Two Churches

I recently had the privilege of hearing Cardinal Seán O’Malley deliver the Bergoglio Lecture here at Sacred Heart University. The cardinal spoke about Pope Francis’ “hybrid” Jesuit and Franciscan spirituality. This spirituality, the cardinal explained, is illustrated in the encyclicals Laudato Si’ and Fratelli Tutti, in which Francis calls for us to care for our common home and to love our neighbor as ourselves. In Fratelli Tutti, Francis uses the parable of the Good Samaritan to underscore who our neighbor is and what our responsibility is. The pope explains that the parable tells us, “we were created for a fulfillment that can only be found in love.”

Another part of the cardinal’s talk that struck me was his explanation of Pope Francis’ view of morality. He said the pope, “views morality in the context of an encounter with Christ that is ‘triggered by mercy.’” Quoting Francis, O’Malley stated that, “the privileged locus of that encounter is the caress of Jesus Christ on our sins.” A caress—what a gesture of love. Before the cardinal’s visit, I had written a brief reflection on Fiducia Supplicans, the papal document on pastoral blessings for same-sex couples and those in irregular relationships. In my reflection, I mentioned my students, almost all of whom have a family member or a friend who is LGBTQ+, and many of whose parents are divorced and remarried. These students, many of whom identify themselves as disaffiliated from the Church, responded positively to Fiducia Supplicans and expressed openness to, and a feeling of, “being more welcomed by the Church” because of what the document said.

A reader of my reflection wrote a response to my column. He was angry about what I had written and argued that a problem with the Church today is that it refuses to stand strong against sin and presents a weakened morality to Catholics. Two examples of sin that the writer gave were homosexual relationships and birth control. He was vehement in his outrage towards the Church’s stand on blessings for same-sex couples. Questioning the Church’s position, he asked somewhat sarcastically, “Did Christ get it wrong or is the Church getting it wrong by not following the teachings of Christ?” He argued that the Church needs to stand strong against sin and enforce the teachings of Christ.

A few days following the cardinal’s lecture, and after I received this response to my reflection on Fiducia Supplicans, Lent began and I traveled to Sicily. There, I visited the many hundreds of churches, cathedrals and basilicas that over centuries have stood emblazoned in architecture and art that integrates the Byzantine, Roman and Arabic cultures that typify Sicily and Sicilian people. As one guide put it, “Sicily is a very inclusive culture and the people are very welcoming.” Immersed in all this art, I was overwhelmed and awestruck by the beauty that revealed, over and over again, faith in a Christ whose incarnation, crucifixion, death and resurrection spoke only of love. 

On Ash Wednesday, the Vatican reported that the pope remained in stable but guarded condition and that he made his usual call to the parish in Gaza. His homily for Ash Wednesday Mass, which was read by Cardinal De Donatis, said that Ash Wednesday asks us “to look within ourselves.” In a small church in Sicily on Ash Wednesday, I joined the other people there as we began a Lenten journey of reflection, prayer and repentance. First, I reflected on the words of the writer who said the Church must stand strong against sin.  And then I reflected on what the pope had written about morality being “triggered by Christ’s mercy” and about how the locus of that encounter is “Jesus Christ’s caress on our sins.” I reflected on all the beauty revealing Jesus Christ in the churches, and I felt sure that this Church of love, mercy and beauty is Christ’s Church, not the other one.

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Michelle Loris is the director of Center for Catholic Studies and associate dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at Sacred Heart University.

As the End Plays Out – or Not Yet

These may well be the twilight weeks or months of the Bergoglio papacy. Hopefully, he will rally from his current physical deterioration, but it is unlikely, and the end of a papal era may be on the horizon.

So, what is in store for us?

We need Francis, but we also need to prepare for his successor. When he dies, the rites and rituals—the elaborate pontifical obsequies, kick into gear, well greased as they are by centuries of use.

After determining that the pope is in fact dead and not feigning—traditionally his forehead is tapped by a silver hammer and his name called to ensure the authorities that they are, in fact, dealing with a corpse (a custom that appears to have fallen into disuse)—a white veil is then placed over his face, his living quarters are sealed, his Fisherman’s Ring is crushed, several days of official mourning are mounted, his body is placed in a coffin (Francis has opted for one coffin instead of the traditional three) and in the coffin are placed a few items of his pontificate nestled beside him including a canister with a rogito. Then, finally, he is laid to rest in his beloved Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. All these proceedings are presided over by a liturgical majordomo in concert with one of the two key figures during the interregnum, the Cardinal Camerlengo or Chamberlain, currently the Dublin-born American prelate, Kevin Farrell.

The other key figure during the interregnum is the Dean of the College of Cardinals, Giovanni Batista Re, a sprightly 91 only recently reconfirmed in his office by Francis. The Dean will summon all the cardinals to Rome to begin the work of electing the new Successor of Peter.

While this high sacral drama is played out before the world—it is, after all, theater without equal—the expectations, hopes, fears and anxieties of the Catholic community struggle to be heard, to be addressed, and it is a wise hierarchy that would pay them heed.

The Francis legacy cannot be compromised; too much is at stake to have a restorationist pope dismantle the ecclesial vision and pastoral timbre of the Argentine’s pontificate. We need a Francis II, not a John Paul III or Benedict XVII.

