Silere non Possum
A year has passed since the morning of 21 April 2025, when Cardinal Farrell announced to the world the death of Pope Francis. Twelve years had passed since that balcony on a rainy March afternoon, since the “buonasera” that went round the world, since the request for a blessing turned on its head, the people blessing the Pope before the Pope blessed the people. Twelve years which the official hagiography, already in full and predictable bloom, is now turning into epic.
The task of Catholic journalism, however, is not to write the lives of saints before their time. It is to look the Church in the face as she is, to listen to her laboured breathing, to register her wounds. And it is precisely in the name of that task - to which Silere non possum has remained faithful in years when keeping silent was by far more convenient than speaking - that, one year after the Holy Father Francis returned to the Father’s house, it is necessary to state clearly what rhetoric leaves unsaid: that pontificate polarised the Church as few others in recent history have done, it produced a fracture which the pontificate of Leo XIV is now trying, with Augustinian patience, to mend, and above all - this is the heart of the matter - it offered the world an image of itself that did not always correspond to the substance.
The manufacture of gestures
In The Leopard, by Tomasi di Lampedusa, there is a line that has become a commonplace without ever being exhausted: if everything is to stay as it is, everything must change. No formula better describes the twelve years of Francis. The Pontiff who wanted “a poor Church for the poor” lived in Santa Marta rather than in the Apostolic Palace: a choice presented as a sign of humility, yet within a few years it had become the instrument of a personal and opaque form of government, removed from the institutional filters which the Curia, for better or worse, had guaranteed for centuries. The door of Santa Marta opened to whom the Pope wished, and closed to whom he did not wish: not the promised transparency, but a new - and less controllable - form of court. Not to mention the cost.
Evangelii gaudium called for a Church that was “bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets”. Yet in the twelve years that followed, it was above all priests, religious and bishops who found themselves bruised and dirty: not because they had been walking, but because they had been overwhelmed by a canon law turned - as Silere non possum has documented meticulously over these years - into a punitive instrument, altered through repeated motu proprio which layered up a vexatious, complicated and often contradictory legal order. There were those, in the lecture halls of the pontifical universities, who recalled an old maxim: those who truly know a subject can explain it simply; those who complicate it betray that they do not know it. Not to mention Vatican law. The four secret rescripts signed between 2019 and 2020 - those which brought to light the existence of a special judicial regime inside Vatican City State - remain the symbol of a season in which the principle of legality was bent to the will of the monarch. And the media system, which on this day celebrates its own god, had closed ranks in exchange for a few favours. The Pope acted like a despot of the sort journalists denounce in eastern republics, but in the Vatican they had become more papal than the Pope.
Hypocrisy as a system
Here it is necessary to pronounce the word that so irritates the “professionals of disinformation”: hypocrisy. Bernanos, in The Diary of a Country Priest, observed that injustice done in the name of the Church wounds twice over: the victim, and the faith of the one who witnesses it. Under the pontificate of Francis, the distance between the official discourse and actual practice at times became abyssal.
Mercy was preached, and priests were suspended a divinis even before the substance of the accusations had been verified, simply in order to feed the media with a guilty party to exhibit. Synodality was celebrated, and those who dared to raise legitimate questions about incomprehensible texts such as In Ecclesiarum Communione were dispatched with a one-way ticket. Poverty was preached, and enormous sums were spent on the whims of the new image: wardrobes redone in order to appear more humble, the abandonment of the Apostolic Palace in favour of a Santa Marta refurbished to measure, the Palace of Castel Gandolfo abandoned and then reopened as a museum attraction; and all the while the Dicastery for Communication was allowed to turn the face of the Pontiff into merchandise. The welcome of those who had gone astray and were “far away” was celebrated, and yet those who were “near” were dealt with mercilessly through commissariamenti and suspensions that bore the marks of a harshness that had nothing paternal about it. Clericalism was thundered against, and personal friends such as Marko Ivan Rupnik were protected, while the alleged victims waited for justice. There was talk of “opening up to women”, and behind closed doors it was said that “gossip is women’s stuff”, only then to stigmatise - with a lexical choice that speaks for itself - the “frociaggine” in seminaries. A veritable worm at the heart of Jorge Mario Bergoglio.
When Manzoni, in chapter twenty-two of The Betrothed, sketches the figure of Federigo Borromeo, he devotes memorable pages to the distinction between charity that seeks the gaze of men and charity that hides itself away. In the twelve years of the pontificate of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, there was plenty of noise. The real good, the silent good of frontier parish priests, of cloistered monasteries, of bishops who did not seek out microphones, that good was often left alone, and at times punished.
The liturgy as a battlefield
With Traditionis custodes, in 2021, the Jesuit Pope who had promised not to leave anyone behind wrote a letter that left a great many behind: those faithful who found in Holy Mass celebrated according to the Vetus Ordo not a reactionary nostalgia but a way into the mystery. The gesture, justified as a defence of unity, produced the opposite: divided dioceses, embarrassed bishops, scattered communities, boys and girls pushed - these really were - towards extreme positions from which authentic pastoral care ought to have kept them away. The present writer recalls the page in Newman, in Apologia pro vita sua, in which the English writer confesses that faith takes root when intellect and affection find their home together. One may debate the Vetus Ordo endlessly; one cannot pretend that thousands of faithful did not feel, in that season, not accompanied but expelled.
More: https://x.com/silerenonpossum/status/2046509977611723167?s=46&t=IydJ-X8H6c0NM044nYKQ0w
