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.

Rabbit, Punched

So did you hear that Pope Francis punched a rabbit in the Philippines? Like, dude, it was like the Thrilla in Manila all over again!

And I heard it was a cartoon rabbit or something, and had made fun of the Profit (sp?) of Islam... and so the Pope, like, totally punched it. Whoa! But it's OK, because the Pope said that all rabbits go to heaven when they die, reversing centuries of infallible dogma. Whaddaguy.

OK, so maybe I got parts of that story wrong. Or... the whole story wrong. Great - now I'm qualified to work for the New York Times! Big Apple, here I come.

So the Pope made a statement on freedom of religion, non-violence, and freedom of expression. There was a little more to it than 'Don't punch my mother, or the rabbit gets it,' or whatever the media said he said. And he made a statement about responsible parenthood and the Church's teachings on family planning. There was a little more to it than 'Michelle Duggar is a rabbit and your father smells of elderberries,' or whatever the media said he said.

Folks, I know I've said it before, but when you read something in the media that Pope Francis said something cuckoobananapants crazy, there are two possibilities. First, that Pope Francis is cuckoobananapants crazy. Second, that the media... well, to put it charitably, the media aren't quite reporting the story totally accurately.

After the 'who am I to judge?' debacle, the 'all dogs go to heaven' farce, the 'Ima puncha you face' inanity, and now the 'don't be a rabbit, dawg!' idiocy... my money is on the media just a bit, kind of, having got the story wrong.

And when you read some foolishness about the Pope, you have two possible courses of action, it seems to me. You could go read what the man actually said (the two links above took me exactly 20 seconds to find, by the way - it's not like it's hard to track down the straight story). And think about it. And put it in the context of, oh I don't know, EVERYTHING ELSE THE MAN HAS EVER SAID IN HIS LONG LIFE. All of which has been totally and utterly Catholic. That's one thing you can do.

But if time is short and you just don't feel like doing that you can always... well, ignore it. There is an unseemly fixation on popes in our modern church, I would gently suggest. Every word that comes out of their mouths (this did not start with Pope Francis), every time they so much as hiccup or cough, we are supposed to anxiously parse it out for every possible shred and shade of meaning.

Nonsense. The Pope is not the center of the Catholic faith. Jesus Christ is the center of the Catholic faith. The Pope has a vital and necessary role to play, and we owe him our filial loyalty and respect, our prayers, our attention when he speaks magisterially, and our religious submission to the exercise of his ordinary teaching office. And... that's about it, really! He's not supposed to be the focus of our faith life. Really.

So the next time the media 'punches the rabbit', so to speak (as opposed to jumping the shark), keep cool, either find out the real story for yourself or quietly go on with the duties of your state of life and your own discipleship of Jesus Christ. That's what matters, not anything else. Really.

The Papal Examen

Among the ways of ‘missing the point’ that the post-modern world specializes in, is the shortened attention span that makes it hard for us to focus on any one thing for any great length of time. Driven by the constant inflow of stimulus (I won’t call it information) that the Internet delivers up to us, it is all too easy to let the latest stream of words and images wash over us and then just keep gushing down-stream. If we stop and think and talk about that one thing that just happened, we will miss the next twenty things that come along, and wouldn’t that be a tragedy?

This is very bad for us. We lack depth in our own personal reflections in this; furthermore, we essentially ‘out-source’ the analysis of the events of the day to those people—the media—who have no specialized knowledge or expertise and certainly no wisdom to speak of, but who have the ability to churn out vast quantities of words in short periods of time (a friend of MH who is a very successful Canadian journalist told us that this is, in fact, the salient qualification needed to work in the newspaper business).

For example, does anyone remember that thing that happened a whole whopping two weeks ago, when Pope Francis gave a talking to the members of the Curia? Remember how he was furious with them and lashed at them about their sins, and how they were cold and unfriendly to him in return, and how this is clearly a sign of… well, something or other happening in the Vatican, and…?

Remember that? I know it happened a whole two weeks ago, but isn’t it amazing how everyone has basically forgotten in any real way what was (we were assured at the time) such an earth-shaking event. A whopping two weeks ago it got everyone’s tongue flapping, either bringing out the Francis cheer-leaders to say “Yeah! Go, Papa! Sock it to them, those lousy no-good curial jerks! Woo hoo!” or on the other hand the Francis nay-sayers wringing their hands: “Oh, those poor curia people. They work so hard! Why is Francis always so mean? That’s not a good way to talk to your subordinates!”

