Pope Francis hoped to convert the world. Has the world converted the Church?
National Post, 19 March 2023
In addressing worldly priorities, has Catholicism become more like liberal Protestantism?
Buona sera!
So began Pope Francis on the balcony of St. Peter’s basilica after his election 10 years ago this week. Good evening!
The watching world loved it. Here was a friendly, informal sort, who eschewed the traditional vestments for the occasion and spoke to the vast assembly in the same way he did when visiting the ordinary folk of the slums, as was his custom in Buenos Aires. The balcony appearance prefigured all that was to come in the subsequent decade.
Thirty-five years earlier, Pope John Paul II had begun instead with a pious declaration: “Praised be Jesus Christ!”
As between the two approaches, the latter is vertical, the former horizontal. A great flattening began that night.
Pope Francis spoke that same night about promoting a “great spirit of fraternity” in the world. He knew from the beginning though that emphasizing the second great commandment — love of neighbour — risked obscuring the first: love of God.
The next day, preaching to the cardinals in the Sistine Chapel, he sounded a warning: “If we do not profess Jesus Christ, things go wrong. We may become a charitable NGO, but not the Church … When we do not profess Jesus Christ, we profess the worldliness of the devil, a demonic worldliness.”
That’s why John Paul began with Jesus Christ, rather than a universal greeting of no religious content. The great gamble of the Francis pontificate is that in addressing worldly priorities — ecology, immigration, financial speculation, arms production, poverty — the world will give him a hearing about God’s merciful love, redemption in Jesus Christ and the real possibility of sanctification in the Holy Spirit.
His great apprehension, repeated constantly, has been that instead of converting the world, the Church will slide into worldliness.
Ten years on, those fears have been partially realized. While superficial observers worry about conservative critics of Pope Francis, it is liberals who threaten to consume all remaining energies in the pontificate.
Days before his tenth anniversary, an assembly of the Catholic Church in Germany, including a majority of the German bishops, voted by large majorities in favour of the world’s menu for the Church — sexual liberalism, intercommunion and women’s ordination, all served up with a side order of climate activism. Very little about Jesus Christ.
Regarding the spectre of a de facto schism, Pope Francis himself quipped that Germany already has a liberal Protestant church; it doesn’t need another one. That, however, is how the Francis project has been seen in Germany and in many other places besides — to make Catholicism more like liberal Protestantism.
Returning from his most recent trip to South Sudan, alongside the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Moderator of the Church of Scotland, Pope Francis included them in his privileged pulpit for preaching to the world, the airborne press conference. Ages past had the papal bull. Now there is the papal flight.
The ecumenical trip was to promote peace. The journalists on board wanted to talk about homosexuality.
“Just a very short observation,” offered Moderator Iain Greenshields in the papal presence. “There is nowhere in my reading of the four Gospels where I see Jesus turning anyone away. There is nowhere in the four Gospels where I see anything other than Jesus expressing love to whoever he meets.”
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