The Promise of Francis by David Willey

Author:David Willey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books

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The synod was over, but the discussions were still beginning. In Rome in November 2014, Pope Francis told specialists of canon law at the Holy Roman Rota (the church’s supreme tribunal in marital cases) that “the church has to dispense not only justice, but also charity over matrimonial situations. If these cases drag on too long, people get fed up and leave the church. I remember, for instance, the tribunal in Buenos Aires which deals with cases up to 240 kilometers [149 miles] from the Argentinian capital,” he said. “Imagine simple people having to travel that distance to a court, and losing days of pay in order to get a decision as to whether their marriage was or was not valid.”

He also said that he had had to deal with a public scandal in his native Argentina. It involved dodgy civil and canon lawyers who told their clients that with “ ‘$10,000 I can fix everything, civil divorce proceedings and the church annulment too.’ Please do not let this continue,” he said. “This is not how the church should act.”13 In essence, he was suggesting that the process should be free.

Pope Francis showed little use for those cardinals who had opposed him during the two synod weeks. The American Cardinal Burke, in particular, had been an irritation. On November 8, Pope Francis transferred Burke from his position of power at the Segnatura Apostolica tribunal in the Vatican to a more or less honorary post as head of the Sovereign Order of the Knights of Malta. Among the reasons given in the press for the transfer was a harsh sentence attributed to the American cardinal: “The church is now rudderless.”

In fairness, Burke accepted the demotion with apparent grace. Speaking to the Catholic news service Aleteia, he said, “Some of the media simply want to represent me as if I existed to oppose Pope Francis. This is wrong. I know that it is part of my serving [the church] to speak the truth, at a time when many people are confused.” Just who was “confused” he did not say. What he did say was that in the church there are “truths that do not change and cannot be changed.”

Burke was replaced by the newly promoted French Cardinal Dominique Mamberti, sixty-two, who from 2006 onward had been Pope Benedict’s head of relations with states, the Vatican equivalent of foreign minister. Mamberti was in turn replaced by a British prelate, Monsignor Paul Gallagher, sixty, from Liverpool, former nunzio or papal ambassador in Australia with a long career in Vatican diplomacy behind him, having also served in Tanzania, Uruguay, the Philippines, the Council of Europe, Guatemala, and Burundi.

The retired Cardinal Kasper had the last word. “Francis is the pope of surprises,” he said during a lecture at Catholic University of America in Washington in early November 2014. “He is not a liberal, but he is a radical in the original sense of the word, which refers to roots.”

Among the biggest surprises has been the ease with which Pope Francis has taken to the new media.

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