On the homepage, I’ve returned to the subject of Pope Francis, a man who has proven himself comically unfit for his office. Popes need to punish sexual criminals in the clergy — Francis indulges them. Popes need to conserve what was handed down to them — Francis claims to innovate on a whim.
Whenever this subject comes up, there is lots of teasing about me being more Catholic than the pope. (You said it, not me). Or about whether I should swim in reverse through the Tiber and join the Calvinists in Geneva.
While this papacy hasn’t quite challenged the extremely narrow definition of papal infallibility offered by the Church in Vatican I, it has been scandalous, and I think a lot of sincere Catholics are struggling to reconcile the faith they had in the institution of the papacy under John Paul II and Benedict XVI with the reality of a pope who just boldly inserts errors into the Catechism (as on the death penalty) and claims to bind our consciences to it.
Full disclosure: I’m not a very good Catholic, just a “practicing one.” My thinking is that these trials are the hand of Providence. I think Catholic piety and practice after the First and Second Vatican Councils tended toward an error of making the pope the only person in Christendom with a duty of fidelity to the Gospel, with all bishops and laymen only taking their cues from him. And even that was sometimes assumed to be automatic. The papal oaths that were meant to bind the office holder to the tradition of the church were dropped in practices. This state of things causes Catholics to look around nervously for “Where Peter Is” — even though the Scriptural Peter was often in the wrong. It has made the Church unbearably passive, with bishops rarely using the authority that comes with being a successor to the Apostles in any active way, at least not without the implicit approval of Rome above them. The whole tendency has been to lock the Church up in self-referentiality. We need to recover a love of the substance of the faith: the Scriptures, tradition, and, above all, the liturgy itself.