Here in fact Francis has done what he would never have dared to do while Joseph Ratzinger was alive. That is, the appointment in the key role that belonged to the great German theologian and later pope of a figure who is his complete opposite.
Suffice it to say that his penultimate predecessor in the same office, Cardinal Gerhard L. Müller, years ago accused Fernández of nothing more or less than “heresy,” for the incoherent theses he supported. But Pope Francis was not the least bit ruffled. He had indeed appointed to the office of prefect for the doctrine of the faith first Müller and then Luis Francisco Ladaria Ferrer, both of impeccable orthodoxy, but for him this was only a tribute to Benedict XVI while he was still alive. What they said and did mattered little to him, even, at times, blatantly contradicting their rulings, such as for example Ladaria’s veto on the blessing of homosexual couples. The writer behind the key documents of his pontificate, “Evangelii gaudium” or “Amoris laetitia,” has always been Fernández, even down to the duplication of whole passages from his previous essays.