Chevalier de la charité

« My parents divorced when I was 4, » Roberts recalled in an interview with Wyofile. « Amid all of that, when I was 9, my 15-year-old brother committed suicide.

« I think in my hometown of Lafayette, Louisiana, we saw the deterioration of American society sooner or in greater relief, greater contrast than the rest of the country. All that to say, you know, my faith, the Holy Spirit was not just active, but very present — very, very present. I think we would never want to be so presumptuous as to refer to our own faith as unshakeable. But mine has felt that way since that moment. » 

The bottoming out of the oil industry « revealed the early signs of institutional decay — families, associations, etc. — that simply weren’t up to the task of keeping society stable. I think that experience was very formative in my kind of conservatism — in particular, gravitation toward [Pat] Buchanan. »

Roberts threw himself into church, school and scouting. He was a champion high school debater, a skill that would serve him well at Heritage. At the end of the 1992 school year, the Lafayette Daily Advertiser newspaper featured Roberts as one of the top students at Lafayette High School. 

‘Historian of race’

Roberts earned a scholarship to the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he got a history degree in 1996. His first interest was Civil War military history but finding that area too crowded he switched to what he would later call the « more PC » field of race and slavery history at the University of Texas at Austin.

According to his graduate school advisers, Roberts excelled at UT from the start. His dissertation examining the lives and struggles of antebellum slaves in his Louisiana homeland was groundbreaking in terms of primary source documentation and detail, according to his dissertation committee supervisor James Sidbury, now a professor of history at Rice University in Houston.

Sidbury said that Roberts was always much more conservative than most of his professors and fellow graduate students, but that he got along well with everyone.

Still, Sidbury and others who worked with him at UT said they have been surprised by the harsh tones and forceful rhetoric of Roberts’ more recent attacks on « critical race theory » in American education. When he was at UT, they saw him more as a Karl Rove-George W. Bush kind of Republican, something he clearly is not now. Both Bush and his political adviser Rove are leading Trump critics. 

For his part, Roberts says his politics have not changed much, if at all. 

« I don’t think I’ve had any radical shifts in perspective on anything related to that, » Roberts told WyoFile. « I lament that CRT [critical race theory] and DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] have taken over, and not just from some knee-jerk conservative standpoint, but from my perspective as a historian of race, those tropes are divisive and undermine much progress we’ve made as a society. »

A move out West

In 2006 he returned to his native Lafayette to serve as headmaster and president of a new private Catholic pre-K through 12 school he helped found, the John Paul the Great Academy. He then moved on in 2013 to take over as president of Wyoming Catholic College. 

« From the moment I learned about Wyoming Catholic College, which was just before I saw that they were hiring for the second president, it captivated me, » Roberts said. « And the most succinct way I can explain that is, if Wyoming Catholic College had existed when I was looking for colleges, and I knew about it, I would’ve gone there. And the reasons are its commitment to faith, the academic rigor of the curriculum, which I would’ve found appealing and do find appealing as an adult and also as a parent. » 

Some Lander residents chafed at his school’s conservative moral policies and how they sometimes spilled over into the often-rowdy town, a mecca for rock climbers and adventurers drawn to the towering Wind River peaks nearby.

In 2015, for example, a gathering of the Wind River Pride organization in City Park was countered by a college-sponsored « traditional marriage picnic » a week later in the same spot. 

Shop owner Susan Meeker said she tired of female Wyoming Catholic College students coming into her women’s clothing store on Main Street to complain that window bra displays were upsetting male students.  

