Francis: Ten Years of His Pontificate in Ten Questions (6)
Pope Francis in 2017
On March 13, 2013, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected pope and took the name Francis. Ten years later, the anniversary of this election was celebrated in a particularly discreet way. The Pope celebrated a private mass with the cardinals present in Rome, in the chapel of St. Martha’s House, which is his residence.
The assessment of the Vaticanists can be summed up in interrogatories or ten essential questions. Here is the sixth.
6. Synodality to pastoralize dogma and dogmatize pastoral care?
How does this “dictatorship of synodality” manifest itself concretely? In The New Daily Compass [La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana] of March 13, under the title “Pope Francis, ten years of turmoil and dismay,” Stefano Fontana sees synodality as “the most expressive feature of the decade that has just ended,” a “new dogma,” the “synthesis of a process in which the means counts more than the end.”
And the Italian journalist explains: “The circular relationship between praxis and theory, pastoral and doctrine, is in fact not a particular chapter of this pontificate, but its guide line.”
“Precisely because he wants doctrine within pastoral care, Francis has been intolerant with the dogmatists, the doctrinaires, the rigid, and open with the adventurers, the innovators, the intolerant. For this very reason, his has been an anti-metaphysical pontificate.”
About this anti-metaphysical attitude of the pope, Stefano Fontana recalls: “As soon as he was elected, Francis declared that Kasper is ‘a great theologian,’ and Kasper, on the eve of the two synods on the family, told the cardinals that there are not remarried divorcees but this or that particular couple of remarried divorcees.”
“It was the declaration that reality and morality do not lend themselves to universal knowledge, as metaphysically based ones do, and that the norm is always within a situation, so that each individual situation had to be encountered from within and no longer judged” [objectively].
“It was pastoralism getting rid of doctrine; it was the assumption of nominalist philosophy: experience is made up of absolutely singular situations that therefore cannot be judged. But nominalism is the philosophy behind the Protestant Reformation. After Amoris laetitia, in fact, it is the conscience of the subject that takes center stage in moral life.”
Anti-metaphysical and antidogmatic, pastoralism imposes its moral relativism by force, just as subjectivism wants to bend the objectively read.
(Sources : La nuova Bussola Quotidiana/Dici n° 431 – FSSPX.Actualités)
Illustration : Trempík, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
