Pope says a strong US faction offers a backward, narrow view of the Church
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
Pope Francis lamented the “backwardness” of some American conservatives who he said insist on a narrow, outdated and unchanging vision.
PHOTO: AFP
ROME – Pope Francis has expressed in unusually sharp terms his dismay at “a very strong, organised, reactionary attitude” opposing him within the United States Catholic Church, one that fixates on social issues like abortion and sexuality to the exclusion of caring for the poor and the environment.
The Pope lamented the “backwardness” of some American conservatives who he said insist on a narrow, outdated and unchanging vision.
They refuse, he said, to accept the full breadth of the Church’s mission and the need for changes in doctrine over time.
“I would like to remind these people that backwardness is useless,” Pope Francis, 86, told a group of fellow Jesuits early in August in a meeting at World Youth Day celebrations in Lisbon.
“Doing this, you lose the true tradition, and you turn to ideologies to have support. In other words, ideologies replace faith.”
His words became public this week, when a transcript of the conversation was published by the Vatican-vetted Jesuit journal La Civilta Cattolica.
His comments were an unusually explicit statement of the Pope’s longstanding lament that the ideological bent of some leading American Catholics has turned them into culture warriors rather than pastors, offering the faithful a warped view of church doctrine rather than a healthy, well-rounded faith.
It has become a major theme of his papacy that he sees himself as bringing the Church forward while his misguided conservative critics try to hold it back.
Many of today’s conservative leaders were promoted in the more doctrinaire church of St John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI.
They have accused Pope Francis, an Argentine, of being anti-American and anti-capitalist, and leading the church away from its core teachings.
But he has consistently argued in his decade as pope that the church was part of history, and not a fortress from it, and that it needed to open up and be amid the people to reflect and respond to their challenges.
Speaking to the Portuguese priests in August, he noted that over the centuries the Church had changed its positions on issues such as slavery and capital punishment.
“The vision of the doctrine of the Church as a monolith is wrong,” he said.
“When you go backward, you make something closed off, disconnected from the roots of the Church”, eroding morality. NYTIMES
