The seasoned English Vatican journalist John Cornwell (born in 1940) has just published an incisive and admirably accessible 300-page book about Pope Francis' papacy and its controversies titled Church, Interrupted: Havoc & Hope: The Tender Revolt of Pope Francis (San Francisco: Chronicle Prism, 2021). One of its many strengths is that Cornwell includes sharply worded commentaries by both conservative and liberal Catholics.

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Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) March 25, 2021: Have you followed the Argentine Jesuit Pope Francis (born in 1936; elected pope in March 2013)? I have.

See, for example, my incisive OEN article profiling him as a doctrinal conservative titled "Pope Francis on Evil and Satan" (dated March 24, 2019):

Click Here

But also see my more recent OEN article "An Open Letter to Pope Francis: Upgrade Your Thinking!" (dated March 1, 2021):

Click Here

But are you ready now for a detailed chronicling of Pope Francis' well-reported papacy and its controversies? I am.

The seasoned English Vatican journalist John Cornwell (born in 1940) skillfully uses the words "disrupt" and "interrupt" and their cognate forms to structure his incisive and admirably accessible 300-page 2021 chronicle titled Church, Interrupted: Havoc & Hope: The Tender Revolt of Pope Francis (San Francisco: Chronicle Prism/ Chronicle Books).

Cornwell is a former Roman Catholic and a former seminarian (for about seven years -- from the age of thirteen onward; page xiv-xv).

One of the many admirable strengths of Cornwell's book is his practice of including sharply expressed criticisms of Pope Francis by certain contemporary conservative Catholics (e.g., R. R. Reno, George Weigel) as well as defenses by liberal Catholics (e.g., Massimo Faggioli, Austen Ivereigh).

Now in 1959, Pope John XXIII in 1959 called the decidedly disruptive Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) that decisively interrupted the centuries-old Roman Catholic Church formed by the epochal Council of Trent (1545-1563). Vatican II inaugurated a new epoch in Church history, an epoch that is still underway and still unfolding.

Because the bishops who voted at Vatican II were simultaneously backward-looking and forward-looking, perhaps we can use the image of the pagan god Janus to express their simultaneously backward-looking and forward-looking spirit, except that Roman Catholics tend not to invoke pagan gods, at least not favorably.

Now, on December 22, 2005, the now-former conservative Pope Benedict XVI had set up a decisive contrast between what he chose to refer to as a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture, on the one hand, and, on the other, a hermeneutic of reform and renewal in his controversial address to the Roman Curia. In it, the conservative pope advocates his so-called hermeneutic of reform and renewal as the proper conservative way of interpreting the sixteen documents of the Second Vatican Council, thereby rejecting his so-called hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture as the mistaken liberal way of interpreting Vatican II.

According to the conservative Pope Benedict XVI, the proper conservative way to interpret the sixteen documents of Vatican II is not the hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture. But Cornwell's structuring words "disrupt" and "interrupt" and their cognate forms sound like Pope Benedict XVI's term "rupture." Through Cornwell's repeated use of these words, he alerts hyper-vigilant conservative Catholics to Pope Francis' threats to their conservative way of thinking about their professed Catholicism.

Now-former conservative Pope Benedict XVI's address is reprinted in the 2012 book Vatican II: The [Six] Essential Texts, edited by the English Jesuit Norman Tanner (New York: Image Books/ Crown Publishing/ Random House, pages 3-13).

For further discussion of Vatican II, see my OEN article "Massimo Faggioli on Vatican II and on American Catholicism" (dated March 16, 2021):

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But also see my OEN article "Massimo Faggioli on President Joe Biden, Pope Francis, and Catholicism Today" (dated February 20, 2021):

Click Here

Now, even though Cornwell refers broadly to the Second Vatican Council (pages xiii, xv, 1, 21, 94, 105, 149, 168, 208, 219, 221, 228, 236, 244-245, 249, and 250), he refers specifically to only two of its sixteen official documents:

(1) Dignitatis Humanae (the Declaration on Religious Freedom; page 168);

(2) Nostra Aetate (the Declaration of the Church's Relation to Non-Christian Religions; page 168).

