A Pope For Better and For Worse

Is Pope Francis helping or hurting the Catholic Church?  For some, the jury is still out on that matter while for others—both of the left and the right—they have their answer and there is nothing that will change their opinion. 

About three weeks ago there was a forum at Georgetown University at which several prominent Catholic journalists gave their opinions. They lined up, as one might expect, according to ideological lines.  When speaking of the polarization in the Church today that seems to be growing ever greater under the strain of Francis’ leadership, Gregory Erlandson, president and publisher of Our Sunday Visitor, a right of center publication said  “I’m a little more skeptical this early in his pontificate around his ability to heal that polarization”  R.R. Reno, the editor of First Things, a journal established by famous convert-priest, the Reverend Richard John Neuhaus to reconcile Catholic Tradition with Reganomic Philosophy was stronger in his critical view of Pope Francis saying: “Is he helping overcome divisions? He’s very comfortable with condemnation actually,” he said. “He very quickly condemns traditionalist Catholics, and that’s not always helpful in overcoming polarization.” 

Father Matt Malone, SJ, editor of the progressive weekly America, framed the question differently by pointing out the divisions in American Society and claiming that these divisions have flowed over into the Catholic Church in this country.  “One of the principle problems we have in American society right now is the collapse of our discourse.”  He went on to say that our political partisanship has “found its way into our ecclesial discourse in disturbing ways.”

Paul Baumann, the editor of Commonweal, another progressive journal, expressed his opinion that too often those who speak for the Church aren’t responding to the deeper questions being asked by contemporary Catholics.  In tones somewhat reminiscent of the theme that Cardinal Kasper keeps hitting, Baumann said: “We think that there are new situations facing Catholics, facing Americans, that old answers the church provides don’t quite make sense,” he said. “We believe it seems to me that we need to pursue these questions in an open and responsible way.”

In some ways, I suspect each of the participants had a piece of the truth.  Pope Francis is not afraid of confrontation.  He is a Jesuit and has been trained in absolute and unquestioned obedience to authority.  While he encourages dialogue, I think he is surprised by dissent when the conversation is finished.  The resistance of Cardinal Burke and several others to the direction that the recent Synod took I think caught Francis a bit off guard.  I don’t think he will remain too shocked to respond.  In fact, I think through the coming year he will make his position more and more clear in order to bring the 2015 Synod members on board with his direction.  To do this we will see more “shuffling of the deck” as those in his administration who are not working with him will find themselves in positions where their resistance is ineffective.  Of course, there is only one Sovereign Military Order of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem to which he can send a Cardinal-patron but Holy Mother Church has other gulags.  Dissent will be not only tolerated but encouraged at the point of discussion but not when it is time for consensus.  Anyone who was educated by the Jesuits understands that. 

As for healing the rift with traditionalist Catholics, I think Francis is somewhat indifferent on matters liturgical but he is unwilling to allow disharmony in the Church.  He clearly has no interest himself in the pre-conciliar rites.  He probably does not understand why people might choose to approach God through rites that might be intellectually sound but are practically unintelligible to the ordinary Catholic.  His experience in the Church of Latin America where there is little interest in reviving the Tridentine Liturgy and where the Liturgical renewal following the Second Vatican Council has been responsible for a new vitality in the Church makes the antiquarian approach to worship seem strange.  Nonetheless, he has done nothing to suppress the permissions for widespread use of the old forms granted by Pope Benedict in Summorum Pontificum.  On the other hand, in his conviction that the Church must be reborn as the Church of the Poor and his focus on Social Justice he is likely to make no allowance for those whose social program is not in harmony with his.  This is, for most American conservatives, far more threatening than his liturgical praxis.  Francis has been outspoken on Immigration, the Death Penalty, economic inequality and other hot-button issues and he will insist that both hierarchy and faithful be on that bus whether they pray in Latin, English, or Klingon. 

And I think his opening the Pandora’s Box of divorce and remarriage, homosexuality, living together before marriage and other matters of sexual mores brought up at the recent Synod—and his willingness to listen and to dialogue—makes it clear that he is in touch with the “new situations” facing Catholics today, especially younger ones. 

Is there division in the Church today? Absolutely.  There is division through western society and it is as strong in the Church as elsewhere.  I don’t think Pope Francis is going to spend a lot of time addressing it.  He will have a relatively short papacy and he will focus on getting done what he needs to get done without being distracted by dissent.  I think he will make it increasingly clear where he stands and one either stands with him or not with him, but he sees that standing against him is standing against the Church.  He won’t address it for the laity, but the leadership—bishops, archbishops, cardinals—will climb aboard the Francis train or find themselves left at remote stations in the ecclesial outback.   

