Civil-Unions ‘Imbergoglio’ Stains the Competency of the Holy See Press Office

National Catholic Register, 03 November 2020

The Vatican’s communications apparatus does grave disservice to Pope Francis and the Catholic faithful for not clarifying his comments.

The recent comments by Pope Francis about “civil unions” for same-sex couples raise serious questions about the competency and integrity of those who have been entrusted with Vatican communications.

There have been spectacular mishaps before. In 2018, a quasi-official spokesman, Basilian Father Thomas Rosica, wrote that the Holy Father was “not bound” by Scripture and Tradition, a flat contradiction of Catholic doctrine and something that Pope Francis himself has never said. That same year, the prefect of Vatican communications, Msgr. Dario Viganò, lied to the press corps about what Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI had written about various booklets on the theology of Pope Francis.

I coined the term imbergoglio for such graves disservices to the Holy Father: 

An imbroglio is an “extremely confused, complicated or embarrassing situation.” It becomes an imbergoglio when Pope Francis — Papa Bergoglio — is just going about his business and the people around him create an almighty flap. The Holy Father gets sucked into the imbroglio even though the principal decisions were not his. The imbroglio, which is not the Holy Father’s fault, nevertheless embroils him and becomes an imbergoglio. And then it ends in farce — all of which is terribly embarrassing for the Catholic Church and causes criticism to fly toward Pope Francis.

The “civil unions” controversy is the mother of all imbergoglios, as it dominated global news, sowing confusion about Catholic teaching for billions of people. The facts are only now known after 10 days of silence and fabrications.

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