Can Pope Francis Revitalize the Catholic Church?

By Brian Coyne
The Catholica
March 14, 2013

http://www.catholica.com.au/editorial/050_edit_140313.php

The surprises keep on coming. Firstly the shock resignation of Pope Benedict; and now the surprising election of Jorge Mario Cardinal Bergoglio — the runner-up to the 2005 conclave but one whom virtually all the commentators had written out of contention as papabile for the 2013 conclave. What messages can we read into this: that the Holy Spirit works in surprising ways? That the Cardinal electors have chosen to give us a pope more in the mold of the humility of Jesus than the ostentation of the Empire of Constantine? Or that the heavies in the College of Cardinals have given up and decided to give the world, and themselves, a leader who would not be too much of a disturbance to their comforts?

We live in interesting times.

As one commentator on the BBC noted within an hour of the announcement, the election of Pope Francis creates three precedents that have great appeal:

The commentator might have added that here we have a man with a demonstrated track record of seeking to identify himself more with the humility and person of Jesus Christ than the ostentation of the Roman Emperors and European royalty.

There is reason to be hopeful that this man might have great appeal to the burgeoning Catholic population of the Developing World. Here is a man with a demonstrated track record in living the "preferential option for the poor". He may well help re-establish some highly visible and symbolic association between the global mission of Catholicism, and Christianity, with the substantive mission of the humble carpenter from Nazareth who is supposed to be the inspiration for the mission of the Church in the world today.

Questions remain...

Questions remain. Does he have the talent, capacity and humility to re-evangelize the First World?

The dogma in the hierarchy appears to be that the faithful in the educated, affluent, socially sophisticated First World have been sucked out of the Church by the distractions of affluence, consumerism, and a whole litany of other more ideological and philosophical "-isms": relativism, secularism, communism, marxism, libertarianism, feminism, anarchism and so on. At the end of the day is any of this an accurate assessment of what has been going on in the heartland of Europe and her former colonies in countries like the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand? What is the mindview of this Argentinian Jesuit that explains the 20th Century apostacy of the West? Will having a pope donning the papal equivalent of sack cloth and ashes be enough to reverse the decline in the First World that, in all probablity, will end up being exported to the Developing World as their standards of living, education, affluence and social sophistication increase with their aspirations to have all those things that we in the Western world today take so much for granted?

Here at Catholica, we would argue that the "dogma of the hierarchy" in their assessment about what has been going on in the Western World has been seriously flawed. At the best assessment it has been only half correct. The half we might agree with is that some, perhaps half of the nearly 90% who have given up on listening to bishops, and participating in the pastoral mission of their church, have done so because it has become "all too hard" to think about the spiritual dimension of life. They HAVE been distracted, or seduced, away from the vision of Christ by the distractions of the secular and consumerist world. Where their mindset has been seriously flawed is in the assessment of the other half who have left which, we submit, has been because their Church has ceased to speak in their language and has resorted to some equivalent of doctrinal and dogmatic baby babble for the intellectually and emotionally challenged.

The hierarchical mindset of the institution for the past nearly three and half decades was well summed up by those words the then Joseph Ratzinger used in 1979 to justify the censures placed on his former academic colleague, Dr Hans Kung:

"The Christian believer is a simple person: bishops should protect the faith of these little people against the power of intellectuals."

Isn't the lesson we can learn from that: Treat your faithful like idiots and they will return the compliment in kind by ignoring what you have to say?

The challenge facing Pope Francis...

The challenge facing Pope Francis if he is to re-evangelize the intellectual heartlands of Catholicism will NOT be achieved simply by trying to emulate the external signs of Jesus' "preferential option for the poor". The man also needs to get into the thinking and mindset of Jesus about how any of us, rich or poor, educated or uneducated, in sickness and in health, navigate this great journey we are all on called "life". Western humanity, we submit — or at least the educated discerning elements in that population — reject the characterisation or "politicisation" of Jesus as some politically conservative numbskull who offered some simplistic and fundamentalist overtly "political agenda" as the pathway to salvation, redemption and eternal life.

The problem the new pope faces in the educated world, is not simply that people have been turned off by the recent ostentation in Catholicism, nor the corruption in the Curia, or the lack of moral integrity in the response of the leadership to the scandal of clerical abuse, the deeper problem today is that many intelligent people are no longer convinced by the theology and intellectual underpinnings of Catholicism. As I suggested in a recent paper to teachers:

There is today this massive disjunction between what the leaders of the Church want their followers to believe and what they (the majority of followers) actually believe is true — and across a whole phalanx of issues albeit the initial disjunction tended to be over teachings on human sexuality. Today I believe the issues go to fundamental interpretations of belief including things like the meaning of terms like the Resurrection, the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth, Atonement Theology, the very nature of God and the nature of the relationship the Divine calls humankind into, and the very purpose of believing, worshipping, praying, or having a church at all.

The challenge facing our new pope is whether he is going to continue treating the flock in the Western world as "simple people" and "little people" who are incapable of thinking for themselves or if he is going to confer some dignity on them as people capable of developing a Catholic moral conscience and being guided by it independently of any hierarchy sitting on their proverbial shoulders like some guardian angels. It will not be enough simply to run around "dressing down" as some humble carpenter. He needs, we suggest, to become far, far more humble in his "attitude of mind" compared to his immediate predecessors — towards those whom he has been elected to serve. Is Jorge Mario Bergoglio, as Pope Francis, capable of taking on the fundamentalists in the secular political administrations in his part of the world, and the pharisaical fundamentalists who have been "let loose" by the late Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI in the lay realms of the Catholic Church? That will be the ultimate test, we suggest, of the assessments we make when we next meet at a conclave and review where Catholicism has got to in the world in shining the light of Christ on this great endeavour we are all engaged in called "Life"!