The Obamazation of Pope Francis IV

Francis’ next shot came when he wrote Eugenio Scalfari the editor of La Republica, an Italian newspaper:
  “You ask me if the God of the Christians forgives those who don’t believe and who don’t seek the faith. I start by saying – and this is the fundamental thing – that God’s mercy has no limits if you go to him with a sincere and contrite heart. The issue for those who do not believe in God is to obey their conscience.
Francis substantially said, that yes, the Mercy of God extends even to those who do not believe in him.  Now un-nuanced, this is theologically problematic as faith has been seen as the sine qua non requirement for salvation every since Paul wrote the letter to the Romans.  Or Galatians.  I can never remember which Epistle comes first. Yet over the course of history this principle has been interpreted in a variety of ways from insisting that one had to be a member of the Catholic Church (Boniface VIII, Unam Sanctam, stating that one must be “subject to the Roman Pontiff” in order to be saved) to some vague acknowledgement of a Supreme Being—a sort of Benjamin Franklin Freemasonry Deism.  Francis seems to take it one step further, however, and say even this minimalistic faith is more than is required. 
I will be the first to admit that Francis is not one to nuance his words—something his predecessors have long been very careful to do (though Benedict XVI, while theologically precise, had a gift for putting his Prada-clad foot in his mouth in geo-politics and John Paul II could soften the harshest language by his Reaganesque acting-school charm.)   But I don’t think it is any accident that Francis is given to a plain-speak that is shattering the glass box in which Catholic thought has long been put on embalmed display.   Francis’ remarks open up dialogue: something of which most Popes—saving John XXIII and Paul VI—of the last century have been terrified.   There is a payoff to this.  In talking with priest friends over the holidays, I am hearing of the numbers of people who came to confess before Christmas and gave credit to Pope Francis for “bringing” them back to the Church.  Perhaps the most touching was the story that one Boston priest told me of a seventy-eight year old Irish woman who had been away from the Church for three years because pastor told her she was in mortal sin for having attended the marriage of her son to  his partner of thirty years.  “He is my son—they are both my sons.  How could I turn my back on them?” she wondered.  “But Pope Francis has let me know that I still have a home in the Church.  I don’t have to choose between my home and boys.”  Of course, for the Pope’s critics he is endangering the salvation of souls by such loose talk, but this is more due to the Jansenism that pervades so many corners of the American Church and which stands ever vigilant against the Mercy of God.  A heart contrite and humbled apparently is not sufficient for these rigorists, but then only those whose hearts are contrite and have been humbled can understand what hope the encounter with Grace brings.  Perhaps this is part of the problem.  We may have a mystic in the chair of Peter. It has been awhile now, at least since Paul VI,  that we have had a Pope who sees the world through those compassionate eyes that view from the Cross.  Philosophers and theologians make their contributions but are generally not the stuff of which mystics are made.    
Francis’ openness to those who understand Truth differently from himself evoked a huge outcry from those who see themselves as the guardians of the patrimony of the faith.  Carol, the woman who blogs The Tenth Crusade (formerly known as Throw the Bums Out In 2013, (thus their url: http://throwthebumsoutin2010.blogspot.com/) wrote”
Pope Francis' letter and outreach to a poor misguided atheist as instructions to obey the diabolical influence of sin upon your intellect.   What a hoot.
This website was founded as an anti-Obama website,(as testified to by a button that reads Gone: 1-20-2013 and which ironically the owner has been unable to remove)  but has morphed into one of the more virulent critics of Pope Francis.  Her sentiments were echoed in The Eponymous Flower (http://eponymousflower.blogspot.com/) which complained that the Pope is too loose in what he says.
The statement may not be so wrong, and really left uncontested, fits. But what does not fit, is the unspoken, but the logical conclusion: There is no need to turn to Christ, it is sufficient that one follows his private conscience. And now you can even invoke a pope. Yes, the Pope says it himself.
The question of the usefulness of this word game of the Pope remains. The danger of a misunderstanding from the outset was on hand. Why, then, was this risk taken, which occurred promptly, as it was used, to the euphoria of La Repubblica, and in whose wake numerous other media? So who has availed themselves of etymological "correctitude"? Whose salvation should this benefit? How much additional confusion has been lent to it without necessity?
Just as criticism was deflected from Francis’ “who am I to judge” statement by the co-incidence of his reining in the Franciscans of the Immaculate and the firestorm that resulted from that, his comments on atheists and salvation was almost immediately overshadowed by his interview with the Jesuit La Civilta Cattolica and reprinted in America.  I have been dealing with the fallout from that interview in my blog postings marked “Why do They Hate Pope Francis,” but it is still noteworthy to remark on the angry response to Francis’ saying:
