Frank Bruni of the
New York Times has shouted “Hallelujah”!1
I can only add “Beautiful, Wonderful!” A very prominent person
has, essentially, endorsed the process of metaphorical thought—and
a person in an organization that has, until very recently, functioned
to buttress absolute ideals at the expense of concrete realities.
I'm talking about Pope Francis, of course, and the ideas he expressed
in an interview published recently in several Jesuit magazines.2
I'm not saying that
the Pope has entirely abandoned boiler-plate Vatican pronouncements.
His interview comments on women in the church were highly abstract
and, I felt, evasive. And a couple of days after the interview was
released, Pope Francis made some very standard comments about
abortion. But the change in tone from the Vatican in this interview
is enormous. Bruni noticed that the Pope “didn't present
himself as someone with all the answers. . . . he recognized that
authority can come from a mix of sincerity and humility as much as
from any blazing, blinding conviction, and that stature is a respect
you earn, not a pedestal you grab.” Carol Zinn, president of
the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (criticized by former
Pope Benedict), stated: “What we're seeing is an incredible
change in the atmosphere. And when you have change in the
atmosphere, it's amazing what kinds of things can unfold.”3
I agree. I think Pope Francis has the potential to bring about
great change in our world, and the way he's changing the atmosphere
is through language.
As two other
reporters put it, the Pope “is assuming the tone of a parish
priest.” That means that he's presenting himself as more
concerned with actual people than with upholding church doctrine. He
has become a pastoral presence in the world. All parish priests
assume a very large pastoral role, in caring for the members of their
congregations. “Pastoral” from “pastor” derives from the
Latin pascere, meaning to feed. Shepherds physically feed
their flocks; pastors spiritually feed their congregants. It's an
old metaphor in the Church, but Pope Francis is using it in a new
way. Thus, the Pope can assert that too much is being made of church
doctrines on abortion, gay marriage, contraception. He keeps
returning in this interview to the greater importance of the
spiritual health of the people than abstract doctrines; the
interviewer states that Francis is concerned when “the rules
threaten to overwhelm the spirit.”
The Pope uses some
very telling metaphors in the interview. In reference to the
consequences of the Church putting rules above the spiritual health
of the people, Francis says: “I see clearly that the thing the
church most needs today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the
hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the
church as a field hospital after a battle. It is useless to ask a
seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the
level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds. Then we can
talk about everything else. Heal the wounds, heal the wounds. . . .
And you have to start from the ground up.” Beautiful. A
suffering person cannot be healed by abstract doctrine; he or she
needs a pastor on the spot who cares for his or her soul (or psyche),
before he cares for how exactly that person abides by church
doctrines. That is why the Pope has turned away from judging
homosexual people; he is more concerned with the state of their souls
than with their sexual orientation. This is true compassion,
humility, a recognition that we are all struggling mortals and equal
in that regard. As Francis has said, “I need to live my life
with others.” And he cites the thought of St. Ignatius, the
founder of his own Jesuit order: “great principles must be
embodied in the circumstances of place, time, and people.”
Thus, Francis understands that even doctrine must change with time
and events, that the Church consists of the people and the hierarchy
of priests, bishops, etc. For this reason, “We should not even
think . . . that 'thinking with the church' means only thinking with
the hierarchy of the church.” What theologians think of the
Virgin Mary is often different from what the people think of the
Virgin Mary, but both are part of the larger truth. This seems to me
to be a radical change in vision; I do believe the Pope is implying
that the people have a say in the meanings and values asserted by the
church as a whole.
Amazingly, given
the history of the Roman Catholic Church, the Pope believes that
“Religion has the right to express its opinions in the service
of the people, but God in creation has set us free: it is not
possible to interfere spiritually in the life of a person.”
This is apparently true because no one walks in another person's
shoes, experiences another person's life in a concrete way. Thus no
one, even priest or pope, can judge another—only try to walk with
that person with mercy: “It is necessary to accompany them with
mercy.” Throughout the interview we see this emphasis on
caring for the real person as more important than imposing certain
doctrines on that person and judging that person by those doctrines.
No individual can live up to abstract doctrine, as we have seen quite
clearly in the scandals among Catholic priests and bishops in the
recent past. To assert that anyone can be perfect is hypocrisy; the
Pope says his most essential characteristic is that he is a sinner.
