UNITED STATES
Christian Catholicism
Jerry Slevin
With escalating stresses and strains that Pope Francis still faces at his advancing age, including the strongly reverberating bishop revolt in Chile (see here), the pope must call for a worldwide and open general council while he still can. Otherwise, he will have a failed papacy. He should make his prophetic call for a council at this joyful time of Easter, or as soon thereafter as practicable, before it is too late.
Pope John XXIII wisely, humbly and successfully did this a half century ago when faced with far fewer and less threatening crises than Francis increasingly faces. One of the heroes of the ongoing Chilean protests and revolt, top US communications executive, Juan Carlos Cruz, lives in Philadelphia. He can be expected with many others to greet the pope with similar protests when he visits the USA soon. This will undercut the pope’s “low tax, less regulation and least safety net” financial backers, in their US election efforts next year, that will depend critically on the pope’s charisma to try to swing essential US Latino voters.
The “family absent” Family Synods seem to be a futile public relations farces to preserve papal infallibility, to push baby breeding and to maximize German bishops’ subsidies. The Vatican’s own internal finances still remain untouched by independent auditors and are still under the ultimate control of a secretive and unaccountable monarch. The priest child abuse crisis is accelerating despite the pope’s dissembling rhetoric. Even the pope’s hand picked sex abuse commission lay members are regularly publicly criticizing his management mistakes. Moreover, the leading Jesuit expert on Vatican organization, Thomas Reese, has recently criticized convincingly the pope’s so-called reform of the Vatican bureaucracy. This all may have been a good try, perhaps, for the over-confident and elderly Pope Francis or just the latest Vatican ploy, but other than raising hopes briefly and preparing many Catholics to monitor closely the coming council, it has effected little of permanent value.
Please see the pertinent, “Vatican Defends Chilean Appointment“, by the informed and fair Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of BishopAccountability, an independent charitable organization that boldly documents child abuse by the Catholic Church and other religious groups, here at,
Pope Francis may be heroic, but he is also imprudent, if not rash and arrogant as well. He may have been able as a young Jesuit provincial to save most of his confreres from military thugs, but at his age he cannot alone be expected to save 5,000 bishops and their wealth — these are his top priorities, it appears from most indications. Paradoxically, worldwide bishops and cardinals are more at risk now than when Pope Francis took over the bad hand the ex-pope dealt him, as the new UK and related investigations make evident. Once again. the key management truth prevails — modern media management can cover-up crises for awhile, but it cannot resolve them. That takes transparent and independent effort over a long period of time. In the final analysis, God cannot be “sold by slogans”.
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