Angelus News | May 31, 2019 | Vol. 4 No. 20

efugees — ordinarily, one of his stock themes.
The omission was notable given that just two days before,
Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, the leader
of the major populist coalition in the European elections,
had staged a rally in Milan in which he quoted John Paul
and Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, and even brandished a
rosary at one point to style himself as a defender of traditional
European values and identity. In that context, many
had expected Francis to tackle the immigrant question.
The proximity to Salvini’s jamboree, however, actually
may help explain the pope’s discretion. Not only would
pushing immigrant rights immediately afterward have
seemed overtly political, but it could have created the impression
that Francis was being drawn into a tit-for-tat with
a populist firebrand — which, frankly, probably ought to be
below the pope’s paygrade.
In this case, Francis
seemed content to let the
Italian bishops do the heavy
lifting — which they did,
among other things using
the front page of their official
newspaper to admonish
Salvini that “rosaries are for
prayer, not rallies.”
In terms of what Francis
did say, the top note was a
rather stern rebuke to the
Italian prelates for failing
to implement the pope’s
reform of the annulment
process, issued in 2015. It
was intended to compel dioceses,
or groups of smaller
dioceses acting together, to
create simplified and accelerated
procedures for considering annulment requests.
“It is with regret that I note that the reform, after four
years, remains far from being applied in the great majority
of Italian dioceses,” the pope told the bishops’ conference.
Among other things, the new process gave a stronger role
to the local bishop, dropped automatic appeals in obvious
cases of annulment, and ensured that the process would be
free. Francis called for “full and immediate application” of
those measures, saying the process should be fast, free, and
characterized by “closeness” to families in difficulty.
Though he didn’t say so out loud, in the background of
his stern tone may be mounting frustration with the Italian
bishops (and prelates elsewhere taking their cues from the
Italians) for their slowness to embrace other aspects of the
Francis agenda too, including measures intended to combat
clerical sexual abuse.
When the pope recently issued a “motu proprio,” or
amendment to Church law, requiring every diocese in the
world to have a clear reporting mechanism for allegations
of either abuse or cover-up, many Italians took it in part as
a reaction to a perceived failure of many Italian dioceses to
implement such measures on their own despite repeated
papal exhortations.
Leader of the Northern League party, Matteo Salvini, shows a rosary during
a demonstration ahead of the European elections in Piazza Duomo on
May 18 in Milan, Italy.
During a media presentation of the new rules, the pope’s
point man on the anti-abuse effort, Archbishop Charles
Scicluna of Malta, told a major Italian broadcast network
that he would actually invite laity to rise up and hold bishops
accountable if they again fail to act.
“I would ask the people of God to help the pope,” Scicluna
said.
Perhaps Francis is simply running out of patience with the
Italian hierarchy. Its perceived lethargy may be especially
frustrating for this pope in particular, given that his own
family hails from the northern Italian region of Piedmont.
For Americans, there’s a deeply intriguing coda to all this.
Neither the annulment reform nor the new anti-abuse
rules contained in “Vos estis lux mundi” (“You are the
light of the world”) seem likely to have much impact in
the United States, largely
because the American
Church had already done
most of what they mandated
decades ago.
The Church in the U.S.
adopted a streamlined
annulment process after the
Second Vatican Council
(1962-65), which for
decades led to perceptions
of the U.S. Church as an
“annulment factory,” each
year granting around twothirds
of all the annulments
in the Catholic world.
Similarly, the U.S.
Church created clear
reporting mechanisms for
abuse cases in the wake of
the 2002 “Dallas Charter,”
as well as strong procedures for investigating and prosecuting
allegations if verified.
At the beginning, those reforms, too, drew criticism from
other parts of the Church, including many in the Vatican,
who saw them as an example of the American penchant for
litigiousness and “cowboy justice.”
Here’s the irony: From the beginning, observers, rightly,
have taken Francis as deeply ambivalent about the United
States due to his strong rhetoric on capitalism and militarism
and many other factors.
Anyone who’s spent time around Francis and his team
understands the distaste with which certain aspects of
American culture are regarded — for instance, a supposed
“ecumenism of hate” in the U.S. between conservative
Evangelicals and Catholics denounced in a celebrated
2017 article by a couple of the pope’s closest advisers.
Yet in at least these two areas, annulments and clergy
abuse, Francis basically has ratified and universalized the
American approach. If nothing else, perhaps that shows
this pope’s alleged “anti-Americanism” isn’t quite as inflexible
as some may be tempted to think.
John L. Allen Jr. is the editor of Crux.
PIER MARCO TACCA/GETTY IMAGES
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