Can you criticize the Pope? How Much, How, and Up to Where? Monsignor Ics. : STILUM CURIAE

From Sydney to Germany, the theme is central to the increasingly polarized Church, writes Matteo Matzuzzi, Vatican correspondent for  Il Foglio .

“Shocked that Anthony Fisher allowed this ill-informed diatribe on the front page of the Sydney Archdiocese newspaper. Fisher clearly wants to continue the Weigel/Pell campaign against Francis and the Synod. Is communion with Rome now optional for bishops?”   Austen Ivereigh tweeted on Sunday.

First of all, the protagonists: Anthony Fisher is the archbishop of Sydney, George Weigel is a conservative American intellectual (  neocon trend ) and former biographer of John Paul II. Austen Ivereigh is a prestigious English journalist writer, former spokesman for Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor and author of one of the most significant, well-curated and in-depth biographies of Pope Francis (in Italian it is Tempo di Misericordia:  Vita di Jorge Mario Bergoglio , Mondadori, but the original title  The Great Reformer  seems more accurate).

The article in question, the one taken up by the Australian diocesan newspaper, is a balance sheet of the Bergoglian decade. A highly critical assessment, with Weigel reviewing the ambiguities of the pontificate and describing a leaden climate dominated by “melancholy” in which there would be multitudes of priests, bishops and cardinals terrified by the risk of ending up under the papal ax. The American author brings together everything, from the  Rupnik affair to relations with Beijing, up to “the systematic effort to deconstruct the legacy of St. John Paul II”.

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Criticare il Papa, si Può? Quanto, Come, e Fino a Dove? Mons. Ics. : STILUM CURIAE