Parsing the pope

Michael Sean Winters
National Catholic Reporter
August 7, 2013

It would be amusing, if it were not so sad, to see many conservative Catholics attempt to qualify Pope Francis’ comment - “who am I to judge?” – when asked about the circumstance of a Vatican prelate against whom charges of homosexual conduct were leveled.

There have been many superficial reactions focusing on the public relations angle. There is Raymond Arroyo, for whom public relations is more his thing than theology, writing, “The entire episode reminds us that papal handlers do have their place. As cumbersome as they are, and as much as they distance the pontiff from his people, handlers can protect the pope from this sort of misinterpretation. Off-the-cuff, vigorous expressions have their place, but so do unambiguous, vetted statements — especially when dealing with a media unversed in Church teaching.” No fear that Arroyo will take to heart the pope’s repeated urgings to risk making a mistake in order to get out to the peripheries of life.

More troubling have been the reactions of some bishops. Emblematic would be the statement issued by San Francisco’s Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone. Among other things, he stated:

While the Church does not judge individuals, the Church does judge actions, for we know that some acts violate human dignity while others make us more truly human according to the image in which God originally made us. With regard to sexual acts, the Church has always faithfully taught, and always will, the teaching she has received from her Lord, namely, that they find their proper order and purpose within the marital union of husband and wife, and outside of the bond of marriage they are sinful. Both natural and revealed law teach us this truth. While everyone struggles with this to some degree, healthy societies encourage and support people to live in accordance with it.

Here is a man who clearly thinks that his primary duty as pastor is to defend the moral law. Certainly, his words do not suggest he has ever talked to gay people and acquired the “smell of the sheep” from them. In an early section of the statement, in which he affirms the dignity of all people, including gay people, there is a lack of human warmth that is astounding.

If you look around, who can deny that the moral law could use a little help? In the last century, the indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations became accepted practice, and this before the dreaded 60s. And, to be sure, the sexual revolution of the 60s brought more harm than liberation for most people. But, in the U.S., for a variety of reasons, morality has been reduced to sexual morality and it seems to be the only thing some bishops want to fret about. Still, the question remains: Is defending and articulating the moral law the principal job of a bishop?

In the Scriptures, Jesus proclaims the advent of the Kingdom of God and, with it, divine judgment too. He was never shy about raising the specter of judgment, although He tended to reserve the severest admonitions for those who put their trust in money. More importantly, Jesus called His disciples not just to a strict moral life, but to a prior stance towards other human beings, especially those in need, and reserved to Himself the judgment of others, a judgment He dispenses with great mercy: “Than neither do I condemn you,” he said to the woman caught in the act of adultery.

The early Church was certainly aware of the need for the moral law, but that concern did not dominate the early Church. They wrestled most intently with making sense of who Jesus was, and what His death and resurrection meant. The early Church took pains not to suggest they were subversive, as when St. Paul affirmed that all authority is from God or when the Christian community in Jerusalem, which was very different from Paul’s communities of Christians in the Hellenic world, nonetheless abandoned Jerusalem when the Jewish revolt against Rome began. But, the willingness to conform had limits: The early Church abhorred the practice of abortion and infanticide, which were quite common, and in a culture that practiced easy divorce, the early Church insisted on a strict following of the Master’s admonitions against divorce.

In the Middle Ages, much was written about usury. It is an interesting window into the values of that time that the canons of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris forbid bankers to donate money to the construction until they had made restitution of their ill-gotten gains, but allowed the prostitutes of the city to contribute because they had earned their money. The Church’s opposition to usury developed as the economic circumstances had changed: In order to preserve the concern against exploitation of the poor, the Church came to permit limited interest charges on lending. The next time someone tells you that the application of a teaching cannot change, ask them when was the last time they heard a sermon against usury. There is a vestige of that teaching, however, in the Church’s concern that the debt of poorer nations is oppressive.

In our modern world, religion is usually permitted to enter the public square provided it leave its dogma at the door and assume the stance of an ethical authority. Time and again, the writings of the late Richard John Neuhaus and George Weigel and Mary Eberstadt make the case that a nation cannot govern itself unless its citizenry is capable of self-governance. There is obviously something to this, as the exploits of Anthony Weiner demonstrate. But, there is complicity with modernity at work here, a complicity with dreadful consequences: The Church’s authority is rooted in the authority of Christ. If we set aside our teachings about him out of concern for pluralism, and assume the role of an ethical authority, the consequent teachings must stand on their own, and they were never meant to, and they must persuade on their own, and they don’t.

