The Mestre resignation is a mess on multiple levels

The Archbishop of La Plata, Argentina, has renounced his see less than a year after taking it. A terse statement in the daily bulletin from the press office of the Holy See announced on Monday morning that Pope Francis accepted the resignation of 55-year-old Archbishop Gabriel Antonio Mestre after only eight and a half months in office.

The press office gave no hint of a reason for the resignation, but a statement from Mestre on Monday said Francis demanded his resignation over something to do with Mestre’s former see, the similarly named Mar del Plata, which Mestre governed from August 2017 until July 2023.

Troubled Sees

Mar del Plata appears to be in some significant trouble.

Two bishops-elect resigned the government of Mar del Plata before they were installed. José María Baliña and Gustavo Larrazábal were each appointed by Pope Francis to succeed Mestre in Mar del Plata. Each quit before starting. The See of Mar del Plata is still vacant.

“[Some] [d]ays ago,” Mestre said in his statement on Monday, “the Holy See summoned me to Rome to discuss some aspects of the Diocese of Mar del Plata after my transfer to the Archdiocese of La Plata,” which is where Mestre went when Francis made him the head of it.

“[A]fter confronting some different perceptions with what occurred in the Diocese of Mar del Plata from November 2023 to the present,” Mestre’s statement continued, “Pope Francis asked me to resign from the La Plata see.”

Mestre reports that he did so “with profound peace and total rectitude of conscience before God for how I acted, trusting that the Truth makes us free, and with filial and theological obedience to the Holy Father.”

Nothing to see here

There’s no word about what, precisely, supposedly transpired in Mar del Plata between November 2023 and the present. More importantly, there’s no word about why anything as may have transpired in Mar del Plata after Mestre left should require Mestre to answer for it.

What’s really worrying, however, is Mestre’s protestation of “total rectitude of conscience” in the absence of any specific reason to think he may not have.

There’s something fishy about the whole business, start to finish, and it’ll be local reporters who burn shoe leather to say just what is causing the stink, but there’s a reason we say that fish rots from the head down.

Competent comms people see this sort of thing from miles away. The really good ones see them beyond the horizon. The great ones see them coming around corners. Given even a little bit of a “Heads up!” any half-decent flack will keep his principal clear of the impact zone when whatever is coming does hit.

Smart principals put their flacks in position to see things coming and give them the information they need to get in front of stories. Smart principals have their comms people in the room and on the watchtower.

Avoidable disaster

La Plata became vacant in July 2023, when Pope Francis plucked the man who was then styled Archbishop Victor Manuel “Tucho” Fernandez out of that see and set him up in the corner office of the doctrine dicastery in Rome, where the fellow now styled Cardinal Tucho has not been an entirely uncontroversial presence.

Mestre was Pope Francis’s pick to succeed Tucho in La Plata, and he is now out after significantly less than a year.

Both men Francis picked to succeed Mestre in Mar del Plata quit before they even started.

So, they’re all problematic—though very differently so—and they’re all Pope Francis’s guys.

Baliña, the first of the two men named to succeed Mestre in Mar del Plata, struggled after ocular surgery and decided he really oughtn’t take up the new assignment.

Larrazábal, on the other hand, had allegations against him from at least one woman, of harassment and abuse of power.

The nunciature in Argentina apparently knew something, since they issued a statement of support for Larrazábal and downplaying unspecified rumors about his conduct and character.

It is fair to wonder whether Francis personally knew about either fellow’s struggles, and fair to ask who knew what about whom and when, and fair to think Francis ought to have known in any case, but leave all that aside for the moment.

For a comms pro, it should have been easy to spin this as the work of a hands-on leader who acts with alacrity when problems come to light.

Whatever is going on in Argentina and in Rome—it bears mention that Tucho was in to see the Holy Father on Monday morning—selling it to the public as the result of a pope who governs without fear or favor should have been straightforward.

Pope Francis has a very big comms outfit full of supremely competent professionals—I mean the people in Comms who actually do things—champing at the bit and rearing to go. They want to do their job, which is to get in front of stories like this one and shape the narrative for their principal. The Vatican’s comms apparatchiks have strong relationships with journalists in Rome and around the world, as well as copious experience with just this sort of work and lots of great ideas.

Just ask them.

In fairness to Pope Francis, there is a long history of cutting the comms people out of comms work.

One thinks of the Williamson debacle under Benedict XVI, when the press office announced the lifting of the excommunication declared on four SSPX bishops—billed as a “rehabilitation” though it really wasn’t—the holocaust-denying Richard Williamson among them. There were plenty of people in several comms outfits who would have told the decision-makers he was a kook. If anyone ever asked any of them, I’ve never heard of it.

That one was particularly egregious, but it was neither the first nor the last. Examples abound. Under Francis, dysfunction has become the order of the day. Cutting Comms out of comms is now standard operating procedure.

One can imagine Pope Francis in the place of Strother Martin’s Captain, saying: “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”

Indeed.