Awkward: Pope Francis eulogizes cardinal who called his pontificate a "catastrophe"

Pope Francis said the final prayers at Cardinal George Pell‘s funeral on Saturday but didn’t lay to rest the grievances of many conservatives for whom the late cardinal was a leading spokesman.

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Cardinal Pell, a pugnacious Australian who died on Tuesday, served Francis as Vatican finance minister but differed sharply with the pope’s progressive approach, including his leniency on divorce and homosexuality. The late cardinal bluntly criticized his boss in a memo, published last year under a pseudonym, which described the current pontificate as “a disaster in many or most respects; a catastrophe.”

The wide-ranging indictment brought together many of conservative Catholics’ criticisms of Pope Francis. Such criticisms could become even more frequent now, following the death on Dec. 31 of Pope Benedict XVI, whose mostly silent decade of retirement at the Vatican set an example of discreet endurance for some conservatives, including members of the hierarchy.

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