There is a strange Kantian influence here as well. A dear priest friend, who is a font of wisdom in the ways of the Spirit, wrote to me this weekend about Archbishop Cordileone’s statement. My friend, let us call him “the Fons,” suggested that it was bizarre to state “that we don't judge people but we judge actions. Actions are done by people so how can you not really judge an action without some of the judgment falling on the person? The pope of course did not make this distinction because he saw that mercy has to enter into the equation and also because the pope is not a Kantian, living in a world of intellectual distinctions, the sum of which do not add up to reality.” The Fons recalled Peguy’s observation that Kant’s hands were clean because he had no hands, that is, he lived at the level of abstract principles and did not concern himself with the messiness of actual moral decision-making. Whatever else he was, Kant was not a pastor.

There is a strange, regrettable, self-secularization at work in all this. In his book “Secularisation,” Edward Norman made the point that more worrisome than the secularization of the ambient culture is the way religious leaders have willingly imbibed the habits and categories of thought drawn from the secular realm. A religious leader who presents himself primarily as a defender of the moral law has accepted secular norms in restricting his ministry. The leaders of the Church must be ministers of God’s mercy as much as they are teachers of the moral law. That, it seems to me is the essence of what Pope Francis is trying to tell the entire Church, but especially the clergy. Francis is trying to re-establish the authority of Jesus by following His admonition to leave the judging to God. Fr. Jim Martin, S.J. had a fine essay in yesterday’s Washington Post on just this subject.

Instead of trying to parse the new pope’s words in ways that empty them of their content, I suggest that those bishops who are wrestling with how to respond to Pope Francis’ way of leading the Church be quiet for bit. Watch. Listen. You might learn something. Pope Francis is getting us back to the basics of discipleship. When he stated, “who am I to judge?” he was not overturning 2,000 years of moral teaching but he was inviting Christians to place themselves in the crowd, stones in hand, gathered around the woman caught in adultery, and to listen to the words of the Master: “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.”

Pope Francis is unsettling - and dividing - the Catholic right

David Gibson
Religion News Service
August 6, 2013

(RNS) For more than three decades, the Vatican of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI operated on a version of the conservative maxim, “No enemies to the right.”

While left-wing theologians were silenced and liberal-to-moderate bishops were shunted aside in favor of hard-liners, liturgical traditionalists and cultural conservatives were diligently courted and given direct access to the apostolic palace.

But in a few short months, Pope Francis has upended that dynamic, alienating many on the Catholic right by refusing to play favorites and ignoring their preferred agenda items even as he stressed the kind of social justice issues that are near and dear to progressives.

“I’ve personally found many aspects of this papacy to be annoying, and struggled against that feeling from the beginning. I’m hardly alone in this,” Jeffrey Tucker, editor of the New Liturgical Movement blog, wrote as Francis basked in the glow of media coverage of his recent trip to Brazil.

“Every day and in every way we are being told how glorious it is that the bad old days are gone and the new good days are here,” he lamented.

Tucker and other traditionalists who are dedicated to high church rituals have been especially miffed at Francis’ simple — they might say simplistic — style since the moment the former Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio was introduced to the world as the new pope back in March.

“How can I love a Pope who doesn’t even want to be Pope?” Katrina Fernandez, a popular conservative blogger, wrote in a column about her disillusionment.

Since Francis’ election, the anxiety on the right has only mounted as he has continued to model a radically different pontificate — preaching about the evils of the globalized economy while repeatedly reminding his followers to care for the poor and marginalized.

Indeed, he barely mentioned abortion directly or even gay rights until he was asked about gay priests during an impromptu press conference on the flight back from Brazil and, in a line heard round the world, he said, “Who am I to judge?”

Catholics on “the right wing of the church,” Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput said on the eve of the Brazil trip, “have not been really happy about (Francis’) election.” Chaput, a vocal conservative in the U.S. hierarchy, told the National Catholic Reporter that Francis “will have to care for them, too, so it will be interesting to see how all this works out in the long run.”

