Some years ago, when I was younger and somewhat more excitable, I wrote a series of essays about Pope Francis’s liberalizing efforts, arguing that the supreme pontiff’s choices risked a schism in the Catholic Church.
At the time my argument was criticized by Catholics on both sides of the church’s theological-political divides. Liberal Catholics accused me of hysteria, disloyalty or both. More conservative Catholics suggested I was importing anxieties from my childhood Protestantism into the more stable ground of Catholic faith.
But in the seventh year of the Francis pontificate, those “Protestant” anxieties are now everywhere in Catholic discussions, and both liberals and conservatives are deploying the “s” word promiscuously to describe developments that they dislike.
Read more at the New York Times