The power of silence
When a retired Vatican
diplomat called for the Pope to stand down, alleging that he was
complicit in covering up abuse, many felt Francis would be forced to
defend himself equally publicly. Instead, in a move which has infuriated
his opponents, he has chosen to say nothing
On Sunday 26 August 2018 at 4.30 a.m., about the time when Pope
Francis rises each day to spend two hours in silent prayer, Archbishop
Carlo Maria Viganò’s “testimony” exploded into the public arena.
In an 11-page dossier the former papal ambassador to the United States calls on the Pope to resign. He alleges that the Pope had turned a blind eye to ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s sexual misconduct, ignoring the canonical sanctions placed on McCarrick by his predecessor and making the former Archbishop of Washington a trusted adviser. Viganò’s dossier devotes several pages to a vitriolic description of the “homosexual network” that he blames for the sexual abuse crisis and its cover-up by the Pope and his closest collaborators.
Later that morning the Jesuit Pope, who was in the middle of an awkward two-day trip to Ireland overshadowed by the angry fallout from the sexual abuse crisis, paid a short visit in the pouring rain to the shrine of Our Lady of Knock in County Mayo, the site of an 1879 Marian apparition. Unlike the apparitions in Lourdes and Fatima, the Mary seen by a group of local people in Knock said nothing; she was, they reported, “deep in prayer”. At the time, her appearance was read as a call for reconciliation amid the bitter noise of political agitation. Perhaps Francis drew on inspiration from his visit to the Knock shrine in deciding to remain silent in response to Archbishop Viganò’s claims.
One of the main reasons behind the Pope’s refusal to speak is the way the 77-year-old former Vatican diplomat chose to release his “testimony”. With the help of a handful of Catholic media outlets, Viganò and his collaborators were able to time publication so that journalists travelling back with Francis from Dublin to Rome would have to ask him about the allegations during the in-flight press conference. It was an attempt to force a response out of the Pope, and Francis refused to fall into the trap. They wanted Francis to “break his silence”, something that the so-called dubia cardinals – who demanded simple yes or no answers to a series of questions raised by his family life document, Amoris Laetitia – have been unable to manage. Francis was in something of a quandary. Respond to Viganò, and get caught up into his war of words; say nothing, and be accused of running away from difficult questions. He chose silence.
Irish-American Cardinal Kevin Farrell, who was just a few seats away from Pope Francis on that flight back from Dublin, told me that before the press conference he had found Francis in a relaxed frame of mind. He had spoken to Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the secretary of state, and Greg Burke, the director of the Holy See Press Office. “He sat there praying – it must have been for about an hour,” Cardinal Farrell told me. “And then he said, ‘Well, let’s go and talk [to the media].’ Nobody was there preparing him and telling him what to say. I was spellbound. I know if I had to be in that position, I would have been a nervous wreck.”
“I will not say a single word about this,” Francis told reporters when asked about Viganò’s claims, adding that the dossier “speaks for itself”. Journalists, he added, had sufficient “capacity” to analyse and judge the document for themselves. Do your job, he told us, in effect, placing his trust in the tried and tested methods of journalistic inquiry, a very different thing to the unchecked opinion-led chatter that floods newsfeeds and Twitter. The Pope’s decision to say nothing publicly was not an easy one. It required him to resist his natural urge to defend oneself. I recall sitting on the plane and watching him closely as he responded to the journalists’ questions. While the Pope may have been at peace, it was a moment where, for the first time, I saw Francis vulnerable. He has, according to those close to him, felt personally hurt as a result of the saga.
In the chaotic and messy aftermath of Viganò’s j’accuse, many thought Francis’ decision to remain silent was unwise. Silence, after all, had been the Church’s initial response when allegations of the sexual abuse of children by priests had begun to emerge. The decision to remain silent is, to some, still a scandal, as is his refusal to respond to the dubia cardinals.
