As
usual the newspapers are dreaming in Technicolor. We forget just how
fundamental Christian truth is to the church as it should be. The
message is to the leadership to focus on their principle mission and
not allow other issues to dominate their interactions with the media.
What
is true is that the press essentially parsed the pope’s remarks to
satisfy their own bias, showing a superficial gloss of understanding
of the underlying sensibilities. Oh well.
He
does show us that he has the desire and stomach to actually realign
the hierarchy itself toward the imagined church known to us through
St Francis. We pray the rest can follow. To really succeed though,
it will be necessary to have faith in the people which is the hardest
thing to ever do.
Reforming
the Catholic Church to suit the newspapers
MONDAY,
SEPTEMBER 23, 2013
If
you get your theology from mainstream media, you may think you’ve
learned that the Catholic Church has begun something of a
reformation. “Pope Says Church Is ‘Obsessed’ With Gays,
Abortion and Birth Control,” the venerable New
York Times tells
the world, and the author of this piece – the national religion
correspondent for the paper – colors her announcement with parries
designed to penetrate the heart of orthodoxy. [i]
The
pope “sent shock waves through the Roman Catholic church” [sic],
he “criticized the church for putting dogma before love, and for
prioritizing moral doctrines over serving the poor and marginalized,”
and there would “likely” be “repercussions in a church [sic]
whose bishops and priests in many countries, including the United
States, have often seemed to make combating abortion, gay marriage
and contraception their top public policy priorities.” [In what
world does this writer live?]
The
same day as the New
York Times’
piece, September 19, CNN’s belief blog told the world that Pope
Francis was insisting that the “Church can't ‘interfere’ with
gays.” [ii] “Pope Francis said the church has the right to
express its opinions but not to ‘interfere spiritually’ in the
lives of gays and lesbians;” “The church has sometimes locked
itself up in small things….in small-minded rules.”
This
is the fodder of modernists. The same day, one daily
news web-zine columnist chortles that “Pope Francis Is a
Liberal: It’s not just homosexuality or birth control. He’s
profoundly anti-conservative.” [iii]
The
Sunday Albuquerque
Journal informs
a largely Catholic state: “In recent years, many American bishops
have drawn a harder line with parishioners on what could be
considered truly Roman Catholic, adopting a more aggressive style of
correction and telling abortion rights supporters to stay away from
the sacrament of Communion... the new pope, Francis called the
church’s focus on abortion, marriage and contraception narrow and
said it was driving people away. Now, the U.S. bishops face a
challenge to rethink their strategy.” [iv]
And
from the fiscally conservative Wall
Street Journal,
the headlines are full of optimism: “Pope Signals Openness to Gay
Priests: Pontiff's Comments Suggest Greater Acceptance of
Homosexuality among Clerics,”[v] and “Pope Warns Church Focusing
Too Much on Gays, Abortion: Francis Sets Out Vision of More Welcoming
Church, Less Preoccupied With Doctrine.”[vi]
Juicy,
juicy, juicy.
If
one reads through these articles – and dozens more, from sources as
varied as the Huffington
Post,USA
Today,
and The
Blaze -
the message is the same. Oh, there may be a note somewhere
toward the end of these articles that the Pope’s comments don't
break with Catholic doctrine or policy but are simply a shift in
approach, “moving from censure to engagement” but there’s a
presumption that what isn’t censured may, perhaps, be excused…and
what may be excused will, perhaps, in time, be accepted…even
embraced. “He’ll pull the church to the left, not just on
sexuality, but on every issue that pits tradition against freedom or
progress.”[vii]
There
are so many problems with this sort of news “reporting” that one
hardly knows where to begin. But, let’s try.
1.
The Church doesn’t operate the way the world thinks it does.
This
is difficult for the secular media to understand because certainly
individuals within the bureaucratic institution of the Church behave
exactly the way they expect – pulling to the right and left.
However,
those are only surface swells that belie the vast stillness beneath.
The swimmer who has never dived below the waves has no inkling
that his nausea is a passing zeitgeist.
Underneath the push and pull of personal opinions and
“strategies” to make those opinions dominate, however, is
an unchanging moral force called Truth. It’s utterly
indifferent to political persuasion, individual bias, or cockeyed
optimism
that “things will change.” Not these things.
Trying
to manipulate the Church into “change” if one has no
understanding of what is transitory and what is permanent is a futile
effort. Pope Francis can change the bureaucracy – that’s
transitory. He can and will express the Church’s consistent
Good News to a new generation – the voice is new but the message is
fixed and won’t “pull the church to the left” the right or
anywhere other than where it always has been. Right here.
2.
Therefore, saying (or writing) a falsehood doesn’t make it true.
Are
the above reporters lying? Have they consciously and
deliberately plucked tidbits from the Pope’s speeches and
interviews and placed them in a reinterpreted context to leave the
impression he means something else?
Deliberate
or not, in their parsing of “liberal” points from his words,
these commentators are frequently losing Pope Francis’ meaning. To
say: “We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay
marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. This is not
possible…When we speak about these issues, we have to talk about
them in a context”[viii] doesn’t imply that abortion is a lesser
priority than poverty or that the subject is too divisive for public
discussion.