“We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. This is not possible. I have not spoken much about these things, and I was reprimanded for that. But when we speak about these issues, we have to talk about them in a context. The teaching of the church, for that matter, is clear and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time.
The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently. “The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently.
This unleashed a firestorm from the Catholic Right.  Judie Brown of the American Life League and Michael Voris of Church Militant TV (formerly Real Catholic TV) were among the first to respond in angry, even rebellious, bewilderment.  Their toxic tocsin was soon take up by the internet locals.  Janet, at Restore DC Catholicism (http://restore-dc-catholicism.blogspot.com/)wrote
While I realize that there might have been some loss of meaning in the translation process, there couldn't have been that much. That said, the proceeds of this interview are most troubling. Many of His Holiness' replies seem to fly in the face of Sacred Tradition and Scripture. Of course Our Lord Himself guarantees that the Pope cannot teach error, presuming that he is speaking solemnly "ex cathedra". By no stretch of the imagination is this "ex cathedra". But there's no way to put a positive spin, a "happy face" if you will, on this.
Janet followed up a few days later with
the "off-the-cuff" interviews he has been giving lately cannot by any stretch of the imagination be called "teaching moments", let alone solemn declarations in which he speaks infallibly. It is quite legitimate for faithful Catholics to question spontaneous remarks and certainly acceptable to discuss the means of delivery of said messages.
Many of us have been questioning the wisdom of the pope's conduct of these interviews for they have often led individuals to believe that he is altering the Church's age-old teachings on faith and morals - particularly the latter in regards to the life issues.
and
Isn't it rather ironic that in his attempt to address the interviewer "where he's at" that the Holy Father loses sight of all the other millions of people and their situations? Does the phrase "can't see the forest for the sake of one tree" have relevance here?
The Batman to Janet’s Robin, Mary Ann Kreitzer at Les Femmes (lesfemmes-thetruth.blogspot.com/) wrote
Several days ago I commented that Pope Francis reminds me of Cardinal Joseph Bernardin. It expressed my befuddlement over what the pope says. It was common for Cardinal Joseph to articulalate (sic) a teaching of the Church in one breath and imply that personal conscience could overrule the teaching in the next .
To which reader Al Hennenbery replied
 Confusion is a tool of the devil. Pray that the warnings of mystics aren't being fulfulled. The Book of Revelation is fearful enough without any false pope.
Les femmes continued it attack on Pope Francis in a later posting:
What is the pope thinking? Can this mish-mash really lead people to and through the narrow gate? (If you haven't read the interview see it here.) Do we want a church where "Each of us has a vision of good and of evil." where "We have to encourage people to move towards what they think is Good." What if what they "think is good" is really evil?
Jesus warned us there would come a time when people would call good evil and evil good. We're there and now the pope seems to have created a situation where liberals can quite comfortably bash those "obsessed" prolifers with their skewed vision of life and marriage. But we don't want to "proselytize" them because "Proselytism is solemn nonsense." Oy vey!
Fr Tom responded by writing:
I pray that Benedict may help him (Pope Francis) to realize how far his outreach has gone beyond the sanctifying paramenters (sic) of true orthodoxy.
So Pope Francis is beyond the parameters of orthodoxy.  He is impulsive.  He confuses evil for good and good for evil.  He’s troubling.  He lacks wisdom. He flies in the face of scripture and tradition.  And he is a false pope.  Funny—these same people would never have tolerated someone criticizing Pope John Paul or Pope Benedict in these same tones.  But this is the problem with these once loyal adherents to the papal teaching: they agree with the Church when the Church agrees with them.   In the final analysis they are no different than those “Cafeteria Catholics” they criticized so vociferously these past thirty years.  I am not saying that they are wrong.  I am not saying that they shouldn’t criticize Pope Francis.  I only hope they remove that beam from their eye before they fault me for questioning some of the statements of Francis’ recent predecessors.  The days of unilateral pronouncements are over.  Les Femmes and Eponymous Flower and Rorate Caeli and Michael Voris and Father Tom and Bishop Tobin have just discovered that while some of us have known it for quite some time now.  “Things change, Kundun.”   And speaking of change, while I have more to do on Pope Francis and the Franciscan kerfuffles, let’s go back to ol’ Henry VIII and the Church of England.    Jolly Hal was closing the monasteries when we left him and we need to get back to that for a few entries if we are ever going to finish that series. 