Past papal silences also cast long shadows, such as Pius XII’s reluctance to speak out in protest at the persecution of the Jews during the Second World War. The Church has a lamentable record of using silence as a form of control or to duck responding to difficult news. But a distinction must be made between an active and a passive silence. A passive silence is motivated by fear or complicity; an active silence is very different. Christian tradition holds that God is not silent in the silence; as the fourteenth-century Dominican theologian Meister Eckhart wrote: “Nothing is so like God as silence.”
While refusing to speak directly on Viganò’s accusations, Francis has not been inactive. He’s ordered an internal Vatican inquiry into the Archbishop McCarrick files; he has urged journalists to investigate Viganò’s testimony; and, after Viganò issued a second letter, alleging that the prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, Cardinal Marc Ouellet, held the “key documents incriminating McCarrick”, the prelate from Quebec issued a sharp rejoinder.
The strategy of silence seems to be proving effective. While the Pope
says nothing, Archbishop Viganò has persisted in speaking, releasing
further letters and statements, shifting his position and backtracking
from his original claims. He no longer calls on Francis to resign, and
now admits that the nature of the sanctions under which ex-cardinal
Theodore McCarrick had been placed were informal, rather than
canonically binding.
The evidence that has emerged shows that the Vatican made serious mistakes in promoting Archbishop McCarrick to senior positions, particularly in appointing him to the key see of Washington in 2000. But those who are eagerly waiting for Viganò to produce a smoking gun that would incriminate Francis are still waiting.
It’s become increasingly clear that Viganò and his supporters are seeking to use the sorry McCarrick affair and the wider clerical sexual abuse crisis as a weapon to try to destroy this pontificate. The silence of Pope Francis has created a space in which the truths and the falsehoods in Viganò’s claims might be quietly discerned, far from the madding crowd.
A parallel can be drawn between Francis’ silence and what is
happening in the United States, where Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller
has adopted a policy of silence in his investigation into the links
between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Russian state. That
silence has been met with a barrage of tweets from Trump, attacking the
inquiry, protesting his innocence and claiming Mueller is conducting a
witch-hunt. Silence, it seems, draws people out.
In the same way as Mueller versus Trump is playing out on Twitter, the claims in the Viganò dossier were inflamed by commentators on social media in the hours after its publication. And there were knee-jerk reactions from several bishops in the US who decided, with astonishing speed, to issue statements praising Viganò’s integrity, while scarcely mentioning Pope Francis.
Understandable though they might be, hasty reactions and noisy condemnations do little to illuminate the truth. In staying silent, the Pope is putting his faith in the truth always emerging eventually. In the words of Emile Zola, truth “will grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way”. It’s an approach he has followed since the traumatic time he was leader of the Jesuits in Argentina.
For decades, Jorge Mario Bergoglio faced accusations that in the 1990s he had collaborated with his country’s vicious military junta, a regime that kept power by killing dissenters at will. The accusation that Bergoglio collaborated with the generals haunted him right up until his election as Pope. As time passed, however, evidence emerged that Bergoglio worked consistently to help those who opposed the military dictatorship. The experience taught him about the times when it is impossible to speak out in self-defence.
“In moments of darkness and great tribulation, when the knots and the tangles cannot be untangled or straightened out, nor things be clarified, then we have to be silent,” Bergoglio – who has a devotion to Our Lady, Undoer of Knots – wrote in a 1990 essay cited recently by the Jesuit online journal, Thinking Faith. At such moments, we must “remain under the cloak of the Holy Mother of God” and avoid being embroiled in a useless battle of words.
During his trial in front of Pontius Pilate, Jesus refuses to present a defence, speaking only about his kingdom not being of this world. At one level it’s a puzzling decision: surely this was the moment to make a speech that would announce his identity as the Son of God? But for Jesus, the truth was not to be defended on Good Friday. It would emerge later, in the early hours of Easter Sunday, with the discovery of an empty tomb. In Silence: A Christian History Diarmaid MacCulloch explains how St Paul and the early Christians embraced this upside-down logic: “For Paul, and those who follow the Christian way, the crucified one is more powerful in his silent suffering than any power of this world.”
