"Divisions and false expectations. This is Bergoglio's legacy"

Professore Polieri speaks out on the Conclave: 

The Conclave for the election of the new Pope opens on May 7 in a climate of alleged fractures within the Church. "Since the majority of clerics, analysts, commentators and faithful, close to Bergoglian positions, have always believed that Francis I was a true revolutionary, it was to be expected that, both with his declarations and his gestures and with the positions he took in official documents, signed by him or produced by the various Dicasteries to which he gave approval, he could produce splits within the Church. But even in civil society his messages, sometimes not always characterized by clarity of exposition, due to their inflection on the places and circumstances in which they were expressed and on the recipients to whom they were addressed, have generated divisions or false expectations", explains to Il Tempo Pietro Polieri, Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Bari and scientific director of the Observatory "Religion/s and Law. Geopolitics and Geopolitics of Religions" for the online legal journal Ratio Iuris.

Can you give some examples of false expectations created by Bergoglio's messages?

"The case of the LGBTQI+ communities who, at the end of the day, instead of being faced, as they seemed to have been promised, with complete "neo-Catholic" gender acceptance, have seen Francis and his Congregations publish official doctrinal texts in which the authentic family is the "traditional" one, true love is heterosexual love, abortion is a crime, surrogate motherhood is pure trafficking and sex change is an act against nature. In short, Bergoglio has probably revolutionized the very concept of revolution or he has revolutionized revolutionary expectations about himself or, again, he has embraced the idea of ​​revolution without actually having practiced it or having only outlined it. Or, on certain hot topics he has simply adhered to the doctrine of the Church, emerging from a Christianity that is, in its evangelical nature and intentionality and in its historical entirety, revolutionary with respect to the century, the world, and the ordinary mentality".

What is the weight of the Italian cardinals on the conclave?

"A burden that could prove to be double, due to the fact that cardinals such as, for example, Pietro Parolin, Matteo Maria Zuppi and Pierbattista Pizzaballa, all with a whiff of papacy, are not only convinced Bergoglians, capable of publicly and trans-geographically consolidating certain "innovative" convictions of the Argentine Pope on migrants, pan-ecology and the Russian-Ukrainian and Israeli-Palestinian wars, but are already placed in functional and political positions that are strategically and mediatically relevant, to the point that their names were generated "naturally" both inside and outside the group of cardinals. Nothing changes, however, that a non-Italian, such as Luis Antonio Gokim Tagle, appointed by Ratzinger and subsequently supporting Bergoglio, may not displease the Italians, getting their support, given his ability to keep the progressive and conservative blocs in dialogue, as well as winking at the traditionalists"

Will the conservative part of the US Church launch a takeover bid on the conclave?

"It certainly won’t sit back and watch Bergoglio’s successor arrive rather than Peter’s successor, as some non-aligned cardinals have dared to claim. The American cardinals could probably try to form a transversal, intercontinental conservative unity, which could go from the USA of Trump’s Timothy Dolan and the ultra-reactionary Raymond Burke through the Europe of Gerhard Müller, the man ousted by Francis from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, to Africa of the Ratzingerian Robert Sarah and Archbishop Fridolin Ambongo Besungu. An alternative to the progressive and moderate bloc that could really constitute a solution, in some ways unexpected in others, hoped for as a compensation for the (pseudo-)modernist work of Pope Francis".

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