2018: A year to forget

2018, which has a few days left to run out, was the year I began to collaborate regularly at InfoVaticana, and this seems like a good time to take a little break, look at what has been and ask me what that comes, without pretensions of order or exhaustiveness.

It has not been a particularly happy year for the [Conciliar] Church, at least from what I have seen from this vantage point. God only knows how to count to one, said the French poet Charles Peguy and, yes, in agreement, it is not a game of numbers. But the figures, the cold data, reflect something; they are, at last, souls what is being counted when the depressing accounts of the Church in the West are made, when we speak of churches that are closed because people have stopped going to them and monasteries that have to be sold because the religious orders languish; when the number of people attending mass, of vocations for the priesthood or religious life, of sacramental marriages plummets.

And it would be even more bearable this melancholy of seeing the secular work of a centuries-old evangelization be undone without the dissonance of the discourse that comes to us from Rome, of a new spring, of a renewal championed by old prelates who read in today's youth the longings of his own youth, half a century ago. It is what we have seen in that cheating 'synod of youth' in which all the manipulative arts of the advertising manual were tested, and that ended up being, at the last minute, a synod of synodality.

We were sold, as well, the step to a 'synodal church', participatory and assembly, just in an assembly that had been tricked and in which not even discussed what ended up appearing. But we were also sold a static youth, the youth of May '68 redivir, asking for more of what is already in abundance, almost exclusively, talking about the Church today as if it were my grandparents, without noticing that what it wants to promote has been for decades the official line, the normal thing, what exists by default in the pastoral, the only thing that I myself, that I am not exactly young, I have known for fifty years.

If, from my corner, I had to characterize the most relevant notes that have come to me from the ecclesiastical hierarchy this year, I would focus on three and, perhaps curiously, overlook the most scandalous and striking news area, the explosion of cover-up of cases of sexual abuse-homosexuals, in the vast majority of cases-from the 'McCarrick affair' to the explosive Viganò Testimony, to the devastating report of the Pennsylvania grand jury and a string of lesser media coverage issues.

In spite of the scandal and the pain and the apostasies to which these hidden abuses will undoubtedly have led, I judge them a symptom and a consequence, rather than a cause of nothing. That the fish begins to rot on the head is known.

No, what I have seen more consistently and repeatedly has been, first, doctrinal confusion, ambiguity and vagueness; secondly, worldliness of the messages, increasingly political, more focused on matters far from the faith and attached to the fashions and trends of the century; and, finally, as a consequence of the above, certain indefinable disgust for the supernatural, for everything that in our faith refers to what goes beyond what we see and the fleeting time that we have had to live.

As for the first, the doubts raised by four cardinals - two of them already deceased - about absolutely key points of the papal exhortation Amoris Laetitia remain, to this day, unanswered, just like the accusations made by the archbishop Carlo María Viganò in his famous / infamous testimony.

But there is no possible comparison between both silences. The second, being serious, remains in a trifle, in errors of judgment, perhaps, or in mere personal corruption. On the other hand, to stop responding to what the cardinals propose is to leave in doubt the nature of objective moral evil and of three sacraments: marriage, penance and the Holy Eucharist.

The 'only possible interpretation' - words of the Pope in response to the guidelines of the Argentine bishops - already applies in many dioceses around the world, where divorced and remarried - in certain cases, with accompaniment and blablablá - can access Communion without stopping living 'more uxorio' with a woman or a man who, according to the Church, is not his spouse. But in other places it is not like that, so the unity of moral doctrine seems to have been broken and what is sin in a jurisdiction is not a few kilometers away.

Also - with the same vague and subjective conditions - Lutheran spouses of faithful Catholics can receive communion in Germany. Among the conditions is to believe in the Real Presence, which would, in good logic, the person cease to be a Lutheran and require him to enter the Catholic Church, but nobody clarifies this absurdity. In this case, the confusion touched record highs, because the Holy Father, questioned by a group of seven German bishops, said yes, no, and finally that the German prelates themselves solved it.

