Fr. Z's Blog

As a preamble, Fr. Antonio (“2+2=5”) Spadaro, SJ … more HERE.  Scroll down a little.  Read about his interest in Pier Vittorio Tondelli.

Fr. Antonio Spadaro, editor of the semi-official publication La Civiltà Cattolica, has been, at times, nearly sewed to the shoulder of Francis and at other times seemingly shelved.  He got some attention from a sermon he gave last week about the Gospel from Matthew 15 about Christ and the Syrophoenician woman whose daughter was possessed.  At first the Lord doesn’t respond to her pleas, then he used the imagery of a dog (actually more like “puppy”) to describe the Canaanites (inveterate enemies of the Chosen People).  Christ eventually exorcizes the woman’s daughter and then heals many more in that Gentile region.

How did Spadaro describe the Lord?

Indifferent to suffering, peevish and insensitive, unbreakably harsh, an unmerciful theologian, mocking and disrespectful towards his poor mother, lacking humanity, blinded by nationalism and theological rigor, rigid, confused, sick and a prisoner the dominant theological, political and cultural elements of his time.

That’s most of it.   And, in case you are wondering, he didn’t end with, “But, Jesus only seemed that way.  What he was really doing was…”.  Nope.

Read it for yourselves.

What Spadaro published (Il Fatto Quotidiano has a paywall) which I found at Messa in Latino (these guys are great!):

Jesus is in Gennesaret, on the right bank of Lake Tiberias. The locals had recognized him and word of his presence had spread throughout the region, by word of mouth. Many brought him sick, who were healed. It was a land where people had to welcome and understand him. His actions were effective. But the Master does not stop. Matthew (15:21-28) – who writes for the Jews – tells us that he goes towards the northwest, the area of Tyre and Sidon, that is, in the Phoenician and therefore pagan area.
But behold, screams are heard. They are from a woman. She is Canaanite, that is, from that region inhabited by an idolatrous people that Israel looked upon with contempt and enmity. So, the story presumes that Jesus and the woman were enemies. The woman shouts: “Have mercy on me, Lord, son of David! My daughter is very tormented by a demon.” The body of this woman, her voice impose themselves erupting as if at the scene of a tragedy. Impossible for Jesus not to react to the chaos that abruptly interrupted the journey.

But no. “But he did not speak to her even a word”, writes Matthew laconically. Jesus remains indifferent. His disciples approach him and implore him, amazed. That woman was moving those who also ill judged her! Her screams had broken the barrier of hatred. But Jesus does not care. “Hear her, because she comes after us shouting!”, His companions beg him, trying to discreetly use the card of her insistence and the annoyance that her presence would have caused to the fireplace [sic!] of the Master.  [That sic is because the text says “camino… fireplace, chimney” rather than “cammino… journey”.  There’s plenty that’s horrid in this rant that supersedes typos.]

[This is where the train wreck starts.] The silence is followed by Jesus’ angry and insensitive response: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel”. The Master’s hardness is unshakeable. Now even Jesus is a theologian: [A “theologian”??!? That’s really bad.  Now make a connection with the new head of Doctrine of Faith, where a new kind of Prefect was needed, instead of one of those rigid theologians who used “immoral means”.] the mission received from God is limited to the children of Israel. So, nothing can be done. Mercy is not for her. She is excluded. There is no discussion.

But the woman is stubborn. Her hope for her is desperate, and she overcomes not only any supposed tribal enmity, but also appropriateness, her very dignity. She throws herself in front of him and begs him: “Lord, help me!”. [My Italian text has “Signora” rather than “Signore”.  Trans is everywhere, I guess.] She calls him “Lord”, that is, she recognizes his authority and her mission. What else can Jesus demand in order to act? Yet he replies in a mocking and disrespectful way towards that poor woman: “It is not good to take the children’s bread and throw it to the little dogs”, that is to domestic dogs. A downfall in tone, style, humanity. Jesus appears as if he were blinded by nationalism and theological rigor.  [Remember: theologians are bad!]

Anyone would have given up. But not the woman. She is determined: she wants her daughter healed. And she immediately grasps the only crack left open by Jesus’ words, where he had referred to domestic dogs (and therefore not stray ones). They share their masters’ house, in fact. And so with a move that desperation makes astute she says: “It is true, Lord, and yet the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table”. Few words, but well posed and such as to upset the rigidity of Jesus, to conform him, to “convert” him to himself. [It’s hard to believe that this guy thinks this much less published it.] Indeed, without hesitation, [Which could be a clue that maybe S’s interpretation is somewhat lacking…] Jesus replies: “Woman, great is your faith! May it happen for you as you wish ”. And from that instant her daughter was healed. And Jesus also appears healed, and in the end shows himself free, from the rigidity of the dominant theological, political and cultural elements of his time.
So what happened? Outside the land of Israel, Jesus healed the daughter of a pagan woman, despised for being Canaanite. Not only that: he agrees with her and praises her great faith.

Here is the seed of a revolution.

Revolution.

Interesting way to end that, no?

