What do you think of the new Pope?

Dear Rev. Know it all

So, what do you think of the new Pope?

Sincerely,

Shirley U. Geste

Dear Ms. Geste,

I am often asked this question, and my answer is not nearly as intriguing as the question itself. Are you asking what I think, or are you hoping that I will agree with what you think? 

First, an answer. He seems like a nice guy. I was impressed by the look on his face when he came out on the balcony in his white cassock and zuchetto. His “deer in the headlights look” said, “What have I gotten myself into?” This was good. It was honest. Also, I like what he has said so far. He hasn’t said anything a regular parish priest wouldn’t say. He hasn’t said anything I wouldn’t say and haven’t said. He thinks you should be respectful and kind to everyone, no matter their issues or attractions. Parish priests are in the business of welcoming sinners, because they are sinners. 

A friend of mine who rose to some prominence in the Church had to travel to Rome for a meeting with the Blessed John Paul and (then) Cardinal Ratzinger. He said that the two nicest guys he met in Rome were John Paul and Joseph Ratzinger. They were so interested in what he had to say that they invited him back for breakfast. They wanted to hear more about his ideas. I got the impression they were the kind of guys you’d go bowling with on a Friday night. I have this impression of Pope Francis. If we were pastors in the same diocese, I might try to sit near him in the back of the hall if I arrived late at meetings. And in his kindness and compassion, he would probably even laugh at my jokes.  I like his driving a Focus, it’s what I drive. Good on gas. I like that he cooked for himself and did his own laundry. I do that, and so do most priests I know.

But I worry, too. I worry about his living at St. Martha’s instead of the papal apartments. I worry about his having breakfast in the cafeteria. These are not necessarily humble things to do. They are simple things, but not necessarily humble. The papal apartments are probably about as comfortable as a fish bowl. I doubt there is a Lazyboy recliner in them as far as the eye can see. Above all, I suspect the papal apartments are lonely. Lord knows what ghosts linger there. 

In the cafeteria at St. Martha’s you probably get to pick what you want for breakfast instead having a doting staff tell you what you want. There is a perfectly good reason for worrying about the new pope’s choice of breakfast venue. It’s hard to fire someone with whom you have breakfast. 

Perhaps I am confused about this but, one of Pope Francis’ appointments seems to have been someone who did a good job as a manager at the Casa St. Marta. The Holy Father  appointed him to assist in the cleanup of the Vatican Bank. However, there are credible stories that years ago, the fellow in question had a reputation for hanging around in some very unfortunate places and had in fact been beaten up by some very interesting people. 

When he made this appointment, Pope Francis had no idea that the priest in question had such an interesting past. When asked about the matter the new pope assured us that the fellow was a good man, and that was long ago and who was he to judge?   

This is my worry. Having breakfast with someone may not be the best way to vet him for high positions in one’s reformist regime. Maybe Pope Francis should get use to eating his grapefruit and granola in the cold and lonely splendor of the papal apartments.

So, what do I think about the new pope? I like the guy. I agree with him and I am delighted by the response of the world to him... mostly. What I think of your question is the more interesting matter. History and Heaven will judge the new pope, and that will take a century or so. I suspect Heaven’s judgment will be quite favorable. 

The Lord is kind and merciful. He is full of compassion and laughter, and by the time history’s decision is made, you and I will not be much interested in history. So what you and I think of the pope isn’t really very important. He is the pope, and I am a Catholic who trusts Heaven’s wisdom, despite the human foibles of those who do the choosing. “I believe in one, holy, Catholic and apostolic church.”

I don’t believe in the press and the lights of our modern culture. I cannot help but wonder why they so love the man. I have heard so many people say  they like the way the new pope looks. The old one didn’t look as friendly. The other guy was German as I am -- at least in my ethnic background. There is a type of German whose smile makes it look like they are trying bravely to endure a medical procedure. They look  pained, not happy, when they smile. It can be scary. 

However, the way a person looks is far more important to our deep-as-a-puddle culture than the way he actually is. Hollywood stars of a certain age have had so much work done that they look paralyzed from the neck up. Their faces are frozen in a kind of permanent grin. They are caked with so much makeup that they leave little work for the embalmers as they prepare for the not too distant funeral, but we say, “they look so good for their age”.  To paraphrase C. S. Lewis, the devil wants us to look and feel good. Heaven wants us to be good.