Well of course part of it was that once those who were interested read the whole text and watched the video, nothing of what I wrote above was particularly borne out as, you know, having happened. The Pope was offering, in good Ignatian style, an examination of conscience (appropriate for Advent!); he was careful, as all good pastors are, to use the pronoun ‘we’ throughout, and the points of the examen were hemmed on both sides by warm expressions of gratitude and affection.

The curial officials meanwhile, certainly looked serious during the talk. It was a serious talk. Perhaps they were… I don’t know, examining their consciences! It's been known to happen. And afterwards they were all of them smiling and chatting with the Pope with complete cordiality. As usual, the people whose only skill is generating large volumes of words in short periods of time (hey! I could get a job in the media!) force-fed us a narrative with only the most tenuous connection to reality, and that is all the vague recollection most have of that earth-shattering event from two weeks ago.

Meanwhile, we have all moved on, and it’s a shame. Why is it a shame? Because it is a darned good examination of conscience, and not just for the curia, either. And so on this blog I am going to say ‘heck, no!’ to the ADD quality of our modern culture. I am NOT going to move on. In fact, I am going to take the next fifteen Wednesdays, and blog about each of the fifteen ‘diseases’ the Pope wrote about and reflect on how these might apply to our lives.

It is easy to point fingers at the curia, or at Cardinal X or Archbishop Y or Fr. Q. And yes, those in high ecclesial offices do have a higher burden of responsibility and accountability… to God and to their lawful superiors, that is. But it is useless—worse than useless, it is deeply harmful to gleefully or angrily or sorrowfully account for the sins of other people, in high office or otherwise. We are never, no matter what, no matter who, to examine the conscience of another person, only our own.

And so Wednesdays on the blog will be dedicated the next little while to “The Papal Examen” – Lent really is just around the corner, and this will be a good warm-up exercise for that season. See you tomorrow with the first disease!

Striking the Rock, That Water May Gush Forth

Let us return to the Sacrament of Reconciliation. It often happens that we priests hear our faithful telling us they have encountered a very “strict” priest in the confessional, or very “generous”, i.e., a rigorist or a laxist. And this is not good. It is normal that there be differences in the style of confessors, but these differences cannot regard the essential, that is, sound moral doctrine and mercy.

Neither the laxist nor the rigorist bears witness to Jesus Christ, for neither the one nor the other takes care of the person he encounters. The rigorist washes his hands of them: in fact, he nails the person to the law, understood in a cold and rigid way; and the laxist also washes his hands of them: he is only apparently merciful, but in reality he does not take seriously the problems of that conscience, by minimizing the sin.

True mercy takes the person into one’s care, listens to him attentively, approaches the situation with respect and truth, and accompanies him on the journey of reconciliation. And this is demanding, yes, certainly. The truly merciful priest behaves like the Good Samaritan... but why does he do it? Because his heart is capable of having compassion, it is the heart of Christ!

We are well aware that neither laxity nor rigorism foster holiness… Neither laxity nor rigorism sanctify the priest, and they do not sanctify the faithful! However, mercy accompanies the journey of holiness, it accompanies it and makes it grow.... Too much work for a parish priest? It is true, too much work!

And how do we accompany and foster the journey of holiness? Through pastoral suffering, which is a form of mercy. What does pastoral suffering mean? It means suffering for and with the person. And this is not easy! To suffer like a father and mother suffer for their children; I venture to say, also with anxious concern....

Tell me: Do you weep? Or have we lost our tears? I remember that in the old Missals, those of another age, there is a most beautiful prayer to ask the gift of tears. The prayer began like this: “Lord, who commanded Moses to strike the rock so that water might gush forth, strike the stone of my heart so that tears…”: the prayer went more or less like this. It was very beautiful. 

But, how many of us weep before the suffering of a child, before the breakup of a family, before so many people who do not find the path?... The weeping of a priest.... Do you weep? Or in this presbyterate have we lost all tears?

Pope Francis, Address to the priests of the Diocese of Rome, March 6, 2014

Reflection – Well, I don’t know if this address by Pope Francis is helpful to anyone else, but it sure is helping me, so I’m going to keep blogging about it for a couple more days yet. Thank you for your patience.

The laxist/rigorist dichotomy is one we are all familiar with. As I said a couple days ago, I honestly have had very few if any rigorist priests hear my confession over my 40 years as a Catholic sinner (and I haven’t just done confession in Madonna House – I’ve been all over! But laxism… yes, strictly from my first-hand experience this is the more common fault of priests in North America in our day. And Pope Francis expertly and succinctly shows what is wrong with both of these approaches—neither is really merciful, neither really cares for the person. The rigorist crushes the person under the yoke of the Law; the laxist, under a pretence of being ‘kind’, fails utterly to engage the real spiritual illness of the person, their true need for healing.

