Replies

The papal plan for a truce is either ingenious or deceptive, depending on your point of view. Instead of formally changing the church’s teaching on divorce and remarriage, same-sex marriage, euthanasia — changes that are officially impossible, beyond the powers of his office — the Vatican under Francis is making a twofold move. First, a distinction is being drawn between doctrine and pastoral practice that claims that merely pastoral change can leave doctrinal truth untouched. So a remarried Catholic might take communion without having his first union declared null, a Catholic planning assisted suicide might still receive last rites beforehand, and perhaps eventually a gay Catholic can have her same-sex union blessed — and yet supposedly none of this changes the church’s teaching that marriage is indissoluble and suicide a mortal sin and same-sex wedlock an impossibility, so long as it’s always treated as an exception rather than a rule.

At the same time, Francis has allowed a tacit decentralization of doctrinal authority, in which different countries and dioceses can take different approaches to controversial questions. So in Germany, where the church is rich and sterile and half-secularized, the Francis era has offered a permission slip to proceed with various liberalizing moves, from communion for the remarried to intercommunion with Protestants — while across the Oder in Poland the bishops are proceeding as if John Paul II still sits upon the papal throne and his teaching is still fully in effect. The church’s approach to assisted suicide is traditional if you listen to the bishops of Western Canada, flexible and accommodating if you heed the bishops in Canada’s Maritime Provinces. In the United States, Francis’ appointees in Chicago and San Diego are taking the lead in promoting a “new paradigm” on sex and marriage, while more conservative archbishops from Philadelphia to Portland, Ore., are sticking with the old one. And so on.

These geographical divisions predate Francis, but unlike his predecessors he has blessed them, encouraged them and enabled would-be liberalizers to develop their ambitions further. ..

in the last year he has added a second one, seeking a truce not with a culture but with a regime: the Communist government in China. Francis wants a compromise with Beijing that would reconcile China’s underground Catholic Church, loyal to Rome, with the Communist-dominated “patriotic” Catholic Church....

The risks of the Chinese gamble are already apparent in the weirdly sycophantic language that Francis’ allies have used toward the Communist regime, and their eagerness to reassure Beijing that unlike, say, American evangelicals, Rome would never take the threatening step of mixing religion and politics...

Francis’ inner circle is convinced that such a revolution is what the Holy Spirit wants...

Ross Douthat, Pope Francis Is Beloved. His Papacy Might Be a Disaster , NYT, MARCH 16, 2018.

While for me as former devout RC, now evangelical who substantiates the church of Rome to be the most manifest example of deformation of the NT church , for devout RCs who insists in remains, the question is how to reconcile their selective dissent from both Francis and modern RC teaching with past papal teaching which basically requires broad assent to all public papal teaching. Of course, they should go all the way and become born again, and seek to conform to the most ancient church teachings.