This week the Catholic Herald published a blog post by Dr Edward Condon, an American canon lawyer, that began with a description of the Holy Father’s method of communicating his thoughts to the faithful:
… soundbites lifted from off-the-cuff remarks, second hand accounts of midnight phone calls, and semi-reliable digests of interviews with nonagenarian atheists all making the news, followed by a maelstrom of interpretation and counter-interpretation before an eventual ‘clarification’ comes out of the Vatican press office amounting to little more than ‘We don’t think any of you have it quite right’.
I’ve made the same observation myself (though not nearly so memorably). What I couldn’t explain was why Francis was behaving in this erratic fashion. But Condon has a theory, and it rings depressingly true. Here are some highlights from his post:
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