Readers will recall the unparalleled theological analysis of the Francis pontificate by Vigilius, first published here on July 10, 2024. Today, we are pleased to publish a follow-up (in a translation authorized by the author; original German here), in which Vigilius explains why he respectfully disagrees with the eminent Argentinean commentator about the theological program of the present pope. —PAK
Dear Wanderer,
You have done me the honor of responding to my article “The Great Loss” and introducing it to the readers of your blog. Although we agree in our theological views, you have emphasized that you do not share my position that Francis is a strategist. I quote you verbatim: “A few months ago, a brilliant and shocking article appeared on the German website Katholisches.info. It is entitled ‘The great loss or the pontificate of Jorge Bergoglio’. Incidentally, I disagree with the central thesis of the author—who for obvious reasons appears under the pseudonym Vigilius—that Bergoglio acted according to a perfectly orchestrated and thought-out plan that is in line with the globalist world agenda. As we have said many times on this blog, I am of the opinion that Bergoglio is nothing more than a rogue Jesuit from Buenos Aires with an unending and unhealthy hunger for power; his entire life is centered on a single goal: To accumulate power for the sake of power, for the sake of the concupiscence of power, with no other goal than the pleasure he derives from its exercise.”[1]
In the following, I would like to try once again to explain the plausibility of my opposing position. I am doing this because I consider this debate to be very important. It is about much more than the psychological and moral assessment of Bergoglio's personality. I think it is a temptation emanating from this pontificate itself to reconstruct it merely in the paradigm of a gangster who has nothing else in mind but to satisfy his immediate desires. This, I think, would blind us to the real threat posed by Bergoglian rule.
But this threat also has a positive effect, namely a revealing and cathartic one. And this leads me directly to the center of my Bergoglio theory. For although Jorge Bergoglio is an ideologue, he represents—and continuously so—positions that are the product of a theological development that has long plagued the Church. The true essence of this development comes to light in him precisely because he is intellectually grotesquely under-complex and crude in his actions. Many representatives of this line of tradition would certainly be horrified to be associated with Bergoglio, but the art of thought consists precisely in identifying possible commonalities, which are perhaps even the most important aspects, beneath the differences that always exist. I think that Jorge Bergoglio is the brutal apocalypsis (i.e., revelation) of the inner trajectory of the movement in question. This is the only reason why it is worthwhile, but also unavoidable, to deal with him. For the theological challenge that emerges in him in concentrated form and is reinforced by him will remain with us even after his death.
For the rest, we agree that Jorge Bergoglio is a vulgar and vicious creature who represents a single intellectual, moral, spiritual and aesthetic scandal for the faithful. And we are equally unanimous in our assessment of the company of his servants, which includes such illustrious figures as the orgasmic mystic Tucho, whom you particularly appreciate and who has now been immortalized on canvas[2]; additionally, Roche, Hollerich, the McCarrick boys, the Jesuit Fathers James Martin and Antonio Spadaro, Marko Ivan Rupnik, and the great Austen Ivereigh. These characters, I must admit, inevitably remind me of the “Nazgûl” in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, who ride stinking monsters and swarm around the throne of the dark lord. What is pleasing, however, is the perspective: they will end just like the Ringwraiths in Tolkien's epic.
The justification problem
Before I come to my own thesis, I would like to briefly address two difficulties with which, it seems to me, your assertion that Bergoglio has no ideologically driven plan and is nothing more than a rogue Jesuit from Buenos Aires with an unending thirst for power has to contend. On the one hand, this position is baffled by the experience that human beings in the flesh are complex beings with a considerable propensity for inconsistency. Perhaps it is part of the idea of a rogue that rogues merely pursue immediate self-centered ends. But people don't usually represent ideas exactly. So it is quite conceivable that rogues, even rogue Jesuits, also have substantive beliefs and political goals that are not simply identical with a concern for their private pleasure.
Secondly, the power thesis suffers from the fact that the argumentation becomes circular. What is to be shown on the basis of the phenomena, namely that Bergoglio is concerned with nothing other than increasing his power, is always already assumed in order to conclude from the correspondingly interpreted acts that Bergoglio is concerned with nothing other than increasing his power. This is where the arbitrariness of the assessments lurks. If Francis were to behave completely differently in certain cases, for example, the absolute power thesis could still say that he is only imposing tactical restraint in order to maintain his power. Incidentally, the leftists make a structurally identical assertion regarding the Church's doctrinal authority: everything is declared to be merely an expression of the will to power of male clerics, and if these clerics behave submissively, this too is merely a sly deception of the same will to power. The French philosopher Jean-Claude Michéa ironically called this a “user-friendly procedure,” because the person who understands everything as a power play is always right. There is no possibility of refutation, since even the attempt at refutation is in turn interpreted as an expression of the thirst for power.