It
might mean, for example,
that the secular media needs to quit acting as if abortion, gay
marriage, and contraception are the defining issues of the Church.
They are no more defining issues than the presence of gravity.
The only reason the Church discusses them at all is because
people insist on doing these things to hurt themselves. Given
an epidemic of leaping from tall buildings to prove man’s
enlightened independence from the laws of physics, however, there
will be an encyclical about the moral dimensions of physical forces,
followed by intense homilies and earnest articles throughout
Christendom. [ix]
Or
it might mean that Pope Francis wants to shift the conversation away
from the fact of the sin to the possibility of forgiveness, the
latter already assuming the former. The evidence for this
interpretation is what he says elsewhere in the interview, “The
church sometimes has locked itself up in small things, in
small-minded rules.
The most important thing is the first proclamation:
Jesus Christ has saved you.
And the ministers of the church must be ministers of mercy above all.
The confessor, for example, is always in danger of being either too
much of a rigorist or too lax. Neither is merciful, because neither
of them really takes responsibility for the person. The rigorist
washes his hands so that he leaves it to the commandment. The loose
minister washes his hands by simply saying, ‘This is not a sin’
or something like that. In pastoral ministry we must accompany
people, and we must heal their wounds.”
In
fact, to read the entire interview – the context – serves as a
wonderful corrective for all the political interpretations, right and
left, about Pope Francis’ thought. Just as abortion, gay
marriage, and the use of contraceptives have a context within the
larger picture of sin and redemption, rebellion and reconciliation,
and trust in God as opposed to self-determination, so too the Pope’s
words sit in the context of a humble, thoughtful priest who is
suddenly asked to rise above his personal proclivity toward
authoritarianism to shepherd the world with authentic and loving
authority.
In
this interview, he is not primarily setting down a concrete
redirection of other people; he is reflecting on himself as the
Supreme Pontiff: “Instead
of being just a church that welcomes and receives by keeping the
doors open, let us try also to be a church that finds new roads, that
is able to step outside itself and go to those who do not attend
Mass, to those who have quit or are indifferent. The ones who quit
sometimes do it for reasons that, if properly understood and
assessed, can lead to a return. But that takes audacity and
courage.”
When
the sinner – and who isn’t “the sinner” – has fallen, his
fellow sinner can either help him up or walk by him in disdain.
Would one expect the leader of Christ’s Church to say
anything other than: “We need to proclaim the Gospel on every
street corner…preaching the good news of the kingdom and healing,
even with our preaching, every kind of disease and wound. In Buenos
Aires I used to receive letters from homosexual persons who are
‘socially wounded’ because they tell me that they feel like the
church has always condemned them. But the church does not want to do
this.”
Amen.
Amen.
But
these are not the lines picked up by the media. They love that
the pope refuses to “disapprove” (condemn) the “gay person”
or the woman who has had an abortion but ignore that the Holy
Father’s expressed love immediately leads him to consider how the
Confessor must be a sensitive vehicle of God’s grace. They
love that he is not always speaking about their sins but do not want
to hear him say, in the next breath: “The teaching of the church,
for that matter, is clear and I am a son of the church.”
In
fact, the more closely one looks at Pope Francis’ words, the less
one is concerned that he has any agenda except guiding the Church to
do what the Church has always done, as well as it can be done.
If
only reporters would do the same in their own spheres.
Spero columnist
Stephanie Block also edits Los Pequenos - a newspaper based
in New Mexico. She is the author of the four volume 'Change
Agents: Alinskyian Organizing in Religious Bodies,'
available at Amazon.
[i]
Laurie Goodstein, “Pope Says Church Is ‘Obsessed’ With
Gays, Abortion and Birth Control,” New York Times, 9-19-13.
[ii]
Eric Marrapodi and Daniel Burke, “Pope Francis: Church
can't 'interfere' with gays,” CNN Belief Blog, 9-19-13
[iii]
William Saletan, “Pope Francis Is a Liberal: It’s not just
homosexuality or birth control. He’s profoundly anti-conservative,”
The Slate (a), 9-19-13.
[iv]
Rachel Zoll (The Associated Press), “Pope challenges
hard-line bishops,” Albuquerque Journal, 9-22-13.
[v]
Stacey Meichtry, “Pope Signals Openness to Gay Priests:
Pontiff's Comments Suggest Greater Acceptance of Homosexuality among
Clerics,” Wall Street Journal, 7-30-13.
[vi]
Deborah Ball and Jennifer Levitz, “Pope Warns Church Focusing
Too Much on Gays, Abortion: Francis Sets Out Vision of More Welcoming
Church, Less Preoccupied With Doctrine,” Wall Street Journal,
9-19-13.
[vii]
“Pope Francis Is a Liberal…”
[viii]
Pope Francis, interview with La Civilta Catholica, given to
Antonio Spadaro, S.J., published 9-19-13; the English
translation was published in America magazine as “A Big Heart Open
to God,” 9-30-13.
[ix]
With due respect to Erik Verlinde, a string theorist and
professor of physics at the University of Amsterdam, whose recent
paper, “On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton,” argues
that gravity is an illusion. One notes that he has yet to
personally test this.
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