Pope Francis has lamented a “very strong reactionary attitude” in the US Catholic Church, saying that ideology had replaced faith in some parts of it and some members had failed to understand “there is an appropriate evolution in understanding matters of faith and morals.”
During his decade as pontiff, Francis has often faced criticism from conservative sectors of the US church, opposed to reforms such as giving women and lay Catholics more roles and making the church more welcoming and less judgmental towards some, including LGBT people.
The comments were made in Portugal on August 5, during a private meeting on Francis’ trip to Lisbon with members of the Jesuit order the pope belongs to, but were scheduled to be published in full as part of the Italian Jesuit journal Civilta Cattolica’s end-of-August edition. Daily paper La Repubblica published excerpts in advance on Monday
During the question-and-answer session, a Portuguese Jesuit said that he was saddened while on a sabbatical in the US to find many Catholics, including some bishops, who were hostile to Francis’ leadership.
“You have seen that in the United States the situation is not easy: there is a very strong reactionary attitude,” Francis said. “It is organized and shapes the way people belong, even emotionally.”
The liberal Argentine pontiff, born Jorge Mario Bergoglio, has also faced criticism from religious leaders and conservative media in the US on a host of his other stances, including climate change, immigration, social justice, gun control and opposing the death penalty as “neither human nor Christian.”
“You have been to the United States and you say you have felt a climate of closure. Yes, this climate can be experienced in some situations,” Francis told the questioner. “And there, one can lose the true tradition and turn to ideologies for support. In other words, ideology replaces faith, membership in a sector of the church replaces membership in the church.”
Francis said his critics needed to understand that “there is an appropriate evolution in the understanding of matters of faith and morals,” and that being backward-looking was “useless” for the church.
He said it was an “error” to consider church teachings to be a “monolith.”
Francis gave both a historical and a more recent example to try to illustrate this, saying there was a time when many in the Catholic Church would have supported slavery. In the more recent case of homosexuality, he said, “it is apparent that perception of this issue has changed in the course of history.”
“But what I really dislike more generally is when you look at the so-called sins of the flesh through a magnifying glass, as people did for so long,” Francis said. He argued that pastoral care required “sensitivity and creativity,” also mentioning his first meeting with trans people. “It’s become clear to me that they feel spurned. And that’s really hard,” he said.
One of the pope’s fiercest American critics is Rome-based Cardinal Raymond Burke. He wrote in an introduction for a recent book that a meeting of bishops called by Francis for this October to try to help chart the future of the church risked sowing “confusion and error and division.”
Intelligent people are leaving the church, so those left behind are leaning more and more on emotion to guide them. Since they’re watching their religion slowly fall apart around them, the emotions guiding them are often related to fear.
Things are changing, they’re losing power, losing relevance, and they’re angry about it.
I’m an atheist. I disagree that this is about intelligence… I think it’s more about ignorance. This is an important distinction and I think it’s more harmful to our cause to demean them the same way they might do to marginalized groups.
A lot of people have trouble empathizing with those in marginalized groups because they don’t have anyone close to them that is affected by their hateful ways of thinking. Often, just having a family member or friend come out to them is enough to open their mind. I think that most of the time, these people just lack the information (emotionally) necessary to understand harmful their beliefs have been. Years of indoctrination make it so much harder to overcome, but indoctrination doesn’t necessarily mean they lack intelligence. I think the words we use are important tools in changing minds.
I’m not trying to demean them, just sharing my observation, but yes I take your point. Hard to convince someone of something right after you insult them.
I get it. Just have to be careful about the language we use when we want to change minds.
Honestly, the ignorance goes both ways. I used to think very lowly of religious people in general and maybe especially Catholics back when I was a teenager who had just realized the profound truths of atheism. Having travelled a bit more and made friends from various religions, I’ve realized that while my diagnosis of the Catholic church was somewhat accurate, judging the people was a product of my own ignorance rather than theirs.
Emotions motivate everyone.
It’s insulting and counter productive to say this thing is about dumb people following their emotions when education, money and opportunities play such a big part.
And some people, having grown up with something, just end up liking parts of it even if they might be critical of other parts.
The Catholics I know are quite happy to voice their disagreements with the Vatican when there is anything, they just enjoy the role faith has in their lives and want to keep it. Personally I like to have a bitter liquor for digestion after a nice big meal - I have a feeling it’s probably not good for anything on a rational level, but I appreciate living in the belief. It makes my life richer, even if in a little way.
Yeah had I not been queer and slutty I’d probably still be Catholic. I always had my issues with the church but I get something out of religion and it took being made clear that I wasn’t welcome in their religion to drive me out. I spent a few years as an atheist but religion does benefit me so I sought one that was right for me and wound up pagan. Are the gods real? Well the Earth is, but the others who’s to say. But if all I’m doing is rituals to a personification of ideas and stories that appeal to me that’s ok. I feel better for it and it reminds me to be intentional in a lot of ways.
You strike me as someone very close to people who don’t share your same views on a lot of topics.
I’m pretty liberal but I work for a construction company with a lot of very conservative people, and my father and his family are catholic and very conservative as well. I regularly interact with a lot of people that share vastly different views.
Exactly, as long as the group they’re harming remains this faceless “other” they usually can’t see the issue.
Some will never change, but plenty will once they realize the group they’re marginalizing are just regular average people, which is difficult when your perception is essentially just straight up tribalism.
