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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30749 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 24, 2024

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Secular Media Reporting on Poor RCC Governance by Pope Francis

https://www.politico.eu/article/pope-francis-rome-vatican-city-germany-catholics-liberal-revolution/

So, having access to sources of information not available to the general public, none of this really comes as a revelation, and there's a bunch of biased narration and low level mistakes, but the reporting is broadly accurate. Or rather, delivers big picture accuracy while distorting the true stories of lots of specific incidents to reflect the author's liberal biases. Like here:

Last year, for example, a landmark declaration allowing clerical blessings for same-sex couples was diluted after a fiasco involving religious musings on the nature of orgasms.

What they're referring to is Pope Francis' #2 being revealed to have authored erotic poetry(and a book on kissing entitled "Heal me with your Mouth") and trying to defend himself by calling it theology. It was a scandal but didn't have much to do with the backlash to gay blessings, which was the global south against progressives. African bishops declared their opposition to Fiducia Supplicans, in partnership with the eastern rites, as a group and got concessions.

What the article gets right, I think, is doing a pretty good job of summarizing the pope's inability to hold his own coalition together, and accurately noting that this occurs in an environment where most senior churchmen are laser-focused on the possibility of a conclave very soon. It also begins to convey his immense personal unpopularity with Vatican insiders; even cardinal Parolin is campaigning for the conclave by emphasizing their dissimilarities. I like this anecdote:

“Read the document[Fiducia Supplicans],” said a Vatican official who was granted anonymity to speak openly about a pope he described as vindictive toward critics. “It says: well, obviously you cannot bless a homosexual relationship, because from a Catholic point of view, it’s sinful. However, we will invent a new form of blessing. It’s not a sacramental blessing, it’s a ‘fracramental flessing.’ It looks almost like a blessing, and if you run sideways, and do it in under ten seconds, and keep it totally spontaneous…”

The chief problem, the official added, is that the pontiff has an overriding need to do everything his way, often at the expense of ideological coherence. “Most of his energy goes into hiding what he thinks, hiding who he is, and hiding what he’s going to do, in an almost neurotic way,” the official complained. “He keeps what he wants to do even from himself as long as possible, in order to be totally unexpected in what he does.”

This is not the way to win friends and influence people in an oligarchy of elderly true-believing academics.

It doesn’t help that, in all likelihood, the Pope is not long for this world. At 87 and with only one intact lung, he struggles to breathe, suffers bouts of pneumonia, and is perennially in and out of hospital. Every public cough generates macabre headlines. Meanwhile, he has largely failed to appoint enough allies to the College of Cardinals to guarantee a like-minded successor, and liberals wonder whether he will leave any progressive legacy at all.

This is perhaps understating things; many of the cardinals appointed as Francis allies turned on him over something or other, often personal falling outs or mismanagement driven by the tendency referenced above. Factually one of the top papabile in the next conclave, cardinal Pizzaballa, is a recent Francis appointee now campaigning among the conservatives, and the largest initial powerblock in the next conclave is likely to be backers of cardinal Erdo's promise to reign as Benedict XVII. It also understates the mood in the Vatican that pope Francis is going to die any day now.

The current synod has invariably stoked the fears of conservatives who see it as a Trojan horse for an insidious woke agenda. As if in confirmation, the synod’s own leaders have cast it as the last great hope for introducing real structural reform: “If we miss this experience, we will not be effective in our mission,” Cardinal Mario Grech, the Synod on Synodality’s secretary general, told POLITICO in his Vatican office, a portrait of the pontiff smiling down from the wall behind him. “And then the future will be bleak.”

Cardinal Hollerich, the Synod’s relator general, acknowledged that the goal of the synod is rather more aspirational — to seed a culture of inclusivity and dialogue that could, perhaps, lead to doctrinal reform, somewhere down the line. Holy See spokesperson Matteo Bruni said its core aim was to foster “greater involvement of the people of God” in pastoral and administrative Church matters, pointing to early successes in the Eastern Church. But he emphasized that it wouldn’t delve into the other big questions — the Synod on Synodality, as its name suggests, would be entirely self-referential.

I wanted to highlight these two paragraphs- the progressive faction(of which cardinal Hollerich is more or less the leader and one of the more extreme examples thereof) is dispirited, weighed down by outsized responsibility for the sex abuse scandal(s), extremely high average age, and ties to an unpopular and more moderate than commonly perceived pope. All the way up and down the totem pole, progressive Catholics are cynical, expect to lose, and increasingly too depressed to even grasp at straws.

the progressive faction ... weighed down by outsized responsibility for the sex abuse scandal(s)

Could you enlighten the heathen among us why the progressive faction has outsized responsibility for priests molesting children?

In addition to hydro's point about demographics, it also is simply a bit of ideological inevitability. One of the progressive factions main agenda has always been toleration of homosexuality, including in the priesthood. The Catholic Priest abuse scandal was, overwhelmingly, a story of homosexual pederasty and/or homosexual hazing of trainees and young priests by older men. If one's orientation is to be intolerant of those acts outside of the priesthood, there is no ideological reason for you to hesitate to punish them when it happens within.

If one's orientation is to be intolerant of those acts outside of the priesthood, there is no ideological reason for you to hesitate to punish them when it happens within.

The reason why people tolerate sexual abuse in organisations is not ideological - it is office politics. Every organisation which provides male authority figures with access to women or boys has had sexual abuse scandals. If the organisation has a culture of strong hierarchy, it has engaged in the same type of cover up. If the organisation is affiliated to a religion which says that women and boys should not publicly criticise adult men, then the abuse probably happened on an industrial scale. Why? Because once you are senior enough to be a political player, helping your colleague cover up his sexual misconduct is a cheap-but-valuable favour in the Game of Thrones. If you are cynical enough, also because people who are mutually compromised can co-ordinate better by using blackmail as an enforcement mechanism.

