In every age, the levers of power are worked with equal ambition by Church and state. Members of both assemblies inhabit the moral imagination of their time; both breathe the same compromised air. Self-justified worthies gerrymander realities without apology. They confer high awards on finesse in dissembling. Language obfuscates; clarity is penalized.
Two contemporary parallels come to mind, one ecclesial, the other secular.
During the COVID-19 panic, the CDC gave the word vaccine a makeover. It tweaked language in order to sell the public on an inadequately tested gene therapy being used as if it were a vaccine in the traditional sense that Edward Jenner might recognize. The definition of vaccination was renovated—”repurposed” chirped one medical expert—to accommodate an update in technology.
The rhetoric sounded scientific. But if a technological change requires altered language, does it not follow that a substantive difference is in play? It took a while for the word game to fall apart. Ultimately, it did. But now Catholics have another one.
This time the word stretched on the rack is blessing. Down the ages, Catholics understood every priest’s blessing as a liturgical act. Whether an ordained priest blessed a farmer’s field or a dying spouse, his blessing was trusted to be a solemn act of prayer. It was never a casual utterance, never something close to the plane of Gesundheit. Or “Good on you!”
As with vaccine, the noun blessing has been repurposed. Updated to reflect change in Vatican weather, it has been divided. One half, reserved for sacramental marriage between a man and woman, is the sole existing liturgical act. The other half—an informal subdivision but nonetheless hallowed—can be openly granted to same-sex couples.
Fiducia supplicans: On the Pastoral Meaning of Blessings formalizes the bifurcation. It opens our clouded eyes to previously unseen distinctions within the concept of blessings. To facilitate this taffy-pull, FS separates the term couple from its established role as a signal of a sexual relationship.
Blessing lite goes where blessing dare not tread.
• • • • •
Our crisis is larger than Fernandez’ erogenous pensées
In debased times, even the sense and substance of scandal degrades. Frames of reference shrink. Cardinal Fernandez’ proclivities spotlight the unwholesome core of this pontificate. But they also deflect attention from the nucleus of our spiral toward chaos. Grounds for shredding FS are catechetical and canonical. They exist independently of a cardinal’s personal obsessions. The work of steadying the Church is far more complex and formidable than self-satisfying demands to demote Fernandez. There is grave danger in concentrating on the cardinal’s erogenous pensées to the eclipse of more insidious pornography on a geopolitical scale. (More below. Stay with me.)
Yet Catholic media is currently in high dudgeon over Cardinal Fernandez’ Mystical Passion: Spirituality and Sensuality, a coy discourse on orgasms written three years after his 1995 treatise on the high art of kissing. Life Site News heads its reportage with a trigger warning (“The article contains disturbing material”). It solicits signatures on a petition to “put an end to the toleration of such evil material from our Church leaders.” Archbishop Viganò, with characteristic élan, called on the Swiss Guards to “arrest these heretical perverts.” (The plural is code for Fernandez’ fellow travelers, giddy over the blessing of same-sex couples.) The estimable Damian Thompson tweeted (Xed) that “we have arrived at the final crisis of this pontificate.”
If only that were so. But no. A more encompassing crisis looms. If you want obscenity take a good look at Latin Patriarch Pierbattista Pizzaballa in Bethlehem on Christmas Eve. Francis’ hand-picked front man in the Holy Land sports the universal badge of antisemites chanting “From the river to the sea.”
One cardinal, a clown; the other, an incendiary
In Geoffrey Chaucer’s day, a sybarite in holy orders—one with a bent for breathy erotica—would have made raucous material for a story-telling competition among pilgrims on the road to Canterbury. It is the stuff of ridicule, something to hold up to laughter as a moral lesson. A latter-day companion piece to The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, Fernandez’ libidinous mysticism provides a delicious opportunity to jeer at vanity, hypocrisy, and the titillating belles lettres of a high-ranking prelate.
Sadly, moral imagination is duller than that now. Perspective has gone flat. Conscientious Catholics hurry to the internet to cry “Havoc!” over a cardinal’s wet dreams. This, while they turn a blind eye to the foul deed done in public by Pizzaballa on Christmas Eve.
The cardinal accepted a keffiyah placed around his neck when he arrived in Bethlehem. A highly signifiant gesture, it was quite likely pre-approved. He did not remove the thing. Instead, he wore it in solemn procession from the Tomb of Rachel to the Basilica of the Nativity. That keffiyah was a deliberate, incendiary finger in Israel’s eye. The word provocative barely applies. It is too mild for a civilization-destroying salute that signals Vatican assent to the myth of Palestinian victimhood and, at the same time, stokes the demons of Palestinian resentment.
That scarf around Pizzaballa’s neck put paid to sanctimonious pieties about moral equivalence. It was worn as an emblem of imaginary Palestinian innocence in the face of Israeli oppression. The man’s malevolence toward Israel comes disguised as compassion for Gazans. A post-October 7th poll by AWRAD (Arab World for Reasearch and Development) finds Gazans overwhelmingly supportive of Hamas. (See here and here.)
The Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem will not name the terrorist organization whose pornographic savagery caused this war. Instead, he continues to call for an end to the “Israeli occupation of Palestine”—which ended in 2005. [The evacuation was so complete that Israel even removed its own graves.]
Rachel still weeps for her people.
Hamas in Bethlehem’s heart?
Bethlehem’s Terra Sancta Scouts led the parade with declarations of solidarity with Gaza. Which is to say, with Hamas. The lead banner, conspicuously in English, is aimed at Western—particularly American—media. Count it a covert papal message to President Biden and Anthony Blinken. [Hamas networks exist in Judea and Samaria. Bethlehem is in Judea.]
Crowning the indecency of Pizzaballa’s suggestive parade was a mendacious, historically ignorant manger scene. Constructed in Manger Square, it was a politicized propaganda piece that usurped traditional, theologically-infused depictions of the newborn Jesus. Note what substituted for an infant in swaddling clothes: the corpse of an infant covered face to toe with a winding cloth and ready for burial. Razor wire around the scene concretizes the meme that Gaza is “an open-air prison.” The Star of Bethlehem appears as a rocket crater through a roof—a Gazan roof in this context.
The blackened assemblage is hardly a non-partisan plea for peace. It is more sly than that. It conveys a parallel between the Holy Family and the Palestinians. Israel’s genocidal bombing kills babies, you see. Hint, hint: Jews are murdering Christ again.
A more up-to-date and politically honest manger scene would show a Hamas weapons cache under the crèche.
No one is petitioning to have Pizzaballa sanctioned. No one is demanding he resign or be removed from his post as Latin Patriarch. There are no calls for his head. Moralists are not calling foul. No one is getting exercised over this devious admission of the underside of prayers for a cease fire. A cease fire leaves Hamas intact, a thing devoutly to be wished by every anti-Zionist. And by antisemites who duck behind a distinction between the state of Israel and the Jewish people.
Israel’s war to defend itself against murdering neighbors offends a quisling pope. Not because he worries about so-called innocent civilians but because he does not want Israel, a modern Western nation, to prevail. Francis’ hostility to the West—and the orthodoxy that nourished it?—is palpable.
There is no way around the fact that both cardinals were chosen to reflect Pope Francis’ ultimate aims. Fernandez’ tendencies serve this pontificate. Pizzaballa’s animus—disguised as humane compassion—obliges Francis’s own antipathy. The buck for pornography, in its dual manifestations, stops inside the walls of Vatican City.
