ferraresi In New York, Cardinal Timothy Dolan warmly entertained Francis in his informal and media-savvy way, even running the risk of stealing the scene for just a moment from the pontiff, who was playing away from home field. His “thanks for stopping by, come back soon!” accompanied by the OK gesture and answered with two thumbs up from a smiling Francis, has become a meme, all in a day’s work for a cardinal with the highest capacity for media penetration. In Rome, instead, they are casting him in the role of conspirator, an underhanded and manipulated signer of letters of concern over the procedures of the synod, a fact that becomes more substantial than formal if these tend to favor certain outcomes rather than others. Inside the synod hall he says without a shadow of ambiguity that when it comes to marriage and family, “our duty is to follow Jesus in recalling and restoring what His Father intended ‘. . . in the beginning,’” while “pastoral realism and compassion” come later, much later. When Dolan found himself in the “tempest in a teapot,” as he called it, of the famous letter, he faced the controversy with his usual style, which says to always move forward, never backward, to speak openly without getting lost in denials over the details, which send signals of defensive entrenchment and incapacity for dialogue. On Sirius XM he talked about the staging of the letter, which turns out to be no staging at all. He explained that from a conversation with Cardinal George Pell there emerged the concerns that were set down in black and white, and that the thirteen cardinals signed and had it given to the pope. “Cardinal Pell, in his good shrewd way, said: ‘Am I correct in summing up some of the concerns?’ And some of us, myself included, said ‘that seems good enough to me, if you have a letter to the pope count me in.’ And sure enough I signed it.” He restated the same idea to Crux: “I said, here you go, Holy Father, you told us to be honest and we were. You’ve answered right to these [concerns]. I’m grateful you paid attention.” And again: “It seems to me that for Francis, and those who know him better confirm this for me, this is part of Ignatian spirituality: confusion, chaos, questions are a good thing,” while “predictable and very structured things” can sometimes be “an obstacle to the work of grace.” There are those who have read in these words the admission that the American cardinal signed the letter under pressure from Pell, following the Australian leader and becoming the ignorant signer of a blank letter. Which suggests, and without much obfuscation, that Dolan is not “his own man,” as they say in America, but in this case was in some way the victim of higher maneuvers. The victim of a plot embedded in another plot: conspiracy hermeneutics is a tiring business. For Dolan, instead, this is a matter of an elementary exercise of “parresia,” familiar ground for the cardinal who has been called the model of a “conservative open to the world,” a solid theologian with no taste for innovation but who does not go on the defensive even when he speaks with the New York Times about clergy sexual abuse. The same one who together with his American colleagues had been censured by the Holy See for being a bit too talkative during the last conclave, and who before leaving his diocese had not asked the faithful, like Francis, to pray for him, but to send him peanut butter if he wasn’t back in three weeks. The one who showed up in Rome for the synod is not the “doppelganger” of the approachable, easygoing New York pastor, he is not the rigid, curial soul in a body used to the spotlight, to the gala occasions, to public dialogue with figures far from the sensibilities of the Church. If there is one thing that Francis’s journey to America has shown, with the power of actions and words, it is the impossibility of reducing Christianity to a question between conservatives and progressives, between republicans and democrats, and in his pastoral career Dolan has long embodied the attempt to rise above a political template that is widespread in the West but has taken on particular rigidity in America. He has not offered cut-rate mercy when it has come to giving battle. On the restrictions on Christians in the public sphere dictated by “Obamacare” he went so far as to suggest the way of civil disobedience; he has given Barack Obama lessons on constitutional law, calling his restrictive position on religious freedom “anti-American”; as head of the episcopal conference he counterattacked without pulling his punches the “reductive secularism” of which Benedict XVI spoke. He wrote recently that Catholics are the “new minority.” At the same time he has never closed off but instead has expanded the spaces for dialogue and evangelization, as demonstrated most recently by the substantial investment in the resurrection of the moribund Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen Center for Art and Culture, a space of encounter in the heart of Manhattan for “expressing the beauty and profundity of Catholicism.” The pastor with a knack for communication and a vast digital apparatus is playing on the same field as Francis. He exhibits a markedly North American style, inevitably different from Francis’s Latin American outsider style. But in the charitable intention of opening up and dialoguing, without defensive entrenchments and barriers, one recognizes a shared standard. On the verge of the synod he shared with other cardinals and bishops some of his doubts over the procedures, and he expressed them: nothing could be more Dolanesque. The pope broke with protocol to answer in the assembly: nothing could be more Bergoglian. In interviews and in his remarks in the assembly Dolan has explicitly clarified that doctrinal changes are not on the table, but that this should also rule out pastoral changes that risk, by the affirmation of practice, making doctrine hollow over time. His impassioned endorsement of the “breathtaking wisdom” of the African Church, which is not “made up of freshmen anymore,” is a clear affirmation for those who wish to understand, but does not turn him into a conservative caricature. There is not a pliant New York Dolan and a steely Roman Dolan, there is just one cardinal, accustomed to speaking with “parresia” to the world and to the Church.
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