Last week, the Grand Master knelt, symbolically yielding his sword to the Pope. Fra’ Matthew Festing, a Brit, had been embroiled in a nasty squabble with an underling, Grand Chancellor Albrecht Freiherr von Boeselager, a German, whom Festing fired for allowing the Order’s charity to distribute condoms in Myanmar—a violation of Catholic practice. The details of the dispute matter less than Pope Francis’s firm intervention on the side of Boeselager, who, after Festing’s resignation, was reinstated. Defenders of the Order objected to the papal intrusion, calling it a violation of sovereignty—and with condoms at issue, many also caught a whiff of the Pontiff’s liberalizing incense. Conservatives, as usual, gagged. (Ross Douthat, for example, saw a “characteristic move of the papacy” of which he famously disapproves.) Traditionalists have become increasingly peeved with Francis since last November, when he released the encyclical “Amoris Laetitia” (“The Joy of Love”), which seemed to provide an opening for divorced and remarried Catholics to be readmitted to the sacraments. The conservative Order of Malta is not to be confused with anything having to do with the actual island nation, a fact underscored last month when the Catholic bishops of Malta, appealing to “Amoris Laetitia,” declared that a separated or divorced person “at peace with God” cannot be denied communion. [...]
Burke’s opposition to Pope Francis is as much geopolitical as it is theological. Pope Francis is, at this point, the world’s staunchest defender of migrants, and of Muslim migrants. A year ago, in a gesture widely understood to be a rebuttal to Donald Trump, he went to the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border, and on his flight back to Rome said expressly of Trump, “A person who thinks only of building walls … is not Christian.” On Inauguration Day, Francis sent “cordial good wishes” to Trump, but added that America’s “stature” depended on “above all its concern for the poor, the outcast, and those in need who, like Lazarus, stand before our door.”
The American prelate who most closely resembles Francis in thought and style is Blase J. Cupich, archbishop of Chicago, whom Francis made a cardinal only days after the U.S. election. This week, in a resounding rebuke to Trump, Cupich described the President’s executive order banning travel from seven Muslim-majority nations as “a dark moment in U.S. history.” The Catholic Church, despite retaining some of the trappings, costumes, and mental habits of the past thousand years, has left its war with Islam behind. The West seemed to have done so long ago, but now, with the West at war with itself (a match to the intra-Islam conflict), the questions have returned. Who are the faithful? Who are the infidels? Who would have thought that, on an elemental point of liberal democracy, the United States could take instruction from the white-robed man in Rome? And who would have thought that liberal democracy itself could have a stake in the unfinished struggle for the soul of the Catholic Church?
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