The world loves its own!
From Sandro Magister
Francis, the First Pope Lauded by Secular Opinion
It is the true novelty of the success of this pontificate. John Paul II and Benedict XVI also had very high approval ratings, or even higher. But only among the faithful. On the outside there was tough opposition
by Sandro Magister
ROME, March 27, 2014 – Francis has rounded the corner of his first year driven by an immense popularity. But there is nothing new in this. In 2008 Benedict XVI had also reached identical levels of consensus. And John Paul II had been even more popular, and for many years afterward.
The novelty is something else. With Francis, for the first time in ages a pope is being lauded not only by his own, but almost more so by those on the outside, by secular public opinion, by the secular media, by governments and international organizations.
Even the report of a UN commission that at the beginning of February ferociously attacked the Church spared him, bowing to that “who am I to judge?” now universally taken up as the emblematic motto of the “openness” of this pontificate.
Not with his two predecessors. At the apogee of their popularity they had the Christian people on their side. But all the others were against them.
In fact, the more the “age” opposed the pope, the larger the pope himself loomed. The magazine “Time” dedicated the man of the year cover to John Paul II in 1994, the year of the pitched battle that he waged, almost alone against the rest of the world and the American administration foremost, before, during, and after the UN conference in Cairo on birth control and therefore, according to the pope, for “the systematic death of the unborn.”
Karol Wojtyla had made 1994 the year of the family because he saw it threatened and attacked, when instead at the approach of the new millennium, in the vision of the pope, it should have shone as at the beginning of creation, male and female, increase and multiply, and “let man not separate what God has united.”
In 1994 John Paul II also wrote a letter to the bishops to reiterate the ‘no’ on communion for the divorced and remarried. And he spoke another categorical ‘no’ on women priests. And the previous year he dedicated an encyclical, “Veritatis Splendor,” to the natural and supernatural foundations of moral decisions, against the autonomy of the individual conscience. And the following year he published another encyclical, “Evangelium Vitae,” a scathing indictment of abortion and euthanasia.
Not only that. On the chessboard of international politics as well pope Wojtyla had much of the world against him. Between 1990 and 1991 he opposed the UN-supported first Gulf war with all his strength, while between 1992 and 1993 he called ceaselessly for a humanitarian “intervention” in the Balkans, which found no hearers until it was too late. And yet precisely those were the years of John Paul II’s greatest popularity, the decade that stretches from 1987 to 1996.
Proof of this is found in the surveys of the Washington-based Pew Research Center among the Catholics of the United States, which are also an excellent test for the substantial presence of a “liberal” current among them.
The more John Paul II was dismissed by secular opinion as obscurantist and backward, the higher his popularity among Catholics was. During that decade it was stable at 93 percent in favor, about ten points higher than Pope Francis today and Benedict XVI in 2008.
The arc of Pope Joseph Ratzinger is also exemplary, Just after he was elected, in 2005, his popularity among Catholics was low, at 67 percent, with only 17 percent saying they were very favorable. But he gradually won greater consensus, in spite of the rigor with which he criticized the challenges of modernity.
Secular opinion was entirely against him, even in his own backyard, to the point of denying him access to the state university of Rome to deliver a talk. It was the beginning of 2008, and shortly afterward he was scheduled to go to the United States, home of the most implacable secular criticism against the Church and the pope on the explosive terrain of pedophilia. And yet it was precisely during and after that voyage that Benedict XVI reached the height of his popularity among Catholics.
The lesson that can be gathered from this is that a pope’s success among the faithful is not automatically connected to his pliability on crucial questions. Two intransigent popes like John Paul II and Benedict XVI registered very high popularity levels.
The “openness” of a pope to modernity can instead explain the consensus he gets from the outside, from secular opinion. This seems to be the novelty of Francis.
A novelty that deep down he mistrusts. He said in his recent interview with “Corriere della Sera”: “I don’t like a certain mythology of Pope Francis. Sigmund Freud said, if I am not mistaken, that in every idealization there is an aggression.”
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This commentary was published in “L’Espresso” no. 13 of 2014, on newsstands as of March 28, on the opinion page entitled “Settimo cielo” entrusted to Sandro Magister.
Here is the index of all the previous commentaries:
> “L’Espresso” in seventh heaven
__________
The latest survey of the Pew Research Center, with comparisons with the previous popes:
> U.S. Catholics View Pope Francis as a Change for the Better
__________
It must be noted that the applause of secular opinion for the “openness” of Pope Francis goes on without a hitch even in the presence of his explicit statements of an opposite nature, which are ignored or tamed down.
Two examples should suffice.
The first concerns women priests.
On this point pope Bergoglio has spoken out unequivocally and definitively against. He wrote in “Evangelii Gaudium,” the action plan of his pontificate: “The reservation of the priesthood to males . . . is not a question open to discussion.”
But as if nothing had happened, last March 14 “Corriere della Sera” drew upon the interview given by Bergoglio to this same newspaper a few days before to print the headline: “Women and the priesthood. The openness of Pope Francis.”
In reality, in the interview, to a question on how he intended to promote the role of woman in the Church, Bergoglio had replied:
“It is true that woman can and must be more present in the Church’s decision-making. But I would call this a promotion of a functional type. On its own this approach doesn’t make much of a difference.”
But it was enough for a highly authoritative editorialist of the flagship newspaper of the Lombard middle class, the ambassador Sergio Romano, to “translate” the pope’s words as follows, certain that he was unveiling his true thinking:
“It is not right to call women to be part of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in order to take advantage of their knowledge, and at the same time exclude them from the priesthood.”
A second example concerns legislation on homosexual marriage and euthanasia.
On this point as well Bergoglio’s interview with “Corriere della Sera” gave the opportunity for another leading author of this newspaper, Aldo Cazzullo, to write approvingly in a front-page editorial of March 20 that “the Church has given signs of openness to dialogue, starting with its moving beyond the very expression ‘non-negotiable values,’ as Pope Francis clarified in the interview.”
In effect, the pope’s reply was the following:
“I have never understood the expression ‘non-negotiable values.’ Values are values and that’s all, I cannot say that among the fingers of one hand there is one less useful than another. That is why I do not understand in what sense there can be negotiable values.”
According to these words of his, it is therefore not true that for Pope Francis any value is negotiable. On the contrary, taken at face value, he seems paradoxically to be saying the opposite.
But the secular exegesis of these words is the same everywhere, regardless of Bergoglio’s repeated and unequivocal statements that he adheres to Church doctrine. Pope Francis – it is maintained – has broken with non-negotiable values and has opened up to “dialogue.”
That is, he has opened up – as “Corriere” explained in the same editorial and as shared by secular opinion on the whole – to the “civil and religious mercy” of the new laws on civil unions and the end of life. Mercy that “must prevail over ideological models and over indifference toward the real life and suffering of others.”
The formula of non-negotiable principles (“principles,” to be precise, not “values”) had appeared in the magisterium of the Roman Church for the first time in the “Doctrinal note on on some questions regarding the participation of Catholics in political life” published in 2002 by the congregation for the doctrine of the faith, headed at the time by Cardinal Ratzinger:
> Doctrinal Note…
As pope, Ratzinger revisited the formula for the first time in the speech addressed on March 30, 2006 to the participants at a conference organized by the European People’s Party:
> “Honourable Parliamentarians…”
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