The Mind of Pope
Francis on Conscience = Ratzinger in “Conscience and Truth.”
Dear Craig,
A+ on your assessment
of the pope. And I would add that the turn to person as relation is not an
alternative to moral absolutes, but the ontological grounding. The immorality
of abortion is the dignity of the human person and that is grounded on the
person imaging the divine Person of the Son - who is nothing but relation to
the Father. The immorality of contraception is the failure of the spouses to
make the gift of self to each other - which again is relationality. The
immorality of gay marriage is the impossibility of the self giving as donation
and reception (relationality) which is constitutive of enfleshed persons [male
and female anatomy as "language of the body].
Also, the
relation of Christ to each of each (Christ's self-gift) as the redemptive act.
Francis points out the discrepancy between the conscience of Judas and that of
Mary Magdalene (the good thief, Zacchaeus, the Samaritan woman at the
well....). Judas sees himself as bad - irretrievably so - and commits suicide.
Mary is also bad (prostitute in the exegesis of Leo the Great ?), but she has
Christ home for weekends with Martha and Lazarus, and the Lord loves to come.
Francis' point (he also sees himself as sinner, nay, more: sinner is the appropriate
definition of the person who has become pope) is that we all sin, we all see
ourselves as sinful, but the Lord continues to love us, and in so doing makes
us good. We can begin again. There's hope.
Craig,
The email
got away from me.
The large
point of the pope is that we continue to be loved and forgiven, and with that
the conscience - that kills us because we are bad - is
restored to goodness. To know we are loved - related to in the most profound
way, i.e. to the death of God who loves us so that it costs all of His
blood - makes me good. I'm not good because I obey all the moral
laws, and everything my state in life demands. I don't, and, in reality, I
can't. That is, I find myself incapable of loving my enemies as I find myself
set up. I have trouble loving my friends in any consistent way. I am a
fraud. And my smallness makes my unsure of myself and jealous of
the success of others. My immediate judgment of others is negative because I
build myself up putting others down in my mind.
However,
as miserable as I am, Christ still loves me. The sun keeps rising. I have a
heart beat and can breathe. Someone keeps affirming me, loving me. This gives
me a sense of being good. That is, I am good because Christ continues to love
me, and in so keeps giving me value and identity. This is the meaning of the
"Good News:" The Eu-Angelum (Evangelium: Gospel). I have hope. I
think that was the import of BXVI's "Spe Salvi."And hoping, I want to
do good.
This and
only this will save the world today. This, and only this, will move us
out of ourselves. And if we move out of ourselves, we will become who we
are as images of the triune God.
This is
the salvation of global humanity. All the hatred and the wars are coming out of
hating ourselves because we are bad.
Joseph Ratzinger, in his “Conscience and Truth” in “On
Conscience” (Ignatius [2007) 39-41), writes about the expiation of
conscience for Orestes’ crime of matricide. “Orestes finds himself hounded by
the Furies… who are mythological personifications of conscience and who, from a
deeper wellspring of recollection, reproach him, declaring that his decision of
conscience, his obedience to the ‘saying of the
gods,’ was in reality guilt. The whole tragedy of man comes to light in
this dispute of the ‘gods,’ that is to say, in this conflict of conscience. In
the holy court, the white stone of Athena leads to Orestes’ acquittal, his sanctification,
in the power of which the Erinyes are transformed into Eumenides, the spirits
of reconciliation. Atonement has transformed the world…
“This myth speaks to us of the human
longing that conscience’s objectively just indictment – and the attendant
destructive, interior distress if causes in man – not be the last word. It thus
speaks of an authority of grace, a power of expiation that allows the guilt to
vanish and makes truth at last truly redemptive. It is the longing for a truth
that does not just make demands of us, but also transforms us through expiation
and pardon. Through these, as Aeschylus puts it, ‘guilt is washed away,’ and
our being is transformed from within, beyond our own capability.
“This is the real innovation of
Christianity: The Logos, the truth in person, is also the atonement, the
transforming forgiveness that is above and beyond our capability and incapability.
Therein lies the real novelty on which the larger Christian memory [anamnesis:
from being created in the image and likeness of the divine Persons] is founded,
and which indeed, at the same time, constitutes the deeper answer to what the
anamnesis of the Creator expects of us.
“Where this center of the Christian
message is not sufficiently expressed and appreciated, truth becomes a yoke that
is too heavy for our shoulders, from which we must seek to free ourselves. But
the freedom gained thereby is empty. It leads into the desolate land of
nothingness and disintegrates of itself. Yet the yoke of truth in fact became ‘easy’
(Matthew 11, 30) when the Truth came, loves us, and consumed our guilt in the
fire of his love. Only when we know and experience this from within will we be
free to hear the message of conscience with joy and without fear.”
No comments:
Post a Comment