In fact, the risks for Francis in disappointing Catholic conservatives are high given their disproportionate presence in the pews and in the upper echelons of the church.

“They have loyally supported the church with donations and activism and can be expected to oppose any change in direction of the sort Francis has signaled,” Michael D’Antonio, author of a book on the clergy abuse scandals, wrote in a Foreign Policy magazine essay that asked, “Is Francis too radical for his flock?”

“But this constituency cannot sustain the church in the long term,” D’Antonio said, “and the church now needs a figure able to bridge the gap between its rightward movement and the reality that Westerners are leaving the church in droves. That problem requires a wily pope with the skill and charisma to pull off the high-wire balancing act of unifying these two disparate impulses.”

Not everyone on the right, however, is willing to concede that their influence may be on the wane or even that Francis is really any different than Benedict.

Instead, many are advancing detailed arguments that they say show Francis doesn’t actually mean what the media and public think he means, adding that the pope’s honeymoon will get a cold shower when liberals see that Francis is just as orthodox as his predecessors.

Some even think, as writer Elizabeth Scalia explained in the conservative journal First Things, that Francis may be manipulating journalists in order to insinuate traditional Catholic teaching into mainstream press reports.

“Unlike Pope Benedict XVI, who was already despised by the press as Cardinal Ratzinger, Francis is the surprising, not-quite-known entity with whom the press is still unfamiliar and thus only marginally prepared to counter,” said Scalia, who compared the pope’s tactics to those of the ancient Chinese military manual, “The Art of War.”

Others, like EWTN’s Raymond Arroyo in the National Catholic Register, are recycling a narrative from the latter days of Benedict’s troubled papacy and pointing the finger of blame at Francis’ aides, saying that “as much as they distance the pontiff from his people, handlers can protect the pope from this sort of misinterpretation.”

But other Catholic conservatives say these read more like excuses than explanations. The handwriting is on the wall, they say — which might not be such a bad thing for a Catholic right that was so accustomed to preferential treatment that they often identified the pope with the church itself.

“To the extent that conservative Catholics in the United States find themselves actively disagreeing with Pope Francis’s emphases … it might help cure them/us of the recurring Catholic temptation toward papolatry,” wrote New York Times columnist Ross Douthat.

“The papal office has been occupied by many more incompetents than geniuses,” he concluded, “and there’s a reason why so few occupants of the chair of Peter show up in the litany of the saints.”

Priestly sexual predator went unchecked in Oakland

Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests
August 6, 2013

OAKLAND, CA (8/6)- Members of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) gathered on the sidewalk outside the Oblate Provincial Mission House, 290 Lenox Avenue (between Montecito Ave. & Van Buren Ave.) in Oakland. Holding signs and childhood photos at a sidewalk news conference, clergy sex abuse victims will disclosed that a credibly accused child molesting Catholic priest quietly lived in Oakland for ten years, and 521 pages of his personnel files were released last week and are now available on line. (The Associated Press say they “paint a devastating picture.”). Going door-to-door, they handed out leaflet to neighbors urging anyone who may have seen, suspected or suffered his crimes to call police. They also called on local Catholic officials to reveal the names of other proven, admitted and credibly accused child molesting clerics who live or lived at this church building.

A predator Catholic priest from Southern California who admitted abusing at least 100 kids lived for at least a decade at the Oblate Provincial Mission House. The AP reports that he “confessed shocking details” including that he abused his 5-year-old brother, had sex with male prostitutes, and frequented gay strip clubs.

Summary at The Blaze

His file was released last week because victims insisted that the documents be made public when they settled their abuse and cover up lawsuits back in 2007.

LA Times story at LA Times

The priest is Father Ruben D. Martinez. He belongs to a religious order called the Oblates of Mary Immaculate.

The files, which were made public on July 31st by a lawyer for victims, include more than 500 pages about Martinez. The LA archdiocese, the Los Angeles Times reports, “settled eight lawsuits accusing him of molesting boys from 1970-82” at three southern California parishes.

History of Fr. Martinez Assignments

“Over the years, hundreds of dangerous proven, admitted and credibly accused Catholic priests, brothers, nuns, seminarians and bishops have been removed from active ministry, but allowed to come and go as they please in unsuspecting neighborhoods,” said Melanie Sakoda. “We suspect most weren’t and still aren’t being monitored even now.”

