#405: New Pope Promotes “Global Warming”

A profile of the impact Pope Francis is having in the land once called “the Oldest Daughter of the Church.”

Six months after the election of Pope Francis, I was curious to explore the reaction of non-American Catholics.  And since my best access to church people outside the U.S. is in France, French Catholics (and even non-Catholics) where my best option.

During two weeks in mid October, I interviewed roughly 20 people.  They included one bishop, six priests, four practicing Catholics, five non-practicing Catholics, a Protestant, a few non-observant Muslims (one of whom is a product of Catholic schools), and even a self-professed atheist.

What emerged was a rather complex but remarkably consistent image of a pope who has quite suddenly raised hopes (and also questions) among a wide range of French people.  And the periodicals I consulted confirmed the sense that Francis has ushered in a sudden climate change in the Catholic world that is already touching the world at large.

The very first person I interviewed spoke for all that followed by declaring herself perfectly satisfied to see a non-European elected pope.  “The only good European choice was another Jesuit, Carlo Maria Martini [former Archbishop of Milan], but it was too late for him [he died in August 2012].  This man seems to have the same kind of open spirit.” She said this even though Martini was famously progressive, not a word usually applied so far to Francis.

The bishop I spoke with declared that, despite the world’s reaction, Francis’ election was no surprise.  “After all,” he reminded me, “he finished second in the balloting in 2005.” He also took time, as did many I spoke with, to comment on Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation.

“He had the courage necessary to resign,” said the bishop, who had spent several hours with Benedict in Rome only a year ago.  He told me that Benedict had seen the effect of John-Paul II’s staying on too long, had watched the ailing pope lose control of church governance to a curia in bad need of reform.  He knew he himself was not a governor by nature, and that the job required too much for him.

The bishop was convinced, moreover, the Benedict’s resignation will become a precedent, so that future popes will routinely retire, thus opening the door to younger candidates.

Francis, the bishop thinks, is returning the Church to the renewal-and-reform agenda of Pope Paul VI, and doing it in the style of John XXIII.  As for the future, he said: “We will see if the body follows the head”-- observing that many Bishops do not share the general public’s enthusiasm for Francis.  (Just this week, of course, one German bishop was removed due to his lavish lifestyle.  No doubt many other Bishops are feeling nervous about their own excesses.)

Many others echoed these views.  A non-practicing couple said that Benedict had been “too austere,” and they found Francis “warmer” and especially liked his distaste for ornate institutional formalities.  But they wondered if he can do the job needed.

The young Arab I interviewed (Muslim by heritage but Catholic in schooling) was convinced that Benedict could not deal with the multiple crises facing him: scandal, leaks, the Vatican bank, corruption, and rampant careerism at virtually all levels.  He thought that Francis’ election came “just in time” since much needs changing.  Francis strike him as a “peoples’ pope” with the advantage of third world roots.  He noted the symbolic power of the pope washing the feet of prisoners and women, and expressed some confidence that, if Francis alters the tone of Catholic leadership and makes reforms, that will mean real progress even without any doctrinal changes.  “The Catholic church moves through history very slowly,” he noted, “step by step.”

One non-practicing woman told me that she has already noticed how popular Francis is among French people.  “He has definitely changed the PR image of the Church, for the better.”

Next I interviewed a very devout older woman who began by saying how much she had liked Benedict, and how much she admired a resignation that was “wise, courageous, and well-time--especially compared to John-Paul II.” But she also detected an “immediate shift in tone” when the newly-elected Francis asked the crowd to bless him, when he refused some ceremonial garb, and when he refused to live in the papal apartments.  She found his words, such as his comment on homosexuals, to offer a fresh take on Catholic tradition that she considered “a good thing for the Church”--especially beyond Europe.

A group of parish priests just outside Paris had less to say.  The consensus was that French people generally saw Francis’ election and performance as “good news”, but they also knew of some “extremists” (mostly traditionalist Catholics) worried about possible changes in liturgy.

An older, practicing couple observed that there had not been a lot of news coverage of Francis in the French media, at least not compared to the coverage that John-Paul II had received.  But, they added, “all the news has been good news”--unlike the bad press Benedict had received.

