Published on Commonweal Magazine (https://www.commonwealmagazine.org)
Letter from Rome
The Pope & 'Dr. Pell'
Robert Mickens June 17, 2015 - 9:18am
[1]
Pope Francis’s much-awaited encyclical on creation and ecology is already out. The Italian current affairs magazine, l’Espresso, posted a pirated copy [2]
of it Monday on its website. The head of the Vatican press office, Fr.
Federico Lombardi, SJ, claimed it was just a “draft.” But he and his
colleagues were so annoyed by the “heinous” act (as one of them described it [3])
that the Jesuit priest took away the press credentials of the offending
journalist, Sandro Magister. Among vaticanisti, Magister is the leading
critic of Pope Francis, but he claims it was his editor – not he – who
obtained the text of the encyclical and then decided to make it public
three days ahead of Thursday’s official launch.
Obviously, the real villain was the Vatican official who leaked the text to l’Espresso
with the obvious intention of embarrassing the pope and deflating the
much-hyped roll out of what many have called the most anticipated papal
document in decades. Officials don’t leak documents they like. They pass
them on to raise alarm bells. And l’Espresso was the natural
tool for carrying out the dirty deed since Magister’s articles have been
a constant vehicle for airing the views of Francis’s critics. These
include church figures and others who do not agree with the pope’s
statements up to now on the environment, especially his conviction that
climate change is mostly man-made.
The most prominent of the church’s self-described climate change skeptics (he insists he is not a denier) is Cardinal George Pell [4].
He has given lectures and written articles on the topic. Well,
according to the leaked draft, Pope Francis is very clear that
human-induced climate change, pollution, exploitation of natural
resources, and the current economic systems that depend on unfettered
abuse of the environment are all very serious moral issues. What will
Dr. Pell do? He’s not only a very high-ranking Vatican official, but is
also one of only nine people in the whole world on the pope’s special
advisory council of cardinals. Can he – or any Catholic – simply ignore
the new encyclical or the parts they don’t like? Many have done so
before, not least concerning Paul VI’s controversial 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae. Of course, the cardinal and many others in the hierarchy call such people “dissenters.”
**********
Pope
Francis seems not the least bit troubled by people, including bishops,
who disagree with him or with each other. Further proof came on Tuesday
when the Synod office issued yet another list of bishops whom the Pope
has approved to attend next October’s assembly on the family. These are
bishops elected by their national episcopal conferences. And it doesn’t
seem that Francis has vetoed any of their choices. The Poles elected
their conference president, Archbishop Stanisław Gadecki of Poznan, and
two others who have vowed to resist any changes in church praxis on
issues like communion for the divorced and remarried or being more
welcoming to people in same-sex partnerships.
Contrast
that with the Belgians. They elected Bishop Johan Bonny of Antwerp, who
worked for ten years as an assistant to Cardinal Walter Kasper at the
Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, as their lone delegate
(because of they are smaller conference). The former Vatican official,
who turns sixty next month, has been a leading voice among bishops who
believe the church must revise its teaching on human sexuality. The
Belgians debated whether or not they should select Bonny as their
representative, fearing that some of his public statements, which were
twisted by conservative commentators, might be seen in Rome as throwing
down the gauntlet. But in the end, they voted their convictions. And by
doing so they also sent a message to the pope that this is the man they
want to succeed the conservative Archbishop André Léonard in the
primatial see of Malines-Brussels.
Léonard,
who turned seventy-five last month, has been denied the cardinal’s red
hat all four times that consistories have been held since 2010 when he
was named to Belgium’s top diocese. His appointment by Benedict XVI five
years ago proved extremely controversial, especially when it was
revealed that he had not even been on the terna, or list of three
candidates, that the apostolic nuncio sent to Rome. Nor was he the
choice of Cardinal Godfried Danneels, who had held the post the previous
thirty years. Pope Francis, who counts Danneels as a friend and ally,
took the first steps to aright the situation last February when he gave
the red hat to that now-retired nuncio, Karl Josef Rauber. And many are
wondering if he’ll now allow Danneels to finally have a say in who
should be next Archbishop of Malines-Brussels. If so, John Bonny in
Antwerp, where the cardinal was also once the ordinary, may be the
front-runner.
**********
No doubt you’ve seen that Pope Francis has set up a special tribunal [5]
in the Vatican to try bishops who abuse their office. And you’ve also
seen that many people have begun naming all sorts of mitered wonders
they think should be hauled before it. Unfortunately, no such tribunal
exists. The Vatican merely announced last week the pope had agreed to a
proposal to set up a special “judicial section” within the Congregation
for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) that will “judge” bishops who have
abused their office “in connection with abuse of minors.” But this
remains only an agreed-upon proposal. It is likely to take several more
months or even a year or two before such an entity is fully established
and operational. In the meantime, the pope still has to deal with
bishops who have covered up sex abuse in their dioceses.
And
it looks pretty clear that’s what happened on Monday when the Vatican
announced that Francis had accepted the resignations of Archbishop John
Nienstedt of St. Paul-Minneapolis and his auxiliary, Bishop Lee Piché.
They stepped down just ten days after a local prosecutor announced plans
to sue the archdiocese for failing to protect children [6].
Will this be the end of the story? What will happen to these two men
now? The archbishop is sixty-eight years old and still seven years away
from the normal retirement age of seventy-five. But the auxiliary bishop
is only fifty-seven, nearly twenty years from being sent out to
pasture. Will they be sent to work in parishes or given a sinecure in the Vatican [7]?
And will they ever be tried once the new judicial section is set up at
the CDF? They apparently resigned because of their mishandling of the
case of at least one priest-abuser. But people seem to have forgotten
that Archbishop Nienstedt was also under investigation for allegations
that he had inappropriate sexual relations with several priests,
seminarians, and other men dating back to when he was a priest in the
Archdiocese of Detroit and continuing even after becoming a bishop. The
man who oversaw the investigations as Bishop Piché. He was supposed to
report his findings to the apostolic nuncio in Washington. But in the
past several months the investigation overshadowed by other turmoil
inside the archdiocese. Will the results ever be made known? Or was
resignation the price for making it all go away?
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