UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
William D. Lindsey
The synod on the family opened in Rome yesterday, and as this gathering begins, journalist Robert Mickens states, in an interview with Ari Shapiro of NPR,
Married people need to be heard. Gay people and their struggles need to be heard. Single mothers need to be heard. It won’t do for a bunch of celibate men, so-called, to be parsimonious with God’s mercy.
Yes, as Mickens notes in his recent “Letter from Rome” column at Commonweal (a regular feature of that journal that he’s now resuming after he has been named editor in chief of the journal Global Pulse), Francis is facing open resistance from younger priests, seminarians, and some bishops. Mickens reports that those hostile to Francis and what he appears to stand for have “placed the bull’s eye on the backs” of several of his close advisers.
And:
Precisely because there is substance to changes the seventy-seven-year-old pope is trying to make, especially in his efforts to root out clericalism, resistance to him has grown. It is not, however, good form for priests or bishops to go around bashing the bishop of Rome. (Nor is it particularly good for one’s clerical career.) So they must select another target. That is exactly what happened during Benedict XVI’s pontificate, when the former pope’s enemies chose his secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone as their surrogate punching bag.
Mickens observes that Cardinal Walter Kasper is the latest and most prominent adviser of Francis to have had a bull’s eye placed on his back, due to his suggestion that mercy might dictate that the leaders of the Catholic church relax their opposition to admitting divorced and remarried people to communion — a stand that has earned him a rebuke from Cardinal Raymond Burke, as David Gibson recently reported. Burke: Catholic leaders are “held to obedience to the truth.” End of story.
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