A priest I have known for more than 15 years confirmed that Francis has received consistently good press, even in the non-Christian media.  “And they never give us any gifts!” he observed--suggesting that Francis has made a genuinely good impression on secular journalists who are otherwise prone to skepticism in their coverage of the Church.

Right from the start, this priest said, Francis “broke through the screen” like a movie character bursting into the audience, so that people were approaching my priest friend with favorable comments right from day one.

     This priest agreed that Benedict's resignation was a reaction to John-Paul II’s long demise.  “The last time I saw John-Paul II in Rome,” he told me, “he was long gone.” He regarded the resignation a mark of Benedict’s “honesty and integrity.” He hoped it would become the precedent for future popes but, unlike the bishop I spoke with, he was not sure--and insisted that no one was.

Like some others, he personally agreed that Francis’ manner and priorities echoed the papacy of John XXIII more than anyone else, and for him this was reason to hope that the legacy of Vatican II could be recovered and preserved.

Two evenings later, at a large social gathering, a man approached me to ask what Americans thought of the new pope, and then offered his own view: “I think he’s going to be the bishop of all the poor--and I think that is a good thing!”

On my last day, I spoke with a self-proclaimed “atheist” (later he re-labeled himself “agnostic”) who offered his opinion of the new pope without being asked.  Francis, he said, was creating a fresh impression of openness and reform--just like John XXIII had done at Vatican II.  Given that this man was not a Christian, and also not old enough to remember John XXIII personally, I took his opinion to reflect a historical awareness rare among most Catholics--and a broad sense of what this new papacy promises.

All in all, The French seem happy and impressed with Francis and relieved to get beyond John-Paul II and Benedict. For them, it feels like a new season of warmth after a long chill. But they are holding their breath—and their judgment—to see what Francis can actually accomplish. Even so, some of them realize that what he has already accomplished—to show the world, by his character and manner and words, the Church’s warm, human, humble face—is a historical achievement all by itself.

Next: what French journalists are saying.

  © Bernard   F. Swain PhD 2013

#404: An Epochal Change?

Pope Francis’ latest interview, with the founder and editor of La Repubblica, provides the clearest and bluntest signals yet about this pope’s vision and agenda. 

Just when I began to fear I had wasted 40 years working in the trenches of a church unwilling to renew itself despite the historic impetus of Vatican Council II (1962-1965), along comes the miraculous election of a pope who begins to proclaim, in a loud global voice, the very things that have gotten me blacklisted and even fired over many years.

A recent example: after a Catholic layperson proposed by visit to his parish to discuss adopting my Fidelis leadership formation program, the pastor checked out my blog.  There he found that I had written this:

After nearly 35 years of Catholic officials obscuring the vision of Vatican Council II, the new pope may already be rescuing its legacy

In reaction, the pastor wrote:

I went to his blog and saw this line. That's all I needed to see. I didn't need to read anything else.…To imply that JPII and Benedict have "obscured" Vatican II makes my blood boil!!!!!!

Of course, I never referenced those two popes.  I referred only to one “Catholic official” by name: Bernard F. Law, who resigned in disgrace as Archbishop of Boston after his role in the sex abuse scandal became public.  For this the pastor accused me of being “heterodox”--something less than an authentic Catholic.

But here is what Francis said when asked about the place of Catholicism in global culture:

Our goal is not to proselytize but to listen to needs, desires and disappointments, despair, hope. We must restore hope to young people, help the old, be open to the future, spread love. Be poor among the poor. We need to include the excluded and preach peace. Vatican II, inspired by Pope Paul VI and John, decided to look to the future with a modern spirit and to be open to modern culture. The Council Fathers knew that being open to modern culture meant religious ecumenism and dialogue with non-believers. But afterwards very little was done in that direction. I have the humility and ambition to want to do something.

Note these words: “But afterwards very little was done in that direction.” In short, Vatican II has not been implemented.

When the interviewer suggested, as I had, that Catholic officialdom was to blame, saying “I think that the institution [of the church] dominates the poor, missionary church that you would like,” Francis replied this way: “In fact, that is the way it is, and in this area you cannot perform miracles.”

Perhaps the pastor I quoted considers this pope heterodox as well? 

That same pastor also decided he could judge me without ever meeting me, saying:

This Swain beaut is NOT to be invited to speak at a group associated with St._____[parish]...Studying heterodoxy as if it were orthodox Catholicism will NOT happen at St._____[parish]under my watch!