It’s an insight that Pope Francis seems to be embracing. It is a powerful countercultural witness in a noisy media-saturated world that demands to be fed instantly and continuously. He is showing that silence can be more powerful than words.
In an 11-page dossier the former papal ambassador to the United States calls on the Pope to resign. He alleges that the Pope had turned a blind eye to ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s sexual misconduct, ignoring the canonical sanctions placed on McCarrick by his predecessor and making the former Archbishop of Washington a trusted adviser. Viganò’s dossier devotes several pages to a vitriolic description of the “homosexual network” that he blames for the sexual abuse crisis and its cover-up by the Pope and his closest collaborators.
Later that morning the Jesuit Pope, who was in the middle of an awkward two-day trip to Ireland overshadowed by the angry fallout from the sexual abuse crisis, paid a short visit in the pouring rain to the shrine of Our Lady of Knock in County Mayo, the site of an 1879 Marian apparition. Unlike the apparitions in Lourdes and Fatima, the Mary seen by a group of local people in Knock said nothing; she was, they reported, “deep in prayer”. At the time, her appearance was read as a call for reconciliation amid the bitter noise of political agitation. Perhaps Francis drew on inspiration from his visit to the Knock shrine in deciding to remain silent in response to Archbishop Viganò’s claims.
When so much public discourse takes place amid the frenetic noise of
social media and a relentless stream of breaking news, saying nothing is
risky and potentially dangerous. But the Pope’s decision shows that
amid the constant chatter silence remains a valuable currency, and, when
deployed correctly, can speak volumes. And it can be a Gospel-inspired
choice. Christ did not respond to his accusers; and his vicar on Earth
is not responding to those hurling accusations against him – at least
for now.
One of the main reasons behind the Pope’s refusal to speak is the way the 77-year-old former Vatican diplomat chose to release his “testimony”. With the help of a handful of Catholic media outlets, Viganò and his collaborators were able to time publication so that journalists travelling back with Francis from Dublin to Rome would have to ask him about the allegations during the in-flight press conference. It was an attempt to force a response out of the Pope, and Francis refused to fall into the trap. They wanted Francis to “break his silence”, something that the so-called dubia cardinals – who demanded simple yes or no answers to a series of questions raised by his family life document, Amoris Laetitia – have been unable to manage. Francis was in something of a quandary. Respond to Viganò, and get caught up into his war of words; say nothing, and be accused of running away from difficult questions. He chose silence.
Irish-American Cardinal Kevin Farrell, who was just a few seats away from Pope Francis on that flight back from Dublin, told me that before the press conference he had found Francis in a relaxed frame of mind. He had spoken to Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the secretary of state, and Greg Burke, the director of the Holy See Press Office. “He sat there praying – it must have been for about an hour,” Cardinal Farrell told me. “And then he said, ‘Well, let’s go and talk [to the media].’ Nobody was there preparing him and telling him what to say. I was spellbound. I know if I had to be in that position, I would have been a nervous wreck.”
“I will not say a single word about this,” Francis told reporters when asked about Viganò’s claims, adding that the dossier “speaks for itself”. Journalists, he added, had sufficient “capacity” to analyse and judge the document for themselves. Do your job, he told us, in effect, placing his trust in the tried and tested methods of journalistic inquiry, a very different thing to the unchecked opinion-led chatter that floods newsfeeds and Twitter. The Pope’s decision to say nothing publicly was not an easy one. It required him to resist his natural urge to defend oneself. I recall sitting on the plane and watching him closely as he responded to the journalists’ questions. While the Pope may have been at peace, it was a moment where, for the first time, I saw Francis vulnerable. He has, according to those close to him, felt personally hurt as a result of the saga.