However, curiously enough, in Cornwell's Chapter 23: "Francis the Modernist: Myths of Tradition and Liberalism" (pages 239-247), he discusses the historical controversy known in Church parlance as the modernist controversy, but he does not happen to advert explicitly to Vatican II's famous lengthy Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (also known by its Latin tag-name as Gaudium et Spes).

Now, in the conservative Catholic thought-world, Pope Francis is viewed as a liberal, even though he is decidedly conservative doctrinally. But how can such a decidedly doctrinally conservative pope strike certain conservative Catholics as being unacceptably liberal - indeed, as threatening "Havoc," to use the word in Cornwell's subtitle "Havoc & Hope," to their beloved Church and to their beloved conservative Catholic thought-world?

To help his readers understand the fierce conservative/liberal contrast in contemporary Roman Catholicism since Pope Francis was elected pope in March 2013, Cornwell quotes something that the late Italian Jesuit Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini (1927-2012) said to him in an interview in the 1990s: "We [Roman Catholics] are not all contemporaries in a biographical sense . . . some are in the 1990s, some Catholics are still mentally in the 1960s and some in the 1940s, and some even in the nineteenth century; it's inevitable that there will be clashes of mentalities'" (quoted on page xiii; ellipsis in Cornwell's text).

What Cardinal Martini refers to here in the quoted passage as "mentalities," I refer to as thought-worlds. In general, the conservative Catholic thought-world tends to be fixated on some idealized imaginary past, as Cardinal Martini suggests.

Now, within the spectrum of doctrinally orthodox Roman Catholics, the liberal Catholic thought-world tends to look forward to what exactly? At times, to an imagined Vatican III that will finally reverse Pope Paul VI's lamentable 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae and formally authorize married Catholics to use artificial contraception?

A few pages later, Cornwell says, "[The English] Cardinal John Henry Newman [1801-1890] wrote a powerful essay, 'The Grammar of Assent' [1870], on how one comes to religious belief; his argument is perhaps equally valid for loss of belief. We come to [religious] faith, he declared, not through an effort of the will or logical arguments but [through] a 'feeling toward,' or a 'yes,' on encountering a religion's people, its rituals and practice, over time. As he puts it, the 'popular, practical, personal evidence,' backed up by the [Roman Catholic] Church's 'authority,' the magisterium. Yet if this is true of the path to faith, then it is equally true of a resistance to assent, leading to a 'feeling against,' or a 'no!' As for authority, the priestly abuse scandals appeared to have damaged the Church's moral standing, drastically, perhaps irreparably" (page xvii).

Now, within the conventional conservative/liberal spectrum of thought among contemporary practicing Catholics today, the doctrinally conservative Pope Francis is not on record publicly as favoring any positions that are customarily favored by so-called liberal Catholics. However, in the spirit of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," contemporary liberal Catholics such as Garry Wills tend to favor Pope Francis.

But what exactly has Pope Francis done to arouse the fierce ire of conservative Catholics? Let us consider certain possible reasons for their fierce ire - which are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

(1) One of Pope Francis' seemingly unforgivable offenses is that he has urged conservative Catholic culture warriors on the right to stand down a bit from their zealous anti-abortion campaign, but without abandoning his own anti-abortion stance. (In theory, the pope's request to stand down might apply equally well to liberal Catholic culture warriors on the left, except for the fact that they have not received much attention in the public square - but only in Church circles.)

Now, culture warriors, both on the right and the left, derive an addictive adrenaline rush from engaging in culture wars. Consequently, it is hard for cultural warriors to stand down from engaging in culture wars, because they are so strongly addicted to the adrenaline rush from engaging in culture wars.

(2) Pope Francis has deeply challenged conservative Catholics (as well as liberal Catholics) to grow spiritually and thereby become more fully Christian, and he has set a good example for his fellow Christians.