Even with the theoretically absolute power of the Pope over the Catholic Church, fortified by an explicit command from a God that almost everyone involved actually believes in not to do this kind of stuff, coming down on this kind of stuff once it is widespread is a political challenge. The Pope can only piss off so many bishops at once, and the paedo-enablers had become a sizeable faction. There is a fairly widespread theory that Benedict XVI resigned because he couldn't do it.

Your explanation seems to not explain the relative dearth of teenage pregnancies arising out of the Catholic church sex scandals.

The reason why people tolerate sexual abuse in organisations is not ideological - it is office politics.

Indeed. And because this claim is a superweapon once you become weak enough for it to be levelled against you, and it will be levelled no matter how perfectly you tamp down on it (the optimal rate of sexual abuse is not zero, and your opinion on how much you should tolerate depends on how strongly into defending the Cause you are), there's actually very little reason to bother. Besides, some of the abusers can be very powerful attack dogs, so if the trans community terfed (for example) Keffals a replacement that is as effective at harassing their enemies is going to be very hard to find.

If the organisation is affiliated to a religion which says that men or children should not publicly criticise adult women, then the abuse probably happened on an industrial scale.

You have successfully explained why an overwhelming majority of public school personnel are obsessed with castration and sexual bullying transgenderism (as that's what sexual abuse looks like when women do it).

A huge majority of sexual abuse cases were of teenaged boys, which is by definition something homosexual clerics did at high rates.

The fact of the matter is that yes, there was a link between homosexuality in the priesthood and the abuse crisis. It’s a common belief that liberal priests are more likely to be gay than mainstream conservative ones, but I’ve never seen anyone present any actual evidence, even anecdata, for this, although lots of the outside the mainstream conservative priest groups have some anecdotal evidence for less homosexuality in their groups. What does seem to be true is that new priests started getting drastically less likely to be gay at some point in the 80’s. This probably reflects young gay men moving to San Francisco instead.

That being said, yes, regional corruption networks(this is what the strongman version of the gay lobby mostly is) were the real driving force behind sex abuse coverups, regardless of from the top directives or ideology. Those regional corruption networks are less powerful than they used to be because of reforms to seminary disciplinary policies and bishop selections.

If the organisation is affiliated to a religion which says that women and boys should not publicly criticise adult men, then the abuse probably happened on an industrial scale.

Don't public schools BTFOing the church in child sexual abuse stats contradict this part?

In addition to that, sex abuse seems to have gotten sharply worse as it became more acceptable for laypeople to criticize clerics, then a bit better as disciplinary standards coalesced during general anti-corruption drives, then much better when Benedict decided it was worth cracking down on specifically.

Not a story about the lack of power for women and boys.

Because, due to age, they were disproportionately in charge when it went down, for one thing. Priests molesting children in the post JPII era is pretty rare; most sex abuse scandals today are ‘it has been revealed in an audit of diocesan archives that another predator priest was transferred from parish to parish in the seventies and eighties’. The people in charge from 1965-1990 were progressive within the RCC by today’s standards, and given the length of time senior clerics serve for, the current progressives are frequently direct protégés or even literally the same people(albeit they were at a lower level in 1985) of those who made object level decisions at the time. The sharply limited amount of progressive ‘new blood’ has also prevented turnover in a way that gives many more conservative factions a bit of distance from the scandals.

Also, by happenstance, senior conservatives made up most of the internal opposition to the policy of coverup and reassignment, and Ratzinger(the future Benedict XVI) personally went out on a limb to laicize predatory priests at a time when that was not the general practice. This is especially strong in recent days because pope Francis just keeps using his authority and connections to protect Fr Marko Ivano Rupnik, who molested nuns. That pope Francis seems to like senior clerics with a worse record on sex abuse issues is a common accusation; while there’s not nothing to it, I think it’s mostly happenstance and generational issues+typical South American corruption in the spotlight. The fact of the matter is that Benedict had a much better record at addressing sex abuse cases than Francis does.

Could be an argument via Vigano?

Without getting too deep into the allegations of a disgruntled former nuncio, it is at least semi-plausibly alleged that Francis was/is allied to and relied on the support of abusers. Some circumstantial evidence bears this out - if you look at the sordid history of Theodore McCarrick, it looks suspicious.

Very short version: American cardinal slept with seminarians, this came out around 2006-7, Benedict XVI put restrictions on McCarrick's movements and activities, after Francis became pope in 2013 he removed those restrictions, this is suspicious because McCarrick was an advocate for progressive changes in the church and a potential ally of Francis.

Former papal nuncio Vigano made public accusations along these lines, Francis refused to respond but told journalists "I will not say one word on this. Judge for yourselves." Naturally the media ended up exonerating Francis and declaring Vigano a crackpot. Now, to be fair, Vigano has gone to in fact basically be a crackpot - he's a hardcore Trumpist and he alleges some kind of gay Freemason conspiracy within the Catholic Church - so it makes sense to take his accusations with a grain of salt, but at the very least, the idea that Francis ignores or lightly skips over sexual abuse committed by political allies is plausible.

There isn't a single smoking gun, but we know that the rate of homosexuality among Catholic clergy is extremely high and there is ample cause for suspicion. I don't take any of Vigano's specific accusations at face value, but I am distrustful of Francis and anything going on inside the Vatican.

I don't know if you've heard, but +Vigano (if I still get to use the + for him) has been officially excommunicated and summoned to Rome.

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