They were, as is typical for Francis, sane and easy to understand for everybody but precisely the Reactionaries he mentions in the remarks who responded with fury and self-pity. Here is the article in full:
The Catholic Church in the United States has “a very strong reactionary” element that is well-organized and refuses to see how Catholic doctrine can and must grow and mature, Pope Francis told Jesuits in Portugal.
“I would like to remind those people that ‘indietrismo’ (being backward-looking) is useless, and we need to understand that there is an appropriate evolution in the understanding of matters of faith and morals,” the pope said in response to a question about U.S. Catholics during a meeting in Lisbon, Portugal, Aug. 5.
On most of his foreign trips, Pope Francis spends time with the local Jesuits, answering their questions. As is customary, the Rome-based Jesuit journal, La Civiltà Cattolica, published the transcript of the Lisbon encounter several weeks later, releasing it in Italian and English Aug. 28.
A Jesuit brother had told the pope he spent his sabbatical year in the United States and something that made “a great impression” on him was how many Catholics, including bishops, were “criticizing your leadership of the church.”
“In the United States the situation is not easy: There is a very strong reactionary attitude. It is organized and shapes the way people belong, even emotionally,” the pope responded.
“Those American groups you talk about, so closed, are isolating themselves,” Pope Francis said. “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.”
The pope insisted there is a difference between haphazardly changing church teaching and growing in understanding.
As examples, Pope Francis said, “Today it is a sin to possess atomic bombs. The death penalty is a sin; you cannot employ it, but it was not so before. As for slavery, some pontiffs before me tolerated it, but things are different today.”
“So, you change, you change, but with the criteria” taught by St. Vincent of Lérins that it be “ut annis consolidetur, dilatetur tempore, sublimetur aetate” — consolidated by years, enlarged by time and refined by age, the pope said.
“In other words, doctrine also progresses, expands and consolidates with time and becomes firmer, but it is always progressing,” he said. “Change develops from the roots upward, growing in accord with these three criteria.”
“The view of church doctrine as monolithic is erroneous,” the pope said.
Another Jesuit, who works in campus ministry at a university, asked Pope Francis about his insistence at World Youth Day in Lisbon that there is room in the church for everyone and about how to respond to Catholics who identify as homosexual, want to be full and active members of the church, and yet do not feel in conscience that their sexual activity is sinful.
“Jesus is very clear about this,” the pope said. “The door is open to everyone; everyone has their own space in the church.”
The question becomes how the church can help each person “live so that they can occupy that place with maturity, and this applies to all kinds of people,” he said.
“What I don’t like at all,” he said, is that “we look at the so-called ‘sin of the flesh’ with a magnifying glass” and tend to ignore other sins. “If you exploited workers, if you lied or cheated, it didn’t matter, and instead (only) sins below the waist are relevant.”
The first church welcomes everyone, Pope Francis insisted, and then “the most appropriate pastoral attitude” is taken for each person.
“We must not be superficial and naive, forcing people into things and behaviors for which they are not yet mature, or are not capable,” he said. “It takes a lot of sensitivity and creativity to accompany people spiritually and pastorally. But everyone, everyone, everyone is called to live in the church. Never forget that.”
Gosh, why would Francis say such things just because this is the endless drumbeat of conservative US Catholics?:
A reader gave a typical Reactionary response:
The Holy Father invites many voices but then he condemns those who speak to power what he does not want to hear. I suspect this papacy will not simply be known for those whom it invites to the table but for those spurned as well. Catholics in America were loved by Pope John Paul II, is this the case for Pope Francis? In any case, I hope the Holy Father knows that most faithful Catholics in the U.S. love him and respect his authority.
Rubbish. Conservative American Francis-haters mistake “Not being treated as the center of the universe” and even “Not hating and rejecting all the people they hate and reject” for “persecution”. They live the life of Riley in the US and spend their time feeling sorry for themselves while this pope goes to the highways and byways to welcome the poor, crippled, blind, and lame that the Greatest Catholics of All Time want to kick out of and drive away from the Church. The people forever complaining he is persecuting them are the persecutors, not the persecuted.
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12 Responses
Right wing American Catholics remind me of 17th century Puritans. They left England, not because they were persecuted, but because they were not allowed to persecute others.
I’ve noticed that right Wing (I refuse to call them “conservative”) Catholics think that they,and only they speak for God. The spiritual arrogance of them is breathtaking.
