The death of pope emeritus Benedict XVI was followed by a small literary production, a series of publications that were interpreted as salvages from the civil war of the Catholic Church.
The list includes a memoir by Benedict’s former secretary that mentioned the former pontiff’s disappointment over his successor’s restriction on the Latin Mass, a collection of posthumous essays by the German that is being scoured for controversial quotes, and an interview. by Pope Francis who made the news for his call for the decriminalization of homosexuality around the world.
Among all these words, two interventions deserve special attention. One is not exactly new, but the revelation of its author increases its importance: it is a memorandum, intended for the cardinals who will elect the successor of Francis, which first circulated in 2022 and has now been revealed by Vatican journalist Sandro Magister as the work of the Cardinal George Pell of Australia, a leading conservative cleric who died shortly after Benedict XVI.
Beginning with a simple declaration that Francis’ pontificate was a “catastrophe,” the memo describes a church falling into theological confusion, losing ground to evangelicalism and Pentecostalism as well as secularism, and weakened by financial losses, corruption and papal government without law. (On the internal climate at the Vatican, Pell writes, “Telephone tapping is practiced regularly. I’m not sure how often it’s authorized.”)
The other is a long essay by Pell’s colleague, Robert McElroy, Cardinal of San Diego, published this week in the Jesuit magazine “America.” He shares with Pell’s memorandum the premise that the church faces debilitating internal divisions, but argues that the division must be resolved by completing the revolution sought by religious liberals.
In particular, McElroy urges the church to shelve any significant views on sexual relationships and to open Communion to “all the baptized”, supposedly including Protestants. Only this kind of radical inclusion would have “any hope of drawing the next generation into church life.”
The fact that the warring factions within Catholicism have very different points of view is not a revelation, but it is still impressive to see them stated so candidly by leading cardinals: Pell’s direct criticism of Francis’s papacy and McElroy’s candor about their liberal goals make clear what is often obscured by rhetoric.
Not only is its substance illuminating, but so is its style. In Pell’s concise and brusque list, we can see a condensation of conservative alarm about the state of the church. In McElroy’s more expansive calls for “dialogue” and “discernment,” one can see the confidence of a progressive Catholicism that assumes that any dialogue can only lead in one direction.
In the distance between his assumptions, which begin with different sociological analyzes of why the church is struggling and end with a vast doctrinal chasm, one feels the shadow of schism looming over the 21st-century church. McElroy is not a radical theologian; Pell was not a fringe reactionary. These are traditional figures working at the heart of the Catholic hierarchy, and yet the gap between their worldviews seems likely to place them in entirely different branches of the Christian faith.
For all his undeniable conservatism, a consistent goal for Benedict XVI as well as John Paul IIThewas some kind of synthesis for the modern church, in which the changes introduced by the 2nd Vatican CouncilThe (1962) could be integrated into the traditional commitments of Catholicism.
Their era is now over, but if the church is to keep its present factions together for a long time there is still need for a synthesis; mere coexistence is probably not sustainable. (The current attempt by Francis-aligned prelates to basically squelch the Latin Mass shows how quickly it gives way.) Some kind of stronger bridge would have to exist between McElroy and Pell’s worldviews for their successors to still share a shared commonality. church in 2123.
Is this imaginable? As someone who basically agrees with Pell’s diagnosis, I can read McElroy and find reasonable talking points, particularly when he talks about the role of Catholic women in church governance. In theory, one can imagine a Catholicism with more nuns and laywomen in high places that uphold its core doctrinal commitments, just as —to draw from the pope’s recent interview—one can imagine a church vigorously opposed to unfair discrimination or state violence against gay people who also still adhere to the rule of chastity and the centrality of sacramental marriage.
But syntheses cannot be traced only on paper; they have to live in the hearts of real believers. And now the trend is towards irreconcilable differences, towards a vision of the future of Catholicism, on both sides of its divides, where the current argument can only be resolved with four simple words: we won; They lose.
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