Friday 6 April 2018

On Reporting News about the Pope

When I wrote for the Toronto Catholic Register, I was always conscious that it was a family newspaper that was read by people who knew my parents. It was available in the library of my nephew's elementary school and in the libraries of the two colleges I call my almas matrae. My favourite professors did not read my column, but the late janitor of the theologate did, bless him.

Therefore, I knew that the vast majority of my readers were "simple faithful", which is not an insult but praise. Most faithful Catholics do not bother their heads with church politics or theology but try to love God and their neighbour and do the right thing instead. Simple, in this context, means honest, straightforward, humble. And I did my best not to disturb my readers' simple faith

After the Star of Bethlehem episode, that is. I once wrote an article about how there might not have been a Star of Bethlehem, and a distressed member of the simple faithful, a friend in her late twenties, asked me how the Three Wise Men had found Baby Jesus then. After a second, during which a smarty-pants answer  trembled on my tongue, I said instead, "That's a very good question."

At the time I was not a trad; like many Lonerganians, I thought I was in Lonergan's "not numerous center." It was not until I went to Boston College that I knew I was perceived to be a ultraconservative, that rival factions of the American Catholic Church hated each other with a white-hot hate, and that I was now in left-wing Catholic HQ.

One target of left-wing Catholic hate at the time was Cardinal Ratzinger, whom many feared, and the hate blazed up into a fiery furnace when he was elected Pope. When the haters discovered that none of them had been fired, hatred simmered down to contempt. The contempt for "Rome" was like a poison gas floating through the halls. The paranoia, too, was contagious. One of my fellow PhD students broke out in a welter of fear because disgruntled conservative undergrads had written a letter protesting some inter-religious event or other.

Having been a Catholic tribalist and triumphalist all my life, that was all very hellish for me. And hating the hate with all my heart, I never imagined that twelve years later I would be in the thick of the Catholic civil war.  But just the other day I wrote a summary of a dozen articles reacting to the news that Benedict's successor had allegedly told a journalist pal that hell did not exist and that, instead of denying this with guns blazing, the Vatican had politely asked the world to discount the journalist pal's punctuation.

Yesterday morning I discovered that the Drudge Report had linked to this article. Yesterday evening I discovered that my parents may have read it. At any rate, they had heard the "Pope says there's no hell" story, and that made me very sad. It's only now that I realise that they must have heard about it from the Canadian television news last weekend.

It seems that the simple faithful cannot help but be scandalised after all. Only the really obtuse (or, to be charitable, the really frightened) can keep yelling "Fake News" at this point. We have a crisis on our hands, and it's not because there's a big anti-Francis plot that began the day he was elected. It's because there was a big anti-Doctrine plot hatched long before Francis was elected.

Crises often have good theological and doctrinal outcomes. In the first centuries of Church life, Christians battled each other in an attempt to get at the truths of faith. The truths were unchanging, but we didn't understand them right from Pentecost Day onward. The exact relationship of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost was a problem that had to be worked out. The role of the Son's human mother is salvation history had also to be worked out, and this was only finally pronounced upon in 1950.

A good that may come out of the present crisis would be a better understanding of what a pope is and what the papacy is. The star power of Saint John Paul II  blinded many of us to the dangers of overemphasising the person of the pope, and I see now that my convert mother was right to hold the papacy a little at arm's length.

We simple faithful were very proud of JP2 as a world figure, as an intellectual, and as a defender of deeply unfashionable Catholic sexual and reproductive ethics, that most of us weren't interested in discussing any theological defects he might have had. Had the internet been born 20 years earlier, there would have been a lot more screaming about his take on inter-religious dialogue, not to mention the excommunication of Archbishop Lefebvre.

It is probable that Pope Francis does not believe the Catholic faith the way that Benedict XVI believes, and Saint John Paul II believed, the Catholic faith. That's a problem. However, the bright side is that this is an opportunity for Catholics to prove to other Christians that we don't, actually, worship the Pope.

Almost twenty years ago, on my first visit to Rome, I overheard a Protestant tourist tell a nonbeliever that the difference between Catholics and Protestants was that Protestants believed the Bible but Catholics just did whatever the Pope told them to do. I was so utterly furious, I didn't know what to say. Besides, it is quite true that we expect the Pope---in communion with all the other Popes, with all the saints, doctors and Fathers of the Church---to mediate Scripture to us and help us understand how to be faithful to it through every age.

But just because we expect the Pope to do that doesn't mean he will. We have had atrocious Popes before, as historians are happy to point out, and we may have atrocious Popes again. We may have an atrocious Pope now, but it generally doesn't do to call living Popes names.

So that is more-or-less what I would say to the simple faithful. The Pope doesn't matter as much as Doctrine matters. The Pope is supposed to protect Doctrine, not Doctrine the Pope's relationship with his family, his friends and The New York Times. Therefore, one should listen to the Pope when he tells  the mafia that they're in danger of hell, and one should not listen to the Pope when he tells Eugenio Scalfari that hell does not exist.

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