A friend of mine who is rather skeptical of the Roman Catholic Church and Christianity in general, recently asked me what I think about Pope Francis I appearing on the cover of Rolling Stone.
I replied, “I don’t.”
Not satisfied with that answer, she said that she thought it was kind of neat to see him there. To her, he projects—and I’m paraphrasing here—a hip, modern flair. Surely that is what the Church needs right now, no? After all, he wants to bring people back right?
My answer was that it’s the same message as it’s always been, just a different messenger. Ultimately it is God who draws us.
No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up at the last day.
~Jn 6:44 NIV
Mark Benelli, in his article for Rolling Stone, takes her view. A view that much of the media has adopted since Francis was elected.
He assumes, incorrectly, that because Francis I appears more hip, more in tune with the age, that he is a revolutionary who will do away with the Church’s moral teaching in favor of one more in line with the relativistic milieu of our post-modern world. In a typical passage dripping with snark Mr. Benelli writes:
After the disastrous papacy of Benedict, a staunch traditionalist who looked like he should be wearing a striped shirt with knife-fingered gloves and menacing teenagers in their nightmares, Francis’ basic mastery of skills like smiling in public seemed a small miracle to the average Catholic. But he had far more radical changes in mind. By eschewing the papal palace for a modest two-room apartment, by publicly scolding church leaders for being “obsessed” with divisive social issues like gay marriage, birth control and abortion (“Who am I to judge?” Francis famously replied when asked his views on homosexual priests) and – perhaps most astonishingly of all – by devoting much of his first major written teaching to a scathing critique of unchecked free-market capitalism, the pope revealed his own obsessions to be more in line with the boss’ son.
Because Francis is a decidedly different personality than his esteemed predecessor, many make the mistake of assuming Benedict was just a hard-ass, who was also wrong, and that Francis is the “real” Christian because the former emphasized the reality of sin, and the latter the importance of mercy.
Don’t be fooled: Both men believe in both.
Each, in his own imperfect way, tries to hand on the Faith as it was delivered to him. Matters of style mean nothing compared to the content of that faith.
In his encyclical Lumen Fidei, Francis states:
Similarly important is the link between faith and the Decalogue. Faith, as we have said, takes the form of a journey, a path to be followed, which begins with an encounter with the living God. It is in the light of faith, of complete entrustment to the God who saves, that the Ten Commandments take on their deepest truth, as seen in the words which introduce them: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt” (Ex 20:2). The Decalogue is not a set of negative commands, but concrete directions for emerging from the desert of the selfish and self-enclosed ego in order to enter into dialogue with God, to be embraced by his mercy and then to bring that mercy to others. Faith thus professes the love of God, origin and upholder of all things, and lets itself be guided by this love in order to journey towards the fullness of communion with God. The Decalogue appears as the path of gratitude, the response of love, made possible because in faith we are receptive to the experience of God’s transforming love for us. And this path receives new light from Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount (cf. Mt 5-7).
… Since faith is one, it must be professed in all its purity and integrity. Precisely because all the articles of faith are interconnected, to deny one of them, even of those that seem least important, is tantamount to distorting the whole. Each period of history can find this or that point of faith easier or harder to accept: hence the need for vigilance in ensuring that the deposit of faith is passed on in its entirety (cf. 1 Tim 6:20) and that all aspects of the profession of faith are duly emphasized. Indeed, inasmuch as the unity of faith is the unity of the Church, to subtract something from the faith is to subtract something from the veracity of communion. The Fathers described faith as a body, the body of truth composed of various members, by analogy with the body of Christ and its prolongation in the Church.[42] The integrity of the faith was also tied to the image of the Church as a virgin and her fidelity in love for Christ her spouse; harming the faith means harming communion with the Lord.[43] The unity of faith, then, is the unity of a living body; this was clearly brought out by Blessed John Henry Newman when he listed among the characteristic notes for distinguishing the continuity of doctrine over time its power to assimilate everything that it meets in the various settings in which it becomes present and in the diverse cultures which it encounters,[44] purifying all things and bringing them to their finest expression. Faith is thus shown to be universal, catholic, because its light expands in order to illumine the entire cosmos and all of history.
The teaching of the Church has been, and will ever be, that sin is real. It is because of the reality of sin that Christ came into the world to show us God’s mercy. That does not absolve us of striving against sin however.
Look, I know that Christians can be very judgmental and hypocritical, of which I am first, to quote St. Paul. But the Roman Catholic Church has no monopoly on that attitude. Some of the most judgmental people I have ever met are those who profess no particular faith at all.
Some of them even write for Rolling Stone.
