No one expected him to speak today but he did, and it was harder than ever. During the meeting of the Synod held in Rome, the first where laymen and women can vote and that this afternoon the call was approved Letter to God’s people (336 votes in favor and 12 against), Francis gave one of the worst speeches in recent times, in which he attacked the “sexist and dictatorial attitudes” of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and criticized “the clericalism a whip, it is a scourge. , it is a kind of worldliness that pollutes and enslaves the holy faithful people of God.”
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Improvising in Spanish, Bergoglio made a speech that left a large part of the assembly speechless, stressing that “it is painful to find in some parish offices the ‘price list’ for sacramental services like a supermarket.” And he is categorical in saying that, if it continues, the Church “will end up as a company of different services” and “become a supermarket of salvation, and the priests, only employees of a multinational.”
“This is the great defeat to which clericalism has brought us. And this with much shame and scandal,” he said, giving examples of daily life in the Eternal City: “It is enough to go to the ecclesiastical tailor shops of Rome to see the scandal of young priests trying on cassocks. and hats or albs and roquettes with lace.”
Facing this, the Holy Pope defended the “infallibility” of the people of God against the clericalists, explaining it with the accent of the parish priest of Buenos Aires that he never stops. “If you want to know what the Holy Mother Church believes, go to the Magisterium, because he is in charge of teaching you, but if you want to know how the Church believes, go to the faithful that person.”
An honest people who, moreover, are mostly women. “The Church is a woman, and these are the women who know how to wait, how to discover the resources of the Church, honest people, they take risks beyond the limits, maybe with fear but courage, and in the chiaroscuro of a day that began they approached a tomb with the intuition (not yet hope) that there was a life,” the Pope recalled, adding that “the Church is a woman, she is a wife, she is one you mother,” in the face of those who “damage the face of the Church.” with sexist and dictatorial attitudes.”