Agreed. You know what modern right-wing Catholics remind me of more than anything? Protestants. And not the modern lovably annoying Ned Flanders style of Protestants, but the
old-fashioned Jean Calvin / Oliver Cromwell Protestants.
Garrison Keillor once remarked that the Puritans came to the New World seeking the freedom to be harsher with themselves than English law allowed.
Chesterton once observed that in America they have a feast to celebrate the arrival of the Pilgrims and add that “In England, we should have a feast to celebrate their departure.”
“Huge.
Trump says he’ll be voting to make abortion **a constitutional right** in Florida.
It needs 60% to pass, this might make the difference.
He’s completely burying the pro-life movement.”
https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1829288835311923429
The irony is that the Catholic Church (overall, and in the USA) holds to what used to be the majority Protestant view on abortion – it’s regrettable, but state-enforced restrictions would violate civil liberties and religious freedom – even as a many Protestants have moved to what used to be the Catholic view – that it’s an intolerable crime and must be prohibited by law, those laws being enforced.
Here’s Cory Doctorow: https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/25/roe-v-wade-v-abortion/
“Here’s something weird: in the wake of Roe v Wade in the 1970s, the Southern Baptist Convention repeatedly passed resolutions affirming the right to abortion and rejecting government interference in the decision to bear a child to term: https://text.npr.org/734303135. Back then, white evangelicals were deeply suspicious of people who opposed abortion. Getting too worked up about the issue was a sign of crypto-papacy, and back then, white evangelicals hate Catholics:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/ …”
Jimmy Carter apparently holds the SBC view: abortion is immoral but governments enforcing laws against it would be a religious freedom issue.
Then a small number of Protestants (mainly Franklin Shaffer) took up the issue and said: No, seriously, if it’s murder then we should treat it like murder. The Catholics are actually right on this one.
By the 1980s many prominent evangelicals had swallowed the Muggeridge/ Mother Teresa kool-aid on abortion being “*THE* fundamental test of a just society”. Even though, if taken seriously, this would mean that Nazi Germany or Ceausescu’s Romania (or, for that matter, Jim Crow-era America) were more just societies than 1970s America. Clearly this does not pass the GK Chesterton “Apostle of Common Sense” test, and to their credit most Catholics backtracked with “Well, uh, abortion’s not exactly like full-on murder, because most murders aren’t committed to avoid the murderer having to donate the equivalent of a kidney. – It’s still bad, though.”
Unfortunately most Protestants, especially evangelicals and fundamentalists, lack the Catholic flair for “it’s both/ and at once” and instead tend much more to binary reasoning; they may not have deutero-canonised Artistle, but boy do they give the Law of Non-Contradiction a workout. So once they went anti-abortion, they went full anti-abortion, took it to its logical conclusion, as Protestants do. Hence we end up in the curiously reversed situation today.
Could you elaborate on this bit?
“Well, uh, abortion’s not exactly like full-on murder, because most murders aren’t committed to avoid the murderer having to donate the equivalent of a kidney. – It’s still bad, though.”
Either it’s phrased very poorly or I’m misunderstanding this completely. How is an unborn baby “the equivalent of a kidney”?
Had the US anti-abortion movement taken a different path (and thereby influenced pro-life movements in other countries, the US being the gorilla in the room when it comes to religion), their position today might have been a lot more defensible….
Imagine if pro-lifers could say this with a straight face:
“No, we are not campaigning against non-abortifacient contraceptives, not against gays and lesbians (who, ahem, have far fewer abortions than heterosexuals do for some reasons). So no, we are not trying to conscript people to have more children, or to stop them enjoying sex by making it harder to have sex without having children. And no, we are not campaigning to protect traditional gender hierarchies or to maintain a white Anglophone majority in the USA. We are campaigning strictly on the exact position that we say we’re campaigning on – that it’s a bad thing to kill unborn children. This is not a ‘religious’ belief in the sense of unprovable metaphysics. If your vengeful ex slipped an abortifacient into your drink and caused your ‘wanted’ foetus to miscarry, you’d be angry, even if you were a thoroughgoing atheist.
“At the same time, we recognise that pregnancy, child-bearing and maternity impose extra costs on women that the Ayn Rand/ Heinlein pro-choicers discount, so we support a social safety net for mothers and for children.”
Deprived of the (entirely well-founded) ad hominem “gotcha!” arguments that so richly suggest themselves against the actually existing anti-abortion movement (“just think of school shootings as late trimester terminations”, etc), pro-choicers would have to face more honestly what they are praising.
