“I knew that there have been teams that didn’t love me, some prepared to do something — judging by the expressions they used on social networks and even in messages they wrote on my Fb web page — and I used to be afraid of inflicting issues for Francis,” Fernández stated in an interview with The Washington Publish.
When the pope known as once more final June, from a hospital the place he’d simply undergone intestinal surgical procedure, Fernández relented. He moved to Vatican Metropolis, was named a cardinal and have become the pope’s right-hand man, serving to to translate the modifications in tone and elegance Francis delivered to the papacy into concrete new tips for 1.4 billion Catholics.
“Fernández’s appointment was essentially the most consequential of [Francis’s] preach,” stated Massimo Faggioli, a Catholic theologian at Villanova College. “After one 12 months of Fernández, we’ve witnessed a collection … of frequent, particular, out-of-the-ordinary actions have by no means been noticed. And this from a prefect who is aware of full effectively that he’s Francis’s personal alter ego and enjoys the pope’s full belief.”
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Most Catholics have little sense of the person behind the Vatican’s current main pronouncements, together with blessings for individuals in same-sex relationships. However the church conservatives against Francis see Fernández as Enemy No. 2. Inside the partitions of Vatican Metropolis, the machinations in opposition to the 61-year outdated cardinal have risen to the extent of excessive palace intrigue, full with pictures snapped surreptitiously within the evening and personal threats to “destroy” him.
A brand new period for an outdated workplace
Fernández’s arrival marked the top of an period of conservative management within the Vatican division generally known as the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Religion. The workplace is most well-known for the tribunals of the Roman Inquisition within the sixteenth century. In newer a long time, it has managed — critics say mismanaged — circumstances of clerical abuse; strengthened the “immorality” of premarital intercourse, abortion and euthanasia; and disciplined bishops, clergymen and nuns for not toeing the Vatican line.
By Fernández, Pope Francis got down to reinvent the workplace.
“The dicastery that you’ll preside over in different epochs got here to make use of immoral strategies,” he wrote in a letter to Fernández in July. “These had been occasions when greater than selling theological information they chased after potential doctrinal errors. What I anticipate from you is one thing no doubt a lot totally different.”
Like Francis, Fernández — identified broadly by his nickname “Tucho” — has ushered in a change in tone. In information conferences, his prolonged digressions and elaborate anecdotes can really feel like falling “into a brief story by Borges,” a author for the Catholic Herald assessed. In a single session, he uttered a gentle profanity. “Tucho, the cardinal prefect with a sinful penchant for swear phrases,” a scandalized Italian information outlet declared.
Fernández can be answerable for modifications of substance. With Francis’s consent, he penned the most important doc in December that licensed Catholic clergymen to bless individuals in same-sex relationships — simply two and half years after his extra conservative predecessor had rejected the notion out of hand. Fernández issued a decree explicitly permitting transgender godparents and baptisms of transgender individuals.
Final month, he launched a new ruling that took a few of the magic out of the Catholic church, eradicating a bishop’s proper to declare unexplained phenomena — corresponding to claimed apparitions of the Virgin Mary — as “supernatural” occasions. And final week his workplace took its most decisive motion but in opposition to the pope’s critics, launching a trial of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò on costs of fomenting schism and denying the pope’s legitimacy.
Senior church critics insist it’s no coincidence that Francis waited to position Fernández within the rulemaking put up till after the demise of Benedict XVI, the traditionalist pope emeritus.
“I believe Pope Francis felt himself now freer to comprehend his concepts,” stated Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, an ally of Benedict who ran the dicastery from 2012 to 2017. “And subsequently, he requested [Cardinal] Fernández to come back [to] his aspect, and to advertise this program, this agenda.”
Not all of Fernández’s work has come off as “liberal.” LGBTQ+ activists had been stunned in April when he unveiled a doc, additionally signed by the pope, that stated “sex-change intervention” threatened “human dignity.” Fernández informed The Publish {that a} model drafted earlier than his arrival had centered extra closely on gender identification, and a part of his contribution had been to convey its contents in step with the pope’s broadly inclusive message towards migrants, the poor and others. The last doc, he famous, additionally explicitly denounced persecution based mostly on sexual orientation.
The mission of inclusion led by Francis and Fernández took a success because of the pope’s repeated use of a slur in closed-door discussions about upholding the ban on brazenly homosexual males learning for the priesthood.
“Actually it has executed harm to the connection that was created with the LGBTQ+ neighborhood,” Faggioli stated.
Fernández argued that in clerical circles, the phrase the pope used — “frociaggine,” or “faggotness” — isn’t “a synonym for homosexuality” however refers to “some teams in seminaries and in priestly environments that foyer in the hunt for energy” and “see all heterosexuals as potential enemies.”
“It’s true that it might be advisable to search out one other phrase to precise that actuality, as a result of it could appear homophobic,” Fernández stated. “However I’ve seen gays themselves use comparable expressions.”