“Regardless of whether the offenders are supervised or not, Catholic officials have a duty to tell citizens who and where these child predators are,” she added. “These men could still be serious threats to innocent kids.”

SNAP is calling on Catholic officials – in the Oblates and in the Oakland diocese – to reveal the names of other child molesting clerics who live or lived at this Oblates facility. The documents released on Martinez can be found here.

Click here for Martinez documents

Martinez worked in at least three southern California towns, all within the Los Angeles archdiocese: San Fernando, Wilmington, and Pacoima. He was ordained in 1968 and sent to treatment in 1991.

Melanie Sakoda voiced her anger at officials within the San Francisco Archdiocese and Oakland Archdiocese, stating,"I am angry and frustrated. When Pope Benedict promised victims that he would do everything in his power to help the victims of priestly abuse, I seriously doubt that meant allowing child molesters to live in a residential area without any supervision. They are certainly not doing everything possible to address this issue in any serious fashion..."

A revolution underway with Pope Francis

John L. Allen,Jr.
National Catholic Reporter
Aug. 5, 2013

Revolutions are funny things. Some are launched by one group but hijacked by others, as in Egypt, where liberal democrats have become bystanders to the real contest between the army and the Muslim Brotherhood. Some are born amid great idealism that quickly becomes a smokescreen for hypocrisy, as in the various communist uprisings. Still others fizzle out, while a handful eventually produce new systems that, despite their flaws, really do change the world -- the French and American revolutions, for instance.

It's too early to know which trajectory will apply to the upheaval launched by Pope Francis, in part because at the level of structures and personnel he still hasn't made many sweeping changes, and in part because the parallels are inexact anyway -- Catholicism, after all, is a family of faith, not a political society.

Perhaps the lone certainty is that a revolution is, indeed, underway. In mid-July, the Italian newsmagazine L'Espresso ran a cover story on the new pope under the banner headline "Ce la farà?" The phrase translates roughly as "Will he make it?" or "Will he pull it off?"

There was no need to explain what "it" meant -- everyone, it seems, knows that Francis is trying to engineer a Catholic glasnost.

Among other innovations, Francis has decided to skip his summer break, staying in the Vatican rather than heading off to the papal retreat at Castel Gandolfo, Italy. (He made a brief visit there July 14.) Nonetheless, the expectation is that August will be a period of calm, after his taxing homecoming to Latin America for World Youth Day in Brazil, as a prelude to dramatic action in the fall.

It's thus a good time to stand back and ask a few big-picture questions:

What are the main lines of the Francis revolution?
What's already changed, and what's still to come?
Who are those most put out by the changes -- who may seek to resist or reverse them?
What are the looming moments that will determine how much change to expect, and whether it's for real?
The answers suggest that L'Espresso is onto something: There really is a revolution going on, even if some of its content has yet to arrive.

Change is here

One could argue that in most of the ways that matter, the change has already arrived.

In just four months, Francis has revived the international prestige of the papacy and its moral capital. The Italian edition of Vanity Fair recently declared him its "Man of the Year," including snippets of praise from unlikely quarters such as Elton John, who termed the pontiff "a miracle of humility in the era of vanity."

Polling in various parts of the world show approval ratings that would be the envy of any politician or celebrity. A recent survey in Italy showed Francis' popularity at 85 percent, with spillover effects for the church; the percentage of Italians saying they trust the church was up to 63 percent, from 46 percent in January during the twilight of Benedict XVI's papacy.

"There has been a worldwide change in attitudes toward the papacy since the election of Francis," said veteran Vatican watcher Marco Politi, a columnist for the Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano. "There has been a great outpouring of sympathy, not only among believers but also from people who are very secular or far from the church."

If anything, Politi may be understating it.

In terms of public opinion, Francis is already on the cusp of achieving the iconic status of Nelson Mandela, a figure of unquestioned moral authority. It's telling that during his trip to Brazil, protagonists in the nation's current unrest virtually tripped over one another in a contest to see who could demonstrate more deference and respect.

There's also a sense in which Francis is the "Teflon pope," in that nothing bad seems to stick. When anything scandalous happens, reaction isn't to blame the pope, but to see it as additional proof of why he's needed.