In the chaotic and messy aftermath of Viganò’s j’accuse, many thought Francis’ decision to remain silent was unwise. Silence, after all, had been the Church’s initial response when allegations of the sexual abuse of children by priests had begun to emerge. The decision to remain silent is, to some, still a scandal, as is his refusal to respond to the dubia cardinals.
Past papal silences also cast long shadows, such as Pius XII’s reluctance to speak out in protest at the persecution of the Jews during the Second World War. The Church has a lamentable record of using silence as a form of control or to duck responding to difficult news. But a distinction must be made between an active and a passive silence. A passive silence is motivated by fear or complicity; an active silence is very different. Christian tradition holds that God is not silent in the silence; as the fourteenth-century Dominican theologian Meister Eckhart wrote: “Nothing is so like God as silence.”
While refusing to speak directly on Viganò’s accusations, Francis has not been inactive. He’s ordered an internal Vatican inquiry into the Archbishop McCarrick files; he has urged journalists to investigate Viganò’s testimony; and, after Viganò issued a second letter, alleging that the prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, Cardinal Marc Ouellet, held the “key documents incriminating McCarrick”, the prelate from Quebec issued a sharp rejoinder.
The evidence that has emerged shows that the Vatican made serious mistakes in promoting Archbishop McCarrick to senior positions, particularly in appointing him to the key see of Washington in 2000. But those who are eagerly waiting for Viganò to produce a smoking gun that would incriminate Francis are still waiting.
It’s become increasingly clear that Viganò and his supporters are seeking to use the sorry McCarrick affair and the wider clerical sexual abuse crisis as a weapon to try to destroy this pontificate. The silence of Pope Francis has created a space in which the truths and the falsehoods in Viganò’s claims might be quietly discerned, far from the madding crowd.
In the same way as Mueller versus Trump is playing out on Twitter, the claims in the Viganò dossier were inflamed by commentators on social media in the hours after its publication. And there were knee-jerk reactions from several bishops in the US who decided, with astonishing speed, to issue statements praising Viganò’s integrity, while scarcely mentioning Pope Francis.
Understandable though they might be, hasty reactions and noisy condemnations do little to illuminate the truth. In staying silent, the Pope is putting his faith in the truth always emerging eventually. In the words of Emile Zola, truth “will grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way”. It’s an approach he has followed since the traumatic time he was leader of the Jesuits in Argentina.
For decades, Jorge Mario Bergoglio faced accusations that in the 1990s he had collaborated with his country’s vicious military junta, a regime that kept power by killing dissenters at will. The accusation that Bergoglio collaborated with the generals haunted him right up until his election as Pope. As time passed, however, evidence emerged that Bergoglio worked consistently to help those who opposed the military dictatorship. The experience taught him about the times when it is impossible to speak out in self-defence.
“In moments of darkness and great tribulation, when the knots and the tangles cannot be untangled or straightened out, nor things be clarified, then we have to be silent,” Bergoglio – who has a devotion to Our Lady, Undoer of Knots – wrote in a 1990 essay cited recently by the Jesuit online journal, Thinking Faith. At such moments, we must “remain under the cloak of the Holy Mother of God” and avoid being embroiled in a useless battle of words.
During his trial in front of Pontius Pilate, Jesus refuses to present a defence, speaking only about his kingdom not being of this world. At one level it’s a puzzling decision: surely this was the moment to make a speech that would announce his identity as the Son of God? But for Jesus, the truth was not to be defended on Good Friday. It would emerge later, in the early hours of Easter Sunday, with the discovery of an empty tomb. In Silence: A Christian History Diarmaid MacCulloch explains how St Paul and the early Christians embraced this upside-down logic: “For Paul, and those who follow the Christian way, the crucified one is more powerful in his silent suffering than any power of this world.”
It’s an insight that Pope Francis seems to be embracing. It is a powerful countercultural witness in a noisy media-saturated world that demands to be fed instantly and continuously. He is showing that silence can be more powerful than words.
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