« I was having a bra fitting event and fundraiser for the Susan G. Komen Foundation for breast cancer, » said Meeker, who now lives in Colorado, « and I had a poster with a picture of a woman wearing a bra. Nothing trashy, slutty or whatever. Just a very sensible bra. These students came in all upset and wanted me to take it down. »

The school itself has strict behavior policies. Students can hold hands, but premarital sex is seen as not in keeping with Catholic teaching. There is a 10:30 p.m. curfew. Male students are banned from going shirtless. There are dances — ballroom and Western — and concerts, but Wyoming Catholic College is the opposite of a party school. Wearing his trademark black Stetson and Lucchese goatskin boots, Robert would lead horseback expeditions for outdoor prayer and study including an annual « ranch blessing. » 

Politics and publicity

While the college’s conservative values sometimes collided with the greater Lander community, Roberts and his family fit nicely into the small mountain town. Kevin played noontime pickup basketball at the Mormon church gym, where he was known for his sneaky right-handed set shot. Roberts and his wife participated in neighborhood road maintenance and water meetings. When something upset him, Roberts wrote a letter to the editor of the local newspaper, a civic practice he began as a high school student in his hometown of Lafayette.

But Roberts alienated some in the community because of comments he made when he rejected federal Title IX money for the school.

« The strings attached to that money, » Roberts told Wyoming Public Radio at the time, « would allow the federal government to invoke an interpretation of Title IX, in particular concerning transgendered persons and people with a same-sex attraction who want to bring a certain activity or activism to our college — either as students, or as employees — or — and this is very troubling for us — even people who want to use our restroom facilities and dorms. »

Roberts’ political activism sometimes grated on his own faculty. Glenn Arbery, the man who followed him as president, credits Roberts with skillfully publicizing the college. « Kevin put us on the map, » Arbery said. « He made an issue of our not taking federal aid. He made sure he got interviewed by The New York Times. He was always thinking in terms of publicity and of the political impact of the college. » 

But the faculty of the college were not always on board with the kind of political agenda that Kevin felt the college should have. « We are a ‘Great Books’ Catholic college that doesn’t necessarily have an activist understanding of itself. That became a kind of real tension because Kevin had one idea of the college and most of the faculty had a different idea, » Arbery said. 

After Wyoming U.S. Rep. Cynthia Lummis decided to run for the U.S. Senate in 2016, Roberts briefly toyed with the idea of seeking her vacated congressional seat. But then a better offer came along from the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation in Austin. 

Roberts became the Texas nonprofit’s chief executive officer in 2018 and immediately became one of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s top advisers. Abbott named him to head the 1836 Project, created to celebrate Texas history as an independent Republic and as a counter to The New York Times’ 1619 Project, which examined slavery and the founding of the U.S. While at Texas Public Policy, Roberts again eschewed any kind of federal aid, including COVID relief funds. 

He launched a Texas Public Policy video podcast, « The Advance, » where he moderated interviews with conservative leaders in a format that he later recreated at Heritage with « The Kevin Roberts Show. » Long an admirer of Heritage, he adopted the proactive policy strategy that Edwin Feulner, former Heritage president, had pioneered in the Reagan years. Like Feulner, Roberts had learned the value of repetition of themes and phrases. Feulner once likened it to selling toothpaste.

« Proctor and Gamble does not sell Crest toothpaste by taking out one newspaper ad or running one television commercial, » Feulner wrote in a 1985 essay titled « Ideas, Think-Tanks, and Governments. »

« They sell it and resell it every day by keeping the product fresh in the consumer’s mind. »

So when the offer came along to lead and — indeed revive — the country’s most powerful conservative mouthpiece, Roberts jumped at the opportunity. 

At 49, he is still a young man with seemingly boundless energy and a willingness to appear and present conservative positions whenever he is summoned, even before the « global elites » at the Davos World Economic Forum if necessary. Along the way, the product of a hardscrabble broken home has been able to dramatically increase his income from the $94,000 a year he made at John Paul the Great Academy, to $146,000 at Wyoming Catholic College, to $280,000 at Texas Public Policy Foundation to his current $668,000 at Heritage. 

But despite his lucrative and meteoric rise in conservative circles, Roberts says his heart still belongs to Wyoming. « We try to get back there at least once a year. I average two or three times a year since we’ve left. »

Roberts said he has ruled out the idea of  returning to Wyoming to run for public office, but can imagine returning to live full time once his days at Heritage are over. He refers to Wyoming as his « spiritual home. »

For many, however, Wyoming politics seem to have coarsened in recent years with deep fissures in the ruling Republican Party. That coarsening has been often led by MAGA-style Republican politicians, who have little patience for compromise or even civility. But Roberts sees this movement more as a kind of retreat from the patrician GOP politics once practiced by the Cheneys — Dick and Liz — and before that, Sen. Alan Simpson.