I’ve encountered this sort of unprofessional, disrespectful, judgmental, even un-Christian tone time and again over the years—usually but not always from members of the clergy.  To me, such behavior simply does not compute with the role of pastor, which ought to be marked by humility and service.  Instead, in this case we got a name-calling watchdog.  Sadly, I was not shocked.  I have seen it too many times before.

Pope Francis is not shocked either.  When the subject of “narcissism” comes out in the interview, Francis is quick to note the link between narcissism and power:

I don't like the word narcissism…it indicates an excessive love for oneself and this is not good, it can produce serious damage not only to the soul of those affected but also in relationship with others, with the society in which one lives. The real trouble is that those most affected by this  -  which is actually a kind of mental disorder  -  are people who have a lot of power. Often bosses are narcissists.

With the interviewer suggest that “many church leaders have been” narcissists, Francis does not shrink from the truth:

You know what I think about this? Heads of the Church have often been narcissists, flattered and thrilled by their courtiers. The court is the leprosy of the papacy.

No doubt Francis has seen in his own work as archbishop that narcissism also shows up among the lower-level heads of parishes and dioceses.

Of course, whenever I, a life-long layperson, have criticized pastors, priests, or deacons for such behavior, some people have labeled “anti-clerical.”  They mean it as a negative judgment, even a condemnation of my character and good faith.

But Pope Francis makes it seem like a badge of honor.

When he notes that the interviewer is “a non-believer but not anti-clerical,” the interviewer replies: “True, I am not anti-clerical, but I become so when I meet a clericalist.”

Francis then smiles and says:

It also happens to me that when I meet a clericalist, I suddenly become anti-clerical.  Clericalism should not have anything to do with Christianity.

This is not, of course, a case of the pope attacking clergy.  In decrying “clericalism,” he is decrying certain attitudes and behaviors: privilege, arrogance, presumption, paternalism--things that pertain to power, position, and rank, but not to the ministry of a Good Shepherd.  Such things are not conveyed by Holy Orders, but they are nevertheless sometimes adopted by the ordained.

In effect, Pope Francis is calling out the emperor’s new clothes--or, rather, the old trappings of the imperial Church that Catholicism adapted from the Roman Empire.  When he calls Vatican courtiers the “leprosy of the papacy,” he is bluntly naming the rot that has infested too much of Catholic life - - and not just at the Vatican itself.

I would not be human if I did not feel some vindication and even validation in this.  As a child of the 1960s, I chose the Church (rather than politics) as a vehicle for social justice and peace; I brought up my kids in an inner-city “ghetto” so they would live with the poor in a neighborhood more like the rest of the real world than an American suburb; I devoted my work to parish at great sacrifice, and I suffered the petty resentments and punishments of officials too weak to deal with someone like me, who could exert influence without the benefit of rank, office, or Roman collar.

For the last 20 of my 40 years in ministry, it has seemed like the bright promise that the Church held when I started out was being worn away by the inertia of the institution’s power structure.  And as I saw the number of “lapsed” Catholics grow, I knew they had not fallen away--they had been pushed.  This was a discouraging realization, which called into question the years I had invested in Catholic renewal.

Finally, however, we have a leader who speaks the truth: that the institution not only is not always right, but sometimes does active harm to the Church’s own mission.

But the very fact that the “man at the top” sees the problem and claims “the humility and the ambition” to do something about it gives me great hope, both for my own work and for the mission of the Church.

So I find great kinship with the Italian editor who interviewed Francis, a non-believer who nonetheless concluded by saying:

This is Pope Francis.  If the church becomes like him and becomes what he wants it to be, it will be an epochal change.

  © Bernard   F. Swain PhD 2013

#403: Pope Francis: My Kind of Traditionalist—Part 2

It is no mystery why Pope Francis’ interview sparked such rapid and widespread commentary.  For in one fell swoop, he took direct aim at all three flawed tendencies of the last generation of Catholic officialdom: Fetishism, Puritanism, and Proof-testing of Vatican II.  The result was a “triple play” against any distortion of Catholic tradition or the legacy of Vatican II.

Against Puritanism: Ecclesiastical fetishism not only reduced the faith to a small set of obsessions, it also justified attacks on Catholics who did not share those obsessions.

