Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Why is Pope Francis’s leadership such a confusing mess? This may be the answer…

This week the Catholic Herald published a blog post by Dr Edward Condon, an American canon lawyer, that began with a description of the Holy Father’s method of communicating his thoughts to the faithful:

… soundbites lifted from off-the-cuff remarks, second hand accounts of midnight phone calls, and semi-reliable digests of interviews with nonagenarian atheists all making the news, followed by a maelstrom of interpretation and counter-interpretation before an eventual ‘clarification’ comes out of the Vatican press office amounting to little more than ‘We don’t think any of you have it quite right’.

I’ve made the same observation myself (though not nearly so memorably). What I couldn’t explain was why Francis was behaving in this erratic fashion. But Condon has a theory, and it rings depressingly true. Here are some highlights from his post:

Excepting by some outlying voices, it isn’t credibly held that the Holy Father is aiming for confusion. Indeed, his interventions, when they come, seem to have an almost impatient tone at the inability of the rest of us to get with the programme, whatever it might be. So, if the Pope isn’t trying to leave himself open to constant contradictory interpretations, what is going on? The most obvious answer seems to be that the he is simply unaware of the turmoil carrying on outside the Vatican walls.

… Francis seems, in many ways, to be more remote than either of the two previous popes; he seems unable to avoid confusion over whatever he says, or to hear clearly the questions he’s being so earnestly asked to address. But why?

Earlier this year, in an interview with an Argentine newspaper, it came out that the Pope had not watched television for more than 20 years, did not use the internet, and read only one newspaper.

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