Case in point: In late July, an Italian media outlet published reports that the pope's handpicked prelate to reform the Vatican bank had been involved in brazen gay affairs while serving as a Vatican diplomat in Uruguay more than a decade ago. Those inclined to take the reports at face value saw them as proof of a "gay lobby" that Francis will upend; those disposed to dismiss them said they're evidence that Francis' reform is eliciting resistance.

What everyone could agree on is that Francis is the solution, not the problem.

Truth to be told, most ordinary folk aren't paying attention to such inside baseball anyway. Vatican watchers may fixate on questions such as who Francis will name as the next cardinal secretary of state, or what changes he'll make at the Institute for the Works of Religion (the Vatican bank), but the only question most people have about a pope is, "Does he inspire?"

For now, the answer seems to be yes. Given all the scandals, bad press and controversy the Catholic church has weathered over the past decade, if that's not a revolution, it's hard to know what one would look like.

In Rome, too, there are clear signs that a new order has already arisen.

Clergy who chafed under what they perceived as a mounting liturgical fastidiousness during the late John Paul II and Benedict years -- showing up for a papal Mass, for instance, only to be told they weren't properly dressed because they weren't sporting enough crimson and lace -- report all that ended in mid-March.

Francis' humbler lifestyle is having a ripple effect. Princes of the church today are more likely to be spotted wearing simple black clerical dress rather than the usual sartorial splendor, and some have begun to sign their names in official correspondence simply as "Don So-and-So," avoiding "His Eminence" or other bits of court nomenclature.

Even beggars who ply their trade around the Vatican have clued in that something has changed. Vatican personnel say that if they spurn a request for spare change today, they're likely to hear back, "Cosa direbbe Papa Francesco?" -- meaning, "What would Pope Francis say?"

The game' is over

All that might be written off as superficial matters of style, but there's also a sense that the plates are shifting at a deeper level.

To take the most obvious example, there's long been an in-group/out-group distinction in the Vatican, between a majority who show up for work and try to do their job, and an elite minority who run "the game" -- who monopolize access to the pope, who control the allocation of personnel and resources, and who otherwise pull the strings of power on the basis of patronage and political savvy.

As recently as four months ago, this game was in full swing. Ambitious personnel knew precisely who they should try to befriend, which receptions to attend, which movements they should cozy up to, which devotions to embrace and so on. Many Vatican officials found that repugnant, while others worked it to perfection, but in any event they knew the lay of the land.

Today, this insider/outsider distinction is largely defunct. By living in the Casa Santa Marta, by working the phone for himself, and by bypassing the usual gatekeepers, Francis has ensured that no one has a monopoly on his ear.

"He's very charming, but he's also very controlling, as all powerful people are," said Omar Bello, an Argentine Catholic journalist and author of a new book on the pope.

Efforts to descry a new cabal around the pope have been fruitless. In May and June, for instance, Francis was often seen in the company of Italian Archbishop Rino Fisichella, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting New Evangelization, because of public events related to the Vatican's "Year of Faith." Some thought Fisichella was emerging as a man of influence -- then, of course, Francis left Fisichella standing at the altar at a Vatican concert June 22.

What Vatican watchers have realized is that trying to figure out who's up and who's down misses the point. The novelty is that the game, as it has long been understood and played, is finished.

Over and over, Vatican personnel speaking on background say that Francis is his own man, collecting his own information and making his own decisions -- governing, in a sense, like the Jesuit provincial he once was. There is no éminence grise, and no figure like Msgr. (now Cardinal) Stanislaw Dziwisz under John Paul or Msgr. (now Archbishop) Georg Gänswein under Benedict, serving as the power behind the throne.

With Francis, what you see is basically what you get.

Hallmarks of the new order

Four hallmarks of the new order seem clear.

First, this Latin American outsider seems determined to break the Italian monopoly on governance of the universal church.

Francis has set up three bodies to flesh out his reform: a group of cardinals to assist him in governance, a committee to investigate the Vatican bank, and a pontifical commission to study the Vatican's economic and administrative structures. All told, they include 21 people now in positions of real influence, with just three Italians among them.

(As a footnote, one could argue that it's two and a half Italians, since the Italian named to the panel for the economic and administrative reform, a laywoman named Francesca Immacolata Chaouqui, is the child of an Italian mother and an Egyptian father.)

