A Paper Church by Julia Yost | Articles | First Things

A Paper Church by Julia Yost | Articles | First Things

"But the appetite for papal pronouncements is perennial, and it reveals the ultramontane clerisy as a distinct class with its own ideology and interests. In the Francis pontificate, ultramontane discourse declares that capital punishment must be abolished; that climate change is un-Catholic; that plastics in the ocean are worse than sex abuse; that national borders are worse still; that mercy entails never excluding the stably married from communion, even to save their souls.

"From the start of his pontificate, Francis has posed a hermeneutic ­challenge. Conservative papalists struggle to regularize his verbal output with their notions of the privileges of infallibility. ('What did he say? Peter can't say that. Ergo, he meant something other than what he said.') A few years in, one commentator was reduced to presenting the Holy Father as a practitioner of Straussian esoteric writing who sneaks subversive conservative messages into apparently progressive texts.

"...papalism pursued too far dictates piety to the person of the pope at the expense of the tradition he nominally secures."