UNITED STATES
Christian Catholicism
Jerry Slevin
1. It took the experienced Vatican bureaucrat and Church historian , Good Pope John (Saint John XXIII), only two months as pope to realize that the Catholic Church could only be fixed permanently by convening a full and open ecumenical council. Why otherwise would John have convened a massive Church council if he thought he could fix the Church alone or with only minor groups of selected cardinals and bishops? This is all Pope Francis has tried for two years so far, unsuccessfully. Francis was elected by the cardinals who helped create the multiple Church crises. He has mainly relied on some of these same cardinals, unsuccessfully and secretively so far, to try to resolve the crises. That cannot succeed. In the little time he may have left, he must now convene a full worldwide council as John XXIII did.
2. Councils have been considered infallible by Catholics and other Christians from the Church’s beginning. They alone have resolved major Church crises over almost 2000 years from the first “Council of Jerusalem” attended by Jesus’ earliest followers in the year 50. So called “infallible” popes’ had, in effect, only been invented by Pope Pius IX in 1870 at an unfinished council he convened and controlled.
3. John XXIII, with much more experience than Francis with the entrenched Vatican bureaucracy and with international politics, had been born under the first pope that had been elected after popes “became infallible”. He had worked directly under the imperious Pope Pius XI, who made his harmful deals with Mussolini in 1929 and Hitler in 1933 and also recklessly banned birth control in 1930.
4. John knew with certainty that only an infallible council could possibly succeed in reforming the corrupt Church. He knew that it was ultimately futile to rely, as a cure for Church crises, on merely an “infallible” pope who could always be overruled by a successor “infallible” pope, as has happened often since John’s papacy untimely ended in 1963. Francis will be overruled by opportunistic future popes as well, if Francis unwisely fails to convene an open and representative worldwide council soon, a council that alone can infallibly and permanently fix the Church now.
5. Francis may win a temporary public relations “battle” in the polls if he refuses to convene a full ecumenical council like Pope John did, but he surely then will also lose the longer term permanent reform war after the polls settle down. Unlike John, Francis faces multiple major scandals in a 24/7 media Internet Age, especially unprecedented scandals involving priest and even bishop child sexual abuse. These scandals alone could well bring down an unreformed Catholic Church, sooner rather than later.
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