By Gavin Ashenden, from Anglican Ink. (Editor’s note: a different take on the Crux interview)
(image: Wiki Creative Commons)
Pope Leo has given an interview to Crux, and revealed his mind. He has spoken clearly – with a certain delicate code. The code is designed to break his heterodox opponents, but not to eviscerate them. It is a triumph of pastoral gentleness and credal vigour. But the exercise to read his mind needs a little code-breaking.
The news is good. It’s more than good. It’s excellent. The pope is a Catholic.
Why should the pope speak in code? Because the questions he has been put and answered are technical theological questions, each with political wings that could take off and fly around at high velocity if they were not anchored in carefully articulated thought to restrain them. And by speaking in theological rathet than political language, he does not humiliate the opposition.
And as it happens, the pope is doing just what some of us thought he would. He is using the language and preoccupations of the progressives, but rooting the words in the magisterium, and so emptying the rhetoric of heterodox velocity. The ideas can’t take off like a revolutionary firework and wreak havoc. They are tethered to the teaching of the Church.
The Latin Mass.
In a deliciously skilful way he set out to heal the damage done by ‘Traditiones Custodes.’ He disarms it by reaching for that other great weapon of nuclear progressive revisionism, ‘synodality.’
“Between the Tridentine Mass & the Vatican II Mass, the Mass of Paul VI, I’m not sure where that’s going to go. It’s obviously very complicated…
That is an issue that I think also, maybe with synodality, we have to sit down & talk about.”
Synodality could mean so many things. Pope Francis allowed it to be used as a platform to justify changing the teaching of the Church. Pope Leo is going to use it to allow the Church to be reminded of the teaching and the magisterium of the Church.
What will happen if as he predicts, “we sit down and talk about the Latin Mass?”
The Church will articulate the position that was always true ‘BF’ (before Francis). The bishops whom Francis consulted will be able to tell the truth about what they really said. The evidence that the TLM is the antidote to the loss of enchantment will get a hearing. The few diehard Novus Ordo fanatics will be shown to be the tiny minority of late modernity pensioners, stuck in a kind of time-warp shaped by John Lennon and EE Cummings. And, most importantly and skilfully, Leo will not have reversed his predecessor’s act of neurotic revenge, thereby doing the one thing a pope cannot do, which is to give the impression that that doctrine can go one way with one pope and another way with subsequent pope, which does great damage to the see of St Peter. Instead he will allow the magisterium to make the corrective,(discovered by talking about it, =benign synodality), as indeed it should.