Pope Francis may turn out to be the most important pope since Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli entered the world scene in 1958 as Pope John XXIII.
Like John, Francis seems to have a generous heart and an equally generous theology. John’s most famous saying was: “We were all made in God’s image, and thus, we are all Godly alike.”
Francis has said: The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone!
But what has really put the wind up conservatives in the church—as well as putting wind in the sails of liberals—is a 12,000-word interview with the Jesuit magazine America titled A Big Heart Open to God. (See americamagazine.org for the complete text.)
It strikes me as not entirely coincidental that this interview came out just days before the Oct. 11 anniversary of the first session of Vatican II in 1962. But that is beside the point. What surprised not only Roman Catholics but the whole world were his comments that the church needs to pay less attention to rules and morals and focus more on pastoral and social justice issues.
“We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods,” said the pope. “This is not possible … it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time.”
It is not that Francis disagrees with his church’s teaching on these subjects, but he clearly wants to shift the emphasis away from them as the top priorities for Catholics.
This may signal one of the most profound shifts in Christianity in more than 100 years, and is certainly the most profound shift in the Roman Catholic Church since John XXIII threw open the doors to ecumenism and launched Vatican II, whose reforms conservatives have since been working assiduously to close.
The impact of Francis’s comments will be felt widely across Christendom, because he identified what one writer in the National Catholic Reporter, Michael Sean Winters, called “[t]he fetish for moral clarity on certain moral issues [that] has led to many unfortunate results.”
As Winters goes on to say: “the fixation on ‘intrinsic evil’ and its role in determining the Church’s stance in the public square has led to a deflated concern to focus on grave, but not intrinsic evils, like poverty.”
These twin fetishes, moral clarity and intrinsic evil, infected many Christian denominations and turned Christianity in the West into something of a laughing stock at best and despised at worst for being morally hypocritical, intellectually bereft and utterly irrelevant.
And, as has happened in other denominations, hard-liners who trumpeted church authority to back up their
obsessions are now challenging their ultimate authority, suggesting he doesn’t think clearly.
Perhaps it’s just the opposite; that he, in fact, thinks very clearly. And in so doing, is provoking people to think very clearly about their own faith.
We should all do that.
