Wrong Reasons

 

Some lapsed Catholics thought the new headmaster had a new and refreshing approach to teaching.

 

This article from the NBC is a rather good example of what is wrong with the perception (I am talking here merely of the perception: the reality might be much worse) of this papacy.

If the trend described by the article is true – and there is no reason to suppose it isn’t, at least at the level of momentary fashion and purely emotional excitement – the new Pope is found an attractive proposition by lapsed Catholics for the wrong reasons. They look at him and see a Church that is less like the Church and more like them. “Cool”, they say, “I like it”, and you can see the nods of appreciation of the sympathetic journalist.

Pope Francis does everything he can to at least let people perceive that the Church might, divesting Herself of her traditions, her pomp, her liturgical exactness, become a place where they can feel comfortable instead of encouraging them to change and feel (actually: be; let us stop talking about feelings all the time) comfortable within the Church. As a result, those who end up “feeling” nearer to the Church will do so bringing with them the expectation that the Church changes in order to keep them. It is a wrong allegiance based on the wrong premises. It’s the same as liking a school because it does not bother you with those unpleasant things like spelling.

Also note the astonishing shallowness of some of the arguments: if one has the gut to say with a straight face that he or she now feels nearer to the Church because the Pope used to travel by bus, how solid can be his (or her) newly found nearness to the Church? This is not much different from saying one is encouraged to go to Mass again “because the Pope washes women’s feet”. It’s the wrong mentality, and the impact with the Truth can be softened as much as the Pope can, but in the end it will be there and it will still be brutal. Unless, of course, this Pope does not manage the feat of converting himself to un-Catholicism so that un-Catholics may identify with him.

This Pope is arousing hopes in the wrong people (meaning here: in people with the wrong mentality) for the wrong reasons. With his shallow message of ostentatious simplicity  he is deluding the shallow and being ostentatious in the other way. They are attracted to him because they see in him glimpses of what the Church is not allowed to be: the friend of all their mistakes.

The last person interviewed by the journalist, allegedly a 70 years old ill-lived man striding towards hell, points out to the fact that this is in the end just another “retro-Pope”, and points out to all the contradiction of the present situation: a Pope who will never manage to be who he cannot be, but might manage rather well to be the caricature of who he should be. The Pope can’t avoid being “retro”. He can only become ridiculous, or heretical, in trying to be less so. 

Mundabor