The civil war in the Catholic Church
Conservative priests are using outrage over sexual abuse to try to force Pope Francis to resign
David Gardner and Hannah Roberts
Some call it a Catholic civil war, others a culture war. But, clerical decorum very much to one side, war it is.
Pope Francis, the Argentine prelate whose ascent to the chair of St Peter five years ago has given new life to the Roman Catholic Church, is facing a bitter backlash against his progressive papacy — amid a humbling crisis he has struggled to resolve over the sexual abuse of children by predator priests.
Conservatives have regrouped to fight Pope Francis’s relaxation of old doctrinal anathemas, which he sees as vital to the spiritual renewal of a two-millennia-old institution serving a notional 1.2bn Catholics around the world. Shortly after taking over from Pope Benedict XVI — who took the almost unheard of step of resigning in circumstances the Vatican has never explained — he said the Church had to find “a new balance” or it would collapse “like a house of cards”.
Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò published a letter alleging the pope was complicit in covering for sexual abuse by Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington © Reuters
But now traditionalists are trying to stymie Francis’s reforms — and seek to weaponise outrage over clerical cover-ups of the rape of children to bring the pope down. As Francis’s supporters rally to defend him, the Church is being bespattered with scandal.
This new descent into the mud began last Sunday. Francis had just ended a 36-hour visit to Ireland, overshadowed by years of revelations of clerical sexual abuse the Vatican covered up and has failed to redress. The pope met with abuse victims and repeatedly expressed shame and contrition — to a shrunken turnout of the faithful that was a shadow of the vast crowds that greeted Pope John Paul II in 1979. A bombshell greeted Francis on his way home.
Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, a former papal nuncio, or ambassador, to the US, published a letter alleging the pope was complicit in covering for sexual abuse by Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington. Francis had forced Cardinal McCarrick to stand down and face an inquiry over alleged abuse of a 16-year-old boy, but Archbishop Viganò demanded that the pope resign.
Sulphurous and salacious, laced with innuendo but light on evidence, this 11-page broadside targeted 32 other Catholic clerics — the majority of them liberal allies of the pope — denouncing “a homosexual current in favour of subverting Catholic doctrine on homosexuality”.
At one level, this is a naked power play. “The enemies of Francis and his reforms are using Viganò’s ‘testimony’ to support calls for Francis to resign”, says Brendan Walsh, editor of The Tablet, the British Catholic weekly. “They are manipulating the child abuse scandal — which has devastated so many lives — for their own political purposes.”
Crowds gather for the arrival of Pope Francis in Phoenix Park, Dublin, last month. The pope met with abuse victims and repeatedly expressed shame and contrition — to a shrunken turnout of the faithful
Conservatives in the Church, who had things pretty much their own way for half a century but especially under popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, are desperate to discredit Francis. For most Vatican-watchers, the shrill moral stances of men like Archbishop Viganò or Cardinal Raymond Burke, the American leader of the reaction to Francis, is inextricably linked to the fact that the pope elbowed them aside in his push to revitalise the Church.
Their intemperate attacks on Francis, of a different order to the workaday intrigue of the Vatican, betray a desperation to cripple Francis’s papacy before he can create a liberal majority in the conclave of cardinals to elect a successor who will safeguard and develop his legacy. This is about power in a future papacy, as well as power now.
Cardinals nominated by Francis, who will be 82 in December, are now thought to be close to a majority in the electoral college for the next pope. This first Jesuit pope is trying to devolve power along similar lines to the way his Society of Jesus order is run — a radical decentralisation of Church governance that would make him the last Bishop of Rome to wield absolute ecclesiastical power.
In an interview with a Jesuit magazine in 2013, Francis compared the Church to a “field hospital after a battle” where the doctors were obsessing about cholesterol levels. “We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods,” he said. There is steely pragmatism here, alongside Francis’s expansive piety. It is hard to see, for example, how a Church so devastated by revelations of child rape could credibly keep sexual mores and personal morality at the pinnacle of its concerns.
