24 October 2018

Vigano and the political agenda 

The Tablet

Archbishop Viganò, the retired nuncio to the United States, has now issued his third attack on the papacy of Pope Francis. In his first, in August, he called on the Pope to resign. Viganò alleges that Francis has deliberately facilitated the appointment of homosexual clergy to senior positions in the Catholic Church, and that the root cause of the sex abuse crisis is “the scourge of homosexuality”. The great majority of priests implicated in abuse are gay, he says, implying cause and effect; and they are protected from censure, civil or ecclesiastical, by their gay superiors.
There is no evidence for this causal connection. Paedophilia is a devastating crime against the innocent. Homosexuality as a condition is morally neutral. Pope Francis instead pins the blame for abuse on “clericalism”: a culture which places priests on such a pedestal that they are beyond criticism, and which puts the protection of the Church’s reputation above the safety of children. Archbishop Viganò rejects this. There is a distinct aroma of a homophobic conspiracy theory about his argument.

But one phrase he attributes to Pope Francis deserves closer examination. It illuminates an inner tension within North American Catholicism amounting almost to undeclared schism. When Archbishop Viganò first met Francis and introduced himself as the nuncio in Washington, the Pope allegedly remarked: “The Bishops in the United States must not be ideologised! They must be shepherds!”
Assuming Pope Francis did say this, and it sounds quite likely, what is he referring to? There has been a pattern to senior appointments in the US Church, particularly under Pope John Paul II, which saw progressive prelates replaced on retirement by more socially conservative ones. That policy has been put into reverse. Viganò is clearly unhappy about this.
Behind all this lies the American phenomenon known as the “culture wars”, which are as much about economic policy as about sexuality, about a liberal versus a conservative interpretation of what the United States fundamentally stands for. That is why Archbishop Viganò’s personal crusade has had so much resonance in right-wing American circles.
Many conservative Catholics have constructed their own version of Catholic Social Teaching, carefully selecting quotes from papal documents which appear to support the core principle of free-market economics – that state intervention, in business regulation as much as in welfare provision, is generally perverse in its effects. For Catholics of this sort, a “small state” is always to be preferred to a larger one. That is not the doctrine taught by Pope Francis, nor was it ever taught by Pope John Paul II, or any of his other predecessors.
It is a strongly individualistic creed that downplays solidarity and regards economic success as a mark of divine blessing. Its natural home is within a strand of American fundamentalist Protestantism, but it has permeated American culture to such an extent that it now pervades large sections of the Catholic Church. It has an inflexible Jansenist/Calvinist approach to human weakness, with more emphasis on judgement than mercy, and a fondness for clear, strict rules. If this lies at one end of a spectrum, Pope Francis is at the other. Without this factor, it is unlikely Donald Trump would have won the Presidency. Given a choice between Francis and Trump, it seems too many American Catholics would follow the latter. Thus the Viganò affair has unwittingly shone a light on these dark corners of the American Cath