Fr. Robert Imbelli does himself no favor by replying to my piece about his recent articles on the Synod with an air of aggrieved innocence. He calls my piece “polemical,” suggesting that his two articles were not. He says I failed to inform readers of his loyal citations of Pope Francis. But did his two articles not fail to inform readers of the language of faith throughout the Instrumentum? He says I have an “animus” against Sandro Magister. Apparently, Imbelli submitted his article to Magister’s blog, Settimo Cielo, without regard to Magister’s longstanding animus against Pope Francis, his papacy, and the Synod. Imbelli claims he was taken aback by Magister’s introductory remarks, though he does not quite distance himself from them, and proceeded to take up Magister’s biting evocation of Joachim of Fiore as the theme for his own article in First Things.
Can Fr. Imbelli also be innocent of the well-coordinated campaign being conducted against Francis’s papacy, and the similar campaign against the Synod on Synodality? About the Synod, the message is not simply that there are risks to be set against potential gains—Synod leaders have said as much—and that steps should be taken to minimize the former and promote the latter. No, the message is that the whole venture has been wrongheaded from the start, and the sooner and more loudly that is said the better. When Sandro Magister called the synodal process “reckless,” he spoke for many. I asked whether he also spoke for Imbelli, and Imbelli still hasn’t said.
What is distinctive about these two campaigns is not that they converge on the fear that the Francis papacy and now the Synod on Synodality might unintentionally undermine the faith—didn’t liberal Catholics entertain parallel fears about aspects of previous papacies?—but that this undermining is being done deliberately and surreptitiously. Since Imbelli posted his column on the First Things website, that journal has published an article portraying the Synod as a farce doomed to end in tragedy, the culminating effort “engineered in advance” by progressive neo-modernist “masterminds” to lead the Church toward a “new totalitarianism” marching “under a rainbow flag.” True friends of Francis will expose this radical agenda “being advanced under cover of his name” and convince him to reject the project the way that Paul VI rejected the findings of his own Birth Control Commission in Humanae vitae.
Obviously, Fr. Imbelli has no responsibility for that article. But this is the context, clouded with insinuations if not outright accusations of heresy, in which he published his articles and in which this exchange is taking place. I cannot believe he is unaware of that.
Fr. Imbelli claims I disputed his assessment of the Instrumentum’s “Christological inadequacy.” But that’s not in fact what I did. Rather, I disputed the adequacy of his overall characterization of the Instrumentum. By his choice of venue for his critiques, by what he said and what he chose to leave out, by his accusatory tone regarding allegedly missing words that turned out not to be missing, by implied contrasts between the Instrumentum and the robust Christological affirmations of Congar and de Lubac, by the dire prospects of dissolving the Church into secular ideologies and utopian fantasies à la Joachim of Fiore, his articles painted a picture of the Instrumentum that was, to my reading, simply false.
Please email comments to [email protected] and join the conversation on our Facebook page.