Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the former prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), has launched the latest salvo of harsh criticism against Pope Francis as he spoke in Turin (Italy) on 11 May 11, 2023 quoting Joseph Ratzinger that the pope also can become a scandal. He was speaking of the case of Simon Peter being rebuked for his “cowardly action” by Paul (Gal. 2:11-14). Card Mueller adds, “As human beings, they believe they want to blaze a trail that is populist to public taste but contradicts the spirit of Christ.” This is severe criticism of the present Pope Francis. He further said, “Pope and our bishop or pastor has nothing to do with the unworthy personality cult of secular autocrats, but is brotherly love for a fellow Christian who has been entrusted with the highest responsibility in the Church. It can also fail in this. That is why loving admonition promotes the Church more than slavish hypocrisy.” He also opined that there are some other cardinals also of the same hue. Our true faith involves a critique of the believer’s social environment, and a projection into the future of an ideal derived from the remote past. There will be leaders in the church who are tempted to be inhumane, unscrupulous builders, mixing its mortar of lies, blood and mud.
We do not know whether the Syro-Malabar Synod will name those cardinals “deviants” just as they called the priests of Ernakulam-Angamaly archdiocese? George Bergolio was Provincial of the Jesuits of Argentina and Uruguay in 1973 at the age 36. During the Peronists regime which claimed to be socialists, but was closer to the fascism of Mussolini’s Italy or Franco’s Spain to lead the Jesuits was indeed difficult. Fr. Bergoglio found that it was impossible to hold the balance. He not only became unpopular, as Fr Bergolio himself confesses, “My authoritarian and quick manner of making decisions led me to have serious problems and to be accused of being ultra-conservative.” Jesuit leaders in Rome eventually decided to strip Bergoglio, then 50, of all responsibility. In 1990, he was sent to Cordoba to live in the Jesuit residence, pray, and work on his doctoral thesis. But he was not permitted to say Mass in public in the Jesuit church. He could only go there to hear confessions. He was not allowed to make phone calls without permission. His letters were controlled.
Cordoba was, for Bergoglio, a place of humility and humiliation. There seems to have been more to this than learning from experience. Pope Francis later admitted to having made “hundreds of errors” in his time as leader of Argentina’s Jesuits. Cordoba was, he revealed in his first interview as pope, “a time of great interior crisis.” Bergoglio turned inward. A revolution happened inside with the divine within. His style became delegatory and participative. That was like Dostoevsky’s inward journey to the “underground” and his dialogical truth.
In 1992, when Bergoglio returned to Buenos Aires as auxiliary bishop, he had totally remodelled his approach to being a leader. This was the making of a pope by the instrumentality of the Jesuit authorities. The authority was truthful and ethical. They were not using criteria of complacency and clientelism. Authority is.authenticity only when those in power are listening the Holy Spirit within and without of the people of God. When they shut out dialogue they get into monologue of imposition and domination.
Even after the Vatican divested an archbishop of the administration of the archdiocese and directed to pay restitution for losses suffered by the archdiocese in land deals and the High Court of Kerala judged that there was criminal conspiracy involved in them and the Supreme Court concurred with that judgement, the Synod repeats its refrain of innocence and says, “It is what everybody does.” Who do they serve? The whole Church authority becomes a scandal! People can afford to live in optical illusions at the higher levels of life. We are a “text written in invisible ink; and though one could not read it, the knowledge that it existed was sufficient to alter the texture of one’s existence and make one’s actions conform to the text.”