A powerful storm has swept away the summer heat dome over Rome; temperatures are below 30 degrees. It is the time of the “rientro“, the return of the Romans to the city; and officials are also filing back into the corridors of power of the Church and state.
Italy’s head of government, Giorgia Meloni, gathered her team of ministers to prepare the budget for 2024. And in the Vatican, the heads of the dicasteries met the Pope for the first time in many weeks. Unlike most people, Francis did not take a holiday this year.
Nevertheless, he has been taking it easy. After his abdominal operation in June, doctors strongly advised him to take a break and recuperate, and the 86-year-old has largely complied. General audiences were cancelled, and the program of Church services and visitors was greatly reduced.
By the World Youth Day in Lisbon at the beginning of August, Francis already looked recovered and a lot leaner. Three weeks later, he seems full of energy – and thanks to improved glasses, he reads his texts fluently and with verve again.
His speeches are dominated by a new pet theme, which he emphasized several times at the World Youth Day: the Church must be open to all; also to sinners and to those who, as sexual minorities, have so far felt excluded because of Catholic sexual morality. For the time being, however, Francis has remained vague on the tricky question of whether and how practising homosexuals and trans people will be admitted to which sacraments of the Church. What is decisive for him is “non-exclusion”.
Most recently, at the weekend, when he was awarded a prize, he repeated his Lisbon dictum about the Church being open to all and said, with a view to the World Synod in October: “We have opened our doors, we have offered everyone the opportunity to participate, we have taken into account everyone’s needs and suggestions. We want to contribute together to build the Church where everyone feels at home, where no-one is excluded (…) there are no first, second, or third-class Catholics”.
And on the stormy Monday of the rientro, his chief strategist, the Jesuit Antonio Spadaro, went even further. He published passages in the left-liberal newspaper La Repubblica from a conversation the Pope had had three weeks earlier with members of the Jesuit order in Portugal. In it, he threw down the gauntlet to unnamed conservative Catholic groups in the US whom the Pope accused of trying to spread a well-organized, backward-looking ideology within the Church. In this conversation, too, he repeated his vision of a Church that excludes no one, and explicitly mentioned trans people.
Both speeches sounded like a response to growing criticism from the conservative camp in the run-up to the World Synod. On social media and most recently in a book with a foreword by Curia Cardinal Raymond Burke, one of the Pope’s fiercest critics, they evoked the danger of a synod breaking with the Church’s teaching.
“The Synodal Process is a Pandora’s Box,” the authors Jose Antonio Ureta of Chile and Julio Loredo de Izcue of Peru warned. They said the plan to reform the Church would overturn its foundations. And Burke added that both the term synodality and its adjective “have become slogans behind which a revolution is at work to change radically the Church’s self-understanding”.
The Pope will have plenty of opportunities to reaffirm his power before the World Synod debates the future of the Church. These include his trips to Mongolia and Marseille – as well as the appointment of new cardinals on September 30. After this solemn act, to which all cardinals are invited – even the critics – the electoral college for a future conclave to elect the next Pope will contain more than two-thirds of cardinals appointed by Francis.
Originally reported by KNA Germany.
