Catholicism is exciting. A few weeks ago, many Catholics awaited their new leader because of an unexpected retirement. Pope Benedict XVI stepped down as the Vicar of Christ because of his weakened health. The last pope to resign was Gregory XII, 598 years ago due to the Great Western Schism.
The Catholic Church experienced a lot more firsts as well. Pope Francis, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, is the first latin American pope, first Jesuit pope, and the first Pope to pick the name Francis from Saint Francis of Assisi, who lived a simple life and died in poverty. Also, Pope Francis’ installation mass is the first to ever be attended by an Orthodox Christian leader, Bartholomew I.
For many like me, these are amazing historical events. For others, Pope Francis is merely a new face promoting the same old problems. Critics have already attacked Francis for his views on Catholic social teaching and his personal life story. They are out there to defame him instead of actually understanding him.
Pope Francis does espouse conservative cultural beliefs. He holds views that don’t mesh well with today’s secular world. Yes, he’s against gay marriage: in fact, he clashed against Argentine President Cristina Kirchner when she legalized same-sex marriage. However, his political approach is less dogmatic and more pragmatic. Pope Francis is privately known to support civil unions, a much more politically-driven solution that doesn’t conflict with the Catholic teaching of holding marriage between a man and a woman.
But his critics don’t bother to look at his past. They keep harping on him with unrealistic demands and want Pope Francis to be of this world. They want him to adopt the spreading secular values that the Church is against. Just look at the The New Yorker: the publication insinuates that Pope Francis needs to enact new reforms that align more and more with current social changes. The writer, Jane Kramer, argues that the election of this new pope means that “you will not see women in the priesthood anytime soon; or married clergy; or an end to the bans on divorce, abortion, and contraception; or a reprieve for the nuns in trousers who go froth to give food, music, and solace to the poor, or even an acknowledgment that ‘unrepentant’ gay and lesbian Catholic men and women, might conceivably, get to heaven.”
The New Yorker also dared to mention an Argentine falsehood. Kramer’s article cited the accusation that then- Father Jorge Mario Bergoglio worked with the Argentine military dictatorship by turning in two priests to be tortured and accepted the military’s initiative to send babies from the desaparecidos–dead revolutionary parents–into military families. Such accusations against Bergoglio are embarrassing.
The problematic part of these accusations is that they were made in Argentina. Pagina 12 is the leftist newspaper that keeps funneling articles that make Bergoglio look like a boogeyman instead of a genuine person. They perpetuate falsehoods instead of reporting that Bergoglio actually persuaded Argentine Dictator Videla to release the two priests he supposedly turned in. There is actual testimony from 2010 which shows Bergoglio’s frustration and his 1976 demand that the priests be released. Bergoglio also helped many to hide away from the vicious regime and helped them to leave the country. Pope Francis will actually canonize one of the assassinated priests, Carlos Murias.
Of course these genuine stories don’t sell in extreme liberal newspapers. Bergoglio could have been executed for helping any rebels from the government’s opposition.
Shame on these individuals. As an Argentine and Catholic, I am appalled by these accusations. Instead of actually celebrating, these people, along with President Kirchner, are unhappy about Pope Francis’ election since he is well-known for disagreeing with leftist policies. Congressman De Narvaez points out that then-Archbishop Bergoglio was on Kirchner’s Nixon-styled enemies list. That is no way to treat a new pope or member of her opposition; however, Kirchner has been quick to ask the newly anointed Pope Francis for favors. She recently asked him to claim British Falkland Islands to be Argentine.
Argentina is ruled by a bunch of ignorant and opportunistic secular leaders that are disinterested in Bergoglio’s life. They want to use him for political reasons instead of helping the Catholic Church.
The bottom line is, Pope Francis is a good man. He’s a compassionate Catholic. As strong as some of his ideas may be, have any of his critics looked at his actual life and experiences? Do they know that Archbishop Bergoglio went to an HIV/AIDS and drug victim hospice to bless them and wash their feet? Do they know that he opted to live in a small apartment instead of a mansion for the archbishop of Buenos Aires? Do they know that he rode the public bus instead of using a limousine? These are acts of austerity and kindness that contrast with a Church that festers with consumerism and opulence. This is an average man like Father Francis of Assisi.
But Bergoglio’s critics don’t want to hear or learn these facts. They are out there trying to suck any kind of excitement from the Catholic Church and trying to kill it or turn into a secular safe haven. “The Catholic Church will only be embraced by its critics if it becomes pro-gay marriage, pro-choice, pro-contraception, anti-celibacy, pro-female priests…” etc. You get the general idea. But why should the church change this way? Why should the Church listen to The New Yorker or to Pagina 12?
The Church should listen to the Holy Spirit. There are several aspects of the Church that need to change, and the Church is already on the path to changing them by electing Pope Francis. The only thing Catholics like myself can do is pray for him as he asked on Twitter.
With defamation like this already mounting, he needs prayer. He needs our blessing.
