Over at Fishwrap the cracks are widening. They are losing John Allen. They closed the combox. MSW is deeply into logorrhea. They are panicky.
Now I see a piece by Thomas Reese, SJ, who was removed from his editor’s position at America Magazine about a month after Benedict became Pope (HERE), entitled “Francis makes his first mistake“.
Reese – not a lover of the Roman Curia – is unhappy with four of Francis’ nominations to the cardinalate. Reese is unhappy that heads of Roman curial dicasteries are still going to be cardinals. That means that heads of dicasteries get to play on the major league team. Well, bad news to Reese: curial heads still get to wear the big league uniform and they will still wield power. More bad news for Reese is that with these four men getting getting the red hat from Francis, four others more to Reese’s liking will not get it.
But here is a sentence that Reese tries to slip into his argument without you noticing it.
It was very easy for the Vatican to take back control during the papacy of John Paul.
HUH?
In Reese’s parallel universe, it was the those bad meanies in John Paul’s curia who took back power during John Paul’s time. It couldn’t have been John Paul! Oh, no. Remember, liberals like to love on John Paul … now that he is dead. They hated him when he was alive.
There’s more:
But under John Paul II, the decentralization was reversed and power reverted to the Vatican. That is why we have the terrible English translation used in parishes today.
LOL! Still whining about the translation, too.
No, it was John Paul who wanted to reverse the decentralization. This was his doing. Cards. Sodano or Ratzinger weren’t acting on their own. John Paul II brought Ratzinger to Rome and told him to go after X, Y, Z. He told them, “Get me back the Church. Get Catholic theology back.” It was John Paul II who hit the reset button and slowed the the spiraling chaos of dissent in the local churches that Paul VI allowed. Look, I am not fan of Card. Sodano, by a long shot, but John Paul II wanted him to strengthen the Curia, and strengthen the Curia he did.
And let’s here leave aside that the Curia ballooned under the liberals’ darling, Paul VI.
Let’s not forget our history. It isn’t as if the Roman Curia took control from local churches and the Pope just watched it passively or turned a blind eye. This was John Paul II’s design. He determined that the local churches were incapable of playing the role they were assuming. Liturgy, inter-religious dialogue, doctrine, moral theology, seminaries, religious life…. These are just a few spheres in which local churches had failed.
No, centralization was a Johanine-Pauline goal. Benedict XVI continued it.
The rest of Reese’s piece is detritus.
But Reese tried to slip in a whopper.
I hope hereby to draw the readership’s attention to the blog of Fr. John Hunwicke, 
