I heard from a mother of four children – one adopted, another disabled from birth -- who’d spent years counseling pregnant girls and opening prolife clinics. She wanted to know why the Pope seemed to dismiss her sacrifices. A priest said the Pope “has implicitly accused brother priests who are serious about moral issues of being small minded,” and that “[if you’re a priest,] being morally serious is now likely to get you publicly cast as a problem.” Another priest wrote that “the problem is that [the Holy Father] makes all of the wrong people happy, people who will never believe in the Gospel and who will continue to persecute the Church.”
We can draw some useful lessons from these reactions. First, we need to be very careful in taking mass media coverage of the Catholic Church at face value. Second, we need to actually read the Holy Father’s interview for ourselves, and pray over it, and then read it again, especially in light of the Year of Faith. A priest here in Philadelphia asked for a show of hands at a Mass last Sunday, and nearly everyone in the church, which was full, had heard about the Pope’s interview. But only five persons had actually read it. Third and finally, we need to open our hearts – all of us – and let God lead us where he needs us to go through the words of the Holy Father.
Pope Francis does not at all turn away from Catholic teaching on matters such as sexuality and the sanctity of human life. How could he? We should remember that Mother Teresa and Dorothy Day – two women with an intimate, passionate devotion to the poor – also saw abortion as a brutal crime against the poorest and most defenseless of the poor: the unborn child.
Among the many vital things the Pope reminds us of in his interview is the new and drastically different condition of the modern world that God seeks to save. It’s one thing to argue about abortion and sexuality when both disputants in the debate share the same basic moral framework and language; the same meaning to words like “justice;” the same set of beliefs about the nature of the human person. But it’s quite another thing when we no longer have that common vocabulary. The modern world is mission territory. It’s morally fractured. Our politics, as Alasdair MacIntyre once famously wrote, is civil war pursued by other means. The modern heart can only be won back by a radical witness of Christian discipleship – a renewed kind of shared community life obedient to God’s Commandments, but also on fire with the Beatitudes lived more personally and joyfully by all of us.
There’s a passage from the Pope’s interview we need to remember in a special way in the weeks and years ahead:
“Proclamation of [Jesus Christ] 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 proclamation of the saving love of God comes before moral and religious imperatives.”