BTW… it is interesting that Spadaro blathers here about Christ being bad (“theologian”) and Francis also just ranted about theology being “ideology”, aiming it at these United States.  When he was in Portugal, as usual Francis On-The-Road has a “private” meeting with Jesuits, after which everything he said is published (with how much editing, we don’t know).  In 2021 in Slovakia, he denigrated EWTN.  This time, he talked about “backwardists” in America.  To a Jesuit who had visited these USA… (btw the Epitome was an orderly compilation, a summary of the less orderly Constitutions, made by a General of the Jesuits which came to be used for Jesuit formation in the 20th century):

You, the younger ones, have not experienced these tensions, but what you say about some sectors in the United States reminds me of what we have already experienced with the Epitome, which has generated a totally rigid and boxed mentality. Those American groups you speak of, so closed, are isolating themselves. And instead of living on doctrine, on true doctrine that always develops and bears fruit, they live on ideologies. But when in life you abandon doctrine to replace it with an ideology, you have lost, you have lost as in war.

Problem: Francis tosses the word “ideology” around for views he doesn’t like, but he hasn’t, to my knowledge, defined what he means by “ideology”.  It’s just… “out there opposed to him” and it’s “bad” because it is “against the spirit”.

Francis rails against the Epitome.  A footnote in the Civilità account says:

The formation of the Jesuits on the Society for a certain time was shaped by [the Epitome], to such an extent that some never read the Constitutions, which instead are the founding text. For the Pope, during this period in the Society the rules risked overwhelming the spirit, and he overcame the temptation to make the charism explicit and over-declared.

In the Civilità text Francis says that he was in the novitiate when the Epitome had “fossilized” the Jesuits.  Then Arrupe changed all that.  One sometimes could have the impression that Francis is treating the Church as a whole as if he were working out the internal problems of the Society.

I digress.  The Civilità piece is revelatory.  I can’t help but think that it presages something dire for a certain bishop of Texas.  I hope I’m wrong.

Archbp. Viganò responded in stark terms to Spadaro’s commentary on last week’s Novus Ordo Gospel from Matthew 15. Viganò’s vigorous reaction is at the blog of Aldo Maria Valli.  Whew.

In Spadaro’s words, the scum of the worst Modernism that has been plaguing the Church for more than a century emerges as if stirring in a puddle of sewage. That Modernism never definitively eradicated from seminaries and self-styled Catholic universities, to which a sect of heretics and misguided has erected the totem of the Council, replacing it with two thousand years of Tradition.

Until some time ago this “synthesis of all heresies” tried to make itself presentable by failing to manifest its anti-Christic nature, which was nonetheless consubstantial to it: there was still the risk that some vaguely conservative Prelate and not yet fully committed to the cause could realize its intrinsic danger. Of course, the divinity of Christ was considered a wishful thinking flowing from the need for the sacred of the “primitive community”, his miracles were exaggerations, his words were metaphors; on the other hand, “there were no recorders”, as said Arturo Sosa, Superior General of the Company of Satan.

[…]

That’s a “no” vote from Viganò, I guess.

Some common sense suggests that the Lord was not indifferent or cruel or irritated with this afflicted non-Jew.  He was teaching patience, testing her faith, underscoring persistence.  We all have had the experience of wondering if God cares about us at all, if He ever hears our prayers, which sometimes are not answered in a way we recognize.    We have to keep going to Him, even in seeming silence, even in worsening conditions.  God knows what is truly our good, our best good.  Discerning the true good for another is the foundation of charity, love of neighbor in its most authentic sense.  One gives another what is truly the other’s good, even though it can pain us or cost us, compel us into a choice of self-sacrifice.   Does anyone with faith in Christ as truly God and truly man really think that a) the Lord didn’t know what He was doing with the Syrophoenician woman, or b) that in His humanity He enjoyed putting her off and hearing her plaintive cries?  He chose what was the true good for her and for those who were looking on, taking it in.  They were in pagan territory.  It was the Lord’s primary mission in this period of His earthly life to gather the lost tribes.  He was not unmindful of the Gentiles.  He had a divinely informed mission which had order to it.  It was not an order that absolutely excluded classes of people, hence His treatment of, say, Samaritans.  St. John Chrysostom says of this moment, that Christ, “withheld the gift not to drive her away, but to make that woman’s patience an example for all of us” (Homily on Phil 1:18)  Augustine said, “She was ignored, not that mercy might be denied but that desire might be enkindled; not only that desire might be enkindled but… that humility might be praised” (s. 77.1)  St. Ambrose says of the parallel in Mark 7:24, “If God invariably listened to every supplicant equally, he might appear to us to act from some necessity rather than from his own free will” (De mysteriis, 1.3)  God is not a Pez-dispenser.    Furthermore, you can see from the exchange between Christ and the Canaanite woman the benefit one’s personal efforts can be for others.  From helping one woman who was desperate, He then healed many of the afflicted in that area before the second miraculous feeding of a multitude.  He foreshadowed the gathering of the Gentiles.  Her intercession wound up being for more than her own daughter.  God’s mercy flows and overflows.  Moreover, we are all in this together.

More can be said, of course.  And perhaps the less said about Spadaro, the better.

Again, that Civilità piece bears attention.  I don’t have the energy to put it into English, but someone will.

And –  in that informal meeting with Jesuits – Francis went off the rails again concerning Vincent of Lérin.  Again.  According to Francis, the principles Vincent lays down for doctrine eventually result in doctrine evolving into something contrary to what it was before.    But this is already too long.