He additionally left open the door to a recasting of official church instructing — or catechism — that states gay acts are “intrinsically disordered.”
“All topics will be refined,” he stated. “And the language we use can at all times be significantly better. On this means there’s a probability of better readability.”
The modifications led to by Fernández and the pope have deepened rifts throughout the church. The ruling on same-sex blessings prompted a rise up by Catholic bishops and cardinals in Africa, Jap Europe and Central Asia. There was grumbling contained in the Vatican, too.
Fernández declined to touch upon particular threats and intrigues. However in January, he informed the Italian outlet La Stampa that “3 times I obtained threats [saying], ‘we will destroy you.’”
In a single beforehand undisclosed incident, Fernández went to the pope over considerations he was being surveilled, based on an individual acquainted with the occasions who spoke on the situation of anonymity to debate confidential Vatican issues.
These considerations had been based mostly on {a photograph} printed in November by a conservative Spanish-language Catholic weblog. In that nighttime photograph, which accompanied an article important of Fernández, he’s seen speaking on the telephone at a distance by a window of his dwelling on restricted Vatican grounds. The photograph identifies the placement of his personal quarters, and Fernández took that as each an invasion of privateness and a veiled risk, the particular person stated.
Opponents have moreover unearthed and circulated two esoteric tomes — “Heal Me with Your Mouth: The Artwork of Kissing” and “Mystical Ardour: Spirituality and Sensuality” — that Fernández wrote within the Nineteen Nineties, and during which he mused intimately on the religious elements of sexual orgasms and recounted a sensual encounter with Jesus as imagined by a 16-year-old woman.
Decrying them as “scandalous books of an erotic nature which border on pornography,” one arch-conservative Catholic group — the John Paul II Academy for Human Life and Household — has demanded Fernández’s resignation.
Looking back, Fernández stated, the books mirrored much less maturity than he would have favored, however he maintained the matters shouldn’t be off-limits in religious discourse: “I don’t have any disgrace of the topics,” he stated. “If I needed to write them at the moment, they might be richer and extra full.”
An extended historical past with Francis
The marketing campaign in opposition to Fernández, and by default, in opposition to the pope, has additionally revived outdated claims that the Argentine cardinal lengthy served as Francis’s secret “ghost author” on essential papal paperwork. In his workplace simply south of the colonnades of St. Peter’s Sq., Fernández declined to debate the subject. However there isn’t any query that he’s a longtime buddy of Francis.
In 2007, Francis — then Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires — invited Fernández to a serious Latin American Episcopal convention and ended up having him work on the gathering’s concluding doc. They sat collectively on the flight dwelling and engaged in deep dialog, Fernández stated.
“Everyone knows that the pope is a really austere man in his private life,” stated Alberto Bochatey, an auxiliary bishop in Fernández’s former diocese of La Plata, Argentina. “In Buenos Aires, he cooked for himself, washed his dishes and had a Tupperware along with his greens. In that sense, [Fernández] may be very comparable, and there could have been a human in addition to a theological affinity.”
In 2009, the long run pope requested Fernández to be rector of the Pontifical Catholic College of Argentina. Fernández has publicly recounted how his detractors sought to undermine him by resurfacing journal items he’d written. In a single, he tried to elucidate the church’s stance in opposition to same-sex marriage whereas providing no ethical condemnation.
After his native critics despatched these items to the Vatican, the dicastery opened a file on him, Fernández has stated. He felt as if he had been wandering “among the many wolves,” he recalled to reporters in April. However Francis had impressed him to remain and struggle.
That appears to his method now, too.
Fernández has been criticized as a selection for his function by survivors of clerical abuse, who level to situations in Argentina the place he allegedly sought to guard accused clergymen. Fernández has admitted to errors, and in a Fb put up final 12 months, stated his preliminary reluctance to simply accept the Vatican job was additionally based mostly on the truth that he “felt unqualified” to handle the delicate circumstances of clerical abuse throughout the dicastery. The pope was so bent on hiring Fernández, nonetheless, that he navigated that difficulty by ring-fencing the dicastery’s work on abuse circumstances beneath autonomous investigators.
Greater than something, Fernández has emerged because the pope’s chief defender, repeatedly reminding the pontiff’s Catholic critics of their obligation to papal fealty.
“Non secular assent of thoughts and can should be proven,” Fernández stated throughout one information convention during which he learn aloud from a web page of canon legislation.
No, he informed senior church figures who had been in revolt, the pope’s pronouncement on blessings for same-sex {couples} was not “heretical” or “blasphemous.”
He has expressed an understanding of cultural variations on gender and sexuality in varied international locations however pushed again in opposition to critics of Francis’s LGBTQ+ outreach.
“What they need [the church] to say is that homosexuals are going to hell, they need to convert, in the event that they don’t, they will’t come to church much less have a blessing. That is what they need,” Fernández stated.
David Feliba in Buenos Aires contributed to this report.