Instead, the actually existing anti-abortion movement has managed to combine the worst from both sides of the Tiber – Catholic determination to outlaw contraception, and Protestant determination to abolish social welfare.
Catholics determined to outlaw non-abortifacient contraception? Where and how exactly???
> “Catholics determined to outlaw non-abortifacient contraception? Where and how exactly???”
Well…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraception_in_the_Republic_of_Ireland#Ban_on_sales
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraception_in_Francoist_Spain_and_the_democratic_transition#Democratic_transition_period_(1975_-_1982)
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/philippine-court-upholds-contraceptive-law-as-constitutional-idUSBREA370HZ/
That said, Japan also banned the oral contraceptive pill until 1999, despite (a) being 99% non-Catholic, and (b) having completely legal abortion.
As best I can make out, the reason for this incongruous combination of laws was that having an abortion required the husband to be consulted, whereas women would take The Pill on their own, which might (it was feared) make them uppity.
After Sarah Palin became famous outside Alaska in 2008, various writers based around ‘SLATE’ had an interesting online colloquium to debate whether you could be a feminist if you were anti-abortion.
The majority of colloquiants were centre-left liberals (Michelle Goldberg, Emily Yoffe, etc). In the end, they begrudgingly concluded that yes, you could be an anti-abortion feminist… but only if you supported an extensive welfare state to assist women during pregnancy and child-raising.
Alternatively, you could be an Ayn Rand-style welfare-slasher but only if you were pro-choice. Either of these two contrasting approaches, they concluded, helped women alleviate the risk of unplanned pregnancies leaving them in lifelong poverty.
But if you’re a budget-cutter who also wants to ban abortion, then you can’t be a “pro-life feminist,” they concluded; you couldn’t ski around that tree in the middle of the path.
Palin, of course, fell into this category, as do most GOP women in the Trump era.
I should also add that one big factor for my younger “abortion should be illegal and prosecuted” stance was that so often US pro-choicers would adulate miserable human beings provided they were willing to take the oath to “free, safe and legal.”
Ted Kennedy is Exhibit A, of course, followed by Bill Clinton and more recently by Andrew Cuomo and Eric Schneiderman.
Here’s https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/07/10/kennedy-expose-ask-not-callahan-review/ a takedown by Nina Burleigh – a prominent feminist who, ironically, is famous for having bragged in 1998 that she would happily reward Bill Clinton with a non-“Humanae-Vitae”-compliant act of non-procreative sex to reward him for keeping abortion legal.
Enough water has now flowed under enough bridges – and the Democrats now have enough diverse faces – that Bill and Ted can safely be cut loose and filed under “entitled white heterosexual Christian males” rather than remembered as objects of pro-choice Beatlemania at the time. Certainly the Gen-Zeds I know who have watched “Chappaquiddick” or “Impeachment: American Crime Story” are outraged but, even more, amazed that supposed progressives dutifully lined up at the time to, as they say, “erase” Mary Jo Kopechne and “slut-shame” Monica Lewinsky: it’s like finding out that George Wallace was a registered Democrat.
However – with all that stated for the record, and ad hominems out of the way, it remains true that grubs like Kennedy, Clinton, Cuomo, Schneiderman (and Harvey Weinstein) remain correct on the substantive issue: that laws restricting abortions are a bad idea.
The best strategy for pro-lifers at this point would be to fight for strong conscience protections for doctors, nurses and other medical staff. If they were smart they would enlist Muslims to make this case, because (as the pro-Gaza protests on October 7 this week will confirm) white left-wingers experience Spock-level cognitive freeze when confronted by people of colour who espouse the same views that white left-wingers would easily condemn as “fascist” or “theocratic” if espoused by white people.
> “Catholics determined to outlaw non-abortifacient contraception? Where and how exactly???”
Well…
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraception_in_the_Republic_of_Ireland#Ban_on_sales
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraception_in_Francoist_Spain_and_the_democratic_transition#Democratic_transition_period_(1975_-_1982)
* https://www.reuters.com/article/world/philippine-court-upholds-contraceptive-law-as-constitutional-idUSBREA370HZ/
That said, Japan also banned the oral contraceptive pill until 1999, despite (a) being 99% non-Catholic, and (b) having almost no restrictions on abortion. As best I can make out, the reason for this combo was that having an abortion required the husband to be consulted, whereas women would take The Pill on their own, which might (it was feared) make them uppity.