Caminante - Wanderer
Buenos Aires
July 3, 2023
A few weeks ago, when we learned of the appointment of Archbishop García Cuerva as the new Archbishop of Buenos Aires, I commented in this blog that Pope Francis had already let go of Bishop Tucho Fernández's hand. A reader sent a comment saying that, in reality, the Supreme Pontiff was reserving Tucho for Prefect of the Doctrine of the Faith. I did not publish the comment because I do not publish nonsense. And in view of the news we woke up to last Saturday, I must say that the reader was not wrong, but I was not wrong either, since this appointment is nonsense or, better yet, a catastrophe.
The fact deserves an analysis from several perspectives. If we focus on the person in question, and from his public antecedents that I summarized in the previous entry, it is clear that he is the most inadequate person for the position to which he was elevated. Bishop Fernandez has no doctrine and his Catholic faith is more than doubtful.
The first statement is proven if one approaches any of the copies of his profuse bibliographic production. We are not talking here about his best-known El arte de besar ("The Art of Kissing"). Choose any of his other books and you will see that they are always bulky and appropriate for the reading of older and disenchanted nuns; a kind of light self-help with Christian coloring.
And as for his faith, listening to what he says in his homilies or writes in the press; it is not reckless to doubt the Catholic character of what he believes. Cardinal Müller himself, in 2016, being prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, called him a heretic (sogar häretisch). That is, it will be a heretic - according to the cardinal's label - who will be in charge of guarding the orthodoxy of the Catholic faith. Hardly anyone could have thought of a more absurd situation; neither Mons. Robert Benson, nor Hugo Wast, nor Soloviev, nor Castellani. Reality, once again, surpasses fiction.
A few hours ago, a letter from Bishop Fernandez was published in which he bids farewell to his parishioners. Few will believe his words, but it must be recognized that he speaks some truths. His close friends knew that, in fact, Pope Francis had made him the offer a month ago, probably at the same time as the appointment of Bishop Garcia Cuerva in Buenos Aires, in order to avoid disappointment. It was also known that he would begin his new function in September. But the taking up of the post was brought forward to August, something very strange because it is a month when Rome and the Vatican are deserted. Some suspect that this is because Francis will not survive till the autumn.
It is curious, on the other hand, that Mons. Tucho, the pontifical sweetheart, has with astonishing naivety confessed in his letter that the pope has prepared for him to live in a little house inside the Vatican, with a terrace and a view of the gardens. It is probably one of the little houses in which the Renaissance popes lodged their mistresses, which is not a good precedent.
But the one who deserves a more detailed and careful analysis is Pope Francis, as we consider the motives behind this decision and the perspectives it opens up for the Church.
1) With this decision, the pontiff tries to outline in a definitive way a new Church whose nucleus consists in the negation of the previous Church. That is to say, the new Church is the non-Church. And the fact is made clear not only by the appointment of Bishop Fernandez himself but also by the unusual letter that accompanies it.
There, the Pope clearly states: "The Dicastery over which you will preside in other times made use of immoral methods. Those were times when, rather than promoting theological knowledge, possible doctrinal errors were pursued. What I expect from you is undoubtedly something very different."
An echo of what Tucho himself had said recently in his cathedral in La Plata and on which we commented at this blog. What our friend Ludovicus so aptly defined as "institutional cannibalism" and which we always thought was a tool to sustain Bergoglio's media popularity has become the all-purpose doctrinal instrument that gives rise to the constitution of a new Church.
Michel Foucault would say that institutional cannibalism is the subjectivation device of the Church born of the Franciscan pontificate: the new Church recognizes itself as such insofar as it rejects the previous Church. "I am me insofar as I am not who I was." This is institutional cannibalism, its condition as a subject. And why is this? Because this new Church needs to be the "Church of the modern world," as the biographer and pontifical friend Sergio Rubin has recently said; for this purpose it needs to deny the anti-modern doctrine proper to the Church of the ages (that is, approve consensual adultery and permit homosexuality; in short, abrogate the sixth commandment) and the only way to do so with a certain legitimacy is to discredit the old and show the inescapable "need" for these changes.
2) There would be another more basic but equally possible interpretation. Pope Francis is a man with a mean heart, full of grudges and resentments, on the basis of which he makes many of his decisions. It is merely a matter of reviewing the bishops dispossessed of their sees and we will see that, in the case of the Argentines at least, a personal vendetta can always be found behind it. Or in the appointments (or non-appointments): the case of creating the bishop of San Diego a cardinal, for example, was nothing more than a sign of his resentment towards Archbishop Cordileone of San Francisco.
In the case of Tucho, the same thing happens. Let's remember that he was always, inexplicably, Cardinal Bergoglio's sweetheart, who insisted on appointing him as rector of the Catholic University of Argentina. In Rome, he was repeatedly denied the appointment because he did not have the required qualifications and his orthodoxy was doubtful. It took two years of back and forth until Bergoglio finally managed to establish him in that position. That is the reason why one of the first measures he took as soon as he arrived at the pontificate was to name Father Tucho archbishop in partibus. It was his way of repaying the Roman Curia for all the trouble it had put him through.
Then, he transferred him to the See of La Plata to replace Bishop Héctor Aguer, a declared and public enemy of Tucho and Bergoglio himself, whom Aguer far surpassed in theological capacity. Papal grudges were satisfied with these undeserved promotions.