(3) Granted, Pope Francis excels at throwing what Cornwell refers to as "word-bombs" (e.g., about trickle-down economics). Consequently, the pope's "word-bombs" may understandably provoke his conservative Catholic critics to return fire in kind, so to speak. In plain English, his "word-bombs" tend to sound bombastic (i.e., intemperate), even though they may express his righteous indignation.

Admittedly, Pope Francis' "word-bombs" do not exactly bespeak the supposed tenderness in Cornwell's subtitle "The Tender Revolt of Pope Francis." Nevertheless, Pope Francis could no doubt defend his customary practice of throwing "word-bombs" by citing certain portrayals of Jesus in the four canonical gospels, who is also at times portrayed as tender and merciful.

(4) Now, Pope Francis is also known for advancing synods as the preferred means of governance for the Roman Catholic Church. Cornwell says, "The word, from the Greek sinodus, meaning a meeting or council, at its root combines syn (with) and odos (path)" (page 235).

Similarly, the widely known word method is formed from the Greek root word hodos, meaning way or path, plus the prefix meta, meaning in pursuit or quest of. The Canadian Jesuit philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984) formulated what he refers to as a generalized empirical method in his philosophical masterpiece Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1957). Subsequently, he amplified his generalized empirical method in his 1972 book Method in Theology. For many years, Lonergan taught theology at the Jesuit-sponsored Gregorian University in Rome.

See the suitably edited scholarly editions of Lonergan's two books in the 25-volume Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan published by the University of Toronto Press.

Now, Cornwell also says, "Some believe that the story of the two disciples on their way to Emmaus [Luke 24:13-25], meeting the risen Jesus, was the very first synod" (page 235).

Luke's portrayal of the risen Jesus speaking to two of his disciples includes the report that his words to them made their hearts were burning within them while he was talking to them on the road (I am here paraphrasing Luke 24:32 NRSV). As the hearts of certain contemporary conservative Catholics burn with anger at Pope Francis today? But perhaps he will have to move on to the next life before their eyes are opened to his message, eh?

In any event, Cornwell dwells on the Synod on the Amazon region that Pope Francis hosted at the Vatican in October 2019, which was followed, as planned, by the pope's post-synodal February 2020 apostolic exhortation (pages 195-196 and 201-208).

Pope Francis' post-synodal 2020 apostolic exhortation is available in English at the Vatican's website:

www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20200202_querida-amazonia.html

But also see my OEN article "Pope Francis' New Apostolic Exhortation Is Visionary" (dated February 14, 2020):

Click Here

In conclusion, your guess is as good as mine as to how well, if it all, the synod approach to governance of the Roman Catholic Church will work out in the future.

Authors Website: http://www.d.umn.edu/~tfarrell

Authors Bio:

Thomas James Farrell is professor emeritus of writing studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). He started teaching at UMD in Fall 1987, and he retired from UMD at the end of May 2009. He was born in 1944. He holds three degrees from Saint Louis University (SLU): B.A. in English, 1966; M.A.(T) in English 1968; Ph.D.in higher education, 1974. On May 16, 1969, the editors of the SLU student newspaper named him Man of the Year, an honor customarily conferred on an administrator or a faculty member, not on a graduate student -- nor on a woman up to that time. He is the proud author of the book WALTER ONG'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO CULTURAL STUDIES: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE WORD AND I-THOU COMMUNICATION (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2000; 2nd ed. 2009, forthcoming). The first edition won the 2001 Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of Media Ecology conferred by the Media Ecology Association. For further information about his education and his publications, see his UMD homepage: Click here to visit Dr. Farrell's homepage.

On September 10 and 22, 2009, he discussed Walter Ong's work on the blog radio talk show "Ethics Talk" that is hosted by Hope May in philosophy at Central Michigan University. Each hour-long show has been archived and is available for people who missed the live broadcast to listen to. Here are the website addresses for the two archived shows:

Click here to listen the Technologizing of the Word Interview

Click here to listen the Ramus, Method & The Decay of Dialogue Interview