“Arbitrariness creates fear and mistrust,” the senior prelate said. “It undermines mutual trust,” he said. “Nothing can be relied on anymore,” he said.
The senior prelate was Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, emeritus of Vienna and a fellow on anyone’s short list of the most erudite living churchmen. Schönborn, it happens, was speaking of US President Donald Trump.
“What is currently happening in the USA is extremely dangerous,” Schönborn told the Austrian daily Heute (Today) newspaper in a piece published two Fridays ago.
His remarks are the more startling for their having appeared even before the explosive letter from Pope Francis on Trump’s immigration policy, which Charley Collins aptly described as a “seismic shift” in a trenchant analysis for Crux.
Across the spectrum of opinion in both the Church and the world, one will find people either cheering or jeering the Trump administration’s management of affairs in Europe (and/or Francis’s surprising irruption into US domestic affairs). Whatever one thinks of either, the past few weeks have seen cascading disruption.
We certainly do live in interesting times, and they are only more interesting as one realizes Schönborn’s remarks regarding the dangers of arbitrary government may as well apply to the Vatican and the Church under Pope Francis.
Take, for example, Pope Francis’s recent extension of the terms of the dean and vice-dean of the College of Cardinals.
In 2019, Francis changed the law so that both offices would no longer be lifetime appointments but renewable five-year mandates. It is fair to think of the dean’s office as a sort of unofficial concierge for visiting red hats while there is a pope reigning. The office is extremely important during an interregnum, however, since the dean of the College organizes the conclave for the election of the next pope and arranges the meetings ahead of the conclave.
The positions of dean and vice-dean are filled by election, with the so-called Cardinal Bishops – the “senior” members of the College – getting a vote. In 2018, Francis expanded the ranks of the Cardinal Bishops, historically limited to the cardinal-bishops of Rome’s suburbicarian sees, to include several senior Roman curial cardinals.
Ostensibly, the expansion was to allow for broader consultation and participation in the election of a dean, but Francis skipped the election process and renewed the mandates of the 91-year-old Giovanni Battista Re and the 81-year-old Leonardo Sandri as dean and vice-dean, respectively.
The practical upshot of the pope’s move is that Re and Sandri, both aged out of voting in the next election, will organize the next conclave, while the not-yet-80-year-old cardinal secretary of state, Pietro Parolin, will run the thing when it begins in the Sistine Chapel.
More broadly, the whole business – about which there is more strangeness, for example the staggering of the renewals by a week, with Francis renewing Re’s mandate and then Sandri’s almost as an afterthought – raises a prior question: Why go through the trouble of changing the law at all?
When Francis first gave the dean’s office a renewable five-year term, Cardinal Angelo Sodano was still in the job. Sodano was the nonagenarian former eminence grise of Pope St. John Paul II whose management of the 2005 conclave saw the election of Benedict XVI and whose record of service included entanglement in the affairs of figures like the notorious founder of the Legion of Christ, Marcial Maciel, and the infamous Theodore Edgar “Uncle Ted” McCarrick.
Wanting to see Sodano gone sooner rather than later is eminently understandable. Francis may have changed the law to make Sodano’s resignation a matter of normale amministrazione. Then, however, he effectively ignored the changes the next time around.
That does not inspire limitless confidence in the rule of law as a going concern in the Vatican.
There are a host of other ways in which Francis has used law as an ad hoc solution to particular problems.
Francis has issued well over sixty changes to Church law through Apostolic Letters issued motu proprio – on his own initiative – and a host of decrees, rescripts, and other acts of special and general legislation, many of which have overridden earlier acts Francis had taken, and many others of which have overlapped with one another.
Canon lawyers with whom I’ve spoken tell me this has created a situation in which even leading legal experts sometimes hardly know what the law is, let alone how to interpret or apply it.
Regaining a sense of equilibrium, of regularity, of normale amministrazione, will be one of the many tasks to which Francis’s successor – whoever he will be, whenever he will come – will have to apply himself with some alacrity.
Exactly how to go about addressing that problem will be a problem of its own, with pitfalls and perils and other potential hazards attendant, consideration of which cannot wait forever.
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Schönborn, impresario who entertained himself and an audience of rabble with gay men dancing on the communion rails in Vienna’s St Stephen’s cathedral. He finds Trump unsettling? Innocent bystander of Vatican debauchery?
“Canon lawyers with whom I’ve spoken tell me this has created a situation in which even leading legal experts sometimes hardly know what the law is, let alone how to interpret or apply it” (Altieri). It’s difficult not to suspect this is canonical sabotage. After all His Holiness hates laws.
The ones who are dangerous are Pope Francis and his minions like Schonborn. Hierarchs of our Church ought to stay in their own lane and leave secular government to those whom the voters chose. I remind both Francis, Schonborn, and Company that no Catholic layman elected any of them.
Altieri’s article as well as Cdl Schönborn deserve better than my comment. Schönborn has made very positive comments on Doctrine and defense of the faith. It’s hard to gauge where he actually stands because of moments like the Vienna Cathedral abomination. Perhaps a fault of inconsistency frequented among intellectuals who find reason to condone the absurd. He does lean toward tolerance of homosexuality and unions. Again, regarding Canon law made into a maze of conflicts by Francis, that will have the effect of impeding efforts to maintain defense of the faith and doctrinal orthodoxy.
Trump poses a danger to Pope Francis as well as Cdl Schönborn because his policies are counter to immigration, the environment – and as recently came to fore during VP Vance’s criticism of free speech in Europe. Europeans, the Germans especially, as well as the Vatican [ironically] do not observe free speech. As much as Pope Francis trumpets freedom, free speech, disagreement with him on matters that are not binding is not tolerated.
