Liberal Archbishop Víctor Manuel Fernández is pope’s right-hand man

“I knew that there have been teams that didn’t love me, some keen to do something — judging by the expressions they used on social networks and even in messages they wrote on my Fb web page — and I used to be afraid of inflicting issues for Francis,” Fernández mentioned in an interview with The Washington Publish.

When the pope referred to as once more final June, from a hospital the place he’d simply undergone intestinal surgical procedure, Fernández relented. He moved to Vatican Metropolis, was named a cardinal and have become the pope’s right-hand man, serving to to translate the adjustments in tone and magnificence Francis delivered to the papacy into concrete new pointers for 1.4 billion Catholics.

“Fernández’s appointment was essentially the most consequential of [Francis’s] hold forth,” mentioned Massimo Faggioli, a Catholic theologian at Villanova College. “After one 12 months of Fernández, we’ve witnessed a collection … of frequent, particular, out-of-the-ordinary actions have by no means been noticed. And this from a prefect who is aware of full nicely that he’s Francis’s personal alter ego and enjoys the pope’s full belief.”

Most Catholics have little sense of the person behind the Vatican’s current main pronouncements, together with blessings for folks in same-sex relationships. However the church conservatives against Francis see Fernández as Enemy No. 2. Throughout the partitions of Vatican Metropolis, the machinations in opposition to the 61-year outdated cardinal have risen to the extent of excessive palace intrigue, full with photographs snapped surreptitiously within the night time and personal threats to “destroy” him.

A brand new period for an outdated workplace

Fernández’s arrival marked the top of an period of conservative management within the Vatican division referred to as the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Religion. The workplace is most well-known for the tribunals of the Roman Inquisition within the sixteenth century. In newer a long time, it has managed — critics say mismanaged — circumstances of clerical abuse; strengthened the “immorality” of premarital intercourse, abortion and euthanasia; and disciplined bishops, monks and nuns for not toeing the Vatican line.

By means of Fernández, Pope Francis got down to reinvent the workplace.

“The dicastery that you’ll preside over in different epochs got here to make use of immoral strategies,” he wrote in a letter to Fernández in July. “These have been occasions when greater than selling theological data they chased after attainable doctrinal errors. What I anticipate from you is one thing no doubt a lot totally different.”

Like Francis, Fernández — recognized extensively by his nickname “Tucho” — has ushered in a change in tone. In information conferences, his prolonged digressions and elaborate anecdotes can really feel like falling “into a brief story by Borges,” a author for the Catholic Herald assessed. In a single session, he uttered a light profanity. “Tucho, the cardinal prefect with a sinful penchant for swear phrases,” a scandalized Italian information outlet declared.

Fernández can be liable for adjustments of substance. With Francis’s consent, he penned the most important doc in December that approved Catholic monks to bless folks in same-sex relationships — simply two and half years after his extra conservative predecessor had rejected the notion out of hand. Fernández issued a decree explicitly permitting transgender godparents and baptisms of transgender folks.

Final month, he launched a new ruling that took among the magic out of the Catholic church, eradicating a bishop’s proper to declare unexplained phenomena — corresponding to claimed apparitions of the Virgin Mary — as “supernatural” occasions. And final week his workplace took its most decisive motion but in opposition to the pope’s critics, launching a trial of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò on fees of fomenting schism and denying the pope’s legitimacy.

Senior church critics insist it’s no coincidence that Francis waited to put Fernández within the rulemaking put up till after the dying of Benedict XVI, the traditionalist pope emeritus.

“I feel Pope Francis felt himself now freer to understand his concepts,” mentioned Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, an ally of Benedict who ran the dicastery from 2012 to 2017. “And due to this fact, he requested [Cardinal] Fernández to return [to] his aspect, and to advertise this program, this agenda.”

Not all of Fernández’s work has come off as “liberal.” LGBTQ+ activists have been shocked in April when he unveiled a doc, additionally signed by the pope, that mentioned “sex-change intervention” threatened “human dignity.” Fernández advised The Publish {that a} model drafted earlier than his arrival had centered extra closely on gender identification, and a part of his contribution had been to convey its contents in step with the pope’s broadly inclusive message towards migrants, the poor and others. The last doc, he famous, additionally explicitly denounced persecution primarily based on sexual orientation.

The mission of inclusion led by Francis and Fernández took a success because of the pope’s repeated use of a slur in closed-door discussions about upholding the ban on brazenly homosexual males finding out for the priesthood.

“Actually it has completed harm to the connection that was created with the LGBTQ+ group,” Faggioli mentioned.

Fernández argued that in clerical circles, the phrase the pope used — “frociaggine,” or “faggotness” — isn’t “a synonym for homosexuality” however refers to “some teams in seminaries and in priestly environments that foyer seeking energy” and “see all heterosexuals as potential enemies.”

“It’s true that it might be advisable to search out one other phrase to precise that actuality, as a result of it could appear homophobic,” Fernández mentioned. “However I’ve seen gays themselves use related expressions.”