However, circularity does not necessarily mean that the assertion is actually false. It is simply not provable and remains subject to a speculative index. This also applies to the explanation of Bergoglio's actions by tracing them back to Peronism, which is understood as an unscrupulous and unprincipled way of acquiring and maintaining power for the sake of sheer power. The German equivalent would be Merkelianism. In this coordinate system, Francis could behave in any possible way, and it could always be interpreted as an expression of Peronism. It may or may not be. It is as irrefutable as it is unprovable.
For this reason, I argue in favor of taking a different approach to elucidating the phenomenon. To do this, we must first look at what Francis says, and we must see whether he says something in passing or whether he says it repeatedly, i.e., whether his statements form a series. In addition, we must analyze how these statements can be placed in the concert of other statements. And if these statements are repeated and have a prominent role in the structure of the other articulations, one must see whether there are demonstrable correlations between these statements and his political actions. It cannot be ruled out a priori that there are several prominent series of statements that are contradictory to each other. However, experience shows that this rarely happens, as it presupposes a considerable intellectual or psychiatric defect. And if one were to have identified such a prominent series of statements that determines the overall context, one would have found the hermeneutic key with which possibly existing side-strands could also be recognized as such. These side threads could be compatible or even correlative to the main motif or perhaps be explained by political calculation, lack of acumen, dementia, or character weaknesses.
Now it is my argument that such a main motif can be identified in the current pontificate: it is the “universal natural brotherhood beyond secondary religious traditions” that I have described. This motif indicates nothing less than the project of depriving the Catholic faith of its defining core. For it pursues the deconstruction of the theology of the new, supernatural creation and of the Church as the mystical body of Christ into a mere natural creation theology. In order to clarify this process, I will first try to describe the authentic content of the Christian faith and then outline the basic motif of the resistance movement that emerged against it, from which the “rogue Jesuit from Buenos Aires” also emerged.
Supernatural faith
The term “mystical body of Christ” means that through the death and resurrection of Christ and the sending of the Holy Spirit made possible by this, a truly new creation is constituted by God, not by simply destroying the old world, as Lutheran theology ultimately claims, but by transforming the first creation in the grace of Christ into “the new heaven and the new earth”. This is why the Pentecost event is the reproduction of the outpouring of the Creator Spirit on a higher, supernatural level. This process has a profound Trinitarian theological dimension: while the creation of the world is appropriated not to the Son but to the Father, who brings forth the world “in Christ”, the new creation is appropriated to the act of the Son Himself. He, in whom things are, now becomes their new founder under a specific consideration. Out of love for His Son, the Father, who is the unfounded foundation of all things, opens up the possibility for the divine Son, who eternally emerges from Him, to become the Creator-God towards man; through His sacrifice, the Son saves man from the sinful separation from the Father and the impending nullity of hell, accepting us into His own personal relationship with the Father. This is the a priori goal of the Father's act of creation itself. The world is brought forth for and towards the Son.
The incorporation of human beings into Christ's own relationship with the Father constitutes the very existence of the Church; it is the communion with the eternal Son, founded in and through Christ, of human beings graced therein. The Son's self-gift to the Father has integrated us into Himself, so that we become “sons in the Son”. Just as the Father gives the world to the Son as His gift, the Son lays the world redeemed by Him and transformed in Him at the feet of the Father for the Father’s glorification. The new creature becomes the Son's counter-gift within His own gift to the Father, who in turn establishes the Son as the judge of the world and empowers Him as the eternal life-principle of the new creation: All authority has been given to Him, Christ, in heaven, on earth, and under the earth. It is no coincidence that from the 21st chapter onwards, the Book of Revelation describes the new heaven and the new earth, which are significantly referred to as the “new Jerusalem”, as a great liturgical context in which “the Lamb”, i.e. the sacrificed Christ, is the central dimension of reference for us. The unfounded foundation of all life is communicated to us solely in Christ. Thus the entire movement of creation and salvation is a unified but differentiated event within the eternal relationship of Father and Son in the Holy Spirit.
With regard to our discussion of the problems of the modern Church, I would like to emphasize two aspects of the process of salvation described above. Firstly, the supernaturally elevated creation is a substantially new creation. Despite substantial continuity with the first creation, it forms a new reality—ontologically not deducible from the preceding—towards which the nature of man is inwardly ordered for its own perfection, but which is only brought forth by God in a second act, again completely free. The relationship between the original creation and the new creation, between nature and supernature, is peculiarly complex. It must by no means be described in the paradigm of a rupture, although it recognizes a genuine caesura, a creative new beginning: “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation: the old has passed away, the new has come” (2 Cor 5:17). This second process can be localized on the time axis: it begins fundamentally with the constitution of the “unio hypostatica” by the Holy Spirit in the body of the Virgin. In God Himself, of course, there are no temporal extensions; all events on the timeline are equally present in Him. Therefore, these acts are only logically distinguishable in Him, but this distinction is nevertheless of paramount theological importance for us, on the side of creation.