The cardinal electors—many of whom have been created by Francis—will discern over a period of concentrated time the qualities most needed in the next pope and what our hyper-turbulent world needs in the new Bishop of Rome. For sure: they will fret about continuity. For some the allure of the Ratzinger papacy will be compelling; for others a new style of leadership is imperative, and for many the special gifts that Francis bequeathed the church must be nurtured and allowed to flourish.

The Francis papacy is not without its flaws, but its strengths are formidable.

He is the pope of many firsts: he is the first Jesuit pope; the first pope to take the name Francis; the first in centuries to live outside the Apostolic Palace, opting instead for the Casa Santa Marta, an apartment complex for visiting clerics and guests; the first to aggressively promote women through appointments to the highest offices of Vatican governance.

To the world—Catholic and otherwise—he is the pope of mercy, a universal pastor who prizes compassion over the law, personal flexibility over administrative rigidity, the enfleshed individual over abstract reasoning.

He has instructed bishops to see their pastorship as something other than mere management; he has exhorted theologians to get onto the streets, to be pioneers in effecting a cultural revolution. And he does these things because he is committed to an enlivening theological enterprise rooted in the reality of the people, grounded in experience and not ideology, a theology that promotes a way of life open to an endlessly unfolding culture of dialogue.

As with his Jesuit companions, he is poised to celebrate all human endeavors that disclose the majesty of God, and therefore all ministry is Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam. And that ministry includes care for our common home, the protection of migrants and the dismantling or at least serious mitigating of the geo-economic policies that perpetuate inequity.

He has made Rome, once the center of an ecclesiastical empire, a treasured seat on the periphery, a sanctuary for a healthy universalism over a debilitating globalization, a soft power that can build bridges, a beacon of human and spiritual harmony in a sea of dark turmoil.

And he can do this—he has done this—because of the authenticity of his moral voice. This is the leader who chose to fly to Lampedusa on his first Vatican outing to stand in solidarity with the homeless and abandoned.

If his successor can do likewise, then the Bergoglio signature will be entrenched.

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Michael W. Higgins’ new book is The Jesuit Disruptor: a personal portrait of Pope Francis. He is Distinguished Professor of Catholic Thought Emeritus of Sacred Heart University.

 

Pope Francis’ Hospitalization

“I’m still alive, although some people wanted me dead.”
— Pope Francis, when asked “How are you?” after abdominal surgery in 2021

The last two weeks on the Vatican news beat have been a nightmare. The Vatican has been relatively forthcoming in its statements—seemingly at the direct request of the pope—while Francis’ doctors held a press conference last Friday (a week into his hospitalization) that was refreshingly frank about his condition.

As of this writing (Wednesday, Feb. 26), his condition remains critical, though the past few days have shown steady improvement. We are expecting the results of Francis’ CT scan tonight, which should provide further details. But recovery is increasingly possible, even if the pope will continue to face some chronic health issues, like the bronchitis he often deals with in the winter.

The problem is not the doctors or even the Vatican’s communications team. The problem is the wild speculation—whether well-intended or malicious—that has clouded the picture so thoroughly that journalists now spend most of our energy fact-checking or counteracting it.

Some of this speculation, of course, comes from a place of genuine concern for the pope and a desire to rally as many prayers for him as possible. I believe this was the motivation behind Cardinal Dolan’s ill-advised comment during a prayer for the pope, that Francis is “probably close to death”—something his doctors have not said and have, in fact, explicitly denied. Similarly, the Gemelli Hospital chaplain’s remark that “now is the hour of hope against all hope” may have been intended to encourage prayers but instead fueled greater alarm.

Even within the Vatican, there was concern that launching a nightly rosary for the pope’s health—just as was done in the final days of John Paul II—might inadvertently signal that Francis’ condition was more dire than it actually is. That concern appears to have been well-founded. Striking the right balance in these moments is difficult, and I’d like to believe that most people speaking about the pope right now have good intentions. But I would urge them to seek out reliable sources, follow the twice-daily updates from the Vatican and approach anything that seems sensational with caution.

This same caution is even more essential when encountering deliberately misleading or outright fake news. Already this week, I’ve seen an Italian journalist fooled by an obviously AI-generated “photo” of the pope in bed. I’ve heard of Catholics in Kenya and China sharing the same photoshopped letter on Vatican letterhead falsely claiming the pope has died. And nearly every day, anonymous reports circulate online insisting that the pope is already dead.

Why do people do this? Some are simply chasing clicks for ad revenue, trying to grow their social media reach, or seeking the dopamine hit of viral engagement. Others have more ideological motives, using Francis’ illness as an opportunity to shape the narrative in their favor. This is most evident in projects like the College of Cardinals Report, compiled by two right-wing journalists as a resource for cardinals in the next conclave. The site ranks papabile based on their perceived orthodoxy on hot-button issues, even commenting on whether they sufficiently opposed COVID-19 shutdowns and vaccinations.

The reality is that greater skepticism and media literacy are more necessary than ever, especially as AI-generated content spreads while content moderation and fact-checking are stripped from major platforms. For well-intentioned Catholics awaiting news about Pope Francis—and potentially a future conclave—this discernment will be all the more essential.