« Wyoming politics are only seen as being more divisive now, » he said in a later email exchange, « because more populist conservatives, like my friend Harriet Hageman, are displacing the establishment types, like [Liz] Cheney. 

“It’s a necessary and good realignment. » 

Irene Leonor Flores de Callata, 68, treks along a bone-dry riverbed, guiding a herd of llamas and sheep through stretching desert.

Flores de Callata’s Native Kolla people have spent centuries climbing deep into the mountains of northern Argentina in search of a simple substance: fresh drinking water.

Here, in one of the most arid environments in the world, it’s a life force that underpins everything.

In rainy months, the sacred lands surrounding their small adobe town of Tusaquillas well with water. In the dry months, families hike miles under the beating sun, hopeful their livestock can sip from a small plastic container, fed by a hose running high into the distant mountains.

Today is a lucky day. Their blue container is brimming with fresh water.

But communities like hers increasingly worry that their luck may run out. That’s because the parched waterways surrounding their town are intrinsically connected with spanning white salt flats below, subterranean lagoons with waters jampacked with a material that’s come to be known as « white gold » — lithium.

In the « lithium triangle » — a region spanning Argentina, Chile and Bolivia — Native communities sit upon a treasure trove of the stuff: an estimated trillion dollars in lithium.

The metal is key in the global fight against climate change, used in electric car batteries, crucial to solar and wind energy and more. But to extract it, mines suck water out of the flats, tethered to the lives of thousands of communities like Flores de Callata’s.

As the world’s most powerful increasingly look toward the triangle, the largest reserve of lithium on Earth, as a crucial puzzle piece to save the environment, others worry the search for the mineral will mean sacrificing that very life force that has sustained the region’s Native people for centuries.

« We will lose everything, » said Flores de Callata. « What will we do if we don’t have water? If the mines come, we’ll lose our culture, we won’t be left with anything. »

___

At the same time Flores de Callata’s town and thousands of others across the lithium triangle have lived quietly off the sparse food and water their lands offer, the price for lithium skyrocketed in 2022.

Between 2021 and 2023, the price for 1 ton of lithium in U.S. markets nearly tripled, reaching a high of $46,000 a ton last year, according to a U.S. Geological Survey report. In China, the main customer of the region’s lithium, a ton of the metal went for a whopping $76,000 at its peak last year.

Leaders, mining executives and companies from across the world look to the region’s barren deserts both as a source of wealth and an engine to power the transition to green energy.

The « white gold » they seek is contained in the hundreds of salt flats, or salares, speckling the region.

From afar, they look like fields of Arctic snow, but below are deep wells of salted groundwater packed with minerals. Unlike other forms of mining, lithium here is extracted not from rock, but rather from the brine water pumped from the salt flats.

The salt flats also act as an essential part of a highly biodiverse ecosystem, say scientists like Ingrid Garcés, a hydrologist from Chile’s University of Antofagasta.

While the water inside the lagoons is not drinkable, they are tethered to surrounding fresh water sources, sparse rains and nearby mountain streams, essential for the survival of thousands of Indigenous communities.

Scientists interviewed by the AP said that industrial-scale water pumping both contaminates fresh water with brine they pump and effectively dries up the surrounding environment. They say it’s produced cascading ripple effects for life in the region at a time it’s already been hit by climate change-induced drought. 

« We’re talking about a living ecosystem, because what you’re extracting from this salt flat is water. And water is life, » Garcés said. « Think of it as an interconnected ecosystem. »

Because of their environmental significance, the salt flats and their surrounding waters have gained a sacred place for Indigenous cultures, an essential part of Native celebrations the entire month of August.

Flores de Callata’s town is one of 38 pressed up against two such salt flats — the Guayatayoc lagoon and Salinas Grandes — which bring income to towns like hers through tourism and small-scale salt harvesting.