Famously, or infamously from a traditionalist standpoint, he has called for an inclusive, non-judgemental tolerance towards homosexuality. “If someone is gay and is looking for the Lord, who am I to judge him?” he asked early in his papacy.
Revealingly, until Archbishop Viganò’s letter the traditionalists had concentrated their fire on an apostolic exhortation called Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love) in which Francis enjoined priests and bishops to adopt a “merciful” approach to divorced and remarried people wishing to take communion. In one sense, this merely aligned the Vatican with existing reality. To conservatives it decentralised doctrinal judgment.
Cardinal Burke, for instance, who keeps company with figures such as Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former strategist, and Matteo Salvini, Italy’s far-right interior minister, regards all this as motive for insurrection. At a Rome conference on “the limits of papal authority” this spring he said that a pope who has “deviated from the faith . . . must, as a duty, be disobeyed”.
Francis has not changed core doctrine. But he has cast orthodoxy in a new light. He has reordered priorities — calling for a missionary Church of the poor and telling bishops to be shepherds who “smell more like the sheep” — and made the theology that interprets Catholic teaching more dynamic and open. With his trademark beaming smile — and his more than 40m Twitter followers @Pontifex — he has caught the imagination not just of the disillusioned Catholic faithful but many people of other faiths or, indeed, no faith.
A protest against sexual abuse in the Church outside the Vatican embassy in Washington DC this week © AFP
This pontiff has also retrieved the idiom and spirit of the Second Vatican Council, convened by Pope John XXIII in 1962. That attempt to bring the Church into less abrasive alignment with its modern flock fizzed through the 1960s and 70s, debating everything from clerical celibacy to liberation theology, before it was shut down by the pinched and defensive dogma of John Paul II and Benedict XVI — the two popes today’s conservatives hope to emulate .
“He hasn’t changed the teaching of the Church on abortion or contraception but he has tried to be genuinely more pastoral, shifting the emphasis down to bishops and parish priests,” says Chris Patten, chancellor of Oxford university who has advised Francis on the media. “This has become a touchstone for the anti-Francis brigade.”
He has appointed “a sufficiently large number of cardinals to ensure that no one can turn the clock back”, Lord Patten adds. “That’s why people like Cardinal Burke continue to make a fuss.”
While the disquiet of many traditionalists’ is sincere, with the Viganò letter they are trying to discredit Francis with charges of criminal conduct. Such allegations will inevitably appear plausible to many both inside and outside the Church, given the Vatican’s history of covering up sexual abuse and complicity with those responsible.
Archbishop Viganò himself is accused of burying evidence against another US prelate in 2014 when he was nuncio. Yet his faction is now trying to conflate homosexuality with rape and paedophilia to undermine Francis.
They are “equating [child abuse] with his refusal to be judgmental about homosexuals”, says Lord Patten. “The gay-paedophile link is an awful and wrong jump by some of the rightwing in the Church.”While this power battle may do immense damage to the Church, it will also prolong the anguish of abuse victims, who are already angry at Francis’s hesitant attempts to deliver them justice.
Peter Saunders, a British abuse victim and campaigner who was kicked off a Vatican commission on child protection, is bitterly disappointed with the pope. “Francis is a very popular guy and makes a lot of sense on poverty and the environment, but on the abuse issue he remains strangely inactive, bar the occasional outpouring of pain,” Mr Saunders says. “Survivors want action” including “publishing names of abusing clergy and their whereabouts, restitution and support for victims; instead the Church continues to denigrate victims and deny them the chance to move on”.
While Pope Francis has said he would “not say one word” on the Viganò allegations, inviting journalists on his plane back from Dublin to draw their own conclusions, he will sooner or later have to respond.
If a disgruntled former employee alleges that “you deliberately covered for a pervert and serial abuser, and that your close associates have succumbed to a mafia-like conspiracy organised by a network of homosexual clergy . . . to refuse to dignify the accusation with a response might seem to show almost saintly restraint”, says Mr Walsh, the newspaper editor.
“But if there’s one thing the Church should have learnt in recent years it’s that when serious allegations of misconduct or the covering-up of abuse are made, there should be an independent and transparent investigation. They should get on with it.”
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