Francis openly disagrees with anyone who thinks that church reform means reducing the flock to a smaller, more faithful few.  Asked about his view of the Church, Francis begins with the image of the people:

The image of the church I like is that of the holy, faithful people of God. This is the definition I often use, and then there is that image from the Second Vatican Council’s ‘Dogmatic Constitution on the Church’ (No. 12). Belonging to a people has a strong theological value. In the history of salvation, God has saved a people. There is no full identity without belonging to a people. No one is saved alone, as an isolated individual, but God attracts us looking at the complex web of relationships that take place in the human community. God enters into this dynamic, this participation in the web of human relationships….The people itself constitutes a subject. And the church is the people of God on the journey through history, with joys and sorrows.

Expanding on that, he makes a clear that this people constitutes an expansive, open community:

This church with which we should be thinking is the home of all, not a small chapel that can hold only a small group of selected people. We must not reduce the bosom of the universal church to a nest protecting our mediocrity. And the church is Mother; the church is fruitful. It must be. You see, when I perceive negative behavior in ministers of the church or in consecrated men or women, the first thing that comes to mind is: ‘Here’s an unfruitful bachelor’ or ‘Here’s a spinster.’ They are neither fathers nor mothers, in the sense that they have not been able to give spiritual life.

And this means we need church leaders who draw others in with a patience that ensures that “no one is left behind”:

“How are we treating the people of God? I dream of a church that is a mother and shepherdess. The church’s ministers must be merciful, take responsibility for the people and accompany them like the Good Samaritan, who washes, cleans and raises up his neighbor. This is pure Gospel. God is greater than sin. The structural and organizational reforms are secondary—that is, they come afterward. The first reform must be the attitude.

It also means we need leaders ready and able to go after every “lost sheep”:

The people of God want pastors, not clergy acting like bureaucrats or government officials. The bishops, particularly, must be able to support the movements of God among their people with patience, so that no one is left behind. But they must also be able to accompany the flock that has a flair for finding new paths.

“Instead of being just a church that welcomes and receives by keeping the doors open, let us try also to be a church that finds new roads, that is able to step outside itself and go to those who do not attend Mass, to those who have quit or are indifferent.

This new pope seeks, not a purer, smaller, more dogmatically correct Church, but a bigger, more open, more merciful Church. 

Shades of John XXIII!

Against Proof-texting of Vatican II.  Asked about the legacy of Vatican II, Francis offers a “big picture” view of the Council as a historical event bigger than its texts:

Vatican II was a re-reading of the Gospel in light of contemporary culture. Vatican II produced a renewal movement that simply comes from the same Gospel. Its fruits are enormous. Just recall the liturgy. The work of liturgical reform has been a service to the people as a re-reading of the Gospel from a concrete historical situation.

He acknowledges that, even 50 years after the council, people still argue about “hermeneutics” (that is, how to interpret its decisions)--but he insists that its “irreversible” impact is above such disputes:

Yes, there are hermeneutics of continuity and discontinuity, but one thing is clear: the dynamic of reading the Gospel, actualizing its message for today—which was typical of Vatican II—is absolutely irreversible.

He even doubts that such disputes can be perfectly settled, since certainty is beyond us:

In this quest to seek and find God in all things there is still an area of uncertainty. There must be. If a person says that he met God with total certainty and is not touched by a margin of uncertainty, then this is not good. For me, this is an important key. If one has the answers to all the questions—that is the proof that God is not with him. It means that he is a false prophet using religion for himself.

He then takes aim at those who insist that our task now is to restore a perfect, secure form of Catholicism:

If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist, if he wants everything clear and safe, then he will find nothing. Tradition and memory of the past must help us to have the courage to open up new areas to God. Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal ‘security,’ those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists­—they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way, faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies. I have a dogmatic certainty: God is in every person’s life. God is in everyone’s life. Even if the life of a person has been a disaster, even if it is destroyed by vices, drugs or anything else—God is in this person’s life. You can, you must try to seek God in every human life. Although the life of a person is a land full of thorns and weeds, there is always a space in which the good seed can grow. You have to trust God.