At the beginning of any day of work, Flores de Callata’s family makes an offering to Pachamama, an Andean deity representing the Earth. Inside their stone corral of llamas and sheep, they dig a hole in the ground, burying coca leaves, meant to represent life, and a clear liquor, representing water.

Just as the basin provided for the Kolla people, fundamental to their culture is giving back to the land. For decades, their collective of communities have fought off large-scale mining and waged long legal battles to halt projects.

But year by year, it’s grown more difficult to fend off those mining companies.

More than 30 companies are officially seeking permission to mine the water in the two salt flats. Signs put up by the community line the edges of the flats reading, « Respect our territory. Get out, lithium company. »

Things came to a head last summer when the local government, eager for the profits by the mines, changed its constitution, making it easier to waive certain Indigenous land rights and limiting the ability to protest against the expansion of mining.

Alicia Chalabe, the environmental lawyer representing the communities, and others argue the move violates international law.

Thousands of Indigenous people protested, blocking off roadways used by lithium mines and carrying rainbow Indigenous flags. The backlash by authorities toward peaceful protesters was marked by violent repression and arbitrary arrests, according to groups like Amnesty International and the United Nations. Yet protests are only expected to continue.

Argentine concerns are born in neighboring Chile, where lithium mining has been in full force for decades in the Atacama Desert, the driest place on Earth.

Giant black tubes pumping salted groundwater run like veins through the cracked, white earth of the Atacama Salt Flat. They wind past roaring yellow bulldozers and workers in bright orange vests.

The flat is home to the two lithium companies operating in Chile, SQM and American-owned Albemarle.

« We’re living through a crisis in which we have big obstacles, but we also have solutions. Lithium represents one of those solutions, » said Valentín Barrera, a spokesperson for Chile’s largest lithium mine, SQM. « We want to grow, understanding that it’s needed to mitigate climate change. »

Here in the SQM mine, that means pumping at least 1,280 liters of salted groundwater a second — somewhere between 6 to 8 bathtubs — according to the mine’s numbers. The tubes converge at rows of blue, green and yellow pools, where lithium-concentrated water is passed pool to pool.

The harsh desert sun evaporates the water, and strong winds often blow it out of the ecosystem, carried as far as Brazil, one mine official said. Because of the evaporation process and harsh winds, hardly any water can be reinjected into the soil. It leaves behind salt and lithium, to be processed and used by some of the world’s biggest companies like Tesla.

Meanwhile, surrounding communities have watched their lands shrivel.

Farmers living near the mines complain of smaller crop yields.

Flamingos, feeding on microorganisms within the brine, have slowly been killed off by mining, a 2022 study showed. Their eggs were once a crucial part of the local diet, and the birds continue to be a big part of Indigenous celebrations.

Wells and lagoons next to the mines brimming with intense blue fresh water dried up. The grass livestock would once eat has vanished, he said.

In 2013, an environmental inspection found that a third of the carob trees — a plant known to survive in harsh environments — near the SQM mine had died. Many more trees were withering.

In 2022, SQM was ordered to pay $51.7 million to correct the damages caused by six infractions, including transparency concerns and contamination of fresh water wells. 

« With the information we have available, we can say there has been no fundamental change in the surroundings (of the mines), » Barrera said.

He attributed court rulings and criticisms to « disinformation, » and cast blame on state-run copper mines, also heavy water users. The mine’s director later said that the water the lithium mines pump is slowly refilled by rain and fresh water in the mountains, a water source for local communities.

An Albemarle spokesperson insisted that the brine water they pump « is not water » because it is not drinkable.

Nearly a dozen scientists that spoke to The Associated Press said it is almost inconceivable that the heavy water use would have no environmental impact.

___

Lithium mining has also sparked an economic boom in parts of Chile.

Since the beginning of the Native Atacama people, generations of Ramon Torres’ family guided their pack of goats along the rolling hills of Peine, a town sitting at the mouth of Chile’s salt flats. 

When companies started extracting lithium in the early 1980s, Ramon Torres was among the people to raise his hand. He worked the tinted pools, going from subsisting like his parents and grandparents to saving.

