Cardinal Angelo Scola, the runner-up in the last papal conclave, and the current Archbishop of Milan, has come out strongly against those who frequently and increasingly attack Pope Francis.
Cardinal Angelo Scola, the runner-up in the last papal conclave, has twice in recent weeks come out strongly against those, especially within the church, who frequently and increasingly attack Pope Francis. “It’s a very strong sign of contradiction and denotes a certain weakening of the people of God, above all of the intellectual class,” he said. “It is a profoundly wrong attitude because it forgets that ‘the pope is the pope.’”
“It is not by affinity of temperament, of culture, of sensibility, or for friendship, or because one shares or does not share his affirmations that one acknowledges the meaning of the pope in the Church,” the cardinal said in an interview published on the Archdiocese of Milan’s website on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of his priestly ordination on July 18.
Then, referring to the countless ways in which attacks have been launched against Pope Francis in these years, the former cardinal-patriarch of Venice and archbishop of Milan declared, “I consider these forms of pronouncements, letters, writings, pretences of judgments on his action, above all when they establish irritating comparisons with previous papacies, a decisively negative phenomenon that is to be eradicated as soon as possible.”
Cardinal Scola declared, “I truly consider admirable and moving the extraordinary capacity of Pope Francis to make himself close to everyone, and especially to the excluded, to those who are subjected to ‘the throw-away culture’ as he so often reminds [us] in his keenness to communicate the Gospel to the world.”
To continue reading this article, click here.
Gerard O’Connell is America’s Vatican correspondent.
With thanks to America Magazine where this article originally appeared.
