As precarious as the condition of his health may be, Pope Francis not only does not show the slightest intention of resigning from the papacy, but he also does not want to delegate to others the command over all that he has most at heart.
And he does this without setting any limit on his powers as absolute monarch, which he has always assigned to himself. Not even two years have gone by since he enacted the new Fundamental Law of Vatican City State, in itself inviolable like all constitutions, which he has already resoundingly broken two times, and from his very bed in the Gemelli Hospital.
The first time was on February 15, one day after his hospitalization, when he appointed Sister Raffaella Petrini as governor of Vatican City State, without taking into account the articles of the Fundamental Law that reserve this office for a cardinal.
And the second time was on February 25, when he appointed two secretaries general of the same governorate, when the Fundamental Law provides for only one, and assigned Sister Petrini the task of dividing the duties between the two.
In this second case, the double appointment was made public with the advisory that at the same time the pope was modifying, by harmonizing them, the conflicting canons of the Fundamental Law and of Law no. CCLXXIV on the government of the Vatican State. But to date nothing appears changed in the texts of the two laws, for one who consults them on the official website of the Holy See.
Nor in the meantime has there been the least correction of that astonishing first line of the preamble to the Fundamental Law, which – for the first time in history – assigns to the pope “by virtue of the Petrine ‘munus’” the exercise of “sovereign powers also over Vatican City State,” as if he commanded it by divine right.
When the Fundamental Law was promulgated on May 13, 2023, this line made canon law specialists around the world shudder in horror, with rare exceptions, foremost that of the cardinal and Jesuit Gianfranco Ghirlanda, the canonist who has done this and more for Francis, entirely at his service. So it is not surprising that the pope should have been particularly irritated, in his bed at the Gemelli, when Italian television incautiously spread the “fake news” that on February 20 Ghirlanda had visited him in the hospital, engendering the suspicion of who knows what new machination, perhaps to change the rules of the conclave and pre-conclave. There followed an immediate, unusual denial by the Holy See, evidently on orders from above.
The same press office did instead give news of the February 24 audience at the hospital that the pope granted to Cardinal Pietro Parolin, secretary of state, and to his substitute for general affairs, the Venezuelan archbishop Edgar Peña Parra. The reason for the audience was to authorize the dicastery for the causes of saints to proclaim several new saints and blesseds, with the concomitant consistory of cardinals that is always held in these cases but which, with a pope in precarious health, raises particular alarm, reminiscent of that similar consistory of February 11, 2013, at which Benedict XVI made the surprise announcement of his resignation.
But in the statement on the audience of February 24 there was also the unsaid: the intention of Francis to demonstrate that his top-level representatives in the curia – whom he also received on March 2 – are Parolin and Peña Parra, and the latter more than the former.
Parolin, in effect, has endured more than assisted with Francis’s pontificate. Excluded at first from the select group of cardinals that the pope called to advise him in the government of the universal Church, he has seen the powers of the secretariat of state eroded year after year, to the point of the complete removal of the funds at his disposal. Not to mention the reputational disaster inflicted on him by the Vatican trial arranged over the ill-advised purchase of a building in London on Sloane Avenue.
As for international politics, here too Francis has always preferred to do and undo as he sees fit, if anything with the assistance of the Community of Sant’Egidio, without the secretariat of state being able to act as a barrier.
The latest affront that the pope has put upon Parolin was, on February 6, the indefinite extension, as dean of the college of cardinals, of the ninety-one-year-old Giovanni Battista Re, who had come to the expiration of his mandate. The one who holds this role is responsible for overseeing the pre-conclave and conclave, and Parolin is seen as having all the credentials to be elected as the new dean by the select circle of “cardinal bishops” that has the faculty to determine this, of which he too is part. But evidently Francis is not pleased that it should be up to Parolin to govern his succession.
The Venezuelan Peña Parra, instead, was not only selected by Francis and wanted close as his main executor, but he also demonstrates that in acting he avails himself of papal cover even for operations that are abundantly beyond the limits of legitimacy.
The latest episode revealing this closeness between Peña Parra and the pope concerned the Argentine priest Ariel Alberto Príncipi, of the charismatic movement, reduced to the lay state in June 2023 by the interdiocesan tribunal of Cordoba authorized by the Vatican dicastery for the doctrine of the faith, and then convicted again, after his appeal, by another ecclesiastical tribunal, that of Buenos Aires, in April 2024.
The conviction was based on the charges of three young people, minors at the time of the events, of having suffered from the priest “impositions of hands of a lewd nature” during healing rites he performed, some of these in the presence of other faithful.
