Gently and without fanfare, without spectacle, in terms humane and genuinely solicitous of the department’s work, Leo set not so much a new agenda as a new – old – course for the office, after a two-year adventure inaugurated when Francis named Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández to lead the dicastery.
“I am well aware of the valuable service you perform,” Leo said, “with the aim – as the Constitution Praedicate Evangelium states – to ‘help the Roman Pontiff and the Bishops to proclaim the Gospel throughout the world by promoting and safeguarding the integrity of Catholic teaching on faith and morals … by drawing upon the deposit of faith and seeking an ever deeper understanding of it in the face of new questions’.”
That one sentence essentially restored the doctrine dicastery to factory settings.
Often described as the “doctrinal watchdog” of the Vatican and historically styled La Suprema, the office now officially called the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith has for centuries policed doctrine and exercised oversight over all the departments of the Roman curia.
Under Pope Francis, however, the office saw itself sidelined.
It is no secret that Francis liked to do things his way, torpedoes be damned, and he liked to keep the high prelates who were supposed to constitute his inner circle of official advisors very much at arm’s length from his counsels and even in the dark about his plans.
John L. Allen Jr. even likened Francis to US President Donald Trump, noting their common preference for informal “kitchen cabinet” advisors and inveterate practice of what Allen called a “keep-’em-guessing” style of governance.
Fernández was for many years a member of the kitchen cabinet, frequently exercising the role of papal ghostwriter and serving as Francis’s theological eminence grise during the first decade of the Francis pontificate.
“Close observers are well aware,” Allen wrote in 2017, “that when it comes to theological matters, Francis relies much more on Argentine Archbishop Victor Fernández, an old friend who heads the Pontifical Catholic University in Buenos Aires, than whoever happens to be running the CDF [Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith].”
In 2023, however, Francis made Fernández prefect of the DDF (formerly known as the CDF), a move that didn’t take Fernández out of the kitchen cabinet so much as it did further obscure the already blurry lines between official and unofficial modes and orders in Vatican operations.
Francis also took another unusual step – highly unusual, to be perfectly frank – of outlining Fernández’s mission profile for him in a private letter Francis caused to be published.
In a nutshell, Francis told Fernández he wanted the DDF prefect to focus on fostering theological dialogue and leave the watchdog work well enough alone. “The Dicastery over which you will preside in other times came to use immoral methods,” Francis wrote.
“Those were times,” Francis wrote, “when, rather than promoting theological knowledge, possible doctrinal errors were pursued.”
“What I expect from you is certainly something very different,” Francis continued. Under Fernández, the DDF would still “guard the teaching that flows from the faith in order to ‘to give reasons for our hope’,” Francis also wrote, “but not as an enemy who critiques and condemns.”
That part about guarding the teaching of the Church in order to “give reasons for our hope” was a reference to the 1st Letter of St. Peter, and the part about doing it “not as an enemy who critiques and condemns” came straight from Francis’s 2013 Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, in the drafting of which Fernández had something of a hand.
Observers including this one wondered aloud at the time what good a doctrine office unbothered with doctrine could possibly do.
Even Pope Leo’s restoration of the DDF to factory settings he accomplished by citing the plain text of Pope Francis’s own curial reform law.
One other remark the new pontiff made in the address is also worth flagging.
“I would like to mention, Leo said, “another service of yours, for which I am grateful and which I commend to your care: That of welcoming and accompanying, with every kindness and judgement, the Bishops and Superiors General called to deal with cases of crimes reserved to the Dicastery.”
“This is a very delicate area of ministry,” Leo said, “in which it is essential to ensure that the requirements of justice, truth and charity are always honored and respected.”
The remark echoed others Leo made on Monday of last week to the judges of the Roman Rota, which deals mostly with marriage nullity cases.
Leo focused his remarks to the judges of the Rota on the close connection between the “truth of justice” and the “virtue of charity.”
“These are not two opposing principles,” Leo said, “nor are they values to be balanced according to purely pragmatic criteria, but two intrinsically united dimensions that find their deepest harmony in the very mystery of God, who is Love and Truth.”
“In fact,” Leo said, “misunderstood compassion, even if apparently motivated by pastoral zeal, risks obscuring the necessary dimension of ascertaining the truth proper to the judicial office.”
“This can happen not only in cases of matrimonial nullity,” Leo said, “but also in any type of proceeding, undermining its rigor and fairness.”
Leo has spoken to Crux of the need to protect the procedural rights of the accused in abuse cases and of the need to achieve justice more speedily, as well as of the need to give victims of abuse sustained and genuinely compassionate care.
Observers across the spectrum of opinion in the Church agree that securing justice in abuse cases is integral to the task of caring for victims, and justice depends not only on procedural rigor and regularity but also on procedural transparency.
Without procedural transparency, it is impossible to ascertain the extent to which processes have been rigorous and regular. It is also impossible – or at least far more difficult than it ought to be – for a body of criminal jurisprudence to develop.
The case that remains the proverbial elephant in the room is that of Father Marko Rupnik, a former Jesuit and disgraced celebrity artist accused of the serial sexual, psychological, and spiritual abuse of dozens of adult victims over several decades, who very nearly escaped prosecution when the DDF ruled the charges against him statute-barred.
Only after an intervention from Cardinal Sean O’Malley – then the head of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, styling itself the Commission for the Protection of Minors and Vulnerable Persons – and incandescent global outrage at the news Rupnik had been welcomed to serve as a priest of a diocese in his native Slovenia, did Pope Francis see fit to waive the statute of limitations and allow a trial to proceed.
That was in October of 2023.
In October of last year, the Vatican announced that judges had finally been empaneled to hear the case against Rupnik, but the judges were not named and there was no word on what sort of process Rupnik would face or on what specific charges.
Jurists, reform advocates, and the faithful have long noted that justice done in the dark is no justice at all, and it is universally accepted as a maxim that justice delayed is justice denied.