Enough With The Waiting

For some reason, Francis wasn’t scared of them… 

 

If you visit the page of Canon212 (something which you should do every day, as I do) you will see, scrolling down on the left hand side column, the

“number of days since Francis received the Cardinal’s Dubia on Amoris Laetitia”.

As I write this, the count is 188.

I will not, on this occasion, be silent about another fact: that even the Dubia came after an extremely long, certainly gravely culpable silence from the clergy en masse.  Amoris Laetitia was published on 8 April 2016. Heck, it’s almost a year, and we are still awaiting for the first (cough) blessed Cardinal to openly say that the encyclical is rubbish. 

Now, the Church is normally slow. She is slow because she is prudent, and she is slow because in many situations slowness is a good course of action. But you see, slowness must then be prudent and/or a good course of action. Slowness isn’t good in itself. 

The Church is also traditionally slow because, traditionally, information used to travel very slowly. When the one or other heretic started to get notoriety in some more or less obscure part of Europe it would take months (or years) before the thing got to the ears of Rome. Then it would get an awful lot of time only to reliably confirm the information and get more details. Then there might be other distant bishops and cardinals to consult with. In short, the slowness wasn’t there because people just slept one year at a time on well-known facts. The slowness was there because that was the way the entire world was.

Today is different. A published encyclical will be read all over the planet in a matter of hours. A papal tweet (boy, what has the world come to!) is spread worldwide instantly. Information is exchanged with extreme rapidity.

The Cardinals knew as a fact, when they decided to make the Dubia public, that they had been told that Francis would not answer them.  How does waiting six months change any of this? They were told. They got the memo. The decision was made. 

If a private correction was to be made, the time was very fast after getting the news that the Pope had decided not to answer. There was no need for the crème de la crème of Catholic theology to assemble at the Sorbonne, after consulting with who knows how many others. There was no need to visit the King of France and procure his support (financial, if needed) for the planned action.

The correction should have been officially made a week or two after being informed the man does not want to do his job, and a very public rebuke and accusation of promoting heresy should have come a week or two after that. All the rest is meowing of scared kitten.

What it would seem it might happen now is that the mountain will give birth to a country mouse:   a shame for the church as a whole and something that makes the Four Cardinals look, if possible, even worse than those who have shut up from the beginning; then the latter have at least not tried to make themselves beautiful with faithful Catholics and smuggle themselves as the defenders of Catholic orthodoxy. 

Francis must be laughing all the way to the porta potty at seeing that his opponents are such little boys, so fearful and so scared of him that they will not dare to do anything after showing a very, very, very big mouth. To add insult to injury, we are made to wait even for the country mouse, as if a banal reassertion of Catholic doctrine (something I have heard in church, and even in V II churches, in no uncertain terms at least a dozen times since the publication of Amoris Laetitia) were such a momentous event showing anything but the monumental cowardice of these supposed Princes. 

I might still be wrong, of course. The kitten might still wake up lions one day. But what I keep hearing is only the most disgraceful meowing. 

Let the Cardinals speak and be done with this farce. If they speak plainly, then let the serious battle begin. If they limit themselves to the meowing the longer the wait, the worse the shame.  

M