The second aspect is internally related to this. It by no means follows from the incarnation of God that Christ, who took on human nature as His own and united it with the divine nature and supernaturally elevated it, is thus already united with every single human person. The relevance also of this point cannot be overestimated. I consider it highly dangerous when Gaudium et Spes states in no. 22: “For by His incarnation the Son of God has united Himself in some fashion with every man.” It is no exaggeration to say that the entire Wojtyła pontificate, including the ecumenical furor that culminated in the Assisi event, hangs on this single sentence. Even in Wojtyła's first encyclical, Redemptor hominis, this statement from the Council serves a pivotal function.
The qualifying phrase “in some fashion” inserted in the Council’s text does, of course, indicate a certain awareness of the problem. And indeed, the formulation suggests that the relationship of the incarnate Son as such to all other human beings can be described within the paradigm of the relationship that Christ as the eternal person of the Logos necessarily has to the two other persons of the one and same divine being. But this confuses the levels. The sentence of the Council text is much too rough; it must lead us astray. Without being able to go into the complicated facts in more detail at this point, I will name only the result of the necessary distinctions: Christ unites His humanity with other human beings to form a mystical community only in a completely free act that is logically posterior to the incarnation. He unites Himself with those whom He has “chosen out of the world” (John 15:19) and who, for this reason, according to the complete Johannine sentence, are hated by the world (i.e., the non-chosen). This union takes place through the mediation of the Holy Spirit, whose sending is an act of salvation in its own right; in this sending is constituted the Church, which is both the instrument of the Spirit of God for the union of men with Christ and itself the mystical communion with Christ. In this union, the richness of the divine nature that fills Christ's holy humanity is poured into the faithful. For this reason, tradition can describe the humanity of Christ as the primordial “sacrament,” whose concrete modes of appropriation for us are the bodily-sacramental acts of the Church, which Christ Himself bestows on us in the mediation of the ordained ministry that ontologically represents Him.
This idea corresponds directly to the anthropological aspect. For by analogy with the free self-giving of the incarnate Logos and the act of the Blessed Mother, who disposes of her human nature in such a way that the divine Logos can appropriate human nature through the Marian act of self-giving, we too must place our human nature at the disposal of the Logos so that He can fill it with His grace. In other words, whether the incarnate God is able to unite with us at all depends essentially on our free self-disposition. The fact that our self-gift to the Logos is not on the same level as His free self-gift to us can be seen from the fact that our act of freedom is in turn an expression of His electing grace. The divine grace of election precedes our freedom and is unfathomably able to bring about the consent of our freedom without destroying it. The sacrament is then God's response to our indebted act of free faith, in which we open ourselves to the “overshadowing of the Holy Spirit” so that He can unite our nature with the transfigured humanity of Christ and thus transform it into a new creation in Christ. Taken by itself, the incarnation is only the enabling condition for the actual connection of the incarnate Logos with individual human beings. The famous sentence by Angelus Silesius applies precisely here: “And if Christ had been born a thousand times in Bethlehem, but not in you, you would have been eternally lost.”
The revolution of de-caesuralization
Against this elementary, normative, and historically unanimous Catholic theology, a powerful resistance has risen up in modern times. This resistance is mainly based on two interrelated motives. Firstly, in the course of the modern era, the idea of a supernatural world distinct from the everyday world of experience has become increasingly implausible, even to the religious consciousness. This skepticism finds articulation above all in the debate as to whether the idea of the supernatural kingdom of God, even though it is understood as the transformation of the reality of creation itself, does not create a contemptuous distance from the world, a “world pessimism,” a personal “salvation egoism” and a hermetically-sealed ecclesiastical special world. From the 19th century onwards, this debate became de facto identical with the passionately disputed question of how the Church should relate to secular modernity with its guiding principles of scientific rationality, moral autonomy, and individual self-determination.
The answer to all these questions depends essentially on how the fundamental relationship between nature and grace—, which can also be expressed as the relationship between creation, incarnation, and grace—is determined. This readjustment is one of the central concerns of the French nouvelle théologie and Karl Rahner's theology, which have become extremely influential.[3] In general, it can be said that the basic concern of modern theology is to bring nature and grace, anthropology and Christology, world history and salvation history into a seamless continuum. This happens in different ways in various theological enterprises, but the need for a de-caesuralization is always present. The last Council was massively influenced by this endeavor.
The revolutionary potential of this tendency becomes clear only when we connect it to a second motive intrinsically linked to the aforementioned concern of affirming the world and connecting with modern society, which I even consider to be the principal motive for readjusting the relationship between nature and grace: Everyone must always already and eternally belong. The criticism of the nouvelle théologie and Karl Rahner, for example, of the tendency of neo-scholasticism to tear nature and supernature apart and only join them together like two external blocks is not entirely unjustified. Nevertheless, the universal integrative potential of the entire classical approach is too small for the main strand of modern theology. It has become an increasingly unbearable thought for this theology that there is neither a universally always-already existing anonymous Christianity nor a guaranteed apokatastasis panthon (restoration, i.e., salvation, of all). For the sake of universal inclusion, this theology therefore endeavors to weaken the difference between the processes of creation, incarnation, and grace-giving as well as the salvific theological significance of the Church's sacramental events and—even into the realm of eschatology – the personal responsibility for freedom. The great sympathy of the nouvelle théologie and Rahner for Teilhard de Chardin's universally integrative cosmology is highly significant.
