After a rousing message from the man many consider a hero of Catholic conservatism – Francis’s predecessor, Pope Benedict – Pope Francis’s enemies in the Church were in good humour at the start of the summer. In a speech that drew cheers from Francis’s foes, the retired pope dramatically described the Church as “a boat almost filled to capsizing”.
The speech was delivered on Benedict’s behalf at the funeral of Cardinal Meisner, one of four cardinals who had challenged Francis on his bid to loosen the rules on who gets to receive Holy Communion in the Catholic Church.
The cold war is turning hot between diehard doctrinal Catholics and the Argentine pope. At the start of July, Pope Francis sacked Cardinal Gerhard Muller, until then the head of the Vatican’s hard-line doctrinal watchdog. He had backed the challenge by four cardinals to the Pope’s bid to allow communion for some remarried divorcees.
The cardinals – among them Cardinal Raymond Burke, the American conservative who has spearheaded opposition to the Pope’s reforms – have argued that the initiative set out in Francis’s 2016 apostolic exhortation, Amoris Laetitia, clashes with the ruling that divorcees are living in sin if they remarry without an annulment, since their first marriage is still valid in the eyesof the Church. Thanks to Burke the issue has become a war cry for conservatives.
Anxious theologians and ultra-conservative cardinals have attacked the Pope by arguing that his reforms are heretical – the latest, a “filial correction” by a group of theologians entitled “A Filial Correction Concerning the Propagation of Heresies”. Controversy over his attempt to modernise Church teachings on marriage, the Eucharist and papal authority itself have created a strange alliance against him that stretches from academics to cardinals.
At a conference last month, Burke – in a blatant act of disloyalty – said that Catholics needed to distinguish between the teachings of Francis the man and Francis the Pope. He recalled – in a reference reeking of mumbo-jumbo and superstition – that one of the “secrets”, or predictions, to emerge from the apparitions of Our Lady of Fatima to the three Portuguese peasant children 100 years ago concerned “widespread apostasy in the Church and the failure of the Church’s shepherd to correct it”.
It was therefore necessary, in Burke’s view, for Catholics to distinguish between the Pope’s off-the-cuff remarks and the authority of the Church to establish its own teachings. He said: “It is simply wrong and harmful to the Church to receive every declaration of the Holy Father as an expression of papal teaching.”
The battle between the conservatives and their Pope is only just getting started. The conservative tumult is mainly coming from the United States, not the Vatican. There are conservative websites in the US which make a lot of noise, but happily do not influence papal policy.
The battle between the conservatives and their Pope is only just getting started
Francis has ratcheted up tensions with US conservative Catholics. Two of his close allies have written an article suggesting that the Catholic alliance with evangelicals had turned into “an ecumenism of hate”. Writing in La Civilita Cattolica, they have slammed US evangelicals who see the world as a struggle between good and evil – a brand of Christianity that fuels the “apocalyptic geopolitics” of the alt-right in the United States.
It is the disposition to preserve which lies at the heart of conservatism and it is this that is leading to a power struggle between Catholic liberals and conservatives in Rome. There is of course an honourable place for conservatism in public and political life. “If it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.” This maxim, first attributed to 17th century English statesman, Viscount Falkland, reflects a very ancient human instinct that lies at the heart of conservative thought.
A dislike of change for change’s sake. A reluctance to jeopardise what works for what might, in theory, work better. Faith in the firm lessons of the past over airy promises for the future. A concern to preserve what is thought best in established society. All these aspects define conservatism.
Yet, while these various statements reliably inform the spirit of conservatism, its precise nature is harder to define. Conservatism – especially in a small largely backward-looking society like Malta – tends towards the reactionary, or even the fundamentalist. Typically, it is opposed to political or social reform and counsels restraint – indeed, opposes change – when confronted with it.
We have only to note the way a large segment of society has resisted the necessary social changes enacted by legislation allowing civil marriage, remarriage after legal separation, civil unions and same-sex marriage to appreciate the overwhelming reactionary element in Maltese society.
For this reason, conservatism is given a bad name by those who are, in fact, reactionaries since their conservatism takes its lead and most of its colour from what it opposes. One might seek to dress it up – as one of my correspondents did recently – as “responsible”. But it is a form of antiquarianism that is fixated on the past for no better reason than that it is the past. Fossilised in aspic in an idealised past (in our case, a Malta which goes back to a distant memory of the 1950s) and unwilling to wake up to present realities.
It is this dim view of human nature that distinguishes it from liberalism (not “neo-liberalism” – a very different animal – as another learned correspondent called it). Liberalism’s essentially optimistic view of human potential means that its proponents are typically socially progressive and enthusiastic about social reform and improvement.
The instinct of reactionary conservatives, such as American or Maltese fundamentalists of the religious right, in contrast, is to see people as essentially weak and selfish. For them, the principal object of a well-run society is to maintain order and stability. It is a distrust of people tempered by fear.
I am conscious that many of the contributions objecting to the way social progress has advanced in Malta and elsewhere over the last decade are Catholic fundamentalists. Fundamentalists of all kinds believe that through some form of divine revelation they have privileged access to certain elemental truths, which are true beyond any question or doubt. The views of others that contradict their own must therefore be incorrect beyond doubt.
Moreover, the beliefs concerned are so supremely important in the minds of those who hold them that they generally consider it morally justified, indeed a duty, to impose them on those who do not share them. Tolerance is no virtue when you are right and the will of your God is defied.
It is this that is leading to a power struggle between Catholic liberals and conservatives in Rome.