Ny president og visepresident i den amerikanske bispekonferansen

Sandro Magister undrer på om dette valget kan si noe om de amerikanske biskopenes syn på pave Frans – for ingen av pavens favoritter ble valgt – og skriver i dag:

Seven days after the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, the more than two hundred bishops of the United States also went to vote. To elect the one who will preside over them for the next three years.

A vote to which they came “as for a referendum on Pope Francis,” in the plain statement of John L. Allen, the top vaticanista in the United States.

And indeed it was a bit like this, even if the new president, Cardinal Daniel N. DiNardo, immediately made a point of saying that it is “crazy” even to think that he is (not) on the side of this pope, who is “doing some marvelous things for the Church.”

The fact is that when Francis visited the United States, in September of 2015, he ordered the bishops to change course and get into step with him. Enough with “preaching complicated doctrines,” with the “harsh and divisive language,” with “making the cross a banner of worldly struggles.”

Yes, instead, to the “culture of encounter,” the only one capable of transforming the Church of the United States into “a humble home fire which attracts men and women through the attractive light and warmth of love.”

Jorge Mario Bergoglio accompanied these peremptory guidelines with a series of appointments of bishops close to his way of seeing things, in the first place that of Blase J. Cupich as archbishop of Chicago, who on November 19 will also be made a cardinal.

But when, as is the practice in the months leading up to the election of the episcopal conference leadership, each bishop wrote his five top names on a form, only one of the ten most voted for – and as a result designated as official candidates for the presidency and vice-presidency – was a favorite of Bergoglio’s, Santa Fe archbishop John C. Wester. …

John Allen skrev om dette for noen få dager siden, bl.a.:

At the national level, it’s difficult not to see the election of a Mexican-born Hispanic as vice president of the U.S. bishops’ conference as a statement of defiance directed at the new Trump administration. In terms of church politics, it’s also tempting to see the choice of a more theologically conservative figure as a corrective to progressive tendencies under Pope Francis. …

… Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles says reading his election as vice president of the U.S. bishops’ conference as a referendum on either Donald Trump or Pope Francis is wrong. Instead, he said, it’s a statement about the Hispanic presence in the United States and in the American Catholic church.