Movementist tactics, the primacy of praxis, pastoralism, moral relativism: processes that should have produced some new truths have actually scandalised, confused minds and hearts, and disarticulated ecclesial unity. And synodality, a new dogma, is the synthesis of a process in which the means count more than the end.
Today, the tenth anniversary of Francis’ pontificate creates considerable dismay. It is as if someone has intervened to jumble all the cards on the table, leaving everyone speechless both for the method used and for the new content concerning very sensitive points of the Catholic faith. Method and new content have matched each other, to the point that method has become content and vice versa.
It has been ten years of movementist tactics: saying and not saying, affirming and retracting, going forward while saying that one was going backward, making others say what one would like to say oneself, opening and closing, accepting and condemning, declaring and contradicting. Just when you thought you had understood, Francis had already moved on. By the time, one of his interviews had just been read, he had already given another of a different tenor. In the interviews with Italian journalist Eugenio Scalfari it was never clear who had said what. Quotations from the Bible and the Magisterium, often partial and inaccurate; footnotes used to provoke great changes without making them apparent; phrases with a thousand nuances; love for those far away and raps on the knuckles for those nearby; endless receiverships; political interventions; protection of questionable characters; the promotion of doubts of faith made without cultivating any doubts… these are some examples of a method that has caused bewilderment.
It is unrealistic to attribute this only to Bergoglio’s personal temperament or his Jesuitism. The results of changes designed to regain the ground of two hundred years behind the world certainly required official acts of content modification, such as Amoris laetitia or the Abu Dhabi declaration, but also the change in praxis and the ways of thinking they induce. The circular relationship between praxis and theory, pastoral care and doctrine, is in fact not a particular chapter of this pontificate, but its guideline. This is why the dismay has also come about through communication as well as through a change of perspective on content.
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