“By their fruits you will know them.” This is also the case here. The theological axis in the relationship between nature and grace, the world and the kingdom of God finally shifted in the 20th century to such an extent that the idea of supernaturalism has now completely disappeared. It was replaced by a spirituality of “full contemporaneity” and commitment to a “just world”. The Marxist philosopher Theodor W. Adorno regretfully registered this world-optimistic movement, which relies on progress within history, with the remark that it was a great loss that the Church had abandoned any talk of the “vale of tears”. While critical discussion of Enlightenment modernity and modern rationality had been intensifying in philosophy since the 1940s, for example in Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment or Martin Heidegger's Time of the World View, the Church sang its hymns of appreciation to the modern world at the last Council. She wanted to finally shed her skepticism of the modern age and belong to it. In the program of the German Synodal Way, this chubby-cheeked world-optimism comes fully to life. Here the church has become identical with the world. A few decades ago, one of the stars of the nouvelle théologie, namely Father Henri de Lubac SJ, who was elevated to the cardinalate by John Paul II, sharply criticized the post-conciliar process of decay.[4] But Lubac never acknowledged that it was the “new theology” itself that inaugurated the trajectory to this horror, the most famous face of which is Jorge Bergoglio.
The central problem of modern de-caesuralization theology is that it always attacks Christology. This applies above all to the two points I have emphasized, namely the ontological non-derivability of the new creation in Christ and the individual process of grace as a reciprocal process of freedom, in which Christ's act of election always has primacy. Both aspects represent an ineluctable threat to universal inclusivism. This is why modern theological theories have a peculiarly mechanistic, lifeless character. They have this in common with modern metaphysics, which is also primarily concerned with unification, predictability, certainty, and assurance. In the unifying structures of modern theology, freedom, i.e. the undeducible and uncontrollable, disappears. Nothing comes to pass anymore because nothing is allowed to come to pass. The most prominent phrase is “always already”. The sacred disappears from such theological contexts, and with it holiness and the Holy One, who is the living Christ Himself, who grants His chosen ones a share in His holiness. For this reason, Martin Heidegger's sentence applies particularly to modern theology, which has appropriated the Godhead and made it the anthropocentric principle of a universal acceptance of everything and everyone: “Man can neither pray to this God nor can he offer sacrifice to Him”. Man can no longer “fall to his knees in awe” before this God.[5]
Karl Rahner's transcendental theological theory, which integrates Christology into the evolutionary worldview and strives for a conceptual total synthesis, represents the most ambitious attempt at inclusivist theology. Karol Wojtyła formulated a theoretically simpler but politically equally effective variant of inclusivist universalism; in his own way, Wojtyła also arrived at the “anonymous Christian”. Wojtyła's position, as already indicated above, is based centrally on the idea of incarnation, which he interprets to mean that all people always already belong to Christ, because God has united Himself with every person in His incarnation. Here, incarnation and grace are strictly one and the same. According to Wojtyła, this is the “a priori revelation”. It is the theological legitimization of the Assisi meeting, where, from Wojtyła's perspective, it was not simply pagans meeting Christians, but unconscious Christians meeting conscious Christians. The specificity of Christians who have become self-conscious consists only in the fact that they have been touched by “a posteriori revelation”, i.e., by that historical revelatory speech and proclamation in which that which has always been given to all people on the basis of a priori revelation is explicitly articulated and accepted. All belong to Christ in terms of their being and therefore always already form the one universal Church, which includes both those who are enlightened about themselves and those who are not yet enlightened about themselves as its members. This is Wojtyła's concept of “catholicity”. And it is only on this basis that, alongside his fanatical ecumenism, Wojtyła's otherwise completely absurd statement that “the way of the Church is man” can be understood. For the Pope, this sentence is strictly identical to the statement that the way of the Church is Christ.
Jorge Bergoglio, on the other hand, conveys inclusivism in the simplest possible way. Although he occasionally quotes Karol Wojtyła's favorite sentence from Gaudium et Spes, especially in Christmas speeches, he never discusses it on the basis of the complicated distinction between a priori and a posteriori revelation. In other words, he does not even attempt to offer a Christological basis for theological inclusivism. Instead, Francis constantly claims that all people are, as human beings, already “children of God” and therefore form the “family of God”, i.e., the universal community that, as he said in his Lenten message this year [2024], is the “promised land” on which God has set His sights solely and exclusively. The idea that we become “sons in the Son” only in Christ, because we must also be graciously received by the incarnate Logos into His eternal relationship with the Father, is no longer a substantial part of the Bergoglian pontificate. What remains is the horizon of mere creation theology.