Finally, Francis rejects the view that we promote the Council’s legacy (or the mission of the Church) by lamenting the state of the world around us:

There is a temptation to seek God in the past or in a possible future. God is certainly in the past because we can see the footprints. And God is also in the future as a promise. But the ‘concrete’ God, so to speak, is today. For this reason, complaining never helps us find God. The complaints of today about how ‘barbaric’ the world is—these complaints sometimes end up giving birth within the church to desires to establish order in the sense of pure conservation, as a defense. No: God is to be encountered in the world of today…God manifests himself in historical revelation, in history. Time initiates processes, and space crystallizes them. God is in history, in the processes.

Clearly, the new pope prefers the hopeful tone that Vatican II gave to Catholicism’s dialogue with contemporary world:

Christian hope is not a ghost and it does not deceive. It is a theological virtue and therefore, ultimately, a gift from God that cannot be reduced to optimism, which is only human. God does not mislead hope; God cannot deny himself. God is all promise.

This new pope is proving once again that Catholicism can advance in history even when its teachings do not change.  He is showing us that a new attitude, a new style, a new emphasis on the real priorities can renew the core of our tradition and free us from the traps of a fetish-faith, a puritanical Catholicism, and a literalist and legalist reading of Vatican II’s renewal of the Church..

Is Pope Francis resetting the Church’s course? Yes—he is setting us back to the future of Vatican II’s true legacy. If he succeeds, the wisdom of Catholic tradition will be more available—and more accessible—to the people of our world and our time.

   © Bernard   F. Swain PhD 2013

#402: Pope Francis: My Kind of Traditionalist--Part 1

Pope Francis provoked headlines and commentaries by the hundreds last week by his lengthy interview with an Italian Jesuit, subsequently published in English by America magazine.  One result is obvious: a fresh gust of positive PR for the Catholic Church, which has suffered almost constant bad press for the last 10 years or more.  The second result is a question: Is the Catholic Church about to change course?

For the first time in many years, I am beginning to feel optimistic about the future of Catholic leadership.

Fifty years ago tomorrow (September 29, 1963) the newly-elected Pope Paul VI opened the second session of Vatican Council II by repeating Pope John XXIII’s call for “a second Pentecost” and giving it four priorities: A better understanding of the Catholic Church; Church reforms; Advancing the unity of Christianity; and Dialogue with the world.

This brought a sigh of relief to millions who had held their breath after John died in June 1963, fearing that his vision for the Church’s future might have died with him.

In the last six months, Pope Francis has brought a similar sigh of relief to millions who have been fearing (in this case for many long years, not just months) that John’s vision was dying a slow death, dating back 45 years.

For it was only five years after Paul VI re-opened Vatican II that he issued “Humanae Vitae,” his encyclical reaffirming the most recent official teaching on contraception while rejecting any further revisions.  And five years after that, in January 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its infamous “Roe v Wade” decision.

No matter how we view these actions, their combined effect since 1973 has been gravely damaging for American Catholicism.  Taken together, they have divided Catholics and caused a generation of American bishops to encourage the public impression that the American hierarchy is composed chiefly of sex-obsessed celibate men, bent on the self-righteous insistence that only they understand human goodness.

During the 40 years since Roe v Wade, in fact, two more things made matters worse.  First, Catholics who took issue with the official positions on sex-related questions were increasingly labeled “not good Catholics” or “not real Catholics” or even “not Catholic at all.” Second, the outbreak of the sex-abuse scandal beginning in Boston in 2002 sharpened the image of a hierarchy simultaneously obsessed with sex and incompetent to deal with sex.  This undermined their moral authority on virtually all other issues and left them impotent to seed public affairs and policymaking with the wisdom from Catholic tradition.

When progressive Catholics lamented the lost focus on the core of Catholic tradition and invoked the legacy of Vatican II, conservatives derided them for falsifying the Council by citing its “spirit” rather than its “texts,” and claimed Popes John-Paul II and Benedict XVI as champions of a “definitive” or “authoritative” interpretation of Vatican II that promoted “continuity” rather than “rupture.”

The net result of all this polarization has been an official leadership dominated, in the U.S. at least, by three flawed tendencies.

