Amid
all these words, two interventions deserve particular attention. One
isn’t exactly new, but the revelation of its author elevates its
importance: It’s a memorandum,
intended for the cardinals who will elect Francis’s successor, that
first circulated in 2022 and has now been revealed by the Vatican
journalist Sandro Magister to be the work of Cardinal George Pell of
Australia, a leading conservative churchman who passed away just after
Benedict.
Beginning with a bald declaration that the Francis
pontificate has been a “catastrophe,” the memorandum depicts a church
falling into theological confusion, losing ground to evangelicalism and
Pentecostalism as well as secularism, and weakened by financial losses,
corruption and lawless papal governance. (On the climate within the
Vatican, Pell writes: “Phone tapping is regularly practised. I am not
sure how often it is authorized.”)
The other is a long essay
by Pell’s fellow cardinal, Robert McElroy of San Diego, that ran this
week in America, the Jesuit magazine. It shares with Pell’s memo a
premise that the church faces debilitating internal divisions, but it
argues that division should be resolved through the completion of the
revolution sought by the church’s liberals. In particular, McElroy urges
the church to shelve any meaningful judgment on sexual relationships
and to open communion to “all of the baptized,” presumably including
Protestants. Only this kind of radical inclusion, he suggests, has “any
hope of attracting the next generation to life in the church.”
That
the contending factions within Catholicism hold very different views is
not a revelation, but it’s still striking to have them stated so
frankly by prominent cardinals: Pell’s direct criticism of the Francis
papacy and McElroy’s straightforwardness about his liberal goals makes
plain what is often rhetorically obscured.
It’s not just their
substance but their style that’s illuminating. In Pell’s terse, brusque
list you can see a condensation of conservative alarm over the condition
of the church. In McElroy’s more expansive calls for “dialogue” and
“discernment,” you can see the confidence of a progressive Catholicism
that assumes that any dialogue can lead in only one direction.
And
in the distance between their presuppositions, which start with
differing sociological analyses of why the church is struggling and end
with a vast doctrinal gulf, you can feel the shadow of schism hanging
above the 21st-century church. McElroy is not a radical theologian; Pell
was not a marginal reactionary. These are mainstream figures laboring
at the heart of the Catholic hierarchy, and yet the gap between their
worldviews seems like it could place them in entirely different branches
of the Christian faith.
For all their undeniable conservatism, a
consistent goal for Benedict as well as John Paul II was some kind of
synthesis for the modern church, in which the changes ushered in by
Vatican II could be integrated with the traditional commitments of
Catholicism. Their era has now ended, but if the church is to hold its
current factions together for the long run, a synthesis is still
necessary; mere coexistence is probably not sustainable. (The current
attempt by Francis-aligned prelates to basically crush the Latin Mass
shows how quickly it gives way.) Some kind of stronger bridge would have
to exist between the McElroy and Pell worldviews for their successors
to still share a church in 2123.
Is that imaginable? As someone
who basically agrees with Pell’s diagnosis, I can read McElroy and find
points of reasonable discussion, particularly where he talks about the
role of Catholic women in the governance of the church. In theory one
can imagine a Catholicism with more nuns and laywomen in important
offices that retains its core doctrinal commitments, just as — to jump
off from the pope’s recent interview — one can imagine a church
vigorously opposed to unjust discrimination or state violence against
gay people that also still holds to the rule of chastity and the
centrality of sacramental marriage.
But syntheses can’t
just be drawn up on paper, they have to live in the hearts of actual
believers. And right now the tendency is toward irreconcilable
differences, toward a view of Catholicism’s future, on both sides of its
divides, where the current argument can only be resolved only with four
simple words: We win, they lose.