The proximity to Rahner and Wojtyła is, of course, unmistakable. For one thing, it will hardly be possible, not only for Rahner but even for Wojtyła, to integrate, for example, the 17th chapter of the Gospel of John, in which Jesus says to the Father with regard to His disciples: “For them I pray; not for the world do I pray, but for all whom you have given me, for they are yours.” The exclusivism that appears here, rooted in God's unfathomable will of election, is not only no longer factually depicted in these new theories, it is precisely intended to be overcome by them. For Bergoglio as for his precursors, the word of revelation and the mission of the Church are only in service of raising awareness of and defending the promised land that has always already encompassed “all, all, all”—regardless of whether this land is understood in the context of “God's self-communication, being coexistent and coextensive with world history” (Rahner), Wojtyła's a priori revelation, or the Bergoglian understanding of natural humanity, which is simply assumed to be identical with the sonship of God.
To put it as clearly as possible: Jorge Bergoglio no longer needs Christ for his model of universal natural fraternity. And, in my opinion, this is in fact the secret trajectory of the entire de-caesuralization tradition. Bergoglio puts it in a nutshell: if you turn away from the classical ecclesial position with its harsh impositions and shift to the development of harmonizing syntheses, you can do as Jorge Bergoglio does: just reduce Christian discourse to a few simple statements on creation theology and thus reduce Christology to a mere Jesus-ology in which the Jesus of tenderness makes visible what is already the case anyway, namely that “all, all, all” are always already unconditionally accepted by God. God loves you and goes with you on all paths. All paths—be they Buddhist, Hindu, Amazonian-mythological, Islamic, Christian, even secular—are equally paths of salvation, because they start from the identical center of the a priori universal sonship of God and lead back to it. The decisive truth is this fraternity alone, and that is why the various religious traditions are “riches” in the Pope's estimation, but are only secondary in character. It doesn't matter which specific path you take. There is only one path you should never take, because this one leads to perdition: the path of the divisive backwardists (indietristi), i.e., our specifically and irreducibly Catholic path.
The age of equalization
An important essay by the philosopher Max Scheler, entitled “The Human Being in the World Age of Equalization”, dates from the late 1920s.[6] I am mentioning Scheler's essay here because I want to make it clear that the theological movement of de-caesuralization that challenges us is not a trifle, but is part of a large and extremely powerful context that also manifests itself in it. In this essay, Scheler prophesies the advent of a world age whose structure will be largely determined by the reconciliation of the previous opposites—of the different races, of capitalism and socialism, of physical and mental labor, of male and female mentalities as well as of the different nations and cultural areas with their different views of man, world, and God. According to Scheler, a global world is emerging in which the old world age with its tensions and differences will be replaced by the parameters of comprehensive unity, interconnectedness, harmony, and equality. This global development will also have a massive impact on religions, which will interpenetrate each other much more strongly in the course of the equalization process and thus relativize their classical profiles.
When I read this text for the first time, I felt like I was having déjà vu. For I was already familiar with the spirit of equalization described by Scheler, which determines the new world age, only under the somewhat modified name “The Spirit of the Council”. This spirit, which is constantly invoked by the left-wing revolutionary guard, does indeed permeate the Council. In my opinion, it is essentially the need for self-absolution on the part of the revolution’s right-wing that leads it to declare this “Spirit of the Council” to be an invention of the left; with the “hermeneutics of continuity” it blinds itself to the irreconcilability of contradictions in whose production it itself is involved.
One must not be impressed by the significant vehemence with which the Ratzingerians declare the “hermeneutics of continuity” to be a sacrosanct dogma. The truth is that it is quite easy to see how the spirit of the new world age has also left its mark on the theological de-caesuralization movement, on the last Council, and on the conciliar and post-conciliar popes. Most shamelessly, the Bergoglian pontificate has placed itself at the service of the “world age of equalization”. This is also the reason for the alliance that Bergoglio has entered into with the globalist elites. However, this pontificate only radicalizes what was already laid out in the century preceding it.
In Bergoglio, a revolution in the way of thinking has come to fruition, which in its philosophical substance consists of establishing a new concept of identity. This concept understands that which the classical understanding of identity regards as logically not integrable as an inner moment of identity itself. In all its variations, this concept of identity is concerned with the ultimate liquefaction of all differences.
The fact that this new concept of identity defines the Bergoglian pontificate is particularly evident in last year's Synodal Synod and its preparatory period. In the following, dear Wanderer, I will refer to your important essay “The Great Inversion”, in which the synod in question plays a prominent role. The essay focuses primarily on two texts, namely a short biblical exegesis by the Jesuit Fr. Spadaro and the first preparatory document for the Synod.
