The massive days of Pope Francis in Portugal on the occasion of World Youth Day, which the correspondent in Lisbon, Teseira Constela, told us so well, has shrouded the Pope’s important and explosive interview with the Spanish Catholic magazine Vida Nueva before going to Portugal.
Pope Francis was questioned at length by the entire editorial staff of the magazine, which would have been considered crazy for the other popes. Officially, the popes spoke only through official documents. Francis was the first in the Church to break this taboo.
The gracious and smiling Francis, who in the Spanish interview called on a crowd of a million and a half faithful in Lisbon to join him in exclaiming that God “forgives and loves always and everyone without distinction,” was harsh and scathing, making a series of revelations about the issues , which he has to face with the current conservative church.
When asked why he had not called a new ecumenical council, like the last Vatican Council, when all the bishops of the world came to Rome to analyze the current situation of the Catholic Church, he answered bluntly: “The times are still not ripe for this new Council.” And he added wryly: “It is not necessary since Vatican II has not yet begun.”
It is serious for the Pope to say that the most revolutionary council in the history of the Church, held in the 1960s, almost 200 years after Vatican I, raised so many hopes for the renewal of a Church anchored in the past, it hasn’t even started yet.
If so, it’s understandable why Francis refuses to summon the entire Church again to discuss today’s issues. For him, the real revolution consisted in the church returning to its revolutionary origins and shedding all the conservative theological baggage that had accumulated century after century. And he knows that a Council at this point would undoubtedly be conservative.
In the interview, the Pope even goes so far as to tell the journalists of Vida Nueva that he is aware that he suspects “a fist in the stomach” in the Church today. And he adds a harsh confession related to the reforms he would like to make but cannot: “I have not yet succeeded in putting an end to the judicial culture in the Curia,” suggesting that he himself still feels like a prisoner of the bureaucracy, conservative and even corrupt apparatus of the Vatican’s central government. Even his predecessor, the German and conservative Pope Ratzinger, eventually referred to the Curia as a “pack of wolves” and eventually renounced the papacy.
After so harshly criticizing the Roman Curia, whose conservative impulses he could not curb, he erupted again: “Without the Gospel the Church cannot be reformed.” And this desire to return to the Church of the first century of Christianity, and it is the efforts made by Francis to achieve this that lead the apparatus of the Curia to oppose him. It scares them.
The Pope is convinced, as he said in his interviews, as he showed in his speeches in Portugal, where he presented a Church of forgiveness for all without distinction, since God does not discriminate against us and accepts us all as we are : “We must disarm the prophets of confusion”. He didn’t say who they are. Surely those who wish for a new council will stop him in his dreams of a profound renewal of a church weakening in the face of the rise of evangelical sects.
The pope also condemned movements within the church that refuse to accept conversion once they return to their origins. “In these movements, ideology can easily creep in with much apparent mysticism, but also with much corruption,”
Francis’ struggle to restore the power and importance of women in the Church that they had at the time of its founding is well known. During the ten years of his pontificate, his desire for female leadership was evident, as was the opposition he encountered in the conservative church.
In an interview with Vida Nueva, he told them of his surprise when a group of trans people visited him in Rome: “They came out crying and said I gave them my hand, a kiss.” As if he had done something extraordinary for them. “But they are daughters of God!”
Francis’ acknowledgment that a new Council would be useless today and would be led by the conservative Church, which has not yet internalized the novelty of Vatican II, is the best example of the Pope’s vision of Catholicism’s current moment .
Perhaps Francis, speaking to the Spanish journalists to whom he confessed that the Second Vatican Council had not even begun, recalls that the Council had only just ended, in which the episcopacy of Spain was one of the most conservative and reactionary Iglesia, then Cardinal of Seville, Bueno and Monreal, said to his family on his return to the diocese: “And now we have to wait for the water to flow again.”
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