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Colleen Dulle is a writer and producer at America Media, where she hosts the weekly news podcast “Inside the Vatican.” Her forthcoming book on grappling with faith while covering the Vatican will be published by Penguin Random House in spring 2025.

The God of Life

From a biblical point of view, the question is never whether we are religious or worship God. The problem in the Bible is not atheism, but idolatry—the question of which God we worship. The Romans were extremely devout and forced all their subjects to participate in their cults and sacrifices. Christians who refused to participate were charged with impiety and atheism, for which the penalty was death.

The privileged and powerful always favor a religion that justifies and sanctifies their privilege, power and self-proclaimed “greatness.” It was thus with the religion of slave masters, who saw no contradiction between their Sunday worship and the rape and beating of the human beings they “owned.” It was thus with the architects of South African apartheid—among the most devout Christians anywhere—who believed that the Bible endorsed their racial hierarchy and justified any violence or cruelty to maintain it.

In Nazi Germany, many Christian ministers enthusiastically embraced the Third Reich, and devised a form of “German Christianity,” aligned with the Fuhrer’s “mandate” to make Germany great again. In response to this, theologians like Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer launched the Confessing Church, founded on the principle that only Jesus Christ was their leader, and that his teachings of love and justice were the markers of true Christian faith.

The Prophets of Israel were vociferous in denouncing idolatry. By this, they did not just mean the worship of foreign gods, but any worship that substituted loud prayers and sacrifices for the practice of mercy and justice toward the poor. The prophetic church in El Salvador asked the question of whether the ruling elites worshipped “the God of Life” or “the Idols of Death.”

Following tradition, the first day of the Trump Administration included a prayer service at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., where the homilist was Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde. After preaching on the theme of unity and its foundations, she took the opportunity to address a personal message to the president, asking him to show mercy toward those who are frightened by the policies he has championed, including transgender youth, whose lives are threatened; the people who perform so much of the basic work in our country, most of them good neighbors and people of faith, regardless of their immigration status; the children who fear that their parents will be deported. “Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were once strangers in this land,” she said, citing a biblical principle that is anathema to a president who believes immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our nation.”

Unsurprisingly, the president afterward described the bishop as nasty, “not smart,” and said she owed the church and the country an apology. Many of his supporters amplified this. It is, of course, a telling sign when one believes a church service is desecrated by a plea for mercy. It suggests that for all the pious invocation of God and the importance of religion, you are worshipping something other than the God of Life.

At a later National Prayer Breakfast President Trump said: “We have to bring religion back. We have to bring it back much stronger.” He announced that he would construct a “National Garden of American Heroes,” and establish a task force to combat “anti-Christian discrimination.” He would, he said, “move heaven and earth to defend the rights of Christians and religious believers everywhere.” Meanwhile his vice president, a Catholic convert, defended funding cuts to Catholic Charities and other religious organizations serving immigrants on the grounds that they care more about their bottom line than “commonsense immigration policy.” He also invoked the principle of the “ordo amoris,” a “Christian concept,” he said, that you love others in a hierarchy beginning with your family, then your neighbor, your community, fellow citizens, and finally “the rest of the world.”

This trickle-down “concept” of love is accepted by most humans as common sense. And yet in the Sermon on the Mount and in the Beatitudes—which Pope Francis has called the “identity card” of a Christian—Jesus clearly established a completely different ethic. And if this ethic seems discordant or counter-cultural with the prevailing mood, it is important to remember that this was also the case in Jesus’ time.

An “America First Christianity” is not really Christianity at all, but a form of nationalistic idolatry. In such a time, it becomes all the more important to remember our true identity card, an identity expressed in mercy and compassion, detached from greed and consumerism, with care for God’s earth and its creatures, solidarity with the most vulnerable and those on the margins, a commitment to peace and the sacredness of life, and the courage to endure the consequences of living out such “foolish and subversive” ideals.

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Robert Ellsberg is the publisher of Orbis Books. His most recent book, as editor, is Dorothy Day: Spiritual Writings.

AI and the Heart

In the deluge of unprecedented political decisions and distressing headlines the past few weeks, I might have missed the document Antiqua et Nova had a friend not pointed it out to me. This doctrinal note, co-issued by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for Culture and Education on January 28, alongside Pope Francis’ October 2024 encyclical, Dilexit Nos, begins to lay out a Catholic response to the “epochal change” heralded by the wider use of AI tools developed using large language models. These documents also speak to the larger crisis of humanity in our time where value is reduced to productivity and human relationships are at risk of becoming ever more transactional. The objectification wrought by the “technocratic paradigm” meets a politics of objectification that refuses the humanity of the other, turning them into simply another tool for political gain, even at the cost of suffering and death. While not rejecting the good that AI might bring, Antiqua et Nova is clear-eyed about the ways that this technology risks hurrying along the reduction of humanity to transaction. Alongside Dilexit Nos, it also offers a beautiful alternative vision of the human person: one grounded in the heart.