Today, he sits on the porch of his small brick house scrolling through his smartphone, both purchased with the money he earned from the mine. Cherry-red trucks loaded with miners rumble past his home on their way to a long day of work as the sun rises.

« There is development, but there’s also the water issue. And they contradict each other, » he said. « Because everyone needs money, everyone also needs the basics, like health care and education. »

That same tension has divided mining towns like his in both Chile and Argentina: The economic benefits of lithium are undeniable. Mining makes up a whopping 62% of Chile’s exports, a crucial backbone to the country’s economy.

The money that the mines have brought has rippled across Peine. Torres now works building homes for and rents to mine workers that have flooded the region. 

Companies advertise investment projects in nearby towns, touting mobile dental clinics and soccer fields, in many ways filling the endemic absence of the Chilean government.

While brush and other greenery in the surrounding lands withered long ago, fresh water still arrives in Peine through artificial channels and water centers built by the companies, flowing from fresh water wells in nearby peaks.

Communities higher in the mountains say they now feel the effects, too, but without the perks from the companies.

Meanwhile, legal clashes with the mining companies have sowed tensions in Indigenous communities. Long-held traditions like ranching and shared community work have faded. Younger Atacameño generations leave their towns, often favoring work in the mining sector, leaving Indigenous communities with smaller populations.

A 2020 U.N. report said that mining has consumed 65% of water around the Atacama Salt Flat, « causing groundwater depletion, soil contamination and other forms of environmental degradation, forcing local communities to abandon ancestral settlements. »

Researchers say that the worst effects of current pumping may only be felt years down the line.

« When the mines leave, what’s going to happen to us? » Torres said. « Mining is all we have left. »

As lithium mining has gained a greater global spotlight, the fate of water in the region has increasingly fallen out of the hands of those communities.

In April 2023, progressive Chilean President Gabriel Boric announced a plan aimed at offsetting the environmental impacts of the lithium sector by boosting government control of the lithium mines.

Government officials told the AP a new plan would allow them to better regulate water use and distribute wealth beyond « just a small few. » But plans spurred outrage among Indigenous communities who said they were once again sidelined by government negotiations with the mines.

The move also had an adverse effect of pushing mining companies to invest in neighboring Argentina, where lithium mining’s explosion has just begun.

Doors for the mining companies have also been left wide open under the country’s new right-wing « anarcho-capitalist » leader Javier Milei, who was elected in November, under a promise to fix his country’s spiraling economy.

He has announced a broad deregulation sweep, slashing costs for mining companies in an effort to lure investors amid deepening economic crisis. Milei’s rise to power will likely further hamstring efforts by Indigenous communities to beat back mining companies.

While nearby Bolivia sits on more lithium than either country, its stores have largely remained untapped.

Meanwhile, the region has also increasingly become part of a larger tug of war between global powers like the U.S. and China as both countries seek to take advantage of the deep lithium stores. The Biden administration has also sought to offset growing Chinese influence in the region, with officials even claiming Chinese investment in the lithium sector is a democratic threat. 

Meanwhile, to Irene Leonor Flores de Callata and her small town of Tusaquillas, the mounting interest in their home represents another nightmare scenario.

She looks at the stretching salt flats, and the water that has breathed life into their barren land.

She looks at her small corral of livestock she has spent decades leading to through the desert.

And Flores de Callata looks at the adobe house she and her husband built from nothing, where her grandchildren now wrap their arms around her on the way home from school.

She wonders what will be left in 20 years.

« If the mines come, we’ll have money for a time. But then our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren — they’re the ones who will suffer, » she said. « I want to do everything possible to defend these lands, so they still have these fields, so they still have their waters. »

« Agriculture needs Gen Z. And Gen Z is beginning to transform and shift the definition of what agriculture can be, » Little said. (Gen Z typically refers to people born between 1997 and 2012.)

The focus of the two-day conference at Loyola Chicago was on climate change’s impact on global food production and security as well as strategies to develop equitable, resilient and sustainable food systems on a heating planet.

