Valuable commentary on the Viganò affair keeps churning out, and I feel obliged to crank the churn here and provide excerpts for you. Here are some things I've read in the last two days I think worth sharing:
"[Benedict] has never seen the document that was published," Gänswein told the Italian news agency Ansa. "He's never read it, and he has not endorsed it. It's all rubbish."
But do a search for Viganò with Twitter's search engine, and here's the top tweet Twitter will recommend to you:
Pope Francis, you're surrounded: Pope Benedict has corroborated Viganò's devastating factual and legally sworn testimony.— Fr. Kevin M. Cusick (Blue Check Mark here) (@MCITLFrAphorism) August 28, 2018
Come out with your hands up and nobody else gets hurt.
Philip Pullela, "Conservative media move to front line of battle to undermine Pope Francis":
The full extent of journalists' involvement in the statement - from conception and editing to translation and publication - emerges from a series of Reuters interviews that reveal a union of conservative clergy and media aimed at what papal defenders say is a campaign to weaken the reformist Francis's pontificate.
Since his election in 2013, conservatives have sharply criticized Francis, saying he has left many faithful confused by pronouncements that the Church should be more welcoming to homosexuals and divorced Catholics and not be obsessed by 'culture war' issues such as abortion.
'The conservatives have declared war and they are convinced they can reform the Church with a frontal attack," a senior Vatican prelate said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because 'the line is silence' now. …
The statement surfaced on Aug. 26, four days after it was dated. Interviews with those involved show its publication was coordinated in consultation with Valli, Tosatti, the National Catholic Register in the United States and Italy's La Verita, both conservative newspapers that criticize Francis regularly.
It was translated into English by Diane Montagna of the conservative LifeSiteNews, which published it at the same time and often carries full texts of speeches by Cardinal Raymond Burke, one of the pope’s fiercest critics.
"It's very reminiscent of what is going on in conservative politics in the United States. It’s the same playbook," said David Gibson, director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University in New York. He was alluding to the close relationship between President Donald Trump's administration and conservative-leaning news outlets such as Fox News.
Tosatti told Reuters there was "no conservative conspiracy" behind the statement and that its publication was delayed because it had to be translated in several languages.
He said it was "a mere coincidence" that it was published during the pope's trip to Ireland, where sexual abuse by the clergy was a main issue.
But Valli says in his blog that its release was specifically timed so that it would come up during the pope's in-flight news conference from Dublin to Rome. Experienced Vatican journalists such as Valli and Tosatti understand that the papal plane is a rare chance for reporters to ask the pope questions.
Another journalist who received the statement also confirmed that Vigano, who is now in hiding in an undisclosed location and issues statements through Valli, wanted it published while the pope was in Ireland.
"Obviously Vigano is being used as a weapon by a whole coterie of people who can’t stand Pope Francis and the changes he wants to make to the Church," said Alexander Stille, professor of international journalism at Columbia University in New York and author of several books on Italy.
"People who would defend to the death the doctrine of papal infallibility have no difficulty in treating a pope who has been elected by all the standard Vatican protocols as if we were a corporate manager who could be fired from one day to the next."
"So-called conservative Catholics" working to undermine Pope Francis are "patently wrong..and betraying their own principles" says president of conservative Catholic university @avemariauniv https://t.co/3kRTbK01wH— Michelle Boorstein (@mboorstein) August 29, 2018
Rachel Donadio, "The Latest Vatican Crisis Is About Power—Not Abuse Victims":
When I asked Andrea Tornielli, a veteran Vatican reporter for the Turin daily La Stampa and the website Vatican Insider, about the letter, he saw straight through it. "It’s a political and media maneuver of ecclesiastical power." It comes, he said, from the same traditionalist faction that about a year ago tried and failed to impeach the pope over his attempting to open the door to allowing remarried divorcées to receive the sacraments. ...
