Austen Ivereigh wrote that “Francis’s
freewheeling communication and his proclamation in a missionary key – that is, putting
love and mercy and healing first, before rules and doctrines – have particularly
offended some on the front line of America’s culture wars. Some see Francis’s
off-the-cuff remarks in his daily homilies and frequent interviews as creating
ambiguities liable to be exploited and misunderstood by the Church’s enemies.
What had given them ‘the confidence, the solid doctrinal ground they needed to
fight the good fight,’ in the words of one pro-life writer, was ‘a system in
which every word spoken or written by a pope, or for that matter by any office
of the Vatican, has been carefully examined and vetted.’ Now, she added acidly,
‘there appears to be no one minding the store.’”[1]
Examples aiding and abetting liberal
interpretation: 1) “in a morning homily (he) said that Jesus Christ had redeemed
everyone, ‘including atheists,’ which seemed to imply that atheists could be
saved without converting. These and other remarks led to criticism that he was ‘naïve’
and ‘imprudent,’ giving succor to those (liberals) attacking the Church. On the
eve of Francis’s trip to Rio de Janeiro, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia
warned that conservatives ‘have not been really happy’ about Francis, and that ‘he’ll
have to care for them, too.’ Their unhappiness increased in the fall of 2013 with Francis’s blockbuster Jesuit interview,
which produced what was to them nightmare headlines: 2) POPE BLUNTLY FAULTS
CHURCH’S FOCUS ON GAYS AND ABORTION (New York
Times), POPE FRANCIS: CHURCH CAN’T ‘INTERFERE’ WIT H GAYS (CNN), and POPE
FRANCIS: THE CHURCH NEEDS TO MELLOW OUT ON ABORTION (San Francisco Chronicle).
They convinced many that Francis was selling out to secular modernity, a
conviction reinforced by the encomia from liberal citadels such as Time) and the Advocate.
3) The Scalfari-Francis interviews, with Francis not vetting the text of
his own words…
Ivereigh continues: “Accusing
Francis of creating ‘confusion, consternation, and bewilderment among the
faithful,’ one conservative commentator worried that ‘such an informal and
often ambiguous method of communication cannot help but erode the more solemn
teaching authority of the papacy,’ adding that ‘a pope, like a monarch, should
realize that when it comes to public utterances, less is more.’ Francis,
however, does not see himself as a king, but a fisherman.”[2]
Etc.
Examples aiding and abetting conservative orthodoxy: “Shortly after the
Jesuit interview in which he spoke of not needing to speak all the time of
issues such as abortion, he gave a blistering address to Catholic doctors on
the very subject, in which he linked abortion to the throwaway culture, saying
that ‘each child who is unborn, but is unjustly condemned to be aborted, bears
the face of Jesus Christ… who even before he was born, and then as soon as he
was born, experienced the rejection of the world.’ In Evangelii Gaudium he has shown how being pro-life needs to be part
of a broader narrative linked to human rights…
“Francis has taken a
similarly clear line in support of Paul VI’s 1968 ban on artificial contraception,
Humanae Vitae, a touchstone issue for
many liberal Catholics and their publications and t he reason for their
discontent with the papacy. In his interview with Corriere della Sera a year after his election, Francis praised Paul
VI’s prophetic genius in rejecting the recommendation of the body of experts he
had appointed, saying ‘he had the courage to place himself against the majority
in defense of moral discipline, acting as a brake on culture, opposing present
and future neo-Malthusianism…Although the synod might consider pastoral issues related
to the living out of the teaching, ‘there was no question of changing the
doctrine,’ Francis said.”[3]
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
So, both “sides” are
affirmed yet bewildered by Francis. What’s up?
Pay attention to what
Francis understands by “doctrine:” “Christian doctrine is not a closed system
incapable of generating questions, doubts, interrogatives – but is alive, knows
being unsettled, enlivened… It has a face that is not rigid, it has a body that
moves and grows, it has a soft flesh: it is called Jesus Christ.”[4]
Stop to consider this.
Christian doctrine is not about ideas, created persons or things of this world.
It is about the Creator Who totally transcends His creation (the “world” as we
experience it) as the Creator transcends creation. There can be no greater abyss
than that which spans from something to nothing. This has to be understood. The
Creator is not part of the experienced world. He is not even the highest part
of it. He is not the Supreme Being. He is not a Being at all. He is the action of be-ing, which is ongoingly
imparted to everything we experience. And when it is not imparted, nothing is. Absent the Creator, nothing. Therefore, it is
impossible to know Him the way we know everything else. And if we do “know” Him
as we know everything else, we are trapped in idolatry. We “know” a false god –
a god of our making.
St. Anselm, Robert Sokolowski deploying the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl,
Josef Ratzinger theologizing on relationality that is the divine Persons, and in our won time and place, Bishop Robert
Barron plumbing the depths of the Thomistic esse, all have been immensely enlightening and helpful here in
upgrading the epistemological horizon that Christian/Catholic Faith works
in. Notice that doctrine is not Faith.
Faith is the act whereby one becomes the Person of Christ such that one is able
to experience within self that Jesus of Nazareth is the Son of the living
God. This action is the mimicry of the
Son in obedience to death before the Will of the Father. Doctrine is to protect
that act of mimicry. Doctrine keeps one on the track to make the self-gift. But
it itself is not that act. It is thought.
Consider again Ratzinger’s “theological epistemology” whereby one “reads”
oneself as “another Christ” (Gal. 2, 20; 3, 16; 3, 28): Christ reveals himself
to be prayer. That is, He reveals
that He is always in constant contact with the Father. More, He is that contact. He is “Son,” and is
constantly engendered by the Father. He, like the Father, is an action of
relation. That being the case, if our way of knowing is such that like is known
only by like, then to know Christ from within His very Person, we must become
that Person by praying always.
If that happens, we will know Him from within ourselves in consciousness, and
reflecting on that, will be able to conceptualize that into the words: “You are
the Christ…” (Mt. 16, 16).
This is the impossible issue that has been dealt Pope Francis: to move
the Church out of itself to the peripheries, and thus cease being sick. As he
says: “Faced with the ills or the problems of the Church, it is useless to seek
solutions in conservatism or fundamentalism, in the restoration of outdated
forms and conduct that have no capacity for meaning, even culturally. Christian
doctrine is not a closed system… but it is living, it knows how to disturb and
to encourage…Its face is not rigid, it has a body that moves and develops, it
has tender flesh; Christian doctrine is called Jesus Christ.”[5]
What is this “knowing?” It is the consciousness that accompanies the
acting person in going out of himself in the most ordinary life of the street
and home. It is mysticism. It is presence of God. It is sense of divine
Filiation. It is Christian conscience. It is Wisdom. It is always sacrifice. It
is the Cross because overcoming self to be of service to the other mimicking
the relation of Father and Son is the co-redemption that we are privileged to
share. We are ransoming the world at this very moment in a hidden way. It is
secular. It is not religious, as the service of the Good Samaritan was secular,
not religious, but it was Christ.
I think this is what’s up.
No comments:
Post a Comment