First, let us consider Spadaro SJ. His text interprets the episode from the Gospel of Matthew 7, 24-30, in which a Canaanite woman asks Jesus for help for her daughter, who is plagued by a demon. Jesus initially rejects the pagan woman's request, saying that He was only sent to the lost sheep of Israel. However, as the woman does not allow herself to be turned away, but rather shows the Lord her great faith, Jesus finally has mercy on her and fulfills her request. It is easy to see what the intention of the biblical text is: it is about a theology of faith, about the fact that the fulfillment of our requests is crucially dependent on the demonstration of trust in Christ. Correlatively, in the New Testament, the members of His own people are constantly sharply criticized by Jesus for their lack of faith; they are denied the acts of salvation.
Now, what does Father Spadaro SJ make of this pericope? It becomes a lesson in the conversion of Jesus Himself. Only the Canaanite woman, the one who does not belong, softens the hard-hearted Lord. Through the pagan woman, He is liberated from the marginalizing rigidity of His orthodoxy to an authentically religious attitude of inclusion and tender humanity. In the coordinate system of the new concept of identity outlined above, which is obviously taken for granted by Spadaro, the morally bad position initially encountered in Jesus can be described as the insistence on an inflexible identity. This understanding of identity does not yet grasp the foreign as something that in truth always already belongs; and without which the identity is not itself.
Spadaro's explanation corresponds precisely to the statements in the preparatory document of the Synodal Synod, which is the practical realization of the new concept of identity described above. Although this document does not speak of Jesus' conversion, it too refers to biblical dialogues in which the adversary of universal identity unexpectedly sneaks into Jesus' healing conversation with the indispensable others. This adversary is the diabolical enemy who is deciphered by the document as the orthodoxy-fanatic rigorist who wants to prevent fruitful dialog owing to his old understanding of identity. The document thus recognizes two classes of “others”. On the one hand, it recognizes “others” who are the ecclesiastically foreign or alienated, analogous to the Canaanite woman, somehow outsiders, but for this very reason the ones who belong and enrich. And on the other hand, it identifies those other “others” who formally belong, but in fact form the evil group of enemies of the faith. “The ‘antagonists’, the ‘demons’ of the new Church are us, the Catholics who are faithful to the teaching of the apostles, which was taught to us by our fathers. It is we who have come to divide and hinder the dialog between the Church and the world. We are devils, and as such we must be persecuted. (...) This is the great inversion. The truth is no longer in the Church of Christ, it is outside of it. She must no longer be the one who teaches, but the one who lets herself be taught. She is no longer the one who heals, but the one who must be healed.”[7]
It is understandable that this inversion seems extremely disturbing, even crazy to many believers. Nevertheless, this is precisely the point of the great historical arc of which I spoke. The world age of equalization produces its own morality, the morality of equalization: everything that serves synthesis, equality and unification, integrative fraternity and the promotion of agreement, of inclusion, is good. Evil, on the other hand, is everything that both formulates caesuras and differences and emphasizes that there are logically irreconcilable substantial differences that cannot be resolved into an overarching unity. Above all, the “anathema” of the former Church is evil; today the ones who anathematize anything still find themselves in the immoral state in which, according to Father Spadaro SJ, Jesus found Himself before His conversion by the Canaanite woman. Accordingly, Pope Bergoglio wrote to the newly appointed Prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith: "The Dicastery over which you will preside in other times came to use immoral methods. Those were times when, rather than promoting theological knowledge, possible doctrinal errors were pursued. What I expect from you is certainly something very different."
The Bergoglian pontificate is vehemently pursuing the ecclesiastical anchoring of the morality of equalization—not least through personnel policy decisions. In this respect, it can hardly be denied that Bergoglio is a strategist. And who could deny that this project has already made good progress in the Church? Anyone who still dares to criticize the Assisi event, the Amazon Synod, or the Abu Dhabi document, anyone who still talks about “mixed-denomination” rather than “denomination-connecting” marriages, anyone who problematizes ecumenism in its many manifestations and insists that not “all, all, all” are admitted to the “Lord's Table”, whoever claims a particular tradition as the true one, is, in the context of the ethic of reconciliation that has become dominant in the Church, not only considered an opponent with a different position, but an enemy to be eliminated, a moral monster.
This is the only way to understand the intensity of the conflicts we experience in the Church today. In earlier times, the line of conflict was usually clearer, for example when the opponents of Christianity, influenced by the atheistic Enlightenment, accepted the faith articulated by the Church as the genuinely Christian faith from which they were distancing themselves. Today, this clear opposition has fallen apart. However, it still remains in the minds of traditional believers. This creates many errors of judgment when it comes to the current conflict. The conflict is so intense because it is a genuine religious war within the Church. The opponents of the traditional faith no longer appear as unbelievers, but conversely as genuine Christians according to their curated self-image, who believe they have the mission to confront the misanthropic “anti-Christians” such as Cardinal Burke or Bishop Strickland.
Who am I to judge?
The extent to which the Bergoglian pontificate is of a strategic nature can be seen in the systematic linkage of the various theological topics. The Synod on the Family with Amoris laetitia, the Amazon Synod, the Synod on Synodality, the Abu Dhabi Declaration, Evangelii gaudium, Fratelli tutti, Laudato si, Laudate Deum, Fiducia supplicans are by no means mere individual events, but coordinated moments in the program for the comprehensive implementation of the central Bergoglian ideology.
