And there are the books by those bishops and cardinals who refer to the late pope and former doctrinal chief in support of their views on the issues at the center of the ecclesial debate today.

Not to mention the flood of supposedly news-making interviews some of these prelates have been giving.

This publishing spree began with remarkable speed in the very first hours after Benedict's death, even before his funeral was celebrated.

This indicates how the media can dominate intra-ecclesial conversations - a point that Ratzinger understood and emphasized often, one that his followers should have received and applied to themselves.

In part, this is all about marketing. But it's also Church politics, vanity and personal revenge, although it's not clear which is more important.

Benedict XVI's death has marked the end of an era and has triggered a "jump start for the conclave", even though Pope Francis is still fully in charge of the Church's governance and shows no signs of slowing down or that he's ready to step aside, as his German predecessor did.

End of the first post-Vatican II era

The first post-Vatican II era has come to a definitive end with Ratzinger's death.

It marks another point of transition within the context of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), which was called by John XXIII.

When Pope John died in 1963, the papacy and the conclave were part of a larger ecclesial context dominated by Council.

The conclave that elected Paul VI (Giovanni Battista Montini) to succeed the "good pope" was part of the conciliar dynamics between primacy, conciliarity, and collegiality-synodality.

In some sense, the situation of Pope Francis' pontificate almost ten years on, which coincides with the beginning of the crucial phase of the synodal process (2023-2024) is similar to the one of the Catholic Church in 1962-1963 at the beginning of Vatican II.

But there is a big difference today.

It has to do with the way in which the synodal process could change the Church.

It is this, and not the bickering about Benedict XVI's legacy, that is the real target of the some of the statements that have from a number of prominent churchmen these last few weeks. One example was the late Cardinal George Pell's article in The Spectator, written shortly before he died, in which he called the synod a "toxic nightmare".

In a memorandum which he wrote and circulated under a pseudonym in March 2022 the same Australian cardinal warned that "if the national or continental synods are given doctrinal authority, we will have a new danger to worldwide Church unity" and that "if there was no Roman correction of such heresy, the Church would be reduced to a loose federation of local Churches, holding different views, probably closer to an Anglican or Protestant model, than an Orthodox model".

Council and Synod: same but different

The current situation is not the same as that preceding the opening of a new council like Vatican II, which would be impossible today with more than 5,000 bishops and superiors of male religious orders with the right to participate.

Then there is the problem of how representative an assembly of bishops and superiors of male religious orders would be for the Church of today.

Still, the prerequisites for a conciliar event or an ecclesial event with council-like consequences are there, where what has happened up to now in the councils precedes it.

But the "synodal process" now underway is taking place according to a completely different preparation compared to the one that took place between 1959 and 1962 to prepare Vatican II.

The synodal process is much more decentralized and is involving the entire People of God - at that those who could and desired to participate.

This process is also taking place in a Church where, compared to the time of Vatican II, the institutional loneliness of the pope is much more evident: for Benedict XVI when he resigned, for Pope Francis today.

The Catholic Church today needs new ways to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

That proclamation will have to be made more and more by the People of God and less by the clerical elites.

Those who appeal to Benedict XVI are understandably scared by the undeniable fact that the Church is trying to find those new ways and that will require a new form for the Church.

It's clear from the very title of the "working document for the continental stage" that general secretariat of the Synod has prepared: "Enlarge the space of your tent" (Is 54:2).

Attempts to reset the narrative

There are a number of key issues at stake: some kind of de-hierarchisation of the Church's government, a different role for the episcopate, and the relationship between unity and diversity in the one Catholic Church.

One of the questions is what kind of regulation will be part of this new form of the Church, given the highly pluralistic ecclesial system such as the one in which we are and will be part of.

Surely some of the movements of the last few weeks, for example the book-length interview by Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, former prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (2012-2017), are part of the attempts to accelerate and prepare the next conclave.

But no one (or perhaps only one) knows when the next conclave is going to be.

We all know that the Synod is underway and now entering the crucial stage. Cardinal Mario Grech, the Synod's secretary general, put it this way in a recent interview with the Italian Catholic magazine Il Regno:

"The Synod has already begun. According to a new experience. The Holy Father opened it in October 2021 and now there are various stages. The phase completed in August was not a preparatory phase for the celebration of the Synod, but is already part of the synodal process."

The immediate target of those who are trying to reset the narrative in post-Ratzinger Catholicism is not one particular issue or another.

The target is the Synod itself.

• Massimo Faggioli is a Church historian, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University (Philadelphia) and a much-published author and commentator. He is a visiting professor in Europe and Australia.

Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, headed the Vatican's doctrinal congregation, which St John Paul II put in charge of overseeing cases of clerical sex abuse against minors in 2001.

Speaking to Italy's La Repubblica newspaper, Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta rejected past media charges against Cardinal Ratzinger.

Archishop Sciciluna is the head of a board within the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that deals with appeals filed by clergy accused of abuse.

Before he was named an auxiliary bishop in Malta in 2012, Archbishop Scicluna spent 10 years as promoter of justice at the doctrinal congregation, handling accusations of clerical sex abuse.

Archbishop Scicluna said it is "unfounded and unjust" for some media to have asserted that Cardinal Ratzinger covered up abuse when he was head of the doctrinal congregation.

Abuse cases were being handled "on the level of the local dioceses", the archbishop said.

"In the 1960s and 1970s, many bishops were basing their decisions on the woefully inadequate theory that these crimes were caused by surrounding conditions.