Beneath that is a calculation that de-Italianization is a sine qua non of reform, especially on the financial front. As one non-Vatican cardinal said to NCR on background, "If you want transparency on money, then you don't look to Italy as an example."

Second, Francis clearly wants to enhance the lay role -- not just in ceremonial ways, but in the nuts and bolts task of reforming the Vatican and governing the church.

His commission to study the economic and administrative structures, for instance, is made up of eight people, only one of whom is a priest -- Msgr. Lucio Angel Vallejo Balda, a Spaniard who serves as secretary of the Vatican's Prefecture for Economic Affairs, and who's a member of the Opus Dei-affiliated Priestly Society of Holy Cross. The other seven are laypeople drawn from the worlds of economics, law and business management.

Logically speaking, this implies clipping the wings of the Vatican's clerical overlords. In the Italian paper La Repubblica, journalist Marco Ansaldo called the commission a "complete subversion" of the Roman Curia -- noting, among other things, that its members don't report to the Vatican's power structure but directly to the pope.

Four months ago, if someone wanted to influence the Vatican's financial operations, they had to call an Italian cardinal. Today they'd be better advised to ring up a lay economist from Malta -- Joseph F.X. Zahra, who heads the new commission.

New accountability

Third, Francis is giving rise to a new culture of accountability, moving toward a more Anglo-Saxon understanding that "accountability" means somebody can actually get fired.

Two critical moves were the July 2 resignations of the top officials of the Vatican bank, director Paolo Cipriani and vice director Massimo Tulli, as well as the suspension in early June of Msgr. Nunzio Scarano, an accountant at the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See. Scarano was shortly thereafter arrested in connection with an alleged plot to smuggle almost $30 million into Italy, and also faces a separate money-laundering investigation related to accounts he held at the Vatican bank.

Historically it was almost impossible for someone to lose a job in the Vatican, in part because of its tough labor protections, and in part because officials would insist that the church is a family rather than a Fortune 500 corporation.

Whatever the merits of that system, insiders say it tended to discourage potential whistle-blowers, because the perception was that wrongdoers would never suffer any consequences.

Scarano is a good case in point. Insiders knew that his Vatican salary of roughly $2,000 a month couldn't possibly sustain his lavish lifestyle, which, according to Italian prosecutors, included a collection of artwork featuring pieces by Giorgio de Chirico and Marc Chagall.

Two Vatican officials who spoke to NCR on background, and who knew Scarano, said they always found something off about him, but never reported it because they didn't see any point. Both said that today they would have come forward.

Fourth, whether it's a matter of instinct or conscious strategy, Francis seems to be repositioning the church in the political center, after a fairly lengthy period in which many observers perceived it to be drifting to the right.

Veteran Italian journalist Sandro Magister recently observed, "It cannot be an accident that after 120 days of his pontificate, Pope Francis has not yet spoken the words abortion, euthanasia, homosexual marriage," adding that "this silence of his is another of the factors that explain the benevolence of secular public opinion."

Yet Francis has imposed no such gag order on himself when it comes to other political topics, such as poverty, the environment and immigration. It's telling that for this first trip outside Rome, Francis chose the southern Mediterranean island of Lampedusa, a major point of arrival for impoverished African and Middle Eastern immigrants seeking to reach Europe. The pope called for greater compassion for these migrants, chiding the world for a "globalization of indifference."

While the trip played to generally rapturous reviews, the anti-immigration right in Europe was outraged. Erminio Boso, a spokesman for Italy's far-right Northern League, said: "I don't care about the pope. … What I'd ask is that he provide money and land for these extra-communitarians," referring to undocumented immigrants.

The shift to the center also seems clear in ecclesiastical terms. In Rome, the perception is that power brokers associated with moderate positions, such as Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga of Honduras, coordinator of the commission of cardinals, are on the ascendant, while those linked to neoconservative or traditionalist stances, such as Cardinal Raymond Burke of the United States, head of the Vatican's supreme court, are in decline.

The church may not veer sharply in its political allegiances, but there seems a clear preference for the social Gospel over the culture wars.

These points alone are arguably significant enough to constitute a "revolution," but there's likely more to come, especially when the commissions tasked with studying reform report in. Next, in Part 2, we'll consider what's still on the horizon -- and, equally importantly, where the blowback is likely to emerge.

