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Pope Francis said the “reactionary attitude” among some American Catholics is “useless” in the face of doctrinal progress, according to remarks published Monday.
Francis, 86, commented at a meeting with Jesuits in Lisbon, Portugal, on Aug. 5 as part of his visit for the 2023 World Youth Day gathering. His remarks appeared in La Civilta Cattolica (Catholic Civilization), a magazine often featuring the pope’s candid statements in meetings with his fellow Jesuits.
Francis defined his American critics’ “reactionary attitude” as “organized and shapes the way people belong, even emotionally,” according to the Jesuit magazine. He said being “backward-looking,” or nostalgic for earlier times in the church, “is useless” and Catholics “need to understand that there is an appropriate evolution in the understanding of matters of faith and morals.”
Of his opponents, Francis said, “Those American groups you talk about, so closed, are isolating themselves. Instead of living by doctrine, by the true doctrine that always develops and bears fruit, they live by ideologies. When you abandon doctrine in life to replace it with an ideology, you have lost, you have lost as in war.”
Those who are part of a “climate of closure,” he said, “lose the true tradition” of the church “and turn to ideologies. … In other words, ideology replaces faith, membership of a sector of the church replaces membership of the church.”
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American Catholics, including some bishops, have criticized the Argentine-born pontiff in recent years as being too liberal in his attitudes about divorced Catholics, gays and transgender people and for restricting the use of the Traditional Latin Mass. His predecessor Benedict XVI allowed the Tridentine Mass more widely.
A few months after his 2013 election as spiritual leader of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics, Francis gave a controversial statement about homosexuals in the priesthood. “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?”
Answering a questioner in Portugal this month, Francis said those who are gay and not celibate are welcome. He said, “The door is open to everyone, everyone has their own space in the church. How will everyone live it out? We help people live so they can occupy that place with maturity, which applies to all kinds of people.
“What I don’t like at all, in general, is that you look at the so-called ‘sin[s] of the flesh’ with a magnifying glass, just as we have done for so long.” He said the exploitation of labor, lying or cheating “didn’t count” in many instances, but only “sins below the waist were relevant.”
The comments revealed Monday drew little immediate reaction from some Catholic officials who have been critical of the pontiff.
Dissidents such as San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone and Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, were silent on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, helmed by Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio, also declined to comment, spokeswoman Chieko Noguchi said.
Some pundits were willing to jump in.
“Pope Francis has shown himself willing to abuse his authority over his fellow bishops, even removing one in Puerto Rico for refusing to segregate Catholics who rejected the abortion-linked COVID vaccine,” John Zmirak, author of “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism,” said via email.
Mr. Zmirak said he worried that the pope would “remove U.S. bishops who resist his politicized and doctrinally unsound agenda, which includes promoting the LGBT movement as far as he can. U.S. bishops should remember that under American law, they alone control church property, and Francis has no power in U.S. law to remove them. I hope that some will defy his tyrannical and anti-Catholic regime.”
Frank Pavone, a Catholic priest for 35 years who was defrocked in December on Francis’ orders, said the pontiff’s statements lacked Scriptural references and grounding, leaving them open to misunderstanding.
“I have no idea what the pope is even talking about,” Mr. Pavone, who remains president of the pro-life group Priests for Life, told The Washington Times in an interview.
“When [Pope Francis] says, ‘Oh, you Americans are reactionary.’ Would you please describe the behavior that is leading you to this conclusion?”
On the pope’s latest comments concerning gays in the church, Mr. Pavone questioned “how many times” Francis mentioned Jesus when speaking on the subject and “what Scripture verses exactly did he quote when he’s trying to explain this to us.”
Mike Lewis, editor of the WherePeterIs.com Catholic blog site, said part of American Catholics’ confusion stems from some who “interpreted” the comments of Francis’ two most recent predecessors.
“With John Paul and Benedict, they, I think, in their messages, they delivered enough red meat to the conservative U.S. wing of the church, that things that they said about the death penalty or migration, or the poor could either be downplayed or translated into something more palatable for an American audience,” Mr. Lewis said Monday.
When the Argentine-born Francis was elected, “the first thing he said was that he wanted a poor church for the poor. And he was very brash in his language about tolerance and forgiveness.”
Where traditionalists “prefer a vision of doctrinal development that is linear,” Mr. Lewis said, Francis and his supporters would assert “the foundation is still there, but … we need to respond to modern circumstances.”
This isn’t the first time Francis has called out American critics, nor is it the first time La Civilta Cattolica, a 173-year-old semimonthly, has been the vehicle reporting such criticism.
In September 2021, the Jesuit magazine released remarks that Francis made in Bratislava, Slovakia, answering a priest who said some Catholics view the pontiff “with suspicion.” Francis’ answer appeared to single out Alabama-based EWTN, a Catholic cable and satellite television network that often features critics of the current pontificate.
The pope replied, “There is, for example, a large Catholic television channel that has no hesitation in continually speaking ill of the pope. I personally deserve attacks and insults because I am a sinner, but the [Catholic Church] does not deserve them. They are the work of the devil. I have also said this to some of them.”
• Mark A. Kellner can be reached at mkellner@washingtontimes.com.
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