At any rate, the Pope is calling us priests here to a very high and challenging level of mercy and generosity. I don’t know if I can say much about this—his call to priests to weep for and with their people. After all, to put it delicately, a good number of ‘my people’ read this blog – I will simply say that it is my heart’s desire to be precisely the kind of priest the pope is describing, and that this reality of ‘pastoral suffering’ as a means of growth in holiness is very real indeed, at the very least a path that is open to any priest who is willing to enter it.

Meanwhile, we all know that priests on the whole are a pretty human bunch of guys—neither the monstrous vampires of anti-Catholic bigotry nor the paragons of virtue and holiness that a naïve faith would imagine them to be. We’re just people, endowed in ourselves with the strengths and weaknesses, folly and smarts that characterize humanity as a whole. Of ourselves, nothing too special, yet for reasons of His own, endowed by Christ with this sacred task and the sacred powers that go with it.

So, pray for your priests, eh? We’re on the cusp of Holy Week here, and parishes the world over are stepping into high gear. I just came back from a parish mission, and am very aware of just how busy and hard-working my parochial confreres are. Pray for them and, if you can, offer an encouraging word to them once in a while. Pray especially that true mercy and compassion can reign in the hearts of all priests, and that the whole Church can become the community of mercy and compassion it is meant to be.

God Gives Us the Bad Example

A great priest from Buenos Aires comes to mind, he is younger than I, he is around the age of 72.... Once he came to see me. He is a great confessor: there are always people waiting in line for him there. The majority of priests confess to him... He is a great confessor.

And once he came to see me: “But Father....”; “Tell me”; “I have a small scruple, because I know that I forgive too much!”… And we spoke about mercy. At a certain point he said to me: “You know, when I feel this scruple keenly, I go to the chapel, before the Tabernacle, and I say to Him: Excuse me, but it’s Your fault, because it is you who has given me the bad example! And I go away at peace....”. It is a beautiful prayer of mercy! If one experiences this in his own regard in Confession, in his own heart, he is able to give it to others.

The priest is called to learn this, to have a heart that is moved. Priests who are — allow me to say the word — “aseptic”, those “from the laboratory”, all clean and tidy, do not help the Church.

Today we can think of the Church as a “field hospital”. Excuse me but I repeat it, because this is how I see it, how I feel it is: a “field hospital”. Wounds need to be treated, so many wounds! So many wounds! There are so many people who are wounded by material problems, by scandals, also in the Church.... People wounded by the world’s illusions.... We priests must be there, close to these people. Mercy first means treating the wounds. 

When someone is wounded, he needs this immediately, not tests such as the level of cholesterol and one’s glycemic index.... But there’s a wound, treat the wound, and then we can look at the results of the tests. Then specialized treatments can be done, but first we need to treat the open wounds. I think this is what is most important at this time. And there are also hidden wounds, because there are people who distance themselves in order to avoid showing their wounds closer....

The custom comes to mind, in the Mosaic Law, of the lepers in Jesus’ time, who were always kept at a distance in order not to to spread the contagion.... There are people who distance themselves through shame, through shame, so as not to let their wounds be seen.... And perhaps they distance themselves with some bitterness against the Church, but deep down inside there is a wound.... They want a caress! And you, dear brothers — I ask you — do you know the wounds of your parishioners? Do you perceive them? Are you close to them? It’s the only question....

Pope Francis, Address to the priests of the Diocese of Rome, March 6, 2014

Reflection – Well this part of his address is so beautiful that a) I couldn’t bear to cut any of it out and b) I really don’t know what I have to add to it! Except that I believe Pope Francis is really revealing his own heart here, the real core of his faith, his fundamental orientation in life.

Everything else—economic policy and liturgical style, curial reform and magisterial focus—all of this is not nothing, not utterly unimportant, but very much secondary to this profound sense of the wounds of humanity and the need for a merciful Church, a field hospital Church, a Church that is first concerned to stanch the bleeding and assuage the pain of people.

It is not—it never is and it never can be—a question of abandoning this teaching or changing that doctrine. It is a matter of deeply discerning the need of the person in front of you and what they can or cannot hear at this precise point. Truth is truth and truth must be taught, but always with love, always with a profound sensitivity to the level of pain and brokenness of the person.

In other words, the person and his or her immediate need comes first, always. This is how it is with God, and this is how it must be with us, priests for sure, but not just priests, eh? Mercy – the heart of the matter always, but never more than in our poor broken-down world today.