Príncipi has always said he is innocent, the victim of a misinterpretation of his actions. But his proceedings appeared to be closed, awaiting only the definitive conviction on the part of the dicastery for the doctrine of the faith, which is the only Vatican body authorized to deal with such crimes.
Last September 25, however, the diocese of Río Cuarto, to which Príncipi belongs, announced that it had received an edict from the secretariat of state, signed by the substitute Peña Parra, that ordered Príncipi’s restoration to the priesthood, albeit with some limitations in the exercise of the ministry. This “following further evidence provided by several diocesan bishops of Argentina.”
But two weeks later, on October 7, Archbishop John Kennedy, head of the disciplinary section of the dicastery for the doctrine of the faith, which has exclusive jurisdiction in the matter, decreed Peña Parra’s previous edict null and void and definitively confirmed Príncipi’s conviction.
Case closed? Legally, yes, but there remains open the mystery of this astonishing interference by the substitute Peña Parra in a canonical process, which would have entailed his immediate dismissal if done without the go-ahead of Pope Francis.
Then there is the unknown concerning the role played in the affair by the prefect of the dicastery for the doctrine of the faith, the Argentine cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández, who formally would figure as the injured party in the abuse of power by the substitute secretary of state, but is at the same time a longstanding friend of Príncipi and above all very close to the pope.
Also still to be explained is the behavior of Pope Francis, with his having one thing done first and then its opposite: truth be told, a contradiction that is not new in his way of governing.
The fact is that Francis reserves for his Argentina a very special attention, in perfect solitude making decisions that not rarely turn out to be disastrous.
Another emblematic case is that of his long-time friend and protégé Gustavo Oscar Zanchetta, who was made bishop shortly after the beginning of the pontificate but then ended up on trial in the Argentine civil courts for the sexual abuse of seminarians, with the confirmation on appeal one month ago of his sentence of four years and six months in prison.
Having retired in 2016, when the accusations had not yet emerged, Zanchetta was made safe at the Vatican with a sham role that the pope created just for him, that of assessor of the Administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See. But even after his conviction, to be served partly in prison and partly under house arrest, the Vatican authorities did not follow up on any canonical investigation against him, even though it was announced in 2019, nor on any disciplinary measure.
In recent weeks Zanchetta was in Rome for medical treatment at the Gemelli Hospital, the same one where the pope was hospitalized. Still enjoying his manifest protection.
But Zanchetta’s is not an isolated case. There are now several Argentine bishops personally appointed by Pope Francis and soon forced to leave their posts, due to criminal charges or ineptitude.
The latest case came out into the open last February 13 with the sudden resignation of the bishop of San Rafael, Carlos María Domínguez, 59, installed by the pope just two years earlier but now under investigation for the sexual abuse of three young adult males.
Less than a year ago, on May 27, another sudden retirement caused a stir: that of Archbishop Gabriel Antonio Mestre, 57, from the see of La Plata, where Francis had promoted him less than a year before.
Previously, Mestre had been bishop of his native diocese, Mar del Plata. But the first successor appointed by the pope to replace him in this diocese, José María Baliña, had to resign less than a month later, officially for health reasons. And the second, Gustavo Larrazábal, had to do likewise before even entering the diocese, due to a woman’s accusations of abuse of power and harassment.
Meanwhile, there to govern the diocese of Mar del Plata was, as apostolic administrator, the diocesan vicar general Luis Albóniga. But shortly after the appointment of a third bishop in the person of Ernesto Giobando, a Jesuit and long-time friend of the pope, Albóniga also had to go “on break for a while,” due to a canonical investigation launched against him for unspecified offenses.
After which, in a statement, Mestre attributed his forced resignation from the archdiocese of La Plata to the outcome of a conversation in Rome between him and Pope Francis, “after having compared some differing perceptions on what happened in the diocese of Mar del Plata”: a mess evidently attributed to a great extent also to him.
In short, by doing and undoing too many things by himself and on everything, in contempt of the laws and with these nowise thrilling results, Francis is in fact delivering a warning to his successor: to be wary to the highest degree of wanting his turn at playing pope-king.
But no hurry. To Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, received at the Gemelli on February 19 through a decision also entirely his own, Francis said he knows well that there are those who pray for his death, but meanwhile “the Lord of the harvest has thought to leave me here.”
(Translated by Matthew Sherry: traduttore@hotmail.com)
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Sandro Magister is past “vaticanista” of the Italian weekly L’Espresso.
The latest articles in English of his blog Settimo Cielo are on this page.
But the full archive of Settimo Cielo in English, from 2017 to today, is accessible.
As is the complete index of the blog www.chiesa, which preceded it.