The document begins with the basic question of intelligence, noting that AI systems “rely on statistical inference rather than logical deduction.” Inferences can be very useful for analyzing data sets and proposing new approaches to questions that might take human beings much longer to review and consider. This “intelligence” is one aimed at performing tasks and producing responses. In contrast, human intelligence is framed in terms of ratio and intellectus—referring to discursive reasoning and intuitive knowledge of truth, respectively. But in Antiqua et Nova, the emphasis falls more strongly on that intuitive knowledge, with discursive reasoning as its companion, such that human rationality is framed not in terms of particular capabilities but as an “openness” and “orientation” to reality—including questions of ultimate meaning.

The primary image given for this human intelligence is not the mind but the heart, which Francis calls the “coordinating center” of the human person in Dilexit Nos, uniting “the rational and instinctive aspects of the person.” He notes that the Western philosophical tradition has been far more comfortable speaking of the human person in terms of reason and will rather than the heart, a term not as well defined within the philosophical tradition and always at risk of becoming trite. Yet, Francis and the dicasteries both turn to this image to evoke a human intelligence that is not reducible to input and output. It is an intelligence grounded in experience, desire, moral and religious sensibilities and creativity as well as capacities for abstraction and analysis.

Technology, including large language models, Francis writes, cannot fully capture “a smile we elicited by telling a joke, a picture we sketched in the light of a window, the first game of soccer we played with a rag ball...” Centering the heart reminds us that human intelligence is always embodied, driven by desire and shaped by experience. Embracing this embodied knowing, Antiqua et Nova moves away from the dominant sensory metaphor for knowledge—sight—instead, speaking of intelligence as “the ability to savor what is true, good and beautiful.”

To savor is to take one’s time, not simply to consume but to delight in the experience of knowing. I confess to being something of a luddite, and even if I were not, the landscape and promises around AI seem to change almost daily. It may very well be that some uses of AI will allow us to savor the true, the good and the beautiful, or even that—in a vision that my own embodied intelligence can only imagine as a distant science fiction plot—AI itself will someday take on this capacity. (A colleague of mine who works in educational technology says his deepest fear is that we will someday create a genuine humanlike intelligence and then enslave it, in confirmation of the worst of human nature.) But as I read Antiqua et Nova, I was most struck by a warning from the past, in a quotation from Georges Bernanos, “the danger is not in the multiplication of machines, but in the ever-increasing number of men accustomed from their childhood to desire only what machines can give.”

Each generation frets about the next, and, as a millennial, I have certainly experienced handwringing over “your generation.” It may be that I am simply following the patterns of human behavior, passing the anxieties down from my generation to the next. But when I listen to my students speak, I can already hear what a foothold the “technocratic paradigm” has gained in their experience of the world, how transactional and objectified it often is. Added to this, the current tenor of our common life, which is the only one most of my students have known, is driven by those who Francis describes as having “foliage” covering their hearts—who have lost touch with the openness to reality of true human intelligence, substituting it for the creation of various idols. I wish for my students—and indeed, for all of us who live within this paradigm—to recall that the truest desires of our hearts far exceed what the machines provide.

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Callie Tabor is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Catholic Studies at Sacred Heart University.

Cardinal Dolan and The End of the Catholic Truce

Yesterday marked the 75^th birthday (and thus the submission of his required pro forma resignation pending appointment of a successor) of Timothy Cardinal Dolan and with it the end of an era. On the shorter-term end, Dolan is the last American cardinal archbishop appointed by Pope Benedict XVI to reach that age (Archbishop José Gómez of Los Angeles, 73, being the remaining prominent example). In the broader view, Dolan’s impending retirement signals the end of an uneasy rapprochement in American Catholicism between an ideologically and otherwise diverse church with Gospel commitments and a growing sectarian conservative movement that seeks to remake the church in its image. Ironically enough, Dolan simultaneously helped stave off and bring about the situation we now face.

Dolan’s appearances (one of which I attended at Fordham University) with Stephen Colbert, one of the most prominent and outspoken liberal Catholics in American entertainment, illustrate this fragile truce that is now breaking. This truce, which has been in effect since the 1990s, has consisted of increasingly conservative bishops taking often hard lines on social issues (and alienating many Catholics in the process) while continuing to support the church’s social justice advocacy and outreach to the poor despite protests from a vocal and well-funded right fringe. Catholic identity rooted in Gospel values could unite figures like Dolan and Colbert, or other parallel figures like Bishop Robert Barron and Fr. James Martin, allowing them to “agree to disagree” on certain things and present a public face for the church, while keeping the fringe at bay. Those fringes have become the center, increasingly taking figures like Barron with them, as I have detailed in the past.

Dolan has been notable for his prominent engagement with secular politics while keeping a lower profile on church politics. Dolan’s 2010 election as president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops—breaking the then-norm of the vice president (moderate Bishop Gerald Kicanas in that case) being elected president—was, of course, a major intervention in church politics but one that had greater repercussions in secular politics. This came in the form of Dolan’s negotiations with the Obama administration over the implementation of the contraception mandate of the Affordable Care Act. Those negotiations, in which President Obama sided with Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards over a hostile Dolan, led to the “Fortnight for Freedom” initiative framing the affair in terms of religious freedom. This whole matter was a bungle by the Obama administration (against the counsel of then-Vice President Joe Biden who thought the approach needlessly confrontational), but Dolan and his USCCB were instrumental in weaponizing it as a culture war issue.

