Prepare to be Saddened

Crises and scandals have gathered at the Vatican in the past month. This pontificate is spreading chaos and confusion. 

We are all familiar with parody Twitter accounts; someone called Donald J. Trump has a really rather good one going at the moment. When I read the words of a senior Vatican official recently, on the Twitter feed of the Catholic Herald, it seemed just so obvious. A Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorando, according to the report, the chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences — it sounds like a job of soul-destroying tedium but is in fact a rather significant position — had described the one country in the world that, in the bishop’s words, was “best implementing the social doctrine of the Church.” That would be the People’s Republic of China. 

 China is the country that had a remarkably successful try at enforcing a one-child policy, promoting massive abortion (a figure of more than 300 million has been suggested) — sex-selective, with boys highly favored for birth, girls for elimination — enforced sterilization, and execution of criminals. And, of course, the one-party state persecutes the Church and imprisons human-rights advocates. Bishop Sánchez, who said he had been to China and seen all this good work in person, so it must be true, probably wouldn’t agree with Cardinal Joseph Zen, the bishop emeritus of Hong Kong, who recently protested the imminent decision of the Vatican to recognize the government-sponsored, quisling “Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association.” That move would be at the expense of the members of the “underground” Catholic Church, which has stayed loyal to the Vatican and suffered persecution for decades. Zen said that the Vatican, and by that he means Pope Francis, was “ready to surrender to the Chinese Communist Party” — again, perfectly fine if it excelled at implementing the social doctrine of the Church.

Read the whole thing. Here's the final paragraph:

You can hide the rubbish in the streets only for so long. Eventually it overflows, out into the open. When the Church should be speaking with a clear and direct voice, it is instead spreading confusion, misunderstanding, and scandal. Francis famously called for the people to make a “mess” in the Church. To youth in Rio de Janeiro, he said in January 2013, “I want a mess. . . . I want trouble in the dioceses.” It seems, for now, he has got his wish.