Pope Francis is the sort of Catholic whom the elites thoroughly approve: woker than Greta Thunberg, Jacinda Ardern and Waleed Aly all rolled into one, oily, sanctimonious package. Cardinal George Pell, it’s the height of understatement to say, was not. The legion of Pell haters would have us believe it’s all about his alleged complicity in historic cover-ups of child abuse, but it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the real reason for their unhinged venom is that, unlike Francis, Pell had the unmitigated gall to be, well, Catholic.
This cardinal cancelling is a joint exercise between hostile secularists and bitter Catholics. Each cohort loathed Pell as a highly effective conservative warrior, and want to be sure both body and spirit have passed from this Earth […]
The progressive Catholic critique, as expressed by all-purpose clairvoyant Francis Sullivan […] it condemned Pell as at least responsible and recalcitrant in his various leadership roles. But it also attacked that leadership itself as brutal, repressive, out of date and possibly responsible for climate change.
As a collective exercise in fantasy, it all rivalled the Y2K bug.
It is firstly obvious that the mob has appropriated the experience of abuse survivors simply to push their own nasty little bandwagons.
Remarkably, it is always assumed that every victim wants to be represented by these overlords of victimisation. But many do not. They see their experiences as being appropriated. They do not want Andrews, Aunty, Milligan or Sullivan as their self-appointed loud hailers.
The Australian
More infuriating to the elites is that Pell openly opposed Francis’s wokeism. After his death, the cardinal was outed as the author of an anonymous note which condemned Francis’s papacy as a catastrophe. Other cardinals agree.
But is the future of the Church to be the competing visions of Pope Francis, or that substantial body of clerics represented by Pell? German cardinal Gerhard Muller states that “Francis is closer to questions of climate change and globalisation” than he is to the Holy Spirit. For Francis, it’s Greta, not God, who is great. Muller is the author of a back-to-basics manifesto for the Church, In Good Faith.
Speaking before publication, Muller, 75, claimed that Francis had messed up everything from his green policy and outreach to Islam to his attempt to take advice from rank-and-file Catholics. But his biggest frustration is what he describes as the Pope’s decade-long shift away from talking about God.
“Francis is closer to questions of climate change and globalisation […]”
He was reluctant to be become a new standard bearer for Francis’s foes. “As a Catholic theologian and a cardinal, it pains my soul to criticise the pontificate.” But that did not stop him challenging Francis’s call for “radical responses” against climate change, by arguing “we bishops are not experts on this.” He also criticised the Pope’s attempts at outreach to Islamic leaders. “I am Catholic and do not believe the same things as a Muslim.”
The Australian
So, whose vision for the Catholic church has the strongest future? Woke Francis, or conservative George?
The leaders of this revolt of the elite are the religious equivalents of diehard hippies. Aged at least in their 60s, they hark back to a largely imaginary swinging church of Vatican II. Their every word exhales a sour, old breath of embittered defeat and rancorous resentment.
But Catholicism, far from fading, is growing in nearly every continent — with the exception of Europe. Even in the face of murderous persecution by Islam, Catholicism remains strong in sub-Saharan Africa.
The immediate origins of these on-the-ground Catholics were The Philippines, Vietnam, Latin America, the Middle East and Vietnam. They were determined and articulate. Most of all, they were young, hopeful and, in Catholic terms, orthodox.
This is Pell’s revenge. What he called the vibrant, brown-eyed church that will take over just as the tired, blue-eyed church is collapsing. These are the Catholics who take the sacraments, and who actually believe what the church teaches.
Demographics are always a strong bet. Simple numbers show that the upper middle-class Anglo-Celtic Catholics most comfortably disengaged from the church are increasingly irrelevant in the face of a new, confident and inconveniently multicultural church.
The Australian
The bums-in-pews future of the church has a very different complexion and mindset to these bitter old Boomers.