It’s through food that most people will experience the impacts of climate change, said Little, a journalism professor at Vanderbilt University. Rising temperatures are already disrupting global food production in ways that affect nearly every aisle of the grocery store. 

In recent years, Citrus crops in Florida have been wiped out, as were peaches in Georgia. Hotter, drier conditions in California strained avocados and almonds. Excessive rains prevented potato harvests in Ireland. Coffee rust continues to damage coffee plants in Central America. Olive oil production declined in Spain as well as Italy, which also lost its title as top wine producer due to extreme weather. Drought and wildfires in the Pacific Northwest stressed hops production, a key ingredient in beer.

« Climate change is becoming something we can taste, » Little said. « This is a kitchen table issue in the literal sense. » 

At the crux of the issue is a rising global population — and especially, an increasing middle class with diverse and protein-dense diets — while arable land globally is expected to decline 2% to 6% every decade due to stresses from climate change.

As climate change increases drought conditions and reduces crop yields, food insecurity is accelerating worldwide, with more than 600 million people lacking reliable food supplies, and 45 million people near famine.

The stresses that extreme heat and drought place on farming are felt most intensely by the 500 million smallholder farmers around the world, Little said, with the majority in already hot, dry countries along the equator.

A prediction in a 2014 report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — global warming could reach a threshold where current agriculture practices can no longer support large human civilizations — led Little to pivot her reporting from energy to agriculture, investigating the « radical changes » in coming decades in the ways people grow and eat food.

Her reporting took her to apple orchards in Wisconsin, tiny cornfields in Kenya, Norwegian fish farms and « computerized foodscapes » in Shanghai. What she saw was the emergence of « a third way to our food future, » one which marries principles of old-world, organic agriculture with state-of-the-art farming technologies that have been at odds for decades.

« Agriculture, which has long been a driver of climate change, has the extraordinary advantage of being able to transform from sinner to saint, » she said. 

Regenerative agriculture is improving soil health, allowing it to sequester more carbon — with the world’s farmlands capable of absorbing as much carbon as what’s emitted from the global transportation sector. Numerous ancient plants can withstand extreme climate conditions, as can crops designed through genetic modification and gene-editing tools like CRISPR.

Technologies like AI robotics and drones help reduce agrochemicals, and meat alternatives dramatically lower carbon emissions while freeing up land used for cattle grazing for reforestation, said Little, a self-described « failed vegan and struggling vegetarian. »

Along with increasing crop diversity, decentralizing food production is crucial to build more resilient food systems, she said. The growth in urban vertical farms, using hydroponic and aquaponic techniques like those taught at Loyola Chicago, can reduce water use by as much as 90% in some cases, while limiting food waste and greenhouse gas emissions from transporting food from fields to cities.

Asked how to accelerate U.S. agriculture toward more sustainable practices, Little said the answer was simple: Vote, especially among younger generations.

« We need good policies that support and encourage sustainable farming and that advance and protect local and regional food webs, which are totally overlooked, and the current Farm Bill, » she said. 

On March 15, the conference’s second day, a series of panels further unpacked climate change’s impact on food at the global level, within the Midwest and in Chicago.

With an estimated 1,700 registrants, the ninth edition of Loyola Chicago’s climate conference was perhaps its largest yet. 

In the past two decades, the Jesuit school has become a leading Catholic institution on environmental issues. To date, Loyola Chicago has cut campus carbon emissions 70% and expects to be carbon neutral by January 2025. A new university climate action plan will aim for decarbonization, or elimination of all fossil fuel use on campus.

The School of Environmental Sustainability enrolls more than 500 students in seven undergraduate programs and two master’s programs, with a number of them researching and experimenting with the future of how our food will be grown. Through its rooftop greenhouse and urban farm, students harvest roughly 3,500 pounds of food a year, with 1,500–2,000 pounds going to food pantries. 

At the end of her talk, Little cited figures from the latest agricultural census that showed the average American farmer is 58 years old, up roughly six months from 2017. Farmers ages 65 and older increased by 12% over the same timeframe.

The conclusion was clear, she said: The farmers growing the food on dinner tables today are nearing the end of their careers. 

