Does the Roman Catholic Church need a Donald Trump? As with the Washington political establishment when Trump set out to reform it, there is much in the Church in need of an overhaul after the Francis papacy stumbled to a close following the demise of its iron-willed incumbent who was determined that power would not slip from his grasp as long as his weakened body could retain it.
But he was not immortal, and a new Pope will have much to do to restore stability and pastoral sensitivity to the Church after the erratic and at times puzzling authoritarianism of the last thirteen years.
Under Pope Francis, whatever may be his virtues, the Church has been run like a leftish NGO. It has sought, like an aged aunt trying to be cool by subscribing to The Guardian, to accommodate itself to a secular view of the world – not that that has gained it any credit with the anti-religious forces of progressivism. Often its policies seem dictated by a confusion between the socialist agenda and the Sermon on the Mount.
Nowhere has this been more apparent than in the Vatican’s embrace of the fantasies of climate doom, or in its grovelling accord with communist China over the appointment of bishops – an agreement Beijing broke without a squeak of papal reproach. Francis has been just as quiet on the Chinese persecution of the Uyghurs – and this a Pope who could hardly wait for Trump to be inaugurated before condemning his policy of expelling criminal illegal migrants as ‘unChristian’.
De mortuis nil nisi bonum is a laudable principle but its strict application would render historical judgment impossible. And the papacy of Francis has a lot to be judged on.
Francis was a PR Pope. From the start he liked to present himself as a regular non-prelatical guy. He held one of the most influential offices in the world but he was, according to a carefully projected image, an avuncular easy-going type with no taste for ceremony and a concern for ‘ordinary people’. He was no sooner in Rome than he was letting it be known that he had found time to make a personal call to the newsagent who delivered his daily paper in Buenos Aires to say, thanks, he wouldn’t be needing it any more, he had this new job in Italy. Then he announced that, being an unpretentious individual, living in the Vatican’s papal apartments was too grand for him, and he would move to less exalted quarters, more in keeping (but not that much more in keeping) with the poverty practised by the saint whose name he bears. This exercise in humility caused considerable trouble and expense for the Vatican security service.
Yet in reality Pope Francis was a tough dictator and he governed the Church with an iron hand. He was divisive and a liberal who sneered at Catholic conservatives as ‘backward’ and ‘rigid’. To hit them where it hurt he severely restricted the celebration of the older, Latin rite of the Mass, whose largely youthful congregations are one of the few growth points in the contemporary Church. He authorised Vatican bureaucrats to override the apostolic authority of bishops, as in Melbourne where a weekly Latin Mass in the cathedral was high-handedly cancelled on orders from Rome.
A new Pope will have to sort out the Church’s moral teaching after Francis’s no doubt well-meaning but ambiguous attempts to adapt Catholic norms to a world of divorce, queers, and trans triumphalism. And he’ll have to sort out the Vatican’s finances, now well in the red – partly because Catholics who are not in sympathy with this papacy are giving less.
Francis’ cumbersome scheme of turning the Church into a gigantic debating society through ‘synodality’ should be ditched. It’s of interest only to those who enjoy the sound of their own voices.
A new Pope should also call a halt to the endless apologising over child abuse. There have been few if any reports of abuse for over two decades now and huge compensation has been paid, no matter how much ‘survivors’ lawyers still try to milk it. Actually, Francis himself seemed soft on abusers, having inexplicably given several of the worst sanctuary in the Vatican.
Further, a new Pope must steer the Church away from its fixation with looking backward to the Second Vatican Council. Francis is one of many now elderly clerics steeped in the ‘spirit of Vatican II’, the 1960s council of bishops that was supposed to usher in a ‘new springtime’ for the Church, and instead has turned out to have been near-suicidal, with a catastrophic fall in the number of practising Catholics and with empty churches everywhere – not wholly due to the council, true, but the council hasn’t helped. Yet according to its apologists, the decline is not evidence that the modernisers who came to power in the Church in the wake of the new springtime blundered in trying to water down Catholic belief and practice, but that their reforms haven’t been sufficiently implemented. It’s the old apologia for the failure of communism: it hasn’t not worked; it hasn’t been properly tried.
A new Pope must turn the face of the Church towards evangelism, towards proclaiming its unchanging beliefs to the 21st Century. He should leave the council where it belongs, among the detritus of the 1960s along with flower power and flairs.
Above all, he must return to the central function of Popes as a unifier, drawing all elements in the Church together rather than favouring some and excoriating others. If this doesn’t happen, the Roman Catholic Church will split, and the shining light it should offer the world against hatred and materialism will grow fainter. Civilisation would be the poorer for that.