What likely worries Schönborn and Francis is Trump’s growing influence among Catholics, and potentially the USCCB. Will the bishops finally relinquish the agenda of a dead political party and support Trump [Archbishop Broglio highly praised Trump’s effort to end human trafficking at the southern border]? Trump’s election is already benefiting what we hold sacred, the value of human life including in the womb, the principle that there are exclusively two genders. Our Vatican has made both secondary in comparison to global matters, and the dignity of illegal migrants.
Well said, Father Peter.
Father, I prefer to focus on what is correct and true rather than who said what – Trump versus the Pope. Nothing Trump is saying is novel, unique, or new, but some of his statements echo the truths of Tradition. Anyone that conflicts with Tradition and Truth is standing on a foundation of sand and speaking something other than the truths of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
As an aside, Francis will not have a successor, St. Peter will.
The next Pope will need to a establish a Dicastery of Church Effectiveness (DOCE), to root out the filth and rot that infests the hierarchy.
Good idea, you’d probably find plenty of waste. What parallel to Elon Musk could you find in the Catholic world to appoint for such a position?
A good and simple priest or monk, who avoid the public acclaim and has more questions than answers.
You can find the rot in government when data analysts discover there’s 22M centenarians to be found on Social Security rules; but the Census bureau claims less than 100,000.
The Church is more a qualitative than quantitative thing. If something cannot be explained simply to a reasonable person, possessed of deep faith, a reasonable intellect and humility, it probably isn’t right.
“Canon lawyers with whom I’ve spoken tell me this has created a situation in which even leading legal experts sometimes hardly know what the law is, let alone how to interpret or apply it.”
Francis is many things, many bad things, but he’s not stupid. This level of confusion is intentional on his part. He knows exactly what he’s doing.
I find Cardinal Schonborn’s comments disappointing, especially when juxtaposed with his amazing work on the Catechism.
The Church is different to civil societies. It is of divine right. Civil societies are not. There is no principle of subsidiarity in the Church. In civil there is, or should be. There is no mechanism for “impeaching” the Pope, and cannot be, as long as the Church remains the Body of Christ. Civil society, on the other hand, is a natural institution, flowing from human nature and the individuals that make it up, to whom it is responsible, and who can legitimately overthrow and reconstitute civil authorities. It is frustrating to live in the kind of Church established by Christ, however, this foundation also gave us the limits to what the Pope is capable of: he cannot lose the faith. Nobody else has this personal guarantee. We might not like living in the Church when it looks like the leaning tower of Pisa, but we have been promised that the papacy and the Church will never fall.
Would it surprise you if Francis changed the law that the College of Cardinals selects the next Pope so that Francis himself personally picked his successor?
I’ve been wondering the same thing for many, many months now. After the announcement of the next sede vacante (whenever it comes), will we suddenly hear that a conclave is not necessary–that Francis has already named his successor?
Sort of like what Biden did with his intended successor?
Where do overseas high prelates get their information on what is going on
in the U.S.? How well informed are they?
They’re progressives, so that means they’re pretty much not informed at all 🙄.
We read: “Arbitrariness creates fear and mistrust.” Yo, linear thinkers…how about the inverse—that fear and mistrust also create arbitrariness?
Two different notions, plus an observation:
FIRST, a narcissist president who is willing to make some needed moves, but who’s two-dimensional, deal-making fixation leads him to play checkers on a three-dimensional chessboard? This with a pawn/court jester mouthing budget “efficiency” while unwittingly firing air traffic controllers, and upending financially fragile American surplus-crop farming by guillotining the Agency for International Development? Myopic attention to surficial numbers without also suspecting the more complex connectedness of things…
SECOND, Trump has done over 60 executive orders, and Pope Francis over 60 motu proprio. And yet, might the applicable and coherent—not entirely “arbitrary”—model or paradigm-shift (!) be found in “chaos theory”?….
“While most traditional science [even political science, or even canon law] deals with supposedly predictable phenomena like gravity, electricity, or chemical reactions [or the permanence of unsustainable deficit spending, or the spirit thought to operate through town-hall/synodal roundtables], Chaos Theory deals with nonlinear things that are effectively impossible to predict or control, like turbulence, weather, the stock market, our brain states, and so on [like the Law of Unexpected Consequences, or like the predictable blowback from Fiducia Supplicans].
THIRD, about such arbitrary, chaos-theory phenomena, it’s biblical! “If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?” (Psalms 11:3).
Might it be that in such a fallen world, the only “foundation” that lasts and is to be trusted is the revealed Deposit of Faith, together with the sacramental Apostolic Succession tracing forward from the words and hands of the incarnate and central Jesus Christ—the “Word made flesh” (John 1:14)?
One only need to compare and contrast the Pope’s decisions with respect to Bishop Strickland with Father James Martin.
The Executive Branch usurping the “power of the purse” function from the Legislative Branch or Congress is arbitrary and not conservative. It is a right wing power grab. Unfortunately, Congress is infested with cowards and right wing kooks and will do nothing.
You realize that no one here takes these NPR talking points seriously, right?
Read the Constitution (if you can).
William, come to your senses. There is a cure for TDS.
I had the privilege of sitting next to Cardinal Schönborn at a meal in the school dining hall where one of my children was attending college. I’ve been so disappointed in what I’ve read about him since.
What is currently happening in the Austrian Church is extremely dangerous.