Vatican Insider: Pope Francis’ Contradictions Explain Vatican’s ‘Growing Irrelevance’

Pope Francis prays during a penitential celebration service at St. Peter's Basilica on Mar
VINCENZO PINTO/AFP via Getty
Thomas D. Williams, Ph.D.

ROME — Veteran Vatican journalist Sandro Magister said Monday that Pope Francis’ frequent self-contradictions help explain the “growing irrelevance of the Holy See on the world stage.”

In his column, Mr. Magister takes as a point of departure the pontiff’s insistence that all wars are unjust and that weapon-making is evil while also acknowledging that Ukraine — a sovereign nation — has the right to defend itself against its Russian invader and that Europe does well in providing arms to Ukraine.

Following Francis’ logic to its ultimate conclusion, the Ukrainians should defend themselves “with their bare hands,” Magister quips.

Whereas popes of the past have been careful to formulate their teachings regarding war and peace in precise terminology, with great respect for the Church’s millennial teaching on conditions for a just war, Francis has been willing to simply discard and discredit the entire tradition in one fell swoop, Magister notes.

“Once even in our Churches there was talk of holy war or just war,” Francis told Moscow Patriarch Kirill two weeks ago. “Today one can no longer speak like that. Wars are always unjust.”

Making it sound as if such “talk” were a faint memory of ancient ignorance, the pope failed to recognize that the current, authoritative Catechism of the Catholic Church continues to teach the doctrine of a just war.

Then last week, Francis suggested that the real solution to the war in Ukraine “is not other weapons, other sanctions, other political-military alliances, but another approach, a different way of governing the now globalized world,” before going on to propose (incredibly) that such a shift could draw insight from “Gandhi’s school, who led a people to freedom on the path of non-violence.”
What sort of guidance does that offer Christians or other people of good will who seek to assist Ukraine in its moment of real need?

In this way, those leaders who might look to Francis for some sort of moral guidance that could help them shepherd their countries along the right path, find his “contradictory magisterium” provides no help whatsoever, Magister observes, and thus they must look elsewhere.

“This one on peace and war is not the only unresolved contradiction that characterizes the current pontificate,” Magister muses. “But it is perhaps the one most fraught with political consequences, not least the growing irrelevance of the Holy See on the world stage.”

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