Finally, I would now like to address an aspect that is essential for the realization of universal inclusion, one that was consistently brought to bear by Bergoglio and his entourage, especially in the context of the Synod on the Family and on Synodality. This is something like the epistemological foundation of the project of universal inclusion.
The destruction of morality begins with the depotentiation of the reach of reason. The more reason is cut off from the “being-in-itself” of things, the greater must be the inherent share of subjective positing in the constitution of the object-world. In its radical form, this being-in-itself is denied altogether and what we call “reality” is merely a linguistic phenomenon, i.e., a system of signs whose interpersonal validity is exclusively dependent on cultural agreements. The French deconstructivism of Foucault or Derrida has precisely this position as its epistemological premise. According to Foucault, we must not imagine that the world presents us with a legible face. We create the order of things ourselves; our worlds and the schemes of their constitution are so-called discourses. There can be no continuity between the epochal discourses. That would presuppose an objective frame of reference and standards of judgment. Thus, what we call “history” is nothing other than a category construct. Consequently, all concepts of truth and morals appear to be mere cultural constructs: they are scenes in a more or less imaginative performance, and categories such as natural law are inventions within such a script. It is true that Foucault still refers to the old moralities. But he never reconstructs them as their proponents understood them, but interprets them as techniques of a self-staging subjectivity.
Now, it would be an exaggeration to call Jorge Bergoglio a reflective deconstructionist. He lacks the intellectual prerequisites for this. Nevertheless, he makes use of the deconstructivist toolbox. And he does so by using the term “discernment”, which he and those around him constantly refer to. Francis uses this topos, which comes from Ignatian spirituality, to euphoniously formulate his views on the impossibility—with regard to truth and to epistemology—of objective moral judgments. In other words, the Bergoglian discernment does not want to emphasize the backwardist distinctions, but pursues the opposite intention of necessarily integrating “all, all, all”.
The idea underlying Bergoglian talk of discernment can be called nominalist: we have no factually adequate conceptual insights; there is an unbridgeable gap between our supposed theoretical knowledge or our categories aimed at generality (which according to this reading can be deciphered as mere functions of coping with the world) and reality, which occurs in countless details. This means that in moral contexts, as well, individual circumstances are not cases of a generality from which an accurate objective assessment would be possible. They form absolute singularities, which as such can no longer be standardized from an extrinsic position, but can only be addressed from within, with empathetic consideration of the various circumstances.
In terms of moral theory, this leads to a position of situational ethics in which conscience is not merely—as the whole tradition teaches—the highest subjective moral authority derived from reason’s participation in the eternal law, but rather, the individual subject himself becomes the legislator and judge in his own cause.
“Who am I to judge?”: this famous sentence by Francis precisely expresses the basic nominalist attitude that frees pastoral care from doctrine or replaces doctrine with what is now the only possible practice, “discernment”. And because doctrine is epistemologically able to formulate only ideals and prudential advice—the mode of implementation of which can be decided only by the concrete subject himself -, the form of the law in which doctrine has hitherto appeared must disappear. “It is not easy to grasp the truth that we have received from the Lord. And it is even more difficult to express it. So we (the apostolic magisterium of the Pope and bishops) cannot claim that our way of understanding this truth authorizes us to exercise a strict supervision over others’ lives.”[8] These words of Pope Francis perfectly encapsulate the epistemological background of the “Who am I…?”.
Accordingly, “weak reason” even makes it seem theoretically impossible to morally exclude life plans—with one exception, of course. The indietristi with their presumptuous concept of reason must be excluded. They are not only psychological and moral monsters, they are also philosophical monsters who refuse to be enlightened by epistemological skepticism. In contrast, the papal weak reason praises itself for its modesty, which opens wide a completely new scope for tolerance and leads to the Church transforming itself from a doctrinaire authority to a listening companion, from a judgmental institution to an inclusive and compassionate fellow traveler, from a directive and proselytizing master to an accompanying and dialogical permanent “student of (contemporary) man.”
This is why the Bergoglian agenda of overcoming priestly authority described by Bishop Eleganti is consistent.[9] If, epistemologically, only individual case-by-case decisions are possible, the confessor can only be a companion on the way to these situational assessments made by the individual subject. This has ironically been codified into law by Archbishop Koch of Berlin, for example, with regard to the reception of communion by non-Catholics in so-called denomination-connecting marriages: if people have, after their private discernments, come to the conclusion that they are allowed to receive communion, the priest, who has been expressly reduced to an advisory function, no longer has the authority to refuse.[10]
Our task
I cannot answer how reflective a strategist Jorge Bergoglio is. But that is not even necessary. In fact, his pontificate is characterized by the successive implementation of the agenda of difference-levelling and universal inclusion, which is the dominant obsession of our world age. The entire Church's “queer politics,” which for the post-Christian left-wing of the Church has virtually become the center of the project of the neo-religious creation of meaning, is a direct reflex of this obsession. Bergoglio himself is probably driven primarily by a deep-seated resentment against the classical doctrine of supernaturalism. This resentment has led him to summon spirits that unleash an irresistible momentum of their own. They secure their power by developing a systemic momentum of their own. The Bergoglian resentment will probably have been produced most forcefully by the elitism of the sentence: “Narrow is the gate and narrow is the way that leads to life, and few there be that find it” (Mt 7:13f). What could better illustrate how this very phrase is to be overcome by means of inclusion theology than Bergoglio's defense of Judas Iscariot and his empowerment of all the shady Tucho-ish creatures that surround him? It is the resentment that proclaims: “God accepts you as you are.”