"And that's why, instead of reporting the guilty, they moved them from parish to parish. But they remained predators wherever" they were.

After 2001, Cardinal Ratzinger would hold a special meeting every Friday with his staff, Archbishop Scicluna said, to study the cases before them and to launch a trial.

"We all saw his suffering," which often left him absolutely speechless during the meetings, the archbishop said.

He said the future pope was "indignant as well as deeply affected" by the abuse scandal.

Cardinal Ratzinger condemning it in his well-known Way of the Cross meditation in 2005 when he said, "How much filth there is in the Church."

In a press conference on the flight back from Mexico, Pope Francis said Benedict XVI deserves applause for his handling of the sex-abuse crisis, particularly in the time before his election to the papacy.

"He was the brave one who helped so many open this door," Francis said.

Archbishop Sciciluna said every bishop and cardinal should see the film Spotlight which depicts the investigative journalism that exposed the abuse scandal in Boston archdiocese.

Sources

• Catholic Herald
• Catholic Culture
• Image: Life on Dover Beach

El Comercio stated it would not publish any more articles by Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani, who is Lima's archbishop.

The newspaper, described as the paper of record for the Peruvian establishment, deleted the articles from its website.

A Peruvian website, Utero.pe had accused the cardinal of including six paragraphs from the book Communio by Pope Benedict (then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger) and parts of the Ecclesiam suam, an encyclical by Pope Paul VI, in two editorials for El Comercio.

In a letter to El Comercio, Cardinal Cirpriani stated the arguments in his columns were part of the "patrimony of the teachings of the Catholic Church" and as such they had no copyright.

But he did concede: "I regret that the brevity of space led me to omit these sources and I recognise the error."

The Independent reported that Cardinal Cipriani's explanation about space - one op-ed took up an entire page - was met with ridicule from El Comercio's main rival, centre-left paper La República.

Columnist Augusto Alvaro Rodrich wrote: "Not even the most sycophantic of his acolytes believes that."

Another writer, Raul Tola, added that even a "primary school student" would not get away with such an excuse.

Raul Leon, a commentator in La República stated: "Taking someone's work and passing it off as your own is pure and simple plagiary, as set out in article 219 of the Peruvian Penal Code."

The Telegraph reported that in July, 2014, Cardinal Cipriani stated that Peruvian media was being "blackmailed" by foreign organisations promoting gay rights and abortion rights at the expense of reporting on traditional Peruvian values.

"They fabricate stories of death and dramatic situations," said the cardinal, who is a member of Opus Dei.

"Where people wish to learn whether truth and justice are being served, they report nothing."

In June, Peruvian media published an investigation into the cardinal's shareholdings in controversial mines.

Sources

• BBC
• The Independent
• The Telegraph
• Image: Zimbio

Fr Gustavo Gutiérrez said that with Francis it's easier to push the global Church to have a special concern for the poor, "something we find in the Scriptures".

But the Peruvian theologian said there has been no "rehabilitation" of Liberation Theology under Pope Francis, because the movement was never formally rejected in the first place.

"To speak of rehabilitation would be inaccurate," Fr Gutiérrez told reporters in Rome ahead of a Caritas Internationalis assembly, at which he is guest theologian.

"It would imply that there was a de-habilitation first," he said.

Two documents were issued about Liberation Theology in the 1980s by then-Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.

They praised the movement's concern for the poor and for justice, but condemned a tendency to mix Marxist social analysis and concepts such as "class struggle" with religious commitments to end poverty and injustice.

"I believe that it's clear now that the key element of Liberation Theology is the special care for the poor," Fr Gutiérrez said on Tuesday.

He stressed that the CDF never went as far as to ban Liberation Theology.

Fr Gutiérrez also said that even though he was "very happy" to be invited to participate in Caritas's general assembly, attention shouldn't be drawn to LiberationTheology, but to "the rehabilitation of the Gospel, the poor and the peripheries".

The Peruvian thinker said that while he holds a high regard for theology and theologians, at the end of the day "theology . . . has a modest role".

"What matters in the life of a Christian is to follow Jesus and to put his teachings into practice."

"There's no passage in the Bible that says ‘Go and do theology'," Fr Gutiérrez said, "but there's one that says, ‘Go therefore, and make disciples of all nations'."

Sources

• Crux
• Image: National Catholic Reporter

From what comes across my desk in theological literature there is still a lot of life in the Virtual Council, though it is true that it holds no enchantment for young seminarians or members of new ecclesial movements. Thus, the Church of the future, as a matter of demography, will be more closely oriented to the documents of the Real Council.

The end of the "Virtual Council"

When Blessed John Paul II lay dying he said to the youth who had travelled to Rome to offer their prayerful support: "I have searched for you, and now you have come to me, and I thank you." Less irenically he might have said, "I have tried to get through to you, notwithstanding layers and layers of deaf and dumb bureaucrats, and now that I am dying, the fact that you are here means that at least some of you understood, and this is my consolation." Similarly, Benedict seemed to be saying to the clergy of Rome, notwithstanding all the banality, all the pathetic liturgies, all the congregationalist ecclesiology, the Virtual Council of the Media has lost its dynamism. It is no longer potent. It no longer sets the course of human lives; it no longer inspires rebellion. It too has become boring and sterile. Continue reading

Sources

• The Catholic World Report
• Image: Catholic in Brooklyn