While the U.S. Catholic hierarchy has few significant differences of opinion on doctrine, there are differences of tone and approach. Francis is more pastoral and less disciplinarian, and certainly less interested in the Church being on the front lines of culture wars over issues such as abortion and birth control. Others in the U.S. hierarchy—let's call them the "Fox News bishops"—want the Church to be in the thick of the debate. Many traditionalist Catholics find Francis too liberal, too interested in social justice. As the ambassador in Washington, Viganò had pushed at the Vatican for the appointments of more combative bishops in the United States. After the Viganò letter appeared, some U.S. bishops came out in defense of Francis, and others decidedly did not. (Cardinal Raymond L. Burke, a traditionalist known for his penchant for wearing a vestment with a long red flowing train, said Viganò’s calls for Francis’ resignation were 'licit.')"
When I met with @Pontifex we talked about Viganó as I say in the @nytimes Abuse crimes need to be dealt with NOW. But people like Viganò are seizing an opportunity to hurt the Pope and pass their own agenda, a vendetta that doesn’t care about survivors. https://t.co/e5PaqdWSYY— Juan Carlos Cruz Ch. (@jccruzchellew) August 29, 2018
Fr. James Martin, "The Witch Hunt for Gay Priests":
[T]he intensity of hate and level of anger directed [right now] at gay priests are unprecedented in my memory. … In the last few days I have seen more homophobic comments on my social media accounts than ever before. … This hatred currently being whipped up by a few influential church leaders and commentators will, if unchecked, lead us to a place of great darkness, characterized by an increased hatred for innocent individuals, the condemnation of an entire group of people and a distraction from the real issues underlying this crisis of sexual abuse.
There are many things that need to be addressed when it comes to clergy sex abuse: the improper screening of candidates; the prevalence of clerical culture that privileges the word of priests over lay people (and parents); the poor seminary and religious formation, especially in areas of sexuality; the need for regulations that punish bishops who have covered up abuse and many other factors.
What is not needed is the demonization of gay priests. What is not needed is more hate.
Conservatives want to create a world where objective information and right-wing disinformation are treated equally. They’re running the same playbook on tech that they ran on media, caterwauling about bias so that editors would treat them with kid gloves. https://t.co/h9OYnntCRk— NYT Opinion (@nytopinion) August 31, 2018
"It's very reminiscent of what is going on in conservative politics in the United States. It’s the same playbook," said David Gibson, director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University in New York.
"Obviously Vigano is being used as a weapon by a whole coterie of people who can’t stand Pope Francis and the changes he wants to make to the Church," said Alexander Stille, professor of international journalism at Columbia University in New York and author of several books on Italy.
"People who would defend to the death the doctrine of papal infallibility have no difficulty in treating a pope who has been elected by all the standard Vatican protocols as if we were a corporate manager who could be fired from one day to the next."
As I've said from the outset, this is a coordinated attack on the papacy of Francis by some of the worst players in American and international Catholicism — and it's parallel to what Trump and his supporters are doing politically. If you did a Venn diagram of Viganò supporters (both within and outside the U.S.) and Trump supporters (both within and outside the U.S.), you'd find noticeable overlap. The two would turn out to be occupying the same shared space in the diagram. To build on David Gibson's observation that Viganò supporters are working from the same playbook used by the U.S. political right (that is to say, Trump supporters): as with Trump supporters, Viganò's cabal gleefully spreads fake news, gins up hatred, and hopes to conquer by confusing and dividing people.
They detest Francis not only because they perceive him as soft on hating the gays, but also because he has taken Catholic teaching on the death penalty to its ultimate conclusion, defends immigrants and refugees, and emphasizes Catholic social teaching — which is in direct opposition to the economic policies of American right wingers. This is ultimately why big business moguls so influential in the Catholic right want Francis gone: they want Catholic social teaching muzzled.
Viganò's crowd employs the same post-truth, hate-mongering tactics as Trump supporters, to the same end, both claiming to represent the purest of the pure when it comes to Christianity. But both spell death for gospel-based Christianity.
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