As Francis is a very popular Pope, the question posed by the heading of this commentary could elicit some surprise. However, there are many inside and outside the Church who would be jubilant if Pope Francis were to just shut up.
Pope Francis says and does things that we are not accustomed to hear popes say or see popes do. Directly phoning different people is just one example. Probably the calls we never hear about are the more important. There was the peculiar situation when the Vatican Press Office released a statement saying that papal phone conversations are not an ordinary way of expressing the magisterium, or something to the effect.
It happened when the Pope phoned an Argentine woman and he allegedly told her she can receive communion though she is civilly married to a divorced man. We will never know what he really said and its context. Memes about the subject went viral and conservative bloggers were not at all pleased.
The same Catholic bloggers would have preferred him not to open Pandora’s Box about the reception of communion by the divorced and remarried. Cardinal Walter Kasper has turned out to be more outspoken than the Pope on this subject. Several of his statements on the subject, particularly during his recent trip to North America promoting his book, Mercy: The Essence of the Gospel and the Key to Christian Life, were countered by a hostile barrage from the Catholic right. Kasper is also being strongly criticised by several high Church dignitaries.
The Pope, nevertheless, keeps on praising Kasper and his theology of mercy. Could it be that he is ‘using’ Kasper to fly kites on the subject? Pope Francis looks like the incarnation of the Franciscan ‘dove’ but he was trained and nourished by the Jesuit ‘snake’ – for whom, as the Gospel states, shrewdness comes as a second nature.
There are many more outside the Church who yearn for Pope Francis’s silence.
No jubilant support for Francis is forthcoming from the stalwarts of the neo-liberal economic system. The Pope lambasts this system, time and time again equating it, in an interview with La Avanguardia that has just been published, with the “sin of idolatry, the idolatry of money”. He described the high percentage of unemployment among youths as “an atrocity”, adding that “we are discarding an entire generation to maintain an economic system that cannot hold up anymore.”
Then, as if this was not critical enough of neo-liberalism, he upped the ante. He clearly stated that this economic system needs wars to feed on, hence the regional wars that flare up from time to time. Even Noam Chomsky, the eminent darling of left-wing activists, could hardly have been more eloquent. A recent speech of Pope Francis did not endear him with other swathes of contemporary culture.
Speaking to Italian pastoral operators, Pope Francis dubbed our contemporary society as “the society of orphans”. He said: “Hectic days and long commutes tire parents who then have no time to talk or play with their children.” Today’s children are “orphans without affection or love because everyone is in too much of a hurry: Dad is tired, mum is tired. They are orphaned!”
He adds that they are orphans “with no memories of the family, because their grandparents have been moved away to a nursing home”. The Pope’s attack is mainly on the economic and cultural structures that bring about this situation, the parents and children are considered by the Pope to be its victims.
In the above-mentioned interview with La Avanguardia, he did not shy away from a foray into very controversial issues that fan up a lot of emotions, mainly the secessionist movement in Scotland, the Padania in Italy and Catalonia in Spain. Though he did not express an outright disapproval of these movements, he was anything but supportive of these movements. Secessionists were not at all amused.
Many – inside or outside the Church, albeit for different reasons – may ask why Pope gets involved in such controversial subjects. Such a question would probably surprise the Pope. His answer would be very simple: A Church that is interested in the good of the human person cannot but be interested in each and every subject that in some way or another affects humanity or section of it.
As Archbishop Paul Cremona said last Monday, the right of the Church to speak its mind is “never explicitly denied” but more subtle strategies are used to undermine it. Some try to discredit the Church by referring to unsavoury incidents in the past. Others just refuse to engage in a meaningful dialogue with it, saying “what else should one expect the Church to say”.
The worst way to undermine this position of the Church, however, is when the Church itself retreats from the public sphere, not only, in so doing, acting out of fear, but also fearing to act. This all-paralysing fear, often masked as pious prudence, leaves orphans those who believe, those who thirst for guidance, those for whom the bells toll with a call to justice.
No jubilant support for Francis is forthcoming from the stalwarts of the neo-liberal economic system
It is bad enough that there is, according to Pope Francis, a society of orphans. It would be much worse if on top there would also be a Church of orphans.
• I don’t make it a habit of commenting on the result of criminal juries. Jurors spend days listening to evidence. They can also assess the non-verbal demeanour of all those who give evidence. I respect them for this service.
I and, for that matter, the rest of us, only read the newspapers’ reports. These are sometimes too brief and we generally read them in a hurry. However, rightly or wrongly, people form their opinions and perceptions based on these reports.
Many were surprised, not to say deeply worried, when a person accused of the attempted murder of another man, during a court hearing to boot, was found only guilty of causing grevious bodily harm. The aggressor struck his victim with a knife 14 times! How many times then, people asked, does one have to strike another person to be found guilty of attempted murder?
The court described this person as the man who “terrorised Gozo” and as a serial bully who has no right to be shown mercy as he never showed mercy towards others. The maximum sentence was imposed.
Should there not be a good public relations office which would explain to the legally uncultured such as me, the possible rationale leading to such sentences? This is just one example and perhaps it is not the worse one. When no clarifications or explanations are forthcoming, people do tend to strengthen their suspicions and distrust, whether right or wrong.
joseph.borg@um.edu.mt