After Francis, What Stability?

My friend a podcast partner Kale Zelden, a Catholic, has an interesting Twitter thread about how troubled he is by Pope Francis’s recent acts, and what it says about the direction of the Catholic Church. It begins here:

A thread on where we’re at:

1/16 pic.twitter.com/7dR4SrqmlR

— Kale Zelden (@kalezelden) June 3, 2022

Kale talks about how, as a younger man, he was so inspired by the figure of John Paul II, and the solid rock of Truth his papacy, and the Roman church, represented. Now, though, Francis continues to repudiate so much of JP2’s legacy, and not only that, but magisterial Catholic teaching. More:

Kale refers his readers to this Catholic World Report essay by the Catholic theologian Larry Chapp, along the same lines. Chapp begins by talking about what it means that Francis has just elevated Bishop Robert McElroy, the super-liberal Uncle Ted McCarrick disciple, to the cardinalate — just the latest in a line of progressive red-hats made in America by Francis. Excerpts:

Indeed, McElroy was one of the bishops who voted against a USCCB petition pressing the Vatican for more transparency and speed in the McCarrick investigation. I repeat: he voted against transparency. Which marks him off as either someone who is: A) personally compromised himself in the McCarrick situation and who is seeking to cover things up; B) uncaring toward the victims of abuse; C) a Pope Francis sycophant who was simply trying to shield the Pope from criticism; or D) all, or some combination, of the above.

All that said, I think there is a need to identify the root issue at stake in all of these concerns and criticisms. Beyond particular and proximate issues such as LBTQIAA+++ promotion, Eucharistic discipline, sex abuse scandals, and obstructionism, it is important to ask a simple question: why does Pope Francis like Bishop McElroy enough to make him a Cardinal? After all, the man has some serious baggage.

And the answer to that question can only be ascertained once we understand how important to this pontificate Amoris Laetitia is. Just as Traditionis Custodes was in many ways a clear repudiation of Summorum Pontificum, so too is Amoris Laetitia a repudiation of large parts of Veritatis Splendor.

My view of this papacy is that Pope Francis—slowly and brick by brick—is attempting to subvert the theological hermeneutic of the previous two papacies: Pope John Paul II’s in particular, and primarily in the realm of the late Pontiff’s moral theology. Bishop McElroy has been an unabashed supporter of Amoris and his promotion to the red hat is the Pope’s way of signaling that McElroy’s approach to the moral theological principles of Amoris is correct.

More:

This also explains, as I have blogged on before, why Pope Francis has systematically dismantled the John Paul II Institute in Rome and replaced numerous professors and leadership—all of whom were devotees, of course, of John Paul’s thought, of Communio theology, and of Familiaris Consortio/Veritatis Splendor—with theologians who are largely proportionalists in moral theology and strong supporters of a more “progressive” agenda. And they have all been given the specific mandate to transform the Institute into . This is also why nobody from the previous regime at the Institute was invited to the Synod on the Family.

Therefore, in my view, the various red hats that Francis has given out to the Church in the U.S. are primarily, although not exclusively, about moral theology and the revolution in the post-conciliar theological guild on the topic of human sexuality. People tend to focus on the great controversies surrounding liturgy in the post-conciliar era. And those issues are important. But take it from someone who lived through it—the deepest, most important, most contentious, most divisive, and most destructive debates surrounded moral theology, especially after Humanae vitae and the massive dissent from it that followed.

Read it all. 

You might think this is inside Catholic baseball. You’re wrong: it’s one of the biggest religion stories of our time. Kale Zelden is just a few years younger than I am. It turns out that we were both in the New Orleans Superdome in 1987 to see John Paul II. I wasn’t yet a Catholic, but I was drawn to the Dome by the personal magnetism of this Pope. Six years later, I was received into the Catholic Church. It wasn’t a straight line from one to the other, but as I was wrestling with whether or not to become a serious Christian, Catholicism seemed to be the only option (I barely knew what Orthodoxy was back then).

Why? Well, because of John Paul and what he signified. I understood him to be a morally courageous, powerful spiritual leader who stood confidently against the chaos and corruption of the modern world. I believed back then, in my early twenties, that if Christianity was going to survive, it would need what the Catholic Church alone had: a Pope and a Magisterium. The Protestant world was divided into thousands of churches, but the Catholic Church bestrode history and the globe as a colossus of unity and truth. Et cetera. That’s what I believed, because that’s what a lot of the triumphalists of the JP2 era said.

If you had come to me in 1993, right after I had been received into the Catholic Church, and told me that I would live to see a pope do the things that Francis has done, I would not have believed it possible. Seriously, I would not have believed it. Maybe you had to have been there, and been young and in love with John Paul II, to have been so confident about the future. The kind of thing Kale Zelden talks about (“We watch as the legacy of our whole life is just systematically dismantled”) resonates deeply in my heart, though I left the Catholic Church sixteen years ago.

If the abuse scandal hadn’t annihilated my capacity to believe in Roman Catholic claims of authority, then the Francis papacy probably would have done the trick. The reason I wouldn’t have believed a visitor from 2022 going back in time to 1993 with news of the many liberal accomplishments of the Francis papacy is because I honestly believed all that stuff about unchanging doctrine, and the pope never teaching error.

I know that many of my closest Catholic friends are suffering greatly right now. None have talked to me about becoming Orthodox, and I would not take advantage of someone’s suffering to press the case for Orthodoxy on them, unless I feared that they were in danger of losing their faith entirely. Don’t misunderstand me: I think that Orthodoxy is true — I believe that far more strongly today than I did when I became Orthodox in 2006 — but I remember how much pain I was in when my Catholic faith was being gutted out of me, and I would have resented anyone who took advantage of my suffering to push their version of Christianity on me.

Nevertheless, as someone who admires the Catholic Church and who wants it to be strong, and as someone who is passionately interested in religion, I can’t avert my eyes from the iceberg towards which Capt. Bergoglio is sailing his ship. In fact, I think he’s broadsided the thing, for the same reasons Kale Zelden and Larry Chapp do.

I doubt this will matter to most Catholics, who go about their business without worrying too much what the Pope says about this or that. Even Chapp ends his essay with:

Again, at the end of the day, I really don’t care whose head is adorned with a red hat or whose petard sits in an office chair on the via della conziliazione. The immediate needs of my day and the tidal undertow and sinful entropy of my degraded life seem much more pressing to me. I seek Christ and Him crucified.

It seems to me that if a Catholic is determined to remain Catholic, that’s the only realistic response he has after this papacy. Maybe there’s something I’m not seeing, but I don’t see how it’s possible to make the kinds of claims for Catholicism’s steadiness and continuity, especially through the papacy — claims that drew me in like a tractor beam in the early 1990s — and be taken seriously. After JP2 and BXVI, and now Francis, it looks like the Catholic Church is governed like countries are with changes of parties and governments after elections. You can’t just say, “Well, let’s just sit back and wait for God to send us a pope we like better.” It doesn’t work that way. A future conservative pope who undid all Francis has done would unavoidably destabilize the institutional Church and its authority even further.

I welcome comment and critique, but what I won’t post is griping about me being an ex-Catholic writing critically about this papacy. Nor will I post anti-Catholic smears. If you just want to take potshots at Catholics, or me, don’t bother writing anything, because I’m not going to post it. What I’m genuinely interested in is hearing from small-o orthodox Catholics — especially Gen X Catholics whose idea of the Church was shaped by the JP2 era — about how they are coping, and how they are explaining all this to themselves.

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