« Agriculture needs Gen Z, » she added, noting that more first-generation farmers are entering the field — even if not a literal farm field but labs and facilities like those at Loyola Chicago.

« I think Gen Z has great promise to bring us into a new era, » Little said, « in which human innovation that marries new and old approaches to food production can, and I think we have good reason to believe will, redefine sustainable food on a grand scale. » 

It is noteworthy that this cardinal and his friends had no problem with the autocratic and intolerant actions of John Paul and Benedict. These popes routinely silenced bishops and theologians who disagreed with them. Seminary professors were fired; theologians were forbidden to publish. No such actions have been taken by Francis.

The anonymous cardinal wants to return to the days of suppressing theological discussion in the church, to rid it of « ambiguity. » He is outraged that the pope encourages theological discussion and debate, and wants to return to a pre-Vatican II church where nothing changes. He seems to happily side with those prelates at the council who opposed any changes in church teaching or practice.

The pope, on the other hand, knows that discussion and debate is the way theology develops, which is essential if the church is going to communicate with people in the 21st century.

Those who believe that the pope is fostering ambiguity in the church cannot distinguish between the faith and how we explain the faith. They have no sense of history or the development of dogma. They appeal to Augustine or Thomas Aquinas but have no true understanding of them.

The genius of both these figures was that they took the avant-garde thinking of their times and used it to explain the faith: Augustine used Neoplatonism, and Aquinas used Aristotelianism.

If the church is to be true to its tradition, we should imitate Augustine and Aquinas, not simply quote them. Theologians should be free to experiment with new ways of explaining the faith, using modern philosophy, literature and science.

Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin used evolution to explain the role of Christ in the cosmos in a way that spoke to contemporary Christians. He, like Aquinas before him, was condemned by church authorities before he was accepted by them.

The cardinal and his friends instead only want to use the church’s ancient texts as a treasure chest of quotes with which to hammer their opponents.

The anonymous cardinal also attacks Francis for not governing the church collegially with his brother bishops, but his real complaint is that the pope is not doing what the cardinal wants him to do.

Pope Francis has been more collegial than any other pope in history, as can be seen in the way recent synods of bishops have been run. At Francis’ first synod, he encouraged bishops to speak boldly without concern for what he or others thought. He even told them to imitate St. Paul, who criticized St. Peter, the first pope, at the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15).

Francis did this because he knew many bishops were frustrated by the synods held under John Paul and Benedict, where participants were told what topics could not be discussed. Vatican officials’ complete control of these synods gave them the feel of Soviet assemblies where the only purpose of the meeting was to praise the great leader. Most of the speeches quoted the pope to himself, as if he did not know what he had said.

The synods of Francis have been the freest ever.

In one area, the Demos II is correct. Francis has not consulted the College of Cardinals as much as did John Paul, who revived consistories as a place for discussing issues facing the church. Francis discontinued this practice, although he did create a council of nine cardinals with whom he consults periodically.

Some thought John Paul’s innovation was inconsistent with the synodal system, which has elected as well as appointed members. Others thought it would lead to a consultative system with two houses, the synod and the consistory, which would be like the House and Senate in the United States, or the British House of Commons and House of Lords.

But Demos II’s objection is more straightforward. The discontinuation of the consistories has reduced the influence of the cardinals. Being a cardinal, he does not like that.

One advantage of the consistories was that cardinals got to know each other prior to a conclave.

As an example of Francis’ intolerance and vindictiveness, conservative commentators point to the removal of the American conservative Cardinal Raymond Burke as head of the Apostolic Signatura, the church’s highest judicial authority. They conveniently forget how Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, head of the Vatican office for interreligious dialogue, was exiled to Egypt by Benedict.

Let’s all agree that popes have the right to appoint and remove Vatican officials.

In truth, Demos II is a fraud who mourns a church of the past and his own loss of power in it.

He has no consistent ecclesiology. He asserts that the church is not a democracy, but publicly releases his diatribe in the hopes of swaying public opinion to pressure the cardinals at the next conclave.

Make no mistake about it, this document is about power and influence in the church. Demos II has been sidelined, and he is angry.