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Pope Francis Versus the Vatican: The Battle to Remake the Church
posted on August 26, 2013In The New Republic‘s latest cover story, Damon Linker argues against the conventional wisdom that Pope Francis will revolutionize the Catholic Church. He writes: “Francis’s renewed emphasis on the poor is certainly welcome and valuable, and there are circumscribed areas in which the Pope may achieve real reforms. But when progressive Catholics pine for change, they mostly mean that they want to see the Church brought into conformity with the egalitarian ethos of modern liberalism, including its embrace of gay rights, sexual freedom, and gender equality. And that simply isn’t going to happen. To hope or expect otherwise is to misread this Pope, misinterpret the legacy of his predecessors, and misunderstand the calcified structure of the Church itself.”