In all of this, Dolan was carrying out a vision for the church characteristic of the Benedict XVI era. This meant asserting a robust Catholic identity, even at the cost of alienating Catholics who had grown comfortable with cultural and moral developments—most notably LGBTQIA+ acceptance—that challenged church teaching. While Benedict’s comments about a future of a “smaller, purer church” were misinterpreted as more sectarian than they actually were (they are distinct but not that far from Karl Rahner’s statement that in the future every Christian would be a mystic), the logic of prelates like Dolan was to accept an attrition of disaffected Catholics of a liberal bent in trade for a critical mass of intentional conservative Catholics who would form the core evangelizing force for the church.

The election of Pope Francis threw a wrench in Dolan’s best-laid plans. He was notably one of the Cardinals who expressed “buyer’s remorse” about Francis, clearly influenced by donors who disliked the Pope’s social justice emphasis. However, he did not settle into the public anti-Francis culture warrior stance taken with varying degrees of volume by many American bishops. He focused his energies rather on the “managed decline” of the archdiocese of New York, often at the expense of poorer parishes, and on politics where he has taken a notably friendly demeanor with Donald Trump. Dolan’s appearance to give the prayer at Trump’s inauguration, while couched with the usual deniability around partisanship, constituted a kind of final capitulation not just to the new administration but to the fringes that he had tried to stave off.

The controversy surrounding Vice President J.D. Vance’s Ordo Amoris comments—in which he tried to use ideas of St. Augustine to justify the administration’s anti-immigrant stance—illustrates the problem here. Vance is a recent convert influenced by other conservatives in the Washington Catholic scene as well as by thinkers who advocate for pro-natalism and a reimposition of traditional communitarian values as the solution to America’s cultural problems. As such, Vance feels no need even to pay lip service to the church’s social service commitments, viewing them instead through political and ideological lenses. Indeed, the bishops themselves have carried water for this approach by gutting the Catholic Campaign for Human Development following decades of right-wing attacks. Their current attempts to defend Catholic services to refugees and other groups in the face of funding cuts seem unlikely to sway the hardliners in the Trump administration despite (or perhaps because of) Catholics having swung their way in the last election.

One of the men most responsible for this situation, Brian Burch of the strategically and misleadingly named Catholic Vote PAC, now serves as United States Ambassador to the Vatican. Burch’s PAC helped bring about the HHS mandate situation through its vociferous attacks on Bart Stupak and other Catholic legislators working (out of their Catholic social justice commitments) to pass the Affordable Care Act. He has been one of the leading figures in the degradation of American Catholicism and the empowering of the right fringe. Most Catholics are now within one or two degrees of separation from a coreligionist who views Catholic social services in a QAnon manner as a front for human trafficking or other abuses, and Burch has helped to encourage this mentality. These are the kinds of people Dolan has helped to empower, while also losing much of any ability to persuade or moderate them.

It seems likely that Pope Francis will name a new archbishop of New York before he dies or Dolan turns 80; both John Cardinal O’Connor and Dolan were signature appointments of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, respectively. For those who have been disappointed by Dolan’s tenure, that will be a happy day, but it will not obscure the deeper reality of his legacy. Dolan’s episcopal motto is from the Gospel of Matthew: Ad quem ibimus? (Lord, to whom, shall we go?), which is perversely not far off from Louis XV’s infamous statement that might well have been the motto of his actual tenure: Apres moi, le déluge.

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Daniel A. Rober is a systematic theologian and Catholic studies professor at Sacred Heart University.

Remembering Fr. Gustavo Gutierrez, O.P., Pilgrim of Hope

The existence of poverty represents a sundering both of solidarity among persons and also of communion with God. Poverty is an expression ... of a negation of love. It is therefore incompatible with the coming of the Kingdom of God, a Kingdom of love and justice. Poverty is an evil, a scandalous condition ... To eliminate it is to bring closer the moment of seeing God face to face, in union with other persons.
—Father Gustavo Gutierrez

In 2024, Pope Francis issued the bull of indiction “Spes non confundit,” proclaiming 2025 the Jubilee Year of Hope and encouraging all people to cultivate hope as a “constant companion” in their daily interactions and so become, literally and figuratively, “pilgrims of hope.” The bull urges people to be optimistic yet realistic about the world, to strive for patience and to demonstrate compassion, to transform the “signs of the times” into signs of hope and to forge “a social covenant to support and foster hope, one that is inclusive and not ideological.” Not surprisingly, Pope Francis casts that covenant in the rhetorical turn of Matthew 25: where there is war, we must endeavor to create peace; where there are prisoners, we should strive for forgiveness and restoration; where there are immigrants or refugees, we should offer welcome with open hearts; and where there is poverty, we should endeavor to ameliorate economic inequities in modern society.

