The Pope Is Not That Important

Life remains fairly quiet here in Combermere, with it being another week of more or less just taking care of the ordinary things that need doing. So I thought I would skip the popular ‘This Week in Madonna House’ post that I usually write this day (you can just read last week’s post—nothing much has changed!) and write something a bit juicier.

I do confess that the title of this blog post is intentionally provocative, even a bit outrageous. All right – it’s click bait, I admit it! But I’ve got something I want to say about the subject, and what’s the point of saying it if nobody reads it, eh?

Those who are long-term readers of the blog, or who know me personally, know that I am as faithful and orthodox a Catholic as you can find, with a great love and respect for both the office of the papacy and for its current occupant. Not that my opinion counts for a great deal one way or the other, but I think Pope Francis is quite wonderful and I appreciate deeply his talks, homilies, speeches, his emphasis on mercy and evangelization, poverty and joy.

I would also maintain, and maintain quite firmly, that I have not yet read a single word from this man that does not reflect faithfully sound Catholic teaching, as it is found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Is he a perfect human being? Of course not, and Peter’s sede would be permanently vacante if that was the criterion for filling it.  I will confess that I find his off-the-cuff speaking style (i.e. these mile-high press conferences he gives) a bit casual and imprecise for my taste, a bit too easily misunderstood or distorted by those who have an agenda to distort. But c’est la vie—every Pope has areas of weakness, and who am I to… well, you know the drill.

What I want to speak about here, though, is something a bit deeper that has been on my heart for awhile now, since before Pope Francis was elected, to be honest. And it is this: the Pope is, truly, not that important. He is important, that is to say, but not that important. I have been concerned for some time now that there is a papal-centrism that has come into how Catholics appropriate, express, understand their faith, and I think it is off-kilter.

One could point to the rock star charisma and personality cult that built up around Pope John Paul II to account for this, but I think it started a few popes earlier—say around that whole ‘prisoner in the Vatican’ business (was that Pius IX—must look that up before posting this entry…). When the papacy was attacked by Garibaldi and the papal states forcibly taken by him to become part of the emerging Italian nation state, there was a strong sense of personal loyalty to the pope and a fierce identification of Catholic piety with that kind of personal devotion and dedication.

All of that is commendable, of course. And with the specific instance of Pope John Paul II, there is no question that the doctrinal and moral confusion of the 1970s and 80s in the Catholic Church needed to be redressed by a strong unifying figure, someone who was both a clear teacher and a charismatic leader. And so God gave us our beloved Polish pope for all those years, and he was exactly what the Church needed at that time.

All that being said (and I realize I’ve given a very potted and partial history of things here), our balance is out of whack at this point. The information revolution has fuelled this, of course—never before has every papal utterance, every weekday homily, every tweet for crying out loud, been instantly transmitted to the four corners of the earth. And there can be a tendency to make the pope and his teaching office the whole center and focus of our Catholic faith, our Catholic life. 

And this can be very disorienting, when you have a succession of popes like we have just had, from Benedict to Francis, where the doctrinal content is (yes, I insist) the same, but the style, the personality, and the specific pastoral and theological focus, is quite different. Do we have to change our whole approach to being Catholic every time a new occupant of the Chair of Peter is elected? Do we have to change our entire spirituality, our own pastoral and apostolic priorities, our own personal way of following Christ and living the Gospel, depending on what Cardinal gets elected next? Change our whole vocabulary of the faith every few years, to match the style and mode of expression of Pope (insert name here)?

Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense. Nonsense on stilts. Nonsense on steroids. Mega-nonsense. The Pope is important. But he is not that important. We have to recall that, for much of the history of the Church, most Catholics were only vaguely aware of the name of the current Pope, and certainly had no access to anything he said or did.

And yet somehow—somehow!—they managed, eh? The monks said their prayers. The priests celebrated Mass and heard confessions. The laity carried on with their daily tasks. The faith got passed on, generation to generation, badly or well. 

And everyone sinned and messed up a lot, and hopefully most people repented and asked God for mercy, and I fervently hope most people somehow, through the unfathomable grace of God, bumbled and stumbled and fumbled their way into heaven. All while barely knowing the name of the current Pope.

The center, the focus, the fulcrum of our Catholic faith is not, not, not the Pope. It is Jesus Christ, crucified for our salvation and risen from the dead, with us always to the end of the ages and constantly gracing us with the grace we need to follow Him and be saved. Tomorrow I will talk about what the role of the Pope is in all of this, but that’s enough for today.

Let us not be upset then, if the Pope says something to a group of reporters that we don’t much like, or if his personality displeases us, or if we don’t agree with his pastoral priorities or his characteristic vocabulary or whatever. Who cares, really? Get on with being a Christian, why don’t you? Live the Gospel, and be faithful to what God is asking you to do today. Because that is what is important, now and forever.