Saturday, May 27, 2017

Pope Francis Roundup

News

Commentary
  • Francis stacks the College of Cardinals, by Fr. Thomas Reese. National Catholic Reporter 05/25/17. "Pope Francis has done numerous revolutionary things during his first four years as pope, but it is hard to top the change he has made to the College of Cardinals. He has changed the system so that an incumbent pope can stack the college with bishops who support his views. This change will have an impact on the church for centuries to come."
  • Pope Francis and the Doctrinal Ideologues, by Carl Olson. Catholic World Report 05/22/17:
    ... put bluntly, I see such homilies and addresses [from Francis] as exercises in posturing and polemics—and not very sound polemics at that. Put together (and I've only noted a few here), they add up to a collection of blustering statements meant to shut down any and all questions about Amoris Laetitia and related matters. What would be funny if all of this wasn't so serious is just how heavy-handed, clumsy, and even bush league so much of this stuff has been.
  • Burying Benedict, by Matthew Schmitz. First Things 05/22/17:
    Though Benedict is still living, Francis is trying to bury him. Upon his election in 2013, Francis began to pursue an agenda that Joseph Ratzinger had opposed throughout his career. A stress on the pastoral over against the doctrinal, a promotion of diverse disciplinary and doctrinal approaches in local churches, the opening of communion to the divorced and remarried—all these proposals were weighed and rejected by Ratzinger more than ten years ago in a heated debate with Walter Kasper. For better or worse, Francis now seeks to reverse Ratzinger. ...

    Though he is usually portrayed as spontaneous and non-ideological, Francis has steadily advanced the agenda that Kasper outlined over a decade ago. In the face of this challenge, Benedict has kept an almost perfect silence. There is hardly any need to add to the words in which he resoundingly rejected the program of Kasper and Francis. And yet the awkwardness remains. No pope in living memory has so directly opposed his predecessor—who, in this instance, happens to live just up the hill.

  • "Is the Pope a heretic? (Pt 1), by Fr. John Hunwicke.
  • 'What Pope Francis Really Said': Q&A with author Tom Hoopes, by Sean Salai, S.J. Q&A with Tom Hoopes, author of What Pope Francis Really Said: Words of Comfort and Challenge.