Pope as Peronist sends trial balloons, plays media like violin, helped in all of it by his protege from Argentina, the new head dogma protector, serving also as voluble front man . . .

It’s a matter of style and strategy.

As explained by veteran Vatican-watcher Andrea Gagliarducci. 

Argentina’s Juan Domingo Peron thought people were like Parliament. . . . A leader who desired to maintain power had to “adjust” with the people. Peron would float legislative ideas, observe reactions, and adjust everything accordingly.

It has often been said that Pope Francis is a Peronist.

Oh?

In any case, Pope Francis has some characteristic traits of that political movement. His use of trial balloons is one such trait. He gauges reactions and, sometimes suddenly, changes tack according to what he sees. It has happened often enough and with big enough issues to make it a characteristic of this pontificate.

For instance?

The recent Vatican trial featured such “adjustments”:

1. He asked [the defendant] Cardinal Becciu to resign from everything, even from cardinal prerogatives.
2. He allowed the same cardinal to be tried.
3. He went to visit him at home on Holy Thursday and asked Becciu to participate in public events involving members of the college, without ever giving him back his cardinalatial prerogatives.

Keeps us guessing.

More:

The great novelty of this last part of the pontificate, however, is that the Pope is accompanied in this adjustment process by an ally, a friend, and a confidant: Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez, prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, inspirer of many papal texts and also of the theology of the Pope.

And it is Fernandez who, in recent months, has been exercising the role of the Pope’s lieutenant in hacer lio, that is, making noise [or a mess] and then seeing the reactions. Fernandez does not fail to give interviews, and many of them, to explain his position and even to ridicule those who highlight doctrinal and practical problems with his choices. In a recent interview with La Stampa, he went so far as to say it is not decisions that cause tensions; decisions are moments of truth because they bring out tensions.

You gotta get up early to handle this fellow.

The Fiducia Supplicans hurricane served two purposes. One was to burnish the pope’s public image by giving him a few good days in the papers. The other, arguably more important purpose: to count the people faithful to the papal line.

Finding out who’s with him, “those who want reforms or want to exploit the possibilities given by these new documents” and “ask for obedience to the Pope and complain of resistance.”

And who’s against him, “Those who notice the pitfalls behind these new documents and risk finding themselves cast into the vortex of organized groups that attack the Church from the so-called ‘traditional world’ of the right.”

Then there is pope as publicity hound. Like Cardinal Fernandez, Francis

does not fail to give interviews. He does it often (over a hundred in ten years of his pontificate) and with the media and people he trusts. Sometimes, the “request” for an interview came directly from the Domus Sanctae Marthae [where he lives].

Also, in the next year or so, a book will come out in several languages, in which he will talk about his life and the significant events that affected it.

He knows where the action is and goes there, when he has to rescue his image from public opinion when it gets “agressive.”

If necessary, the Pope is not afraid to make tough decisions that have a tremendous widespread impact. It happened in Chile in 2018, an actual turning point of the pontificate. Pope Francis decided not to address the issue of abuse and, above all, the problems related to the appointment as bishop of Osorno of one of the followers of the abuser, Fernando Karadima. 

Then, faced with ferocious public opinion, he immediately changed his mind, summoned the Chilean bishops twice to Rome, pushed them to resign en masse, and sent a mission led by Archbishop Charles J. Scicluna.

In practice, this pontificate works in the wake of public opinion, putting forward specific ideas while remaining willing to change those ideas when the issue becomes difficult.

— more more more to come of this weekly report by the papal chronicler at Monday Vatican . . .