Part two of John Allen's look at Pope Francis' revolution will appear on NCRonline.org on Monday, Aug. 12.

Key US sister: Vatican's LCWR order 'unacceptable'

Joshua J. McElwee
National Catholic Reporter
Aug. 3, 2013

A year and a half after the Vatican ordered the main representative group of U.S. Catholic sisters to place itself under the control of three U.S. bishops, many sister-leaders still consider complete compliance with the order “unacceptable,” the head of the largest order of sisters in the Western Hemisphere said Thursday.

Many members of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) do not think they can give complete control of their group over to the bishops, Mercy Sr. Pat McDermott told NCR Aug. 1.

“The points of direction for the future, I think are unacceptable -- that the bishops would be looking at our materials, our publications, giving direction to the assembly,” said McDermott, who as president of the Institute of the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas leads about 4,000 sisters serving in the U.S. and 11 other countries.

“That’s not a conference that most leaders want to belong to.”

McDermott’s comments come as LCWR, which represents about 80 percent of the 57,000 U.S. sisters, is preparing for its annual assembly, to be held this year from Aug. 13-16 in Orlando, Fla. About 900 women religious are expected to attend.

Addressing them will be Seattle Archbishop J. Peter Sartain. A year and a half ago, the Vatican appointed Sartain as “archbishop delegate” of LCWR, giving him wide-ranging control over the conference’s statutes and programs.

Leaders of LCWR and the individual institutes of U.S. sisters have expressed pain and confusion over the Vatican's move, made in a “doctrinal assessment” published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

While some sister leaders initially expressed hope Pope Francis might take a softer line on the situation than Pope Benedict XVI, a statement from the doctrinal congregation in April said Francis “reaffirmed the findings of the Assessment and the program of reform.”

In her interview, McDermott said she and other sister leaders are looking for a “third way” to deal with the Vatican’s move. She also said they are hoping the pope will consider meeting personally with LCWR’s leaders to hear the concerns over the matter, similar to his meeting with members of the Latin American Conference of Religious (CLAR) in June.

“I think that’s a fair expectation on our part,” said McDermott.

“It seems reasonable and I think it would be a positive step, not only for LCWR and women religious but for our church were he to sit with us and just listen to the experience of the doctrinal assessment and what that has been for us.”

McDermott also mentioned conversations she has had with global leaders of sisters on the LCWR matter stemming from her attendance in Rome in May of the assembly of the International Union of Superiors General (UISG), a membership organization of some 1,800 leaders of congregations of women religious world-wide.

Full article at National Catholic Reporter

San Francisco archbishop says 'Catholic church should welcome people who experience same sex attraction'

Joe Fitzgerald
San Francisco Examiner
August 1, 2013

A day after Pope Francis made waves by commenting positively on gay Catholics, San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone on Tuesday acknowledged the church's troubles reaching out to the LGBT community.

"Of course the church must be a place of welcome for people who experience same-sex attraction," Cordileone said in a statement. "No one has ever denied this, but we need to do a better job at making this known and following through on it."

That came on the heels of Pope Francis' candid interview with reporters aboard the papal airplane leaving Brazil.

"If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?" the pope said.

Could the pope's words have inspired a possible shift in Cordileone? The archbishop's office did not return requests for comment Tuesday on how the church might become more welcoming to the LGBT community.

But Cordileone has taken strong stances against gay rights in the past. He was a major supporter of Proposition 8, California's gay marriage ban, holding rallies and raising more than $1.5 million to put the measure on the ballot in 2008.

At least one Catholic LGBT leader is skeptical of any shift in Cordileone.

Marianne Duddy-Burke is the executive director of DignityUSA, a national advocacy group for gay rights in the Catholic Church that has a San Francisco chapter. She said Cordileone is one of the most outspoken church officials against gay rights.

"I would ask him how he would take that sense of his statement that the church should be welcoming and not support discrimination with the fact that he just signed a letter to a committee of the [U.S. Senate] against the Employment Non-Discrimination Act of 2013," she said. That legislation would protect LGBT workers nationwide against being fired for their sexual identity.

Though some states protect against such discrimination, 38 states do not, Duddy-Burke said.

The letter to the Senate committee said Cordileone and the two other Catholic leaders who signed it had reservations about the act but do not support any forms of discrimination.