The Pope’s message brought to mind Fr. Gustavo Gutierrez, O.P., who died in October 2024. Fr. Gutierrez was indeed a “pilgrim of hope.” While it has been a facile distraction for some to denounce Gutierrez’s call for liberation of the poor and his impassioned witness to the moral hypocrisy of the Church (and many privileged Catholics) with the claim of theological censure, thus avoid his critique altogether. However, Pope Francis and several contemporary Catholic theologians do agree that his work was profoundly grounded in the teachings of Jesus Christ and concordant with Catholic doctrine. Gutierrez understood that to be poor was to suffer an accretion of humiliations and injustices: to be poor, as he wrote, “... means to die of hunger, to be illiterate, to be exploited by others, not to know that you are being exploited, not to know that you are a person.” He consistently reminded the Church about the inviolability of the dignity of every person, and how poverty is a moral offense against that dignity. He struggled to appraise honestly the history of the Church with regard to the poor (notably since the rise of modern capitalism in the West) and to call for a spiritual and moral renewal within the Church and among the privileged faithful. Sadly, the call is still relevant: according to the most current (2023) study by the World Bank, nearly half (47%) of the world’s population lives on less than $50 a week and of that group, about 8% live on less than $14 a week. The populations enduring the direst poverty are concentrated mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, regions of the fastest growing and largest Catholic populations worldwide.

Gutierrez persisted in hope. He anticipated that the global Church would remember itself as a living entity that must have a consequential presence in the actual lives of people, not just in its vaulted edifices but in homeless shelters and forsaken farms and border crossings and migrant refuges. He was mindful of the social risk of speaking truth to power, but also of his moral obligation. Many leaders of the Church seem too interested in remaining close to the dark halls of a brutal secular power, and a majority of Catholics (56%), with their vote in November, have stepped away from the teaching of universal human dignity and compassion for the poor. The teachings of Gutierrez remain a rebuke to such rampant hypocrisy. It is imperative for the Church to readjust its perspective and see Christ, as St. Teresa of Calcutta wrote, in the face of every person, especially the poor, the ailing and the stateless. Or, as Gutierrez explained,

Our encounter with the Lord occurs in our encounter with others, especially in the encounter with those whose human features have been disfigured by oppression, despoliation, and alienation and who have “no beauty, no majesty” but are the things “from which men turn away their eyes” (Isa. 53:2-3)

To look upon the anguish of modern society and to face it actively, sustained by faith, hope and great love, is to encounter the Lord. So we are called during these troubled times.

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June-Ann Greeley is a medievalist and professor of Catholic studies, theology and religious studies at Sacred Heart University.

Kasper’s Suggestion

Back around 1979, I had occasion to visit a Jesuit colleague of mine, the late John Macken, who was doing doctoral studies in Tubingen under Walter Kasper. John invited me to accompany him to a lecture his Doctorvater Kasper was giving. It happened that at the time there was a good deal of controversy at Tubingen owing to the Vatican withdrawing Hans Kung’s license to teach Catholic theology. Before the lecture began, one of the large group of students took over the podium and demanded that Kasper address the issue around Kung. Feelings were running high in the auditorium. Kasper calmly refused, and over half the students walked out in protest.

But then, in the middle of his lecture, Kasper did indeed address, at least obliquely, the burning issue of the day. He noted, in a throwaway comment, that for a long time the Roman authorities had been trying to woo German theological professors to come to Rome to teach in the Roman Catholic universities and serve in various Vatican departments, but that the take up had been poor. Kasper speculated the reason to be the superior conditions of remuneration and standard of living in German universities at the time. It was all said very calmly and matter of factly, but the implications were pointed.

I thought of that later when Kasper himself went to Rome to serve as prefect of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. In the meantime, he had a distinguished career as a theological professor, was ordained bishop in 1989 and appointed a cardinal in 2001. I met him personally in Dublin in 1989 when I spoke at a conference organized by the Irish Theological Association at which he was a keynote speaker. He was affable, moderate and yet not afraid to take a position. He subsequently locked theological horns with Joseph Ratzinger on a number of occasions (most notably in a learned discussion on the priorities of the local and the universal in ecclesiology), promoted the view that divorced and remarried Catholics should be eligible to receive communion (a position Pope Francis came some way to meet in Amoris Laetitia) and has been critical of the synodal pathway in the German Church.

Against this background, I found his recent suggestion on the issue of the female diaconate intriguing. He is reported as saying that in his opinion the ordination of women as deacons is theologically possible and pastorally meaningful. “There are good reasons that make it theologically possible and pastorally sensible to open the permanent diaconate to women … each local church would be free to decide whether to make use of this possibility or not.”

There are two aspects of this opinion that are intriguing. First, Kasper makes it clear that he had struggled with the answer to this question for some time (he is now in his 90s). He notes the historical evidence, not just of female diaconate, but also of development, in what we now call the Sacrament of Orders, in response to pastoral needs. He makes it clear that he is speaking of the permanent diaconate, not diaconate as a transitional stage to priestly ordination. But all this begs the question: why not, then, priestly ordination? Certainly, as Phyllis Zagano of this parish has noted, within the “unicity of orders” framework, the argument that women cannot be ordained deacons because they cannot be ordained priests can easily be turned around—“since women can be ordained as deacons … women can be ordained as priests.” Surely the historical evidence shows that the whole structure of orders developed primarily in response to pastoral needs, so that, as Karl Rahner argued in response to Inter Insigniores, the burden of proof now lies with those (the official Magisterium) who insist that the Church has no authority to ordain women? Are we not in danger of prioritizing ressourcement over aggiornamento in an historical positivism which, against Congar and historical evidence, would argue that only that which has occurred in the past is permissible in the future?

