Fr Aidan Nichols on Episcopal appointments

In August 2017, the finest theologian of the Anglophone world gave a lecture which was partially published in the Catholic Herald. The fact that the full text was not subsequently available gives rise to an inevitable suspicion that Father was pressurised.

Today, I would like simply to point out that, more than a year before Cardinal Mueller's disturbing  words about the sort of questionable individuals, theological illiterates signed up to Bergoglianism, who are being appointed to senior positions in the hierarchy; and before His Excellency Archbishop Vigano's revelations about the same subject, Fr Aidan had spoken with great clarity. His antennae must be very sensitive!

"[The pope's] programme would not have got as far as it has were it not the case that theological liberals, generally of the closet variety, have in the fairly recent past been appointed to high positions both in the world episcopate and in the ranks of the Roman Curia."

"Of the closet variety" is an entertainingly old-fashioned phrase!

It was a few months before Dr Nichols' lecture that, on 19 November 2016, Cupich and Tobin were made cardinals.

The testimony of Archbishop Vigano asserted that the appointments of Cupich to Chicago (November 18 2014) and of Tobin to Newark (November 7 2016) "were orchestrated by McCarrick, Maradiaga, and Wuerl ... their names were not among those presented by the Nunciature for Chicago and Newark".

It would be a good thing if, henceforth, the terna of names submitted by Nuncios to the Holy See for a vacant bishopric were to be published. 

God's people should not have to wait for a Vigano (God bless him) to come along before they can know what is being proposed for their own Particular Church. They should not be deprived of the liberty to form their own minds both about the proposed three names, and ... if this occurs ... why all three have been set aside so that the job can be given to another.

They should be treated as Grown Ups.

This is what, in the Anglo-Saxon cultural world, is often known as ACCOUNTABILITY.

Churchmanship

"[After the Reformation,] the Papal Communion was reknit, much more closely and self-consciously than the late medieval Church, by the Protestant challenges; but the very vastness and richness of the organic life still possible in it, admitted of the existence of strong theological tensions within a single ecclesiastical body, with the spontaneity and vitality which such contained tensions always bring to theological and ecclesiastical thinking. The much smaller and more theologically homogeneous Protestant bodies on the Continent, each modelled largely upon the thought of a single master-mind, had no such inner possibilities, as is shown by the increasing stagnation of orthodox Protestant thought abroad after about 1570. In the rare cases where such strictly theological tensions arose among Protestants, they usually issued in further schisms ... 

"It is historically obvious that [the Counter-Reformation Church] owed this basic advantage to its retention of the Papacy ..."*

Exactly. Another way of putting this ... a rather English way ... would be to say that the Latin Church was a very Broad Church, containing a rich variety of 'churchmanships'.

Fundamentally, this remained true until the present pontificate. You only have to recall the criticisms made by Traddies of S John Paul II and Benedict XVI for some of the appointments they made. Tagle a Cardinal?!?!

There are many tragedies in the present pontificate, but it seems to me that the most distressing of them all is the narrowing of Church life so that only one 'Churchmanship' (I hope to be forgiven for my Anglican terminology) is encouraged; what, on this blog, I have tended to call 'Bergoglianity'. This is demonstrated both by appointments made (e.g., of Cardinals Cupich and Tobin in America), and of the alacrity with which resignations are accepted from bishops felt to be unsympathetic, in contrast to the delays in replacing 'Bergoglians' (e.g., Wuerl, still running his diocese as I write) however gravely compromised they are.

Presumably, PF is aware of his own mortality and is anxious to do what he can, in the time available to him, to prescribe and to delimit the future. "Old men in a hurry to realise their dearest dreams can be very short-sighted."*. One of his own close collaborators, at the beginning of this pontificate, admitted as much.

But to understand PF is not to excuse him for the very great calamity which he is bringing upon the Latin Church by his facile brutality and his unconcealed and narrow partisanship.

The Roman Pontiff is meant to be the Father, papa, of all God's people, not just of his own cronies.

*The first quotation comes from the Report Catholicity offered to the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1947 by fourteen Anglo-Catholics including (the future) Bishops Carpenter, Mortimer, and Ramsey. And T S Eliot! The Report was drafted by Dom Gregory Dix. The second quotation is from Dix.  

Doncha just love him?

I mean, of course, Reverendissimum ac eminentissimum Dominum, Dominum Blasium Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae Cardinalem CUPICH ...

So neat, so sweetly petite, so invariably kempt with never a hair out of place ... what a credit he is to his Nanny, God bless her! What a perfectly precious poppet he is! Don't you just long to throw your arms around him and give him a great big hug ... I address, of course, my female readers ... And just think that the dreadful Dr Kirk has described him as not being the sharpest knife in the drawer ... these Ordinariate bloggers really are the limit ...


What a revealing explanation poor little Cupich has indeed given of why PF is right to refuse to answer questions about the Vigano Testimony: He's too busy sorting out Ecology and Migration ... and, Lo, right on schedule, last Saturday PF launched an attack on Plastics ... the Plastics of Satan have, one gathers, entered through some crack into the Church ... It all reminds me of a story I heard from an American round about the time of the Viertnam War. A woman is explaining how her husband is truly Boss: "He makes all the important decisions ... international politics ... who should be the next President ... nuclear war ... I just make the small unimportant decisions about things like how we spend the money, where we live, how we bring the children up ..."

Life really is hilarious, isn't it? I know many of you long each day to hear that this pontificate has ended, and of course I'm totally with you really, deep down; but we shall lose an awful lot of laughs when it does end. I have manufactured neat little notices which I pin up whenever I come across an example of some non-reader of Laudato si having fly-tipped rubbish in a beauty spot; or on beaches covered with curial condoms: POPE FRANCIS HAS BEEN INFORMED, or BIG FATHER IS WATCHING YOU.

Perhaps PF should also devote his attention to the interplanetary environment and become ktistes, Founder, of the first colony on Mars (Belgranoville? Antinoopolis Martia?). The first colonists could consist of the surviving prominent clerical homosexuals listed in that gigantic dossier Pope Benedict left for his successor in the Papal Safe ...
 
"What's that you say, Holy Father? You never saw that dossier? Nobody ever told you there was a safe in your study? And, in any case, someone else had mislaid the key? If you do ever come across the dossier, of course you will take action? You only learned about it from the newspapers? Through absolutely no fault of your own you are surrounded by people who constantly misinform you and brief you badly?"

Of course, of course, of course. We know how it is. Don't worry. Nobody blames you. There there. Don't cry ...