He additionally left open the door to a recasting of official church instructing — or catechism — that states gay acts are “intrinsically disordered.”

“All topics might be refined,” he mentioned. “And the language we use can at all times be significantly better. On this means there’s a probability of larger readability.”

The adjustments caused by Fernández and the pope have deepened rifts throughout the church. The ruling on same-sex blessings prompted a insurrection by Catholic bishops and cardinals in Africa, Jap Europe and Central Asia. There was grumbling contained in the Vatican, too.

Fernández declined to touch upon particular threats and intrigues. However in January, he advised the Italian outlet La Stampa that “3 times I acquired threats [saying], ‘we will destroy you.’”

In a single beforehand undisclosed incident, Fernández went to the pope over issues he was being surveilled, in accordance with an individual conversant in the occasions who spoke on the situation of anonymity to debate confidential Vatican issues.

These issues have been primarily based on {a photograph} revealed in November by a conservative Spanish-language Catholic weblog. In that nighttime picture, which accompanied an article crucial of Fernández, he’s seen speaking on the telephone at a distance by a window of his residence on restricted Vatican grounds. The picture identifies the situation of his non-public quarters, and Fernández took that as each an invasion of privateness and a veiled menace, the individual mentioned.

Opponents have moreover unearthed and circulated two esoteric tomes — “Heal Me with Your Mouth: The Artwork of Kissing” and “Mystical Ardour: Spirituality and Sensuality” — that Fernández wrote within the Nineteen Nineties, and by which he mused intimately on the non secular elements of sexual orgasms and recounted a sensual encounter with Jesus as imagined by a 16-year-old lady.

Decrying them as “scandalous books of an erotic nature which border on pornography,” one arch-conservative Catholic group — the John Paul II Academy for Human Life and Household — has demanded Fernández’s resignation.

Looking back, Fernández mentioned, the books mirrored much less maturity than he would have preferred, however he maintained the subjects shouldn’t be off-limits in non secular discourse: “I don’t have any disgrace of the topics,” he mentioned. “If I needed to write them right now, they might be richer and extra full.”

A protracted historical past with Francis

The marketing campaign in opposition to Fernández, and by default, in opposition to the pope, has additionally revived outdated claims that the Argentine cardinal lengthy served as Francis’s secret “ghost author” on essential papal paperwork. In his workplace simply south of the colonnades of St. Peter’s Sq., Fernández declined to debate the subject. However there is no such thing as a query that he’s a longtime pal of Francis.

In 2007, Francis — then Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires — invited Fernández to a significant Latin American Episcopal convention and ended up having him work on the gathering’s concluding doc. They sat collectively on the flight residence and engaged in deep dialog, Fernández mentioned.

“Everyone knows that the pope is a really austere man in his private life,” mentioned Alberto Bochatey, an auxiliary bishop in Fernández’s former diocese of La Plata, Argentina. “In Buenos Aires, he cooked for himself, washed his dishes and had a Tupperware together with his greens. In that sense, [Fernández] may be very related, and there might have been a human in addition to a theological affinity.”

In 2009, the longer term pope requested Fernández to be rector of the Pontifical Catholic College of Argentina. Fernández has publicly recounted how his detractors sought to undermine him by resurfacing journal items he’d written. In a single, he tried to clarify the church’s stance in opposition to same-sex marriage whereas providing no ethical condemnation.

After his native critics despatched these items to the Vatican, the dicastery opened a file on him, Fernández has mentioned. He felt as if he have been wandering “among the many wolves,” he recalled to reporters in April. However Francis had impressed him to remain and combat.

That appears to his strategy now, too.

Fernández has been criticized as a alternative for his function by survivors of clerical abuse, who level to cases in Argentina the place he allegedly sought to guard accused monks. Fernández has admitted to errors, and in a Fb put up final 12 months, mentioned his preliminary reluctance to simply accept the Vatican job was additionally primarily based on the truth that he “felt unqualified” to handle the delicate circumstances of clerical abuse throughout the dicastery. The pope was so bent on hiring Fernández, nonetheless, that he navigated that situation by ring-fencing the dicastery’s work on abuse circumstances underneath autonomous investigators.

Greater than something, Fernández has emerged because the pope’s chief defender, repeatedly reminding the pontiff’s Catholic critics of their obligation to papal fealty.

“Non secular assent of thoughts and can have to be proven,” Fernández mentioned throughout one information convention by which he learn aloud from a web page of canon regulation.

No, he advised senior church figures who have been in revolt, the pope’s pronouncement on blessings for same-sex {couples} was not “heretical” or “blasphemous.”

He has expressed an understanding of cultural variations on gender and sexuality in varied nations however pushed again in opposition to critics of Francis’s LGBTQ+ outreach.

“What they need [the church] to say is that homosexuals are going to hell, they need to convert, in the event that they don’t, they’ll’t come to church much less have a blessing. That is what they need,” Fernández mentioned.

David Feliba in Buenos Aires contributed to this report.