Once again, progressive expectations are being raised, as important shifts are telegraphed — the possibility of blessings for same-sex relationships, the possibility of women being ordained to the diaconate. Once again, conservative cardinals are trying to organize against such changes, with dramatic public statements and questions (the so-called dubia) put directly to the pope.
And once again with this papacy’s theological dramas, there are sex scandals in the background. One of the synod’s shepherds is Francis’ new doctrinal steward, his longtime Argentine collaborator Archbishop (now Cardinal) Víctor Manuel Fernández, who was elevated despite a checkered record handling clerical sex abuse. Then further back in the Roman shadows is the simmering scandal of the priest and artist Father Marko Rupnik, a celebrated painter of creepy, hollow-eyed icons who is accused of abusing women in his community in disgusting and sacrilegious ways — and whose repeated rehabilitations suggest he enjoys some kind of special favor in the Vatican.
This all sounds potentially dramatic, but with the repetition comes the sense that we know how the drama will play out. The pattern where accused abusers or abuse enablers somehow stay in favor as long as they’re understood to be on the pope’s team is a familiar one in this pontificate, and the church’s polarization means that mostly conservatives complain about it, while the secular media’s sympathy for Francis limits the frenzies that would have attended similar scandals under Benedict XVI.
Meanwhile, the conservative rebellions against the pope have proved self-limiting so far, because of the self-contradictions involved in conservative resistance to papal authority and the lack of effective mechanisms for such resistance short of actual schism. (Even the most outspoken papal critic in the American episcopate, Bishop Joseph Strickland of Texas, has acknowledged that he would comply if removed from office.)