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Candid talk from senior cardinal on Pope Francis, Benedict XVI—
And All I HAVE TO SAY IS DUH!
Cardinal Camillo Ruini thinks Benedict XVI’s resignation was a mistake. Ruini also found himself flummoxed by the Francis pontificate and unsure whether the reign of the late Argentinian pontiff will prove to have done more harm or good.
“I found myself in difficulty with Pope Francis,” Ruini said in response to a question asking whether the late pontiff had disappointed him. “The change was too great and sudden,” Ruini said.
“More than disappointed,” Ruini said he was “surprised.”
Asked for his measure of the Francis pontificate, whether it did “more good or more harm to the Church,” Ruini said his would be “a complex assessment, with very positive aspects and others much less so.”
“It’s too early to judge which of them prevail,” he said.
He acknowledged things red hats and curial officers – along with the rank and file in the Church’s central governing apparatus and bishops around the world have whispered privately for years: that Benedict’s resignation was a mistake and Francis’s reign was not easy for the Church.
MY COMMENTS: I am glad that Cardinal Ruini confirms my own feelings about Benedict and Francis. I too felt that Pope Benedict XVI made a mistake in resigning and should have persevered in his papacy. Would he have lasted ten more years? I doubt it but things would have worked out differently for the Church.
But, the Holy Spirit always repairs mistakes in the Church but not on our timeline.
I feel the same way as Cardinal Ruini feels about Pope Francis’ papacy. I think it was a disaster and now I know I am not alone and that many felt it was a disaster, including Cardinal Pell.
But of course there were good things but the bad seem to overwhelm me because some of the bad things were so mean-spirited:
1. How he berated those who desired the way the Church was going under Pope Benedict—renewal in continuity, respect for Tradition and traditions. Those who like liturgical and clerical refinery. The worst thing he did was to call into question their mental health and sincerity—a horrible judgment for someone who others touted as non-judgmental. In reality Pope Francis was the most judgmental pope ever and mean in his judgements.
2. Canceling, for the most part, the papacies of St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI especially the liturgical magisterium of Pope Benedict XVI and doing so while His Holiness was the Emeritus Pope, still living and not even giving Pope Benedict a courtesy call concerning Traditionis Custodis.
3. Beginning processes that might have led to heterodox and heretical changes in Doctrine, Morals and the Faith of the Church. Francis’ synodal way was laying the foundation for this and Fiducia Supplicans is a virus, too, to regularize as virtue sexual sins of whatever degree and type. Both Francis’ synodal way and FS were processes to lead to the collapse of the doctrines of the Sacraments along with their anthropology and substitute an inversion of these.
4. Chipping away at the foundation of the Church as being the True Church and necessary for salvation and that Christ and His Church are the exclusive ways of salvation. It seem to me , in my most humble opinion, that Pope Francis was more interested in a Church that makes this world a utopian experience where all are embraced and nothing is sinful but exclusion. Heaven and hell as a just reward were relegated to obscurity.
What is good about Pope Francis papacy? He showed two or more new generations of Catholics, who have no living memory of Vatican II and its aftermath in the 1960’s well into the 80’s, what that period was like, with its confusion, experiments, ambiguity and that everything about traditional Catholic identities was up for grabs and open to change, even doctrines and morals. These new generations got to see how ugly it was because it was still ugly under Pope Francis’ direction.
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