I have to agree. I saw a mini exodus from my childhood church. I grew up “catholic”. My parents made me go to church and get confirmed, but they were always part of the more progressive part of catholics. Believed that gay marriage was perfectly fine, abortion was only the woman’s choice, and evolution was a fact. And they always taught me that the Bible was mostly fiction. Jesus existed, but he was a person, not a magic man and the Old Testament was a book of parables. They were obviously in the minority, but our church had a bunch of people like them. They actually just really liked the teachings and the community.
It wasn’t until 2012 when our city’s diocese sent out a flyer telling them how to vote and a fellow churchgoer did the same, telling them they weren’t real catholics if they didn’t vote straight R. They haven’t been to any church since and although they both consider themselves catholic, heavily criticize the current state of the church (and all the pedophilia shit).
This isn’t going to go down with the strongly Catholic members of my family, all of whom believe they know Church doctrine better than the pope.
Yea I’m sending this to my right wing catholic pastor cousin right now lol.
Just an update on his response that I will edit out only names and identifying remarks.
“My thoughts? I could write an encyclopedia. You just went down a rabbit hole that enters a wonder land of nightmares. Francis is an “anti-pope.” We had them before in history. Your (cousin) is in the middle of a civil war in the Catholic Church. It is about ready to spill out into the secular world and vice versa. It’s a great time to be alive.”
He’s generally a great person to be around, I actually play TTRPG’s with him. He respects my beliefs about spirituality without being overly pushy about his. He’s been in the peace corps, and has worked for the state with helping children that are affected by terrible situations as well as hqving done many other generally good things though his life. I only say this because of the context of this discussion which isn’t in the best of light which does not reflect his over all character at all.
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To be fair, the current pope seems to be more hands on - err, in a good way - than at least Ratzinger was.
As we’re not going to get rid of Catholicism any time soon, at least we can appreciate that they currently have a leader who isn’t a complete enabler.
That said, I don’t disagree with you. Fuck it all.
Agree with everything except it being an extension of the Roman Senate. By the time Constantine declared it the state religion the senate had been all but banned from important offices due to the changes that occurred to end the principate phase of the empire.
In reality it was a subversion of Roman governance as the pope gained the authority to “legitimize” emperors and is a primary reason alternative religious beliefs were suddenly all stamped out after centuries of moderate tolerance.
Trans people “feel” spurned? When you say it’s a sin to transition we are spurned.
Isn’t he, like, the boss of them though? If you’re the Pope and you don’t like a particular bishop then you reassign him to a diocese in the middle of the Sahara or wherever and put your own guy in his place.
Heck, this even works with cardinals - maybe you can’t traditionally un-cardinal a cardinal, but you’re an absolute monarch and you can make up whatever new laws you like - if you want to make it look more official then you assemble a council of a dozen other cardinals you like and get them to do it, but either way, if you want to get rid of the guy there’s nobody really stopping you.
In theory the Pope has such powers, but technically he is the first among equals. It would only make things worse if he started acting like a dictator purging bishops that don’t agree with him. There is already a strong, “not my Pope” movement in the US, hence this article. He doesn’t want to drive those people further away. His goal is unity not division.
But then if a conservative pope acted like that nobody would be surprised.
It feels to me like the modern Catholic Church ought to be uniquely schism-proof because without Rome you’re basically just another random conservative Protestant church and there are other, equally conservative Protestant churches that are bigger + better at marketing.
Last thing you want is more schismatics claiming apostolic succession. Priests leaving is not a big deal, but bishops are.
There are plenty of those already - many of the major Protestant denominations have at least some sort of argument why they have it; heck, the Mormons claim apostolic succession despite the lack of anything resembling an episcopal lineage because they say the apostles conferred it on Joseph Smith directly in a vision.
(and if you’re going to make arguments based strictly on historical facts, then the fact that most of the current Catholic hierarchy - including every pope in the last 300 years - traces their ordination back to one 16th-century Italian dude with no idea who ordained him tends to poke a hole in those)
Joseph Smith directly in a vision
Yeah, well, I got consecrated by Peter himself!
There is already a strong, “not my Pope” movement in the US
lol
Trump is their pope.
Not without very good reason. The church is still attempting to maintain good relationships with the eastern rite latin churches and keep their traditions intact. It’s a balancing act between reform and maintaining the “universal” meaning implied in “Catholic.”
It’ll be interesting to see who they put up next for pope. My experience of history suggests an inevitable regressive swing, but I’m certainly no papal scholar. If Trump is re-elected, I could see him reforming US Catholicism in the style of Henry VIII, with himself as the head of the church. Don’t imagine it would be a big shift for some dioceses.
Trump would lose the evangelical bloc if he did that. Evangelicals don’t think Catholics are Christian.
Wow, you know that you’re doing it properly when the pope calls you backward and reactionary.
This is a big faux pas in the church btw, because metro bishops are supposed to have a largely free hand to run their church as long as they follow doctrine.
There’s plenty of precedent for disciplining misbehaving bishops, he yanked an anti-vaxxer one from Puerto Rico just last year. You may have a free hand in your diocese as far as pastoral care, but you’re still representing the pope’s authority.
If you read the full transcript of his comments, there is also a revealing moment where he says rice is white, and water is wet.
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