"We cannot support a bill, like ENDA, that would legally affirm and specially protect any sexual conduct outside of marriage," the letter said.

The act passed the committee.

Duddy-Burke acknowledged that while Catholic leaders such as Cordileone may not be pushing the pope's sentiment as strongly as she would like, it's still progress. When Duddy-Burke was in college in the 1970s, she said discrimination toward out Catholics was forceful.

"When I was in college and a president of a Catholic group on campus, I was out as a lesbian and word I was gay got to the priest chaplain," Duddy-Burke said. "He responded, 'We can't have someone like you representing Catholics on campus.'"

She was separated from the church for years.

But, she said, the pope's comments have sparked enthusiasm nationwide: "There have been folks being much more hopeful about their place in the church than in a very long time.

Pope Francis: the end of 'fortress Catholicism'?

John Gehrig
Washington Post
August 1, 2013

Something unexpected and extraordinary is happening in the Catholic Church. Pope Francis is rescuing the faith from those who hunker down in gilded cathedrals and wield doctrine like a sword. The edifice of fortress Catholicism – in which progressive Catholics, gay Catholics, Catholic women and others who love the church but often feel marginalized by the hierarchy – is starting to crumble.

While that analysis carries a hint of hyperbole, a pastor with a natural instinct for engaging people and leading by example is now steering the ship at the Vatican. The change of tone and style in Francis’s papacy is striking. In recent decades, many Catholics got the message that a “smaller, purer church” was the top-down model preferred by Rome. A new spirit not felt since the reforming Second Vatican Council began five decades ago is now stirring in the air.

It would be a mistake to say Pope Francis doesn’t care about church doctrine, but he seems far more interested in refocusing the church’s energy toward the example of Jesus in the Gospels. In less than six months, the pope has criticized a “self-referential” church that grows “sick” when clergy fail to engage the world. Francis says he doesn’t want bishops who are “princes,” but pastors close to the people who lead without being “authoritarian.” He has little patience for church officials who act like religious border patrol by making it harder for single mothers or lapsed Catholics to receive the sacraments. Francis even gently noted that Jesus’ first disciples were “a little intolerant” in their moral certainty. The most frequent word used in his homilies and formal addresses is “joy,” according to an analysis from an Italian newspaper. This is a refreshing change from some dour religious leaders who often seem perpetually crouched in a defensive posture.

The latest headline-grabbing news from Pope Francis came this week aboard the papal plane back from Brazil, where the first pontiff from Latin America celebrated Mass at Copacabana Beach in Rio before an estimated 3 million people. Asked by a reporter about the existence of a “gay lobby” inside the Vatican, Pope Francis dove into turbulent waters with little hesitation:

When I meet a gay person, I have to distinguish between their being gay and being part of a lobby. If they accept the Lord and have good will, who am I to judge them? They should not be marginalized. The tendency (to homosexuality) is not the problem….they’re our brothers.

Some have falsely accused gay priests of causing the clergy sexual abuse crisis. Pope Francis clearly rejects that ugly slander. His words also stand in contrast to a 2005 Vatican document, which said that men with “deep-seated homosexual tendencies” should not be ordained or allowed in the seminary. Pope Francis seems to be sending a message that being a good priest has nothing to do with sexual orientation, a point obvious to most of us in the pews but a revelation to some hard-liners.

In addition to his comments about gay clergy, Pope Francis told reporters that the church must do a better job reaching out to women. While he did not open the door to conversations about female clergy, Francis insisted that women play a central role in the Catholic faith. “We don’t yet have a truly deep theology of women in the church,” he admitted.

The pope’s comments this week fit within a consistent theme emerging in his papacy. Instead of fighting culture wars, Pope Francis has called for a “culture of encounter.” He urges Catholics to go to the margins of society. He wants a “church for the poor” and decries the “cult of money” that emerges from unfettered global capitalism. Shunning as much as possible the ostentatious trappings of the papacy, this is a guy who carries his own bags and lives in a modest apartment instead of the Apostolic Palace. In these cases, style is substance. While progressive Catholics are particularly grateful for this new era, Pope Francis can’t be pigeonholed by liberal or conservative labels. By his words and example, Francis is showing us a different path forward. For this, Catholics on the left and right should be grateful.