Fr. Cristopher Cortés Pliego.
Presbyter of the Archdiocese of Puebla de los Ángeles and member of the
International Academy of Catholic Leaders
The culmination of the year 2022 left us with an unforgettable page in the history of the Church when we all received the news of the death of the Pope Emeritus, Benedict XVI. That same afternoon, while St. Peter’s Basilica became the scene of grateful praise for the year that was ending, Pope Francis, during the homily of the I Vespers of Holy Mary, Mother of God, mentioned for the first time the person and the legacy of his predecessor and invited us to give thanks also for the gift of his life given to God and to the Church.
Days later, when St. Peter’s Square was filled for the pontifical obsequies and Catholics from all over the world followed the celebration through various means, Pope Francis delivered a homily that, far from being a eulogy, invited everyone to see the life of Benedict XVI in and from the life of Jesus Christ with a theological and paschal depth that invited everyone to go beyond a relativistic or sorrowful gaze and that – at the same time – invited everyone to experience in their own flesh the grace of an existence framed by hope and by the gifts of faith and charity.
In this way, both pontiffs: one emeritus, already deceased and lying on the floor of the Vatican square, and the other, exercising the supreme Petrine ministry, gave the world a clear lesson of what an authentic “hermeneutic of continuity” is, since they simply showed how in the Catholic Church, the papal ministry is not just another piece of the powerful of this world, but a succession of humble collaborators of the Lord’s vineyard whom Jesus, looking at them with mercy, has chosen.
However, in the midst of this sweet epiphany of the Church, some of its members became embroiled in a series of conspiracy theories or absurd comparisons that only evidenced a Christian existence lacking the depth of the mystery of providence, because if one trusts in Christ’s promise that the gates of hell will not prevail against it, then such a mundane reading of ecclesial events would only denote that at the base there is a serious crisis of faith. And above all, what made this situation more scandalous was that those who promoted this type of reading and attitudes were figures who see themselves as Catholic referents or leaders who, however, were taking an adverse and slanderous attitude against Pope Francis and his immediate predecessor.
This, consequently, would lead us to ask ourselves a profound question: How can someone authentically be a Catholic leader if he is not in communion with the Pope or if his leadership is a belligerent, attacking or slanderous leadership against him?
Communion with the Successor of Peter
This situation is not even a matter of work or labor ethics, since – as Pope Francis himself has stated on repeated occasions – “we are not a welfare company or an NGO”, but rather responds to a much deeper requirement: the requirement of communion as a fruit of the action of the Holy Spirit in the Body of Christ which is the Church and of which, Jesus himself wanted Saint Peter and his successors to be the visible head of the same.
In this way, although it is true that in the Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium, the Church confirmed and deepened its being the People of God in its second chapter and on the hierarchy and the episcopate in the third, it is still striking that the affirmations of the councils of Trent and Vatican I are reiterated, by which the singular vocation and the vital importance for the entire body of the Church of the Petrine ministry is affirmed. Now, if it is affirmed of the bishops that they cannot exercise the episcopal ministry fully or validly without being subject to the authority of the Supreme Pontiff (Cf 22 and 23), what can make the laity or some presbyters think that they can be fully Catholic or exercise authentic leadership if they make their life and their “apostolate” a political – ideological agenda to attack the Pastor of all the People of God again and again? And it is not that this is an exclusive phenomenon of the Franciscan pontificate, because Benedict XVI, John Paul II and the previous pontiffs have also experienced the so-called “friendly fire”, whether from those who pretend to be defenders of “orthodoxy and tradition” or from those who feel they are the leaders of a progressivism that replaces the gospel with the libertine ideologies of the moment, disguising them as “signs of the times” or utopian “incarnations”; however, and especially because of social networks, this belligerence has been accentuated because it is presented under the masks of false erudition (channels of “Catholic” conferences), of an alternative “Social Doctrine of the Church”, which is rather presented as a liberalism or communism disguised as authentic Catholic faith and which does not limit itself in attacking the Pope if he hinders its political – economic interests and, finally, because it makes the totality of the Catholic faith not a gift to share by evangelizing, but an ideology that can only be shared in a proselytizing way under the absurd cry of “cultural battle”.
A Catholic leadership can never be something that can be developed at the whim of whoever wants to carry it out selfishly and – much less – can be exercised going against the Pope as the supreme visible leader of the Church and who defines himself as “Servant of the servants of God”. This incoherence in leadership could only lead to an attitude of perdition in which the “Catholic leader” and his followers would end up going to the precipice of the dictatorship of relativism, which Cardinal Ratzinger already accused in his famous homily of the Mass “pro eligendo pontifice” and that would make them everything but what Pope Francis proposes in chapter V of the Evangelii Gaudium: evangelizers with the Spirit.
A leadership without communion with the Pope is dictatorship.
Therefore, if for a baptized person the call to communion with the Successor of Peter is not only a good intention that one can have or not, but an authentic existential necessity for a full faith, for a Catholic leader, communion with the Pope is a condition without which a fully Catholic leadership cannot be exercised, because he will try to propose a decapitated Catholicism, without a supreme Pastor, chosen not by paranoid conspiracies, but by the merciful providence of God. Without this gaze of faith, without this charity, leadership will become tyranny, perhaps with more or less numerical scope, but it will betray the essence of Catholic leadership: to be men and women at the service of the seed of the Kingdom of God. May the death of Benedict XVI and the example of Pope Francis renew us in the commitment to be more and more disciples and missionaries of Jesus Christ, the Way, the Truth and the Life.