This controversial appointment could lead to more headaches at the Vatican.
The appointment of Archbishop Víctor Manuel Fernández as the new Prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) has caused considerable consternation in Rome and abroad.
In certain quarters, this centres around his alleged departures from Catholic orthodoxy. More popularly, however, interest has focused on a book he published in 1995 entitled Heal Me with Your Mouth: The Art of Kissing (I shall spare you, dear reader, the details). Although Fernández asserts that its insights do not result from personal experience, if so, they certainly imply a startling capacity for empathy. Some have wondered whether this suggests quite the right disposition for the job of doctrinal watchdog.
On the other hand, the Palazzo della Sant’Uffizio (DDF headquarters) has been oddly associated with amorous activities of late. The Pillar obtained data from adulterous and homosexual dating apps showing that both were heavily used by persons inside the walls of Vatican City. And in 2018, an apartment in the DDF building was raided by Vatican police; what they found there suggested the apps had been vigorously put to use. Archbishop Fernández himself is reputedly the writer of chapter 8 of Amoris Laetitia, which is widely perceived to license adultery.
At the end of Paul VI’s pontificate, many felt the Church was spiralling out of control. The resistance to the ailing pontiff’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae was so violent that Pope Paul never wrote another one. Paul VI himself lamented that, instead of a new Pentecost, the “smoke of Satan” seemed to have entered the Church.
The pontificate of John Paul II seemed as if it had fulfilled the promise of Vatican II. Three acts particularly seemed to draw a line under the chaos of the previous decades: the 1983 Code of Canon Law, the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church and the Theology of the Body. The last was particularly important, because it took the very teaching of Paul VI that had been such a rallying point for dissent and built a new positive body of teachings around it, placing it in context and cementing its position, but also seemingly exemplifying a distinctively post-conciliar theological approach, which nevertheless refused to see the Council as a rupture of substance with the perennial magisterium.
For those for whom the Council is cherished precisely as a rupture on every level with what came before, John Paul II is accordingly loathed. He attempted to steal their Council and blasphemed against its Spirit. The election of Pope Francis in 2013 seemed to these exiles a moment of restoration, an opportunity to erase everything that had occurred since that terrible moment in 1978 when the Pole appeared on the balcony of St Peter’s. Target number one was the Theology of the Body and the moral teaching it sought to reinforce. The German Bishops demanded the Theology of the Body be replaced with a Theology of Love.
In his letter appointing Archbishop Fernández to prefecture of the DDF, Pope Francis declares: “The Dicastery over which you will preside, in other times came to use immoral methods”. To what is Pope Francis referring – torture, crusades, censorship, the Thirty Years’ War? No. He is referring to the pontificates of his immediate predecessors. “Those were times when, rather than promoting theological knowledge, possible doctrinal errors were pursued. What I expect from you is certainly something very different.” Quite how different will probably emerge very quickly…
Previously, as Fernández has admitted, he is the sort of person that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) would have been inclined to investigate (having advocated gay blessings, the licitness of contraception in certain cases and the redefinition of orthodoxy in terms of the “recent” magisterium). In fact, former CDF prefect Cardinal Gerhard Müller recently confirmed that the Vatican’s doctrinal office had a file on him.
As Fernández himself said in 2015: “One needs to realise that [Pope Francis] aims at irreversible reforms. If one day he senses that he has little time left, and that he does not have enough to do what the Spirit asks of him, one can be sure that he will accelerate.” And Fernández will have an extremely powerful position from which to implement this manoeuvre. Formerly he was Pope Francis’ ghostwriter. Now, as DDF prefect, soon-to-be cardinal and member of the upcoming Synod, he will likely be both censor and ghostwriter of Pope Francis’s post-synodal apostolic exhortation at the conclusion of the 2023-2024 synodal process.
The documents which have caused controversy over the course of Pope Francis’s pontificate (eg, an apostolic exhortation or change to the Catechism) are already higher in rank than CDF documents themselves. The CDF has been seen as a bastion of sanity and a bulwark against theological anarchy, not because it possesses some greater providential protection against error than the person of the Roman Pontiff himself, but because of the institutional capital built up in the Holy Office over previous pontificates. With the appointment of Fernández, that capital is almost entirely spent. Is it possible that in the coming months and years the new DDF will, instead of immunising the Church against destructive novelty, become a superspreader of a new pandemic, the kiss of death for the post-conciliar order forged by John Paul II?
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