Chai Brady
Austen Ivereigh. 
Both conservatives and liberals misunderstand what reform is, Austen Ivereigh tells Chai Brady
Respected Papal biographer Dr Austen Ivereigh has discussed criticism in Ireland of Pope Francis regarding his efforts to reform the Church, saying not all profound, positive change is solely doctrinal.
Reacting to former Irish president Mary McAleese’s critique of the Pope’s efforts at reform, he said that both conservative and liberal Catholics make a fundamental mistake when discussing doctrine.
Speaking to The Irish Catholic, Dr Ivereigh said: “The common conservative mistake is to think doctrine is fixed – in fact, doctrine is always developing but it remains Church doctrine, but it’s a common liberal perspective to think there is no huge change unless doctrine is changed.
“She [Mary McAleese] misunderstands the nature of Church reform. Reform in the Church tradition is always pastoral, that’s to say it’s about enabling the Church to better communicate the Gospel and to enable people better to live the Gospel, so that’s the nature of Church change.”
Expectations
Prof. McAleese, now chancellor of Trinity College Dublin, said on the Late Late Show that she is “not sure” about Francis and his efforts, but that he has not been the Pope many thought he would be, as “there were a lot of expectations that the Church needed a reformer.
“All these expectations were heaped upon him that he was going to be the great reformer and I don’t think he has been the great reformer in the sense that he has changed anything doctrinally. He hasn’t changed any doctrine that I know of,” she said.
“But what he has done is stir up debate and that was needed, and he did that and I think that has been relatively useful.”
Author of two books on Francis, The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope and Wounded Shepherd, Dr Ivereigh has written extensively about the “profound change” the Pope is “bringing about”.
“If you look at the finances in the Vatican it is now a highly regulated environment so that it’s impossible to go back to the kinds of corruption and scandals that we had in 2011 and 2012, it just can’t happen now,” he said.
“If we look at the way the Vatican treats bishops now going to Rome, and they’re astonished by the way the Vatican wants to listen to them and learn from them and help them rather than treat them like altar boys.”
The Pope has often spoke about the need to create a more ‘synodal’ Church – basically gatherings intended for discussion and discernment of the Church’s direction – as they are an important aspect of an engaged and missionary Church. The process is meant to involve the faithful in decisions that will affect them.
Dr Ivereigh says: “You take something like the synod, the way he’s transformed the synod into a mechanism of real pastoral change, it results in concrete changes.”
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Focusing on the Synod of Bishops on the Family 2014 and 2015 and the outcomes, he said now “we have a whole new attitude and response to divorced and remarried and people marginalised from the Church”.
“There is now a path of discernment that enables people to be much more integrated into Church life and that’s been something of a revolution, it hasn’t yet hit most parishes, most dioceses, because the reception is something else but the change is absolutely real,” he said.
The Amazon synod, which took place in October 2019, caused some controversy. In the final document of the synod released on October 26, the 184 voting members, mostly bishops from the nine countries that contain a share of the Amazon rainforest, appeared to offer cautious approval to some contentious ideas, including married priests.
I would think they have a long way to go but he’s taken, I think, very clear strides in the right direction”
The recommendations, which await a response from the Pope, are all a result of the synod, an important discernment process explains Dr Ivereigh.
I think synods aren’t just about listening they’re about discerning and making changes in response to pastoral challenges. That’s been the most dynamic element of this papacy,” he said.
“In my new book Wounded Shepherd I talk about his reform of the College of Cardinals, changing the criteria in which cardinals are appointed and I think that’s going to have a very long-lasting effect on the Church going forward.”
Mary McAleese said that in some respects the Pope has moved towards reform by “having stoked up debate”.
“That debate has now being pushed out, the German Church is having a great debate, wonderful debates, and we’ve had great debates among the people of God here in Ireland, among the people of God who would regard themselves as laity in the Church and so yes I think same of that is good.
“On the whole though, I’m not sure. I think what happened in Chile showed a man who belonged to another time, struggling to come into this time on the issue of abuse,” she said.
A clip of a well-known speech she made was played in which Prof. McAleese said the Church was the primal global carrier of the toxic virus of misogyny, which the leadership hasn’t sought a cure for, with the antidote being equality.
Responding to the video she said: “It’s been suffering from it for centuries. If you go back right to John XXII, who was probably the most radical Pope of my lifetime, they’ve all said things like we have to do something about women, something has to be done and then you look and you ask well what has been done?
“And not an awful lot has been done and why? Because when you look at things like decision making, the people who make the decisions are people who are in holy orders, that is inevitably going to be males, so that voice is always going to be eliminated by virtue of the structure.
I don’t think Francis has been the great reformer in the sense that he has changed anything doctrinally”
“This Pope has had more synods than anybody I know of – four in a very short period of time, you could count on your one hand almost the number of women who made contributions to those. You’ll have 350 celibate clerics who have a right to vote and then you might have 30 others among whom there might be 10 or 12 women.
“Francis, in fairness to him, has appointed quite a few women to the curia but that doesn’t cut it really, you’re talking about tiny numbers,” Prof. McAleese added.
However, Dr Ivereigh said that he would understand if a person was disappointed with Francis if they were looking at the Church “through the lens of contemporary notion of equality”, but that he doesn’t believe this leads to a true understanding.
He lauded the Pope for appointing women to key leadership roles at the highest levels of the Vatican, as well as including women in the international theological commission and adding consultant roles in the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith.
“I would think they have a long way to go but he’s taken, I think, very clear strides in the right direction,” he said,
“For Mary McAleese and for others who think like her, the test of equality would be female ordination and until that happens she’s never going to believe that change is possible whereas most Catholics would say, ‘well there is no tradition of female ordination in the Church and therefore you can’t just introduce that as it’s outside our tradition’.
“You can go back and recover what was in our tradition but you can’t just introduce something from the outside in that way, that’s just not how the Church works.”
He added: “Mary McAleese is an important progressive voice, but I think she can be more helpful for the Church if she tones down the rhetoric and looks at some of the concrete changes that Francis has made, and she will be taken more seriously.”