Alex Uzarowics | Knox College | @AUzarowicz
I honestly think that Pope Francis’ position on gay marriage is understandable, though I’d still disagree, since I don’t think anyone’s going to tell Catholics they have to marry gay couples. Civil unions are just a way to try to avoid putting marriage as something for gay couples just because it makes people uncomfortable rather than actually being concerned about something that only a vast minority of marriage equality advocates are even suggesting.
Someone posted something on Facebook that actually makes legal sense. Churches are primarily about wedding people in a religious sense, not binding them together in the legal context of getting a marriage license. Of course, the religious official can sign it, but as I recall, so can a judge or magistrate, among a few other secular examples.
The Catholic church’s positions on abortion are a bit more troubling, not to mention the issue of condoms in African nations that is one of the most notorious next to the covering up of priests sexually abusing children.
@Holding Nothing
I may risk going off on a tangent but you mentioned condoms in Africa, which I think is actually more “notorious” than it deserves. If memory serves Benedict, while he was still the pontiff, seemed to indicate that condom use to prevent the spread of HIV, while still immoral, constituted something of a movement toward the good (meaning of course the Catholic interpretation of the good.) While it doesn’t exactly fit nicely into a quantifiable moral scale it seems sensible given the moral strictures in place within the Catholic view of sexuality.
True, but he seemed to be the minority on this in terms of the Catholic position on it. I could sympathize with a position that acknowledges that birth control is not some absolute evil as the Catholic Church still seems to lean towards.
Their view of sexuality seems so overly pragmatic that any aesthetic appreciation, the unitive purpose they speak of, is secondary to the functional and biological basis, which I find ridiculous, even though I would also consider myself a pragmatist.
Again the question of duty: what can we reasonable demand (coerce) from someone for the common good?
A good way to screen applicants for law school would be to ask them to define law. Aquinas did so: a mandate of reason promulgated by authority for the common good. It’s certainly a start.
I came across of photo of the brand-new John Paul II yesterday and he, too, looked full of life in his first days. But, at least in recollection, I also sense he looked like he thought he was the man of the hour. Whenever you think that about yourself, you’re not.
This pope scares the hell out of the Israel crowd. Read about Francis, that book about him and the Sultan, about his visit to meet the enemy during the crusades. He was very political, very canny in that realm. This is no rehearsal, the auto-body guy told me once: this is it, this is the real deal. Politics is the name for how you show if you’re one of the sheep or one of the goats in Matthew 25: it’s how you answer the question, “who is my neighbor?”
But what does this all have to do with conservative politics? I think it reminds us that politics needs language, a philsophical foundation, and not a relativist/reductionist/positivist/solipsist one. Obviously those are all pejoratives: slam words. A Sister of Mercy philosophy professor told me that there was an official Catholic philosophy, called “moderate realism”. If you read Rahner (SJ) or Aquinas (a tiny bit), you’ll think of “Thomism” but realize it’s not just or at all doctrinairess (“I believe whatever the Pope believes”), in fact, it’s so personal and real it’s absolutely unsettling. Try out the phrase “the divine essence is existence itself” in Thomas Aquinas. Rahner, Karl, that is, says knowing and being are one and the same (in “Spirit in the World”, the foundation, as a rejected Ph.D. thesis, for his lifework which may have supplied the foundation for John XXIII’s “opening the windows in the church” at Vatican II). That’s very heavy. “Moderate realism” argues, I’ll say on my own authority, that we can know a little bit and that well enough to make us responsible for how we act on it. E.g., “there is no knowledge without the phantasm”, the mental image, derived fromn sensory experience. So you always know something, if anything, in and by what you’re focusing on in your mind’s eye. Look at something, wonder what it is, and you’ll notice that, at the crucial moment of deciding what you’re looking at, you went up into your head for an instant. Into the imagination, as Thomas and Karl put it. And yet the imagination is also where delusion can operate, where we are free to think exactly what we want. Catholic thought seems not to have delved into this side of it, the seamy sordid side, and yet, without that side, what is freedom?
So we need a vocabulary for politics, and law may be that vocabulary, but just because it says “Law School” doesn’t make it so.
“A Sick Secular World”. Really? Is the entire secular world “sick” because of the actions of some secular commentators? Would you find it fair and reasonable if a secular person called the entire Catholic church sick and twisted because some of its members have used positions of authority to abuse children, and others have helped cover that abuse up?
@Trilby – Yes, the entire “secular” world is sick. They have left any morals that they once had at the door.
That doesn’t seem like an unfair over generalization at all…
/s
He sounds like a nice guy, but the personal pleasantries and sacrifices will not exactly counterbalance the horrific impact the Catholic Church’s policies regarding contraception and abortion (to briefly name two) have had on the world. If he’d like to bring his modesty to the gold-encrusted Vatican, I’d love to see him sell off gratuitous displays of wealth and give the proceeds toward empowering women in the third world- the most effective way of eradicating poverty and violence.