Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD/VATICAN CITY: From his reforms to his foreign relations, criticism of Pope Francis has intensified since the death of his predecessor Benedict XVI, revealing a climate of “civil war” when the Catholic Church has engaged in an international conversation about its future.
According to the APP, Benedict, the conservative German theologian who was pope for eight years before resigning in 2013, died on 31 December.
Pope Francis
Within days of his death, his closest aide, Georg Gaenswein, revealed Benedict’s concerns at some of the changes his successor Pope Francis made, notably his decisions to restrict the use of the Latin mass.
The criticism wasn’t new. Several in the conservative wing of the Roman Curia, which governs a Church, have long complained that the Argentine pontiff is authoritarian and focused on pastoral issues at the expense of theological rigour.
But it followed by the death of Cardinal George Pell and the subsequent revelation that he had authored the anonymous note published the previous year the directly attacked Francis.
A note had described the current papacy as a “catastrophe” and criticized “failures” of Vatican diplomacy under his watch.
Pell, an ex-adviser to Francis, had been jailed for child sexual abuse before being acquitted in 2020.
Then, German Cardinal Gerhard Mueller published a book adding fuel to the fire.
The ex-head of the Vatican’s powerful congregation for the doctrine of a faith denounced Francis’ “doctrinal confusion” or criticized the influence of a “magic circle” around him.
Civil war
Mueller’s book has caused consternation among some inside the Vatican.
A senior official in the Secretariat of State said, “when you accept a cardinal’s cap, you agree to support and help the pope. Criticisms have been made in private, not in public,”.
Pope Francis said on his plane back from South Sudan the previous Sunday that his critics have “exploited” Benedict’s death to further their cause.
He said, “those who exploit such a good person, such a man of God… well, I would say they unethical people, they are people belonging to a party, not to the Church,”.
Italian Vatican expert Marco Politi said Mueller’s book “is a new stage in the unstoppable escalation by the pope’s adversaries.”
He said that “there is a civil war in the heart of the church which could continue until the last day of the papacy.”
International consultations
The tension comes as the Catholic Church conducts an extensive international consultation on its future, the “Synod on Synodality” launched by Pope Francis in 2021.
Designed to decentralize the church’s governance, it revealed key differences, with the German Catholic Church, for example, showing distinctly more appetite for reform than Rome.