Why Are They Afraid of Pope Francis? 15

“And then a thing that is really important for me: community. I was always looking for a community. I did not see myself as a priest on my own. I need a community. And you can tell this by the fact that I am here in Santa Marta. At the time of the conclave I lived in Room 207. (The rooms were assigned by drawing lots.) This room where we are now was a guest room. I chose to live here, in Room 201, because when I took possession of the papal apartment, inside myself I distinctly heard a ‘no.’ The papal apartment in the Apostolic Palace is not luxurious. It is old, tastefully decorated and large, but not luxurious. But in the end it is like an inverted funnel. It is big and spacious, but the entrance is really tight. People can come only in dribs and drabs, and I cannot live without people. I need to live my life with others.”

One of the things that scares the neo-trads most about Pope Francis is not that he hasn’t moved into the palace but the reason he hasn’t moved in—the important role that community plays in his life because this shapes his view of the Church in a way that deemphasizes the hierarchical nature of the Church and consequently shifts the source of authority (and power) from a clerical base to a much wider and more inclusive involvement in which the entire People of God can play a role. 

The above statement that Francis made during his interview with La Civilta Cattolica that was reprinted in America magazine shows his Jesuit roots.  He is not a “Lone Ranger.”  He understands community and derives his personal strength from human relationships.  I wish that I could say that this is because he is a religious but in fact I know many religious—like Archbishop Charles Chaput OFM Cap of Philadelphia—who have forgotten (if they ever knew) the importance of community.  And I know many great diocesan priests who find—and create—community among the people whom they serve.  I mention Archbishop Chaput because the other day some Franciscan Sisters from his Archdiocese told me that when they met him they said: “We share being part of the Franciscan family with you.” And his Grace responded “Don’t think that will get you anywhere!”  Saint Francis rolled over in his grave, I am sure, but then—unlike the Capuchin Archbishop of Boston, Cardinal O’Malley—Chaput has never displayed the Franciscan zeal for the poor, for community, or for the Franciscan family that Francis left as his legacy.  And this goes right to the heart of the issue.  Do you see the Church primarily as an institution or do you see it as the communio of Christ’s Mystical Body.

What do we mean by Mystical Body?  I remember years ago I was giving a talk in a parish in Leesburg Virginia when a particularly sour-faced church-lady took objection to my using the term “Body of Christ” for the Church.  “The Eucharist,” she objected, “is the Body of Christ.  The Church is only his ‘Mystical Body’.”  And this is the problem because we consider that idea of “mystical” as somehow less than real when in fact the term means “sacramental.”  it comes from the Greek: mysterion, the same word for sacrament. The Church—the People of God—is the sacrament of Christ in the world. Christ is sacramentally present in the world in his Body, the Church.  The Church as Body of Christ, according to Saint Augustine, is the flip side of the Eucharist as the Body of Christ.  The Eucharistic Presence and the Ecclesial Presence are intimately related to one another and mutually inter-dependent.  I am not theologizing here, I am simply passing on what Saint Augustine taught and what the Church continues to teach and to believe. 

But this Sacramental Presence of Christ in his Body, the Church, is not complete in the hierarchy alone.  It takes the communio of the entire People of God to be fully real.   My computer keeps wanting to correct communio to communion, and while communion is the English translation of the Latin communio, “communion” is not quite adequate enough a word to use.   Communio comes from the Latin cum (with) and unio (union).  It means that we are “in union together” but it is a particular type of union—a union of heart and mind and will.   And as Church we must be in this union of heart and mind and will with one another in Christ and with Christ. 

We should not see this as doing away with the hierarchical nature of the Church but it certainly shifts the emphasis away from the hierarchical nature.  And hierarchs usually don’t like that.  The bishop has to move over on his bench to make room for the priest and the priest has to move over and make room for the laity.  And so now we have a Pope who says to his brother bishops—“we need to find out where the laity are at with questions about same-sex marriage, birth control, the sacraments for the divorced and remarried and lots of other questions.”  It doesn’t mean that the final answers are going to be democratically selected—we are also a Church of prophecy and need to listen to the voices God sends that make us stop and see things differently from the world around us.  But we will find that the prophetic voice is even more threatening to those in power than the democratic voice.  So hold on to your hats—when the Holy Spirit starts to speak the ride can get really wild.  But in the end—if we listen—to one another and to the Holy Spirit—we will be led to the Truth revealed by God in Christ Jesus.