In truth, one has to be consciously a sinner in order to be
compassionate toward others. C. G. Jung has differentiated between
perfection and completion.4
While many in the Vatican have oriented their lives toward
perfection, including Francis's predecessor, who wanted a more
limited church of true believers, Pope Francis is seeking completion.
To him, the church should be universal; it should belong to
everyone. And this can only happen by not insisting on or even
seriously aspiring toward the unattainable goal of perfection. But
the main value of completion, as opposed to perfection, is that it
allows growth, whereas perfection produces stagnation. As the Pope
puts it, “In ecumenical relations it is important not only to
know each other better, but also to recognize what the Spirit has
sown in the other as a gift for us.” Again, beautiful.
Francis understands
God as being in the present as a “'concrete' God. . . God is to
be encountered in the world of today.” And since God continues
to reveal himself through history in all the moments of the present
as they pass, certainty and even absolute doctrine do not make sense
in understanding the movements of God. “. . . God is always a
surprise, so you never know where and how you will find him. . . . If
the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist, if he wants everything
clear and safe, then he will find nothing. . . . Those who today
always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an
exaggerated doctrinal 'security,' those who stubbornly try to recover
a past that no longer exists—they have a static and inward-directed
view of things. In this way faith becomes an ideology among other
ideologies. I have a dogmatic certainty: God is in every person's
life. . . You can, you must try to seek God in every human life.”
Amazing! This is a courageous man whom we really need to continue
to speak out in this world of sectarian violence and hatred.
According to Pope
Francis, God is more process than certain truth—an ongoing
revelation: “God has revealed himself as history, not as a
compendium of abstract truths. . . . human self-understanding
changes with time and so also human consciousness deepens. . . . we
grow in understanding of the truth. . . . The view of the church's
teaching as a monolith to defend without nuance or different
understandings is wrong.” And doctrines must always be renewed
by contact with real people, especially for Francis the poor, or what
Christ called “the least” of us. “When does a formulation
of thought cease to be valid? When it loses sight of the human or
even when it is afraid of the human . . . .” Thus, Francis
says he prays even when sitting in the dentist's office, a setting
that might surely remind us of our common suffering, mortal nature.
I am not a
Catholic--never have been and never will be, but this man moves me to
hope that we can better ourselves as human beings, by tempering our
rules and laws and paying most attention to caring for other human
beings—by being pastors ourselves, each of us toward the other.
Isn't that really Christ's message, in its essence? And this is the
attitude of metaphorical thought, which anchors the abstract in the
concrete. Pope Francis uses several striking metaphors in his
interview, but I'd like to focus finally on one in particular, which
he repeats. In commenting on a description of the vision of St.
Ignatius (“not to be limited by the greatest and yet to be
contained in the tiniest—this is the divine”), Francis notes “.
. . we can always look at the horizon from the position where we
are.” In that imagery is a description of metaphor itself: a
vision of the abstract (the horizon and all we project onto it)
anchored by our position in the real world, in a certain place and
time. What we can know about the horizon and all it represents is
dependent upon our roots in this world, and what the horizon
represents takes on value in relation to our roots in this world.
Or, as Christ said, “. . . as you did it to one of the least of
these my brethren, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40, RSV).
1http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/opinion/sunday/bruni-the-popes-radical-whisper.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130922
2Quotes
from the interview in this spot are taken from “A Big Heart Open
to God,” in America, retrieved online at
http://www.americamagazine.org/print/156341
. Copyright America Press, 2013.
The interview was conducted in the Vatican by
Antonio Spadaro, SJ, and translated from Italian into English by
Massimo Faggioli, Sarah Christopher Faggioli, Dominic Robinson, SJ,
and Griffin Oleynick.
3Carol
Zinn's quote and the quote from two reporters in the next paragraph
are taken from
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/21/world/europe/with-his-remarks-on-sexual-morality-a-surprise-pope-keeps-on-surprising.html?pagewanted=all
4C.
G. Jung, Answer to Job, ed. 2, tr. R. F. C. Hull (NY:
Bollingen, 1969), pg. 33: “. . . just as completeness is always
imperfect, so perfection is always incomplete, and therefore
represents a final state which is hopelessly sterile.”
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