We have attended interviews and statements in which the Pope appeared saying one thing - that the condemned souls do not go to hell, but disappear, or that God has made homosexuals as they are - that they have denied only half or not at all, leaving the faithful in the most complete darkness. The return planes of the Pope's apostolic trips were turned into time bombs thanks to the careless loquacity of the Pontiff and a campechany that marries badly with an office so in need of precision, discretion and prudence.

As for the second, we have seen the Curia much more obsessed with the same things that alarm the political elite than with what supposedly constitutes its mission. The environment, with its concomitant dogma of anthropogenic climate change, and the radical defense of the massive migration of the Third World to the West has occupied a disproportionate space in the messages that came to us from Rome. A Pope who responds to the flight of Christians from the churches asking us to be anguished and calmly blaming him on the 'sign of the times', urges us instead to fight a climate change that can not be said to be too much known, to save all costs a planet called in any case to its destruction and that it will not be our final resting place.

Chesterton said that the Church is here to tell the world, not what it wants to hear, but what it needs. I doubt I could say the same about the church hierarchy in 2018. I will be told that the Pope's insistence on caring for the poorest, the most needy, the marginalized is a totally evangelical theme, the very core of the message of Christ, to which I have to respond with three essential points.

The first is that neither the care of the most needy has ever been neglected by the Church nor, of course, is it a matter forgotten by the century, at least in its continuous media messages in a line similar to that of the Pope. Whether I speak of the Rohingya of Myanmar or of the Hondurans to the assault of the US border, there is no issue that has not been exploited by means that are not in the hands of the simple ones.

Secondly, this message in favor of the 'disinherited of the earth' is combined by a marked preference for political options that, in any case, have only multiplied the poor, in addition to oppressing and repressing all the rest . Since he confessed to be left-wing in an interview, at the beginning of his pontificate, granted to the Civiltà Cattolica , all his prophetic and severe fire dedicated to Western leaders became a tender understanding and request for the regimes of Castro, Evo Morales or Lula da Silva

In Italy, the hierarchy is in a bitter and constant struggle against the government of Giuseppe Conte and its interior minister, Matteo Salvini, whose party, the League, has the support of more practicing Catholics than anyone else. And while groups and fraternities that love the tradition are "merciful" throughout the world, representatives of the Marxist Theology of Liberation like Leonardo Boff receive affectionate birthday messages.

And, finally, this concern for the poor, although it translates into some knock-on effects, especially media, does not correspond to real initiatives, as would be to meet the needs of immigrants with at least some of the 5,000 real estate properties that the Vatican administers through the APSA instead of doing it with the sale of sacred spaces. Or listen to the direct and real voices of the episcopal conferences of the poorest countries, instead of living pending the theological and moral whims of the richest, like Germany.

And finally, that aversion to the supernatural of which we spoke. All that seems to matter is the here and now, as if this were our definitive home and this is our true life. The last statements in the press of the Bishop of Oporto, despite the late rectification, are significant. Dominates the new German theology, based on doubt - no dogma leaves any subject settled, declared in his day the German Cardinal Walter Kasper - and in the emphasis on the community and immanent on the supernatural and transcendent.

What comes next, what to expect for 2019? Presumably more of the same. The extraordinary meeting of bishops awaits us in February to deal with the issue of abuses but, being the pupil of McCarrick, the cardinal archbishop of Chicago Blase Cupich, the one commissioned by the Pope to organize the meeting, we can already assume that it will not be nothing radical and, of course, nothing that makes reference to the elephant in the room of the homosexualization of the clergy.

Then comes the Synod of the Amazon, which, as is becoming customary, does not have as much to do with that region of the planet - otherwise, no more urgent for evangelization than Spain or Germany - as with the abolition of ecclesiastical celibacy.

The rumored abolition of the Ecclesia Dei Commission and the denunciation in the plenary assembly of the Italian Episcopal Conference of the motu proprio Summorum pontificum of Benedict XVI already announces an upsurge in the attack on traditional forms of worship, precisely those that grow the most and most vocations attract.