First: Fetishism.  Any fetish obsesses over one small part of something rather than the whole (e.g., desiring someone’s big toe rather than their whole body).  Too often in recent years, U.S. Catholicism’s official leadership has been obsessed with sex-related “culture war” issues like contraception, gay marriage, sex in the media, and abortion, as if they represent the core of Catholic tradition.  Whether intentionally or unwittingly, they have revived the distorted Catholic identity of the pre-Conciliar era, in which Catholics saw their tradition mainly as a moral system, saw morality mainly as a set of rules, and saw rules on sex as the most important ones.  In the extreme, this made Catholicism a fetish-religion for the sex-obsessed.

Second: Puritanism.  As Catholic numbers declined across America, many conservative Catholics seemed satisfied rather than alarmed.  To them, the loss of “cafeteria Catholics” or secularized Catholics simply meant that the Church was purging itself of its impurities.  Once everyone contaminated by contemporary values (rather than “traditional” values) drifted away, the Church would be a smaller, purer, more authentic vessel of God’s will.

Third: Proof-texting.  There is a long practice of Catholic teachers quoting whatever Bible passages can be located to “prove” their point.  This means using Gospel texts out of context and without any historical or literary analysis to gauge the writer’s true message.  This clashes directly with modern Biblical scholarship, which has shown that isolating Biblical texts to prove a point often distorts their real meaning and thus violates the Word of God.

Some Catholic leaders have taken the same approach to the documents of Vatican II.  They will find passages supporting their view and rip them out of their literary and historical context.  Anyone who objects is accused of promoting a mythical, even fictional “spirit” of the Council.

What is lost by such proof-texting is (1) the appreciation of Vatican II as an historical event guided by the Holy Spirit, (2) the recognition that John XXIII proclaimed it to be a rebirth of the Church, (3) the acknowledgement that the Council’s driving themes, named by both John and Paul VI, were mercy and hopeful dialogue with the outside world, and (4) the recognition that the Council texts are imperfect, political documents, often worded to appeal to as broad a base of bishops as possible, and thus often containing contradictory statements.

In short, proof-testing pretends that it is the documents alone, rather than the Council itself, which was divinely inspired. The documents become self-defining, rather than being defined by the actual history of the Council.

Thus proof-texting the Council allows conservative leaders to portray the Council as they wish it had been: as an event that restated rather than transformed Catholic tradition.  Often this also allows them to portray John-Paul II and Benedict XVI as historical giants whose groundbreaking work rightly overshadows (or at least defines) the Council.

With all this in mind, it is no mystery why Pope Francis’ interview sparked such rapid and widespread commentary.  For in one fell swoop, he took direct aim at all three of these flawed tendencies.  The result was a “triple play” against any distortion of Catholic tradition or the legacy of Vatican II.

Let’s see how.

Against Fetishism.  Pope Francis clearly rejects the idea that the Church’s mission can be advanced by focusing narrowly on a small piece of Catholic tradition.  But he knows that this has happened:

The church sometimes has locked itself up in small things, in small-minded rules. The most important thing is the first proclamation: Jesus Christ has saved you. And the ministers of the church must be ministers of mercy above all.

Specifically, he rejects a strategy that plunges the Church into the “culture wars” by ripping some “traditional values” out of their real traditional context:

We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. This is not possible. I have not spoken much about these things, and I was reprimanded for that. But when we speak about these issues, we have to talk about them in a context. The teaching of the church, for that matter, is clear and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time.

 Francis makes it clear that a focus must remain on the core of Catholic tradition, which means keeping our priorities straight:

The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently. Proclamation in a missionary style focuses on the essentials, on the necessary things: this is also what fascinates and attracts more, what makes the heart burn, as it did for the disciples at Emmaus. We have to find a new balance; otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel. The proposal of the Gospel must be more simple, profound, radiant. It is from this proposition that the moral consequences then flow.

The point here is that too much official leadership has conveyed an unbalanced view of Catholicism by stressing moral principles over the whole message of the gospel:

The proclamation of the saving love of God comes before moral and religious imperatives. Today sometimes it seems that the opposite order is prevailing…The message of the Gospel, therefore, is not to be reduced to some aspects that, although relevant, on their own do not show the heart of the message of Jesus Christ.

The new pope could not be clearer: the fetishism that reduces Catholicism must give way to a focus on “the heart” of our faith.

NEXT: Francis takes aim at Catholic Puritanism and Proof-texting of the Council.

  © Bernard   F. Swain PhD 2013