The second aspect is even more intriguing. It is clear post-Synod that while the question of female diaconate has been left open, there is nothing like a consensus around it yet in the universal Church. In this context is it imaginable that, as Kasper suggests, this might be something left to each local Church, while allowing of course some powers of veto to Rome in order to ensure ongoing communion? Perhaps providentially this is the kind of vista opened up by a study document entitled “The Bishop of Rome,” which has fed into the synodal study group on the Petrine ministry. This document, a summary of ecumenical dialogues and responses to the invitation of John Paul II in Ut Unum Sint to reimagine the Petrine ministry as a service of love and unity, time and again recommends consideration of strengthening the authority (including doctrinal authority) of local and regional synods/councils/episcopal conferences. Might it be conceivable that in non-dogmatic matters the Catholic Church might become more open to a local/regional reading of the “signs of the times,” that it would be unwise and indeed unjust to impose on regions of a quite different moral and cultural sensibility?

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Gerry O’Hanlon is an Irish Jesuit theologian and author.

Women: Protagonists in a Synodal Church

Many Catholic women followed the October 2023 and 2024 sessions of the Synodal Assembly For a Synodal Church with a sense of hope and anticipation. When, following an extensive global consultation, the document for the continental stage, “Enlarge the Space of your Tent” devoted more space to women’s experience than to any other issue, they began—after a long exile—to feel seen and heard. That report recorded the “urgent and critical” necessity of rethinking women’s participation at every level of ecclesial life. Women, who constitute “the majority of the practicing … and active members of the church” and were “most committed to the synodal process” consistently experience themselves as misunderstood and their contributions as not valued. While they share a “common baptismal dignity” with all other members of the church, lay and religious women in every cultural context find few spaces to “make their voices heard” as they are systematically “excluded from decision-making processes.”

Three principal issues emerged and were proposed as means to foster a substantial increase in women’s participation in ecclesial life: “the active role of women in the governing structures of the Church bodies, the possibility for women with adequate training to preach in parish settings and a female diaconate.” The media and many North American groups have focused so much on the last of these considerations—the ordination of women to the diaconate—that important progress in other areas risks being neglected or lost from view.

The Synthesis Report of the first session of the assembly devoted an entire section of reflections and proposals to “Women in the Life and Mission of the Church,” affirming the equality of their baptismal dignity and co-responsibility. It urged that women be considered not “as an issue or a problem,” but rather as “protagonists, without subordination, exclusion and competition.” Further, it commended an increase in opportunities for the participation of women in processes of decision-making and for greater responsibility in pastoral ministry. It advocated for just working conditions and a fair wage, greater access to theological studies and an increase in the presence of women in centers of theological education, seminary formation and canonical tribunals.

While in some cultures women are just beginning to overcome these barriers, they are unlikely to strike North American women as revolutionary. Since the Second Vatican Council, women on this continent have enjoyed access to theological studies. They serve on parish and diocesan councils, shoulder a large share of pastoral ministry, work as catechists, formators, spiritual directors, canon lawyers, diocesan chancellors, professors of theology and more.

The first generations of women to step into these new roles following the Second Vatican Council discovered a new consciousness of their baptismal identity as perhaps the greatest source of their liberation. Yet to this day, few receive material support from their local communities as they pursue their education and training for ministry. Often, they navigate the path of vocational discernment and formation in the absence of structures or processes of accompaniment. As the synodal consultation revealed, their positions remain highly precarious, not meaningfully integrated into diocesan structures. Too often taken for granted, their contributions are not valued and at times are perceived as a direct threat to clerical power. A synodal conversion is needed if we are to overcome the competitive dynamic that inhibits the full witness of women and men in communion. Such a conversion might also pave the way toward a welcoming of women’s gifts in a fully restored permanent diaconate—a question that remains open, as the final document affirms.

The second session focused on the structural dimensions of synodality, the how, asking what needs to change in the structures and practices of the church at every level for a more synodal and participative culture to take root. The question of women’s participation was not relegated entirely to a study group. Each time the final document reflects on the participation and co-responsibility of the baptized faithful in any aspect of ecclesial life, it envisions women and men collaborating and witnessing together.

A much-neglected area of progress relates to the inclusion of women’s stories in the prayer and teaching of the church, in addition to the use of inclusive language. The final document asks, “that more attention be given to the language and images used in preaching, teaching, catechesis and the drafting of official Church documents, giving more space to the contributions of female saints, theologians and mystics.” While this plea might seem a small thing and has yet to be met by concrete action, it is no small achievement. After decades of counterproductive debate on the correct approach to the translation and adaptation of liturgical texts, or the need to include a wider selection of biblical stories that reflect women’s experience, an inclusive approach is now proposed as an obligatory path for every local church, for translations into every language and for the acts of the universal church. Such a commitment must be seen as the fruition of the painstaking effort of women scholars who have sought to retrieve the forgotten voices of women in the scriptures and the broad tradition of the church.

In recent weeks Pope Francis has continued to follow the trajectory sketched out by the Synod on Synodality by naming competent women to positions of leadership within the Roman Curia and to the Council of the Synod. There is still a long road ahead before the vision of the synod takes flesh in the local churches. Without women as full protagonists, there can be no synodal renewal.

