The Francis Agenda

Five years into his pontificate and coming out of the "summer of shame" (McCarrick, Pennsylvania report, death penalty, Vigano, China) the agenda of Pope Francis has become crystal clear. It is not from what he says that this pattern emerges: in what he says he is complex, contradictory, impulsive, incoherent and irrational. It is in what he does that a logic emerges: his decisions and especially his appointments. His priorities are:

1.  The politicization of the papacy and episcopacy on behalf of a liberal program, especially welcome to immigrants and protection of the earth. These are the heart of his papacy. They are worthwhile goals,  befitting of a politician, social activist or policy advocate. Not a pope! In this he accommodates to the ideology of secular Western elites and it is why he is their darling. Previous popes offered a framework of moral teachings to use in evaluating specific policies and practices without becoming partisan. Francis is the hero of the secular, liberal West. He is also the Anti-Trump!

2.  Communion-for-the-divorced (and remarried without annulment) is the signature initiative by which he has polarized the Church. When his behind-the-stage maneuvers at the Synod were decisively rejected by the bishops he defiantly endorsed it in regard to the Argentine bishops' interpretation of Laetitiae Amoris and then slipped this into the official Church records. In one swap, he dismissed the clear teaching of St. John Paul of just a few years previous, the tradition of millennia, and the explicit will of the synod of bishops. To be sure Francis is no sexual libertarian or gay militant; he himself seems to be of two minds and has at times disappointed his progressive collaborators.  But he lacks the stomach, fortitude or intellect to engage, in confident conflict, Cultural Liberation in the manner of his two predecessors. Instead he has clearly accommodated himself to the gay lobby and distanced himself from his predecessors in favor of a soft, welcoming, uncritical "accompaniment" approach to sexual license.

3.  In China, he hopes to expand the reach of the Church by subservience to the Communist Party through giving them veto power over the choice of bishops. This is probably the single most catastrophic decision he will make. China will only have pro-abortion bishops who are devoid of any capacity speak Truth or to confront that dreadful government, overtly or covertly. Again we see the spirit of accommodation. And again, we see an indifference to Truth.

4.  Elected to clean up the mess in the Vatican, he has now been exposed by the McCarrick/Vigano revelations to be the prime protector of the curia's web of financial irresponsibility, gay sexual immorality, and a heterodox theology of sexual liberation. John Paul seems to have been given over to his mission and blissfully unaware of the culture of sin that was growing around him. Benedict apparently recognized it, attempted to discipline McCarrick, but found himself without the personal stamina and social capital to confront it and so resigned with dignity. Francis has befriended this network because it helps him with his agenda: a progressive internationalism, a softening on sexuality, and normalization in China. McCarrick may be seen as iconic of all these concerns.

5. Accommodation is the substance of his agenda: accommodation to progressive politics, sexual liberation, Chinese communism, and the lavender mafia of the Curia. With his customary verbal flourish, he prefers the expression "accompaniment" which lends a cherubic glow to all he does as welcoming, warm, and nurturing. The underlying spirit of this pontificate is an emotivism that disdains objective Truth in favor of sentiment and a mercy without justice. He clearly has internalized the secular West's stereotypical view of the Catholic Church as rigid, regressive, heartless. Reactive against that, he distances himself from demands, theology, authority, tradition, dogma, and law. Everything with him is feeling, passion, sentiment. When he is mad (at capitalist, clerics, mafia) he spews venom and resentment, demonizing his enemy even as he cloaks himself in righteousness. Entirely lacking is judicial sobriety, temperance, or the patient correction of a confident father.

There seems to be a "splitting" in the dense, strange personality of this Pope: the good Francis and the bad Francis. Clearly, the good Francis is welcoming, merciful, kind, and sweet. The bad Francis is cold, calculating, Machiavellian and brutal in use of power. Like his counterpart, Trump, his dictatorial instincts equip him to remake the Church in his own image without regard to protocol, tradition, or due process. His manipulation of the Synod was quite grotesque. His appointments to the college of cardinals have discarded normal procedures and favored those closest to him in ideology. Liberal Thomas Reese S.J. admitted that had John Paul or Benedict been so subjective and partisan in their appointments that he and other liberals would have been enraged. He has steadily eliminated opposition from within the Vatican (Burke, Mueller,) and surrounded himself with fellow-travelers. John Paul and Benedict were academics, comfortable in the give-and-take of intellectual debate and confrontation; both confronted the repression of Nazism and Communism; both valued freedom even as they protected the Truth entrusted to their care. Francis is instinctively a Peronist in that he weilds power to eliminate his foes and achieve his political goals.

The Church is now in a full-scaled civil war about this pontificate. It is a cold war, a quiet war, a behind-the-scenes war. It is no longer possible to see continuity  between Pope Francis and his predecessors: the contradictions are glaring!  It is hardly possible to be loyal to the Tradition and the past and to this pope. It is like being in Spain in the 1930s! The moderates and mediators (Dolan, O'Malley ) will have to decide, in ways dramatic and hidden. Every thinking Catholic will have to decide!