Carl Olsen of CWR recently wrote: “To state what should be
obvious, a pope in 2013 simply needs to be as precise and clear as possible.
Fuzzy language, half-formed concepts, and failure to make important
distinctions will eventually result in confusion and frustration. Do they also
"give ammunition to the enemy," as at least three readers have
insisted in e-mails? I think so, mindful that there are some folks who will
misrepresent what the pope says, no matter how clearly, simply, and slowly he
speaks. And Francis, it should be noted, has admitted (in the first interview),
"I am a really, really undisciplined person." There comes point when
the off-the-cuff remarks go from being "fresh" and
"explosive" to problematic and puzzling, and that line was probably
crossed, in my estimation, in the second interview.
“This concern only increases with the breaking news that the
pope's interview with 89-year-old journalist Scalfari was apparently carried
out without a recording or even hand-written notes. As John Allen reports today, this led Vatican
spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi to lamely refer to (in Allen's words) "a
new genre of papal speech that’s deliberately informal and not concerned with
precision." Does anyone in their right mind think that papal statements
unconcerned with precision should be served up to readers who are, or at least
should be, looking for reasonable precision and clarity from the Vicar of Christ—even
in remarks made in informal settings?”
One could perhaps remark
that at an historical juncture as this when the crisis seems to be, according
to Joseph Ratzinger as Cardinal and as Pope, the experience of God,[1]
the problem is not really the precision of concepts but the experience of what
is really real. It is apples and oranges, although there is a necessary
complementarity of the two. And as
Benedict wrote in 2008 (Oct. 6), the really real is the Word of God, that is,
the Person of Christ. To be precise where it is important to be precise, the
problem is not a precision about objects, but the difference between Subject
and object.
And when the
Subject we are talking about is a Trinity of Relations (Persons) Who can be known
only by becoming like them by an exodus from the self (which is Christian
prayer) the pope is giving us a most
startling lesson in the Theology of Theos (God) by his exuberant
self-giftedness of racing through crowds to embrace the crippled, calling up
atheists to speak giftedly and openly person to person with a stammering
imprecision of language. He is showing us the way of the “New Evangelization.”
He is showing us what “faith” is. De Lubac wrote in his “The Christian Faith:”
“When I believe in
God, when I give him my faith, when in answer to his initiative I turn myself
over to him from the bottom of my being, there is established been him and me a
bond of reciprocity of such a kind that the same word, faith, can be applied to
each of the partners: ‘The faith of the two parties, ‘writes St. John of the
Cross with a certain audacity, speaking of the relationship of the believing soul
with God. For what we have here indeed is ‘the encounter of two persons
offering themselves to each other in a fullness of presence, a total engagement.’”[2]
And that self giving to God must be
lived out among ourselves since God has
taken the same flesh as we all have.
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