Beware "The Narrative"

 Cardinal Cupich had a meeting with the Pope recently.  Everyone wants you to believe it was in relation to the USCCB.  Which maybe it was. If so, allies of Cardinal Cupich would want you to believe he and the Pope were bashing the USCCB, and angling a preparation for Cardinal Cupich to bring them in line with the "progressive vision" of Pope Francis.  Critics of Cardinal Cupich (but friendly to the USCCB) want you to believe this was the Pope reeling Cardinal Cupich in line, telling him to knock off the publicity stunts.  Traditionalists, as is our way, use this as an opportunity to tell you how terrible both Cardinal Cupich and Pope Francis are.  You might even get someone who uses this as an opportunity to knock both of them, and dismiss the USCCB as pointless.  (Okay, that someone is me.)

One of these opinions may be correct.  Yet there's also a simpler explanation:  either the Bishop of Rome or the Cardinal requested the audience to talk about the matter, they talked, and nobody decided anything, because a decision wasn't the point.  There's an overwhelming urge to tie someone into an overarching narrative, that because of this or that issue, this means that they think x or y on every other issue.

The problem is that people don't actually work that way.  Traditionalists, at least in practice, favor some of the most radical decentralization of anyone in the Church.  Despite being progressives who the narrative says aren't in favor of rigid ideology, Cupich and his allies have a deeply authoritarian and centralized vision:  everyone must do what the pope is doing, and we will be the ones who tell you what the pope is really doing.  The Pope, despite owing his papacy to powerful German prelates, has resisted those same prelates in their attempts to form a vision of a radically decentralized Church where everyone else does their thing, and Germany does theirs.  Yet this pope has also talked of the need to decentralize the Church and embrace synodality.

There is a belief, particularly online, that everyone's ideology is rigid, and that this ideology is predictive on everything else.  It makes a certain intuitive sense... if the Church was limited to a manual of theology or a bunch of nerds who read whoever your favorite philosopher is.  This isn't Catholicism.  People are products of their environments.  We are (or at least should be) united in a set of doctrines, but the things we have to conform on are shockingly small and mostly irrelevant to the day to day experience of most Catholics.  There's a certain learned experience, even among those who practice a certain ideology, but are careful on what to emphasize based on what they've learned attracts, and what repels.  There's also a realization that concepts like "populism" or "decentralization" can serve traditional and progressive ends, just as centralization and a preference for elites can serve both ends, and have throughout history.  Conservatives can be radicals or pragmatists in how/what they aim to conserve.

Then there's the reality that people are just flat out inconsistent in their beliefs, and we should probably be grateful they are.  It is why Pope Francis can be an individual who is clearly progressive, but not only act against type, but routinely violate his own standards.  We can complain about that, and sometimes rightly, but any ideology that doesn't account for this reality will find itself unable to comprehend how the Church works.

Be comfortable in your general ideology, but don't look at things through that prism. Instead, focus on the particulars of certain questions, and then think about how that question can be understood through a variety of different experiences.  I'm a traditionalist.  That means that I, as a general rule, look to the timeless, and treat with great skepticism and prejudice the idea that our present age is more enlightened than previous ages (as a general rule), or that certain leaders today, because they live in this age, are able to solve what centuries have not.  Yet this preference has its limits: sometimes a schism really can be solved now when it couldn't before (such as with the SSPX), among other things.

So yes, think about how things fit into a larger ideological outlook.  But also think about how they don't, and how sometimes an audience is really just that, an audience.