Arroyo interviews Archbishop Cordileone about Pelosi's visit to the Pope.

 

I watched this cringe-filled interview of Archbishop Cordileone by EWTN's Raymond Arroyo over the weekend.

Raymond does really well in asking the hard questions of Archbishop Cordileone, but I felt desperately sorry for the Archbishop. What a position to be put in! He does his absolute best to rely on the Pope's strong condemnation of abortion, but, notwithstanding those words, this act, devoid as it was of any condemnation of Pelosi's anti-Catholic actions and given the present circumstances, where the Archbishop is involved in a very public debate with Pelosi and Pelosi has advanced abortion on demand in a radical and aggressive way, can only be seen as an attempt to criticise the USCCB strategy on Eucharistic coherence.

Raymond: "you're on the wrong side of the Church Archbishop" - how can we infer anything else from this meeting?

Archbishop Cordileone: "The Pope has to use his own discretion" - ++Cordileone has clearly been left high and dry by Pope Francis who has deliberately and publicly undermined him by this meeting.

It is nothing short of a disgrace, and further yet another source of great confusion. But it is in keeping with what we know of the man, as Damian Thompson points out in The Spectator today:

More than any other pope in modern times, Francis gives the impression of being a good hater. His hostility is reciprocated in spades...he gave a typically garrulous and score-settling interview on the plane back from Slovakia...[he] cultivated his image as a man of the people by using salty language. On the other, he was often in a bad mood – in photographs of the time he appears frighteningly hatchet-faced – and had a reputation for travelling to Rome to undermine his episcopal rivals.

All these traits - highly unusual for a pope as Thompson points out - are transparently on display through his undermining of Archbishop Cordileone and indeed Catholic teaching! You may wonder why the Holy Father could not contact Archbishop Cordileone and instruct him to take a different approach. I submit that it is because, as the Archbishop points out in this interview, what he is doing & teaching is what the Catholic Church has always believed and taught. This means the Pope cannot address the issue directly. Instead, he mounts a clandestine campaign to undermine one of his own Archbishops. Who will be next?