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Catherine E. Clifford, is a professor at Saint Paul University, Ontario.

The Catholic Abuse Crisis Is So Over

It was probably inevitable that American Catholics would eventually move on from the clergy sexual abuse crisis. But I’m still surprised that when they did, it wasn’t a matter of “scandal fatigue” as much as a conscious decision that sex abuse really wasn’t that big of a deal after all. That’s effectively what happened when a clear majority of Catholic voters—and nearly six in 10 white Catholic voters—went for serial sex pest Donald Trump over Kamala Harris in the presidential election last November. Catholic enthusiasm for Trump makes the Catholic cohort Trump’s most reliable religious voting bloc after white evangelicals and, given the strategic importance of the Catholic vote in swing states, Catholic votes made Trump the next president. The outcome of the presidential balloting also made sexual predation a feature of the nation’s preferred leadership model rather than a disqualification.

How is it that Catholics who professed to being so scarred by the church’s betrayal in covering for abusive clerics that they stopped going to Mass suddenly found themselves ready and willing to flock to the voting booth to pull the lever for someone like Donald Trump? How is it that they could be fine with the incoming president picking men like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Matt Gaetz and Pete Hegseth and Elon Musk as top officials and advisers despite the slurry of appalling allegations of sexual misconduct and infidelities, cover-ups and even sex trafficking?

American Catholics who had been furious over the church’s clergy abuse crisis suddenly had no problem supporting a president and nominees for top education and law enforcement positions who would be barred from ever working in a Catholic school or parish. Nor were these Catholic voters too concerned about opening the church up to the kind of jabs they would have once decried as intolerable Catholic baiting: “GOP to quietly move Matt Gaetz to a new parish,” as one social media commenter quipped when Gaetz was finally forced to withdraw as Trump’s nominee for attorney general.

No pushback was possible, and none was forthcoming. To denounce the alleged abusers would have hurt Team Trump. Perhaps this outcome was also foreseeable. Catholics who had for decades seen the church primarily as another useful front in the culture wars naturally saw the abuse scandal as another useful weapon against their foes. The victims were secondary. In 2002, at the height of the abuse crisis, the conservative law professor and future ambassador to the Holy See, Mary Ann Glendon, criticized church reform efforts sparked by the scandal and famously declared that “awarding the Pulitzer Prize to the Boston Globe would be like giving the Nobel Peace Prize to Osama bin Laden.” 

In her recent memoir, Glendon did not attempt to revise or even moderate her opinion but instead doubled down on her criticism of the media for its “misleading” coverage and defended John Paul II as the one whose guidance the church should have followed—despite the damning evidence that has continued to emerge of the late pope’s terrible failures to address the abuses. Similarly, conservative culture warriors like the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue have continued to frame the abuse crisis as the fault of gay priests who he regularly defamed as equivalent to pedophiles. Donohue recently went so far as to tar the National Catholic Reporter as “ideologically responsible for the clergy sexual abuse scandal.” That redefines chutzpah given that NCR more than any other outlet was responsible for breaking the clergy abuse scandal.

Last summer, when the Vatican expelled leaders of an elite conservative Peruvian religious community following allegations of physical and sexual abuse, cult-like behavior and “sadism and violence,” among other things, American friends and allies of the disgraced leaders of the society rushed to their defense. “The problem with the Vatican’s latest intervention is the odor of excess, canonical looseness, ecclesial payback, personal vendetta and ideological resentment that clings to it,” Francis X. Maier, a friend and admirer of many of the accused, wrote in one of several articles defending the SCV in the journal First Things.

That First Things hosted such attacks against victims and defenses of abusers is especially resonant given that the journal’s late founder and editor, Richard John Neuhaus, used those same pages to categorically defend Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the Legionaries of Christ, and one of the most depraved clerical abusers who benefited from decades of studious incuriosity during the papacy of John Paul II. 

The saga of former cardinal Theodore McCarrick is another case in point. In June 2018, Pope Francis removed McCarrick, by then 88 and long retired, from ministry and eventually laicized him following credible accusations of child abuse. But conservatives suddenly found in the McCarrick case a chance to appear as crusaders against abuse by trying to hang the McCarrick case on Francis and on any bishop seen as allied with the pope’s reformist vision for the church. This propagandizing required a prodigious amount of historical rewriting and bottomless credulity, but the partisans would not be deterred. The latest iteration of this dynamic occurred when Francis this month named San Diego’s Cardinal Robert McElroy to Washington. Conservative critics mobilized, bending space and time so as to make McElroy—separated by decades and an entire continent from McCarrick—somehow responsible for the former cardinal’s predatory career. It would be absurd if it weren’t so awful, and ironic.

The consistent through line of the Catholic abuse crisis has always been that the bishops were the bad guys and that lay Catholics would be the ones with the sense of justice and moral outrage to set things right. That narrative doesn’t hold any longer. Combatting sexual abuse was supposed to be a unifying commitment in a polarized church, and an issue that Catholics would be remembered for. The presidential vote and other developments show instead that the sexual abuse scandal was for all too many Catholics just another tool to advance an agenda—diminishing real abuse to protect their allies and generating imagined scenarios to hurt their foes.

It feels like we are back where we started.

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David Gibson is a journalist and author and director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University.