Why Are They Afraid of Pope Francis? 6

Pope John XXIII

Let’s go back to why Pope Francis is causing such panic among the neo-trad Catholics and in particular why his interview for La Civilta Cattolica, reprinted in the Jesuit weekly, America, has the katholic krazies so worried. In the interview Francis spoke of the importance of discernment—and for those steeped in Ignatian (Jesuit) spirituality, discernment is the paramount attribute in living the Christian life.  One must come to discern the Will of God.  Note—one must discern. That means there isn’t a ready-made answer coming down from heaven through hierarchal authority.  This isn’t like the old days when you didn’t have to discern, you just had to obey.  Moreover, as if the need to discern wasn’t enough, the Pope quoted the maxim: non coerceri a maximo, sed contineri a minimo divinum est.  America quotes the translation as: not to be limited by the greatest but to be contained in the least—that is divine.  And that translation is just fine, but it wouldn’t pass the test of Liturgiam authenicam—remember that wonderful “instruction” by the Holy See that advocates the “most faithful” (ie literal) translation of texts?  Let’s try this: Not to be coerced by the greatest but to be limited by the least is divine.  Now, all due respect to Liturgiam authenticam, and it preference for the literal, but literal translation is most often not faithful to the translation because it doesn’t take the context of the text into consideration, nor does it pick up on either connotations or implied words or phrases.  Also, the Latin syntax sucks when it is carried over into English—just ask any priest who is struggling with the revised Missal.   So let’s go one step further and let me suggest this translation, placing the maxim both in good English and the context of what Ignatius meant by discernment: It is not God’s Will that we should be coerced by the highest powers but rather that we be made subject to the least important.  Of course Francis expands the meaning of this maxim to say that we should be happy to serve in whatever position—great or small—in which we find ourselves. He expands this to say the grace of magnanimity allows us to devote ourselves to the most humble tasks without resentment but with hearts open to God and to neighbor.  I like this, but for a person whose world-view is hierarchal, this is a more than a bit threatening.  Should we not be constrained by those in power?  Why did God institute hierarchy if it is not to govern us?  It is all well and good to talk about the need for the greatest to become the servant of all, the first to become the last—but hey, as a Church we need the Pope to be Pope and bishops to be bishops and the rest of us to pay, pray, and obey.  We don’t need to discern God’s Will—we need a Pope who will tell us God’s Will and hold our feet to the fire.   You let people discern and the next thing you know nuns aren’t wearing habits, married couples are using the pill, gays are marching down the aisle, and Father is making up the Mass as he goes along. 

And then, if that weren’t bad enough, Pope Francis quotes Good Pope John—who, to the neo-trads—was anything but good.  “You should see everything, turn a blind eye to much, correct a little” said the about-to-be-sainted Pope and echoed by his current successor.  “Whoa Nellie,” the neo-trads cry—“we need a Pope who corrects everything.  Why we got politicians who vote for Gay Marriage and liberal abortion laws marching up the communion aisle with the audacity of a Virgin Martyr; we got lesbian nuns practicing Wicca, we got priests in clown-suits saying Mass, we got Catholics voting for Obama (“the most anti-Catholic President in American History,”) we got churches being turned into discos—this “correct a little” ain’t working.  We need the Inquisition, not “I’m OK; You’re OK.” Yeah, this Francis thing ain’t working for those who want to bring back the old order, but for those of us who accept the basic premise that God’s Grace is given to all in the mystical body—you know, that Vatican II thing about a “universal call to holiness”—this discernment thing is an idea whose time has come.  It worked for Ignatius.  In fact, it worked for the great saints throughout history, men and women who chose (with God’s grace) a path of holiness: Thomas More, Bernard of Clairvaux, Thérèse of Lisieux, Francis of Assisi, Benedict, Damien of Molokai, Edith Stein, and perhaps—best of all—the Blessed Virgin Mary.  They all listened attentively to the Holy Spirit speak within their souls and charted a course that was in one way or another outside the lines of those who had gone before them. In fact, I suspect that if one looked carefully at the lives of the Saints, we would see that an adult, mature, and free response to the Holy Spirit was the more common path than blind unthinking submission to authority.  Go Francis.