But the agenda of resentment goes even further. Not only should God accept man's egocentric acts, but these acts themselves should become the privileged places for experiencing God Himself. In a congenial anticipation of Cardinal Tucho's orgasmic mysticism, a spiritual director in a German seminary spoke decades ago in his “spiritual exhortations” of how seminarians should “masturbate themselves into God” and perceive God's own pleasure therein. The bliss of heaven is interpreted, in the Tuchoesque theology of lust, in the paradigm of masturbation. It is the contemptible ressentiment morality of the weak souls that has become the measure of all things in the modern Church, those soft and libidinous creatures who, to paraphrase Nietzsche, cannot command themselves and cannot obey themselves.
I find the fact of all these processes systemically taking on a life of their own to be the really frightening thing in them. The power of the new world age can also be consistently realized through Jorge Bergoglio. The philosopher Martin Heidegger deciphers this power as the power of technology. By this Heidegger does not mean machine technology, but the spirit of a totalized Machination (manipulative domination), which levels out all qualitative differences and hierarchies and leads to a radical mass culture. All things, all natural specifications and historically evolved traditions, are liquefied in the melting pot of this Machination into mere moments of a domination whose only goal is domination. The result is a unified world in which things lose all distance, and therefore all reference and meaning, as if on an infinite surface. “Something is racing around the globe”, says Heidegger, referring to the power of the Machination. It is hard to overlook the fact that the spirit of this Machination is the spirit of the new world age that Scheler is talking about, and that it has also fully taken hold of the Catholic Church.
Christians identify the power of the Machination described by Heidegger with a certain name. This power has cast the net of its all-unifying ideology around the entire globe because it wants—with impressive moral and spiritual rhetoric—to make a certain particularity unrecognizable. This particularity is Christ, who in His absolutization is the most annoying disruptive factor for all equalization and inclusion efforts. The memory of Him is to be erased from the world's memory. The Church has been very helpful to this power for some time now, because, in addition to obvious instances of liturgical and artistic iconoclasm, she has been positioning the all-embracing Jesus of tenderness against Christ, organizing Assisi meetings, Amazon synods, and Abu Dhabi documents, and declaring world peace, the natural brotherhood of all, service to the political common good, and the neo-mythological concern for “Mother Earth” to be the decisive concerns of Christianity. Things are going very well for this power at the moment.
I think we must be careful not to overlook this fundamental process in all our analyses. All the atrocities of the overall cultural and theological developments of the last centuries, including the dilution of religious differences and the breathtaking liturgical decay, are only moments in the comprehensive program of forgetting Christ. In one of your essays, dear Wanderer, you ask the almost desperate question “what should we do?” in the face of the Church's apostasy. Politically, there is very little we can do. But we can, in a common struggle with the spiritual weapons at our disposal, oppose the diabolical project of erasing the face of Christ. In times which are more competent in solemnity, we would have said: He calls us into battle.
Your Vigilius
[1] https://caminante-wanderer.blogspot.com/2024/06/la-profundidad-del-abismo-i-bergoglio.html
[2] https://caminante-wanderer.blogspot.com/2024/06/el-retrato-del-cardenal-tucho-fernandez.html
[3] See Serafino Lanzetta, The Mystery of Grace
[4] Henri Kardinal de Lubac, Zwanzig Jahre danach. Ein Gespräch über Buchstabe und Geist des Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzils, München 1985
[5] Martin Heidegger, Die onto-theologische Verfassung der Metaphysik, in Identität und Differenz, GA Bd. 11, Frankfurt am Main 2006, 77
[6] Max Scheler, Der Mensch im Weltalter des Ausgleichs, in: Gesammelte Werke, Bd. IX, Bern 1976, 145-170
[7] https://caminante-wanderer.blogspot.com/2023/10/la-gran-inversion.html
[8] Pope Francis, Gaudete et exsultate, No. 43
[9] https://katholisches.info/2023/10/20/die-aufloesung-kirchlicher-autoritaet/
[10] https://www.erzbistumberlin.de/fileadmin/user_mount/PDF-Dateien/Erzbistum/ErzbischofKoch/Orientierungshilfe_AnschreibenplusDBK.pdf
