(Is blush off pope threads?) Rightwing coup crushed all Vatican II reforms, Salon.com
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http://www.salon.com/2013/03/16/is_pope_francis_a_fraud/
Saturday, Mar 16, 2013 12:30 PM CDT
[font size=5]Is Pope Francis a fraud?
After a [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]right-wing coup crushed the reforms[/FONT] of Vatican II, one scholar says the [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]last two popes are illegitimate[/FONT] [/font]
.... But the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio emerges from a [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]Jesuit order[/FONT] that [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]has been largely purged of its independent-minded or left-leaning intellectuals[/FONT], and his reputation at home in Latin America is decidedly mixed. While Francis seems to be an appealing personality in some ways — albeit one with a shadowy relationship with the former military dictatorship in Argentina, along with a record on gay rights that borders on hate speech — it’s difficult to imagine that he can or will do anything to arrest the church’s long slide into cultural irrelevance and neo-[FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]medieval isolation[/FONT]. His papacy, I suspect, comes near the end of a thousand-year history of the Vatican’s global rise to power, ambiguous flourishing and rapid decline. It also comes after [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]40 years of internal counterrevolution under the previous two popes[/FONT], during which a group of [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]hardcore right-wing cardinals[/FONT] have consolidated power in the Curia and [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]stamped out[/FONT] nearly [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]all traces of the 1960s liberal reform agenda of Pope John XXIII and Vatican II[/FONT]. A handful of intellectuals, both inside and outside the church, quietly believe that means Pope Francis isn’t a legitimate pope at all. ....
As Fox and many other Catholic and ex-Catholic dissidents see it, Vatican II marked the moment when the church had the chance to reinvent itself as a flexible moral and spiritual force in a rapidly changing world. Indeed, it briefly seemed to do just that – and it’s important to understand that [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]Bergoglio, like Joseph Ratzinger and Karol Wojtyla[/FONT] before him, [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]was part of the right-wing counterrevolution[/FONT] within the church that aggressively rolled back those changes, crushed dissident thought and reasserted the absolute power of the pope and his hierarchy. Pope Francis is a longtime ally of [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]Communion and Liberation, a fiercely conservative[/FONT] Catholic organization that insists on “total fidelity and communion” with the church leadership and is devoted, among other things, [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]to battling European socialism and Latin American liberation theology[/FONT]. In Italian politics, CL has been [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]closely tied to[/FONT] the party of [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]Silvio Berlusconi[/FONT], and its founder was an intimate friend of Cardinal Ratzinger before he became Benedict XVI. ....
[FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]Vatican II offered the promise of a church that communicated openly with the modern world[/FONT]. It specifically [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]repudiated[/FONT] the church’s history of [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]anti-Semitism[/FONT] and vowed to pursue dialogue with non-Catholics and non-Christians of many stripes. It held out the possibility of a new dogmatic flexibility in which the church would assert the truth of the Christian Gospels while [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]permitting freedom of conscience[/FONT] on a wide range of issues. Millions of learned words have been written on what was and was not addressed or implied in the ambiguous Latin prose crafted by the bishops and scholars of Vatican II, but it might be fair to sum it all up this way: No specific promises were made about changing church policy on priestly celibacy or the role of women or the moral status of homosexuality or the decentralization of Vatican power. But it was implied or understood by many participants and observers that those issues were potentially on the table, and at least you wouldn’t be punished or excommunicated for discussing them.
There was an [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]ideological counterattack against Vatican II almost immediately[/FONT], with Cardinal [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]Ratzinger[/FONT] as its intellectual leader, and that became the dominant current in the church hierarchy after the ascension of John Paul II in 1978. Fox believes that the last two popes, [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]John Paul II and Benedict XVI, departed so far from[/FONT] both the letter and spirit of [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]Vatican II[/FONT] — which should have been viewed as the authoritative teachings of the church — [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]that they should be considered “schismatic,” or illegitimate[/FONT]. “In the Catholic tradition, a council trumps a pope,” he says. “A pope does not trump a council.” (In the great tradition of Catholic intellectuals, he cites precedence in the Council of Constance, convened in 1414, which fired three warring popes and appointed a new one.) “What’s happened since [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]John Paul II is that he and Ratzinger have turned back all the basic principles of Vatican II[/FONT]. I would include the principle of freedom of conscience, the principle that theologians have a right to think. [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]They brought the Inquisition back[/FONT], there’s no question about it.”
Fox’s 2012 book “The Pope’s War: Why Ratzinger’s Secret Crusade Has Imperiled the Church and How It Can Be Saved” contains a list of [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]105 prominent Catholic theologians who have been silenced or expelled[/FONT] under the last two popes, including many influential figures of the Vatican II period and its aftermath. Fox himself is on the list; he was silenced by then-Cardinal Ratzinger in 1988 after publishing his New Age-flavored bestseller “The Coming of the Cosmic Christ” and expelled from the Dominican order five years later. (I noted during our conversation that Fox, who is now an Episcopal priest, consistently refers to the most recent pope — his particular nemesis — as “Ratzinger” rather than Benedict XVI.) This climate of inquisition, Fox says, “runs totally contrary to the entire attitude and teaching of Vatican II. In the Vatican councils, they defined the church as the people, not as the hierarchy. Under these last two popes, it’s all about the hierarchy.” ....
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