Finally, he has now appointed him to the Doctrine of the Faith, until recently occupied by Cardinal Müller, the same one who had publicly accused Bishop Fernandez of being a heretic and had repeatedly clashed harshly with Francis. It is probable that the Supreme Pontiff acted not with a view to constituting a new Church -- a very evil goal, but at the same time a very lofty one for a small spirit like his, but rather, simply to satisfy, before his death, another of his resentments. And, by the way, he was also taking revenge for the blow dealt to him by Cardinal Re a few months ago when Francis had wanted to appoint Bishop Wilmer to the Doctrine of the Faith and was prevented from doing so by the dean of the College of Cardinals.
3) The Church has suffered many bad popes over the centuries. One, in the Iron Years, could throw a wayward cardinal off the roof of Castel Sant'Angelo; another, in the Renaissance, could poison his mistress; and another, in the 19th century, could ally himself with Napoleon.
Bergoglio has followed in all of these footsteps with greater elegance. The wayward cardinals (Burke and Müller, for example) have been stripped of their posts and left floating in the void. He has allied himself with the worst present-day characters, from Fidel Castro to Hillary Clinton. But the totally new evil of this pontificate is that it has turned the Church itself into its principal enemy. It is no longer just about persecuting bishops, imprisoning cardinals, or poisoning lovers; it is about his unabashed attempt to put an end to two thousand years of the Catholic Church -- or else, to "renew" it in such a way that it looks nothing like its predecessor. It is no longer a matter of taking revenge on his faithful porteños by nominating Bishop Garcia Cuerva, or on Cardinal Cipriani by appointing Bishop Castillo Mattasoglio. It is about turning against the Church itself. A sort of autoimmune disease; a kind of HIV that is determined to destroy the whole immune system of the ecclesial body through confusion, so that any disease can enter and kill the organism.
4) In the last few weeks we have had a storm of catastrophic appointments: Buenos Aires, Madrid, Brussels, and now the Doctrine of the Faith. And it would not be at all strange if, in a few days, a consistory will be announced in which these characters and others of their ilk will be created cardinals. This is the manifestation of what is being said with increasing force: Pope Francis is living his last days, and is looking to ensure that everything he has done in his pontificate will be "tied up and well tied up." But we know how long the knots tied by poor Francisco Franco, when he said this phrase in 1969, actually lasted.
5) Msgr. Tucho Fernandez in the Doctrine of the Faith is a "little gift" that Francis leaves to his successor, especially when he has to face the debates and results of the synod on synodality. Let us remember that in previous synods, such as the one on the family, Bergoglio had to deal with the closed opposition of many cardinals. Now, he has cleared the path of opponents and everything will run smoothly. Given the public opinions of Bishop Fernandez, it would not be strange that he himself will be the champion of the proposals for more radical changes in order to achieve "a Church for all, all, and all"; above all, for all.
6) And yet... this appointment could be a blunder by Pope Francis. It is known that in politics, when positions are extreme, the centers tend to triumph. Radicalizing the ultra-progressive position to this level at this final moment of his pontificate could cause fear, or activate the instinct of institutional conservation even in cardinals who do not have sympathies for the conservative wing but retain some faith and sanity. The aggressive appointments of recent times and the policies of the same tenor that are supposed to accompany them would be successful only if Pope Francis had many years of pontificate left or if the whole ecclesial apparatus were "tied up and well tied up." This is the way the Soviet regime survived for so long: even in the last village of the USSR there were political commissars totally aligned with the Kremlin who watched over the fulfillment of the Politburo's orders. This is not the case of the Catholic Church today, where there is an enormous annoyance with Pope Francis among both bishops and priests. A good part of them are waiting for the emergence of some leadership that will allow them to exercise opposition. For this very reason, and perhaps naively, I continue to maintain a certain moderate optimism with respect to the next conclave; I do not expect great changes, but neither do I expect a replica of Bergoglio to be elected.
7) The appointment could also be a failure. Bishop Fernandez does not possess a privileged intellect or even the political astuteness that characterizes his patron. It is a matter of letting him speak, and his words will no longer be reproduced only in some media of a marginal country like Argentina; they will be heard and read in the highest Catholic circles. It would not be strange to imagine him having a couple of scandalous stumbles in which Francis' successor will finds the clean and elegant excuse to relieve him from his office without having to wait for the five-year term. And it would not be strange either if, in the next few days, some folderol would appear, which we Argentines are good at.
8) In his commentary last week, Fr. Santiago Martin spoke of "uprooted Catholics" when commenting on a recent book of that name by Aldo Maria Valli and Aurelio Porfiri. And he was referring to all of us who no longer feel at home in this new Church of Bergoglio, those of us who feel "uprooted," those of us who every day have to face news that is lacerating for the faith of the apostles that we profess. We see that there are mercies distributed to all -- except to us. "Suffer, or go away": that is what Francis, Tucho, and their kind tell us. Will these be the sufferings that were prophesied?
9) Finally, something good can be drawn from all this. In the first place, Bergoglio has definitively assassinated neoconservatism or the "middle line." It is no longer a slip of the tongue, it is no longer a question of interpretation of the facts -- for indeed, the appointment of Bishop Fernandez was even accompanied by a letter to clear up any doubts on the matter! It is no longer possible to remain in the middle and continue defending the indefensible. Secondly, Bergoglio has also assassinated hyperpapalism, the "magisterialism" so dear to some, and the delirious idea of a pontiff conceived as a hypostasis of the Holy Spirit (so much to the taste of ultramontanism).
Caminante Wanderer
July 3, 2023
