Leaking, back-stabbing, corruption, and backroom deals done by faceless men – never mind Australian politics, this is the Catholic church.

Forget the bloodless assassination of Tony Abbott’s political career, the Vatican actually killed Pope John Paul I. At least that’s what lots of people believe. The “smiling pope” served for only 33 days, and the circumstances of his death have given rise to multiple books and many murder theories.
John Paul I came to office in 1978
promising a new style:

[W]arm, compassionate, genuinely happy to be with ordinary people, a man of obvious faith who didn’t wear his piety on his sleeve or take himself too seriously. He pioneered the simplification of the papacy by dropping the royal “we”, declining coronation with the papal tiara and discontinuing use of the... portable throne.

Remind you of anyone?

Depending on which conspiracy theory you want to believe, John Paul I was killed by the conservatives in the church either because he wanted to take the Catholic church in a radically new direction or because he was about to embark on a clean-up of the shadowy and suspect practices at the Vatican Bank.

Remind you of anyone?

Now we have another populist pope and a fresh round of conspiracy theories. Pope Francis is delighting many, wowing the world’s media and renewing interest in the Catholic church with his simplicity, his openness, and his apparent determination to shift the church’s focus away from legalistic obsessions, especially with sex and morality.

Refusing to judge homosexuals, allowing atheists to get into heaven, and speaking to the US Congress without once mentioning abortion: Francis seems to have the conservatives on edge and looking for ways to fight back.

If the conspiracy theories are to be believed, the conservatives struck a blow last week by strategically leaking that the pope had a “secret meeting” during his visit to the US with Kim Davis. The current cause celebre for American conservatives, Davis is a local government bureaucrat in Kentucky and an apparent defender of marriage as traditionally defined between a man and a woman (she’s had four of her own).

She’s enjoying her 15 minutes of fame for refusing on religious grounds to issue marriage licences in objection to the supreme court ruling that two people of the same gender can legally marry in the US.

Often a kernel of truth sits at the heart of any conspiracy theory.

What is true is that Francis was in the US to attend the world meeting of families , and yet did not at any point during his trip make any significant remarks about conservative touchstone issues like divorce, marriage equality or abortion. What the pope fails to address is often just as significant as what he actually says.

What is also true here is that the pope has just kicked off a month long synod on the family, a gathering of bishops, cardinals and others to consider the church’s teachings on family life. From last year’s pre-synod meetings it is clear there are a group of church leaders, seemly emboldened by Pope Francis, prepared to embrace same sex families as a reality in the modern world, as well as accept divorced Catholics back into full communion with the church. Their position created a backlash from the conservatives and set the stage for a showdown at this month’s synod.

The battle lines were drawn this week in the opening statements of the synod, especially in regard to divorced and civilly remarried Catholics. Many hope the synod will find a “penitential path” that permits divorced and remarried couples to be fully accepted in the church. However, others seem keen to resist such a change in church teaching.

For the conservatives, setting up a meeting with Kim Davis, and leaking the fact after the pope left the United States, seemed a perfect way to frame Francis on the eve of the synod as being “on their side”. Within days, the Vatican squashed that notion and the progressives returned serve by counter-leaking: the only people the pope granted an audience to during his US tour was a gay couple, or that the bishop who set up the Davis meeting is likely to be fired.

The Killing Season? Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard have nothing on these guys. At the opening of the synod on the family, Pope Francis said that it was not parliament but rather a place to listen to the Holy Spirit. Perhaps it was his gentle reminder to bishops to stop behaving like politicians and start behaving like pastors.

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