Cardinal 'shattered' by hostility to Pope from within the Church

Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schönborn said he is “shattered” by the amount of opposition to the Pope in Church circles, reports The Tablet.

Speaking to a congregation of more than 4000 in St Stephen’s Cathedral, Vienna, during the annual Medjugorje peace service on September 27, he said: “It hurts me that Francis is meeting with so much hostility in the Church. Why is that? He is after all the Successor of St Peter! He is the Pope!”

So many people worldwide were grateful for the Pope’s “benevolence, his love for the poor and the weak,” the Cardinal continued.

“He is living the Gospel Message for us. Why he is confronted with so much opposition from within our own ranks is completely incomprehensible to me.” It was all the more important to pray for Francis, he said.

One of the specific criticisms levelled at Francis recently from within the Church concerns his apostolic exhortation on the family, Amoris Laetitia. Some more conservative wings say it confuses teaching on communion for the divorced and remarried, and Washington Cardinal Donald Wuerl expressed his disappointment on this subject last week.

Cardinal Wuerl said he could not understand why some people would choose to vocally criticise Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation, saying it was the result of a two-year consultative process “clearly rooted in the tradition of the church," he told NCR Online.