The compassion of Pope Francis is a good and healing thing, even when it appears that he is winking at certain behaviors, even though he is not. The pope emeritus was also a man of tremendous compassion. I have heard a story that I think true about the pope emeritus that may surprise you. There is a certain theologian for whom the new pope seems to have a great respect. He has often been at loggerheads with reactionaries like myself. It is rumored that years ago when Pope Benedict was still Cardinal Ratzinger, he was visiting a famous German school of theology at the same time as the aforementioned theologian. Ratzinger, a.k.a. God’s Rottweiler, summoned the fellow, who thought, “Here it comes. He is going to lower the boom in person!” Quite the contrary. Cardinal Ratzinger let the theologian know that someone was about to be appointed bishop of his diocese who greatly disagreed with the theologian. Ratzinger suggested that the he join a religious order to protect his priestly faculties, which the theologian aforementioned promptly did. 

If the story is true, Ratzinger protected someone with whom he disagreed out of respect for the man’s intellectual honesty and his priesthood. I heard the story from a well placed source, not from the press. It was not something the press would bother to report because the press is uninterested. Ratzinger isn’t much of a looker. The press fails to comment on Pope Francis’ powerful denunciation of abortion, his clear stand on the ordination of women and women’s sacred role as mothers and his very traditional piety, Rosary, Eucharistic adoration and all! The appointment of someone from breakfast at St. Marta’s was dropped by the press like a rotting cantaloupe.  They are in love with a man who doesn’t exist.

The current occupant of the throne of St. Peter is far more complex than the air-heads of the media can comprehend. All that hair spray has addled their wits, I’m afraid. The pope is doing his best to renew dialogue with all people of good will. I worry that the vultures of the press will swoop down to pick the carcass clean as soon as they have a slow news day. 

Personally, I would worry if Chris Rock, Jane Fonda and Sir Elton John had nice things to say about me, but I think the new pope is a better man than I and he may just succeed in reaching the members of the Mediacracy. 

God bless him for trying. Underneath all that hair spray and the layers of makeup, the Holy Father has reminded us, and them, that they do have souls.

Yours as ever,

The Rev. Know it all

Who is in charge when there is no pope? Part 5

So the last time I wrote, the pope was hiding in an old tomb overlooking the Tiber, the German Lutheran soldiers of the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor were looting St. Peters Basilica burning Rome and doing things I would rather not discuss in a parish bulletin.

Pope Clement remained a prisoner in the tomb of the emperor Hadrian, also called the Castel Sant’Angelo,  for six months. He bribed some jailers and  escaped disguised as a peddler. When he could finally return to Rome in 1528, it was a depopulated ruin. He did his best to restore it and finally died after eating bad mushrooms in 1534.  The next 250 years the popes were not bad fellows all in all but one gets the impression that the great powers of Europe mostly ignored them. Some were better some were worse, but the bad old days of the secularized papacy seemed pretty much over.  

Around 1600, just when the nation state was really getting popular, the crowned heads of Europe claimed what they called the right of exclusion (jus exclusivae),  a veto by which a crown-cardinal, a personal representative of a Catholic European monarch could block the election of any candidate they did not approve! The royal cretins who ran Europe and most of the world didn’t get to pick the pope, but they could say who they would not accept. I suppose if they didn’t get their way, they would leave the Catholic Church like Henry VIII had done in 1530, taking England with him. 

By 1600, the English, French and the Spanish pretty much owned the world and had the popes over a barrel. Louis XIV was devoutly Catholic. He never missed Mass, nor an evening with his many mistresses, nor an opportunity to wage a pointless war of expansion to ally himself with the Muslim Turks, nor to ignore the pope. Louis had a point when he said “Apres moi, le deluge.”  (Or for the less pretentious “After me, the flood!”) Louis ruled France and the Church in France as an absolute monarch for sixty-four years during which he managed to put his grandson on the throne of Spain, so Louis and his family controlled almost all of north and south America and about half of Europe and a lot of other places. When he died in 1715, he had outlived seven popes. Nobody was afraid of the pope anymore. They were very afraid of Louis. 

The deluge he predicted came in 1788, one long life later. The French revolution and its offspring swept away the monarchies of Europe over the course of the next century, but they didn’t manage to sweep away the papacy, no matter how hard they tried. The years since the American/French Revolution have been an unremitting catalogue of wars. You already know that and the French Revolution and Napoleon tried to abolish the Church in all Europe. I have already explained how they failed. England tried to destroy Catholicism in Ireland in 1650 by means of Oliver Cromwell and war and again in 1842 by the use of mass starvation. They failed.

Germany tried to limit Catholicism after the Prussian takeover of German speaking Catholic countries in 1866 by means of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf,  then went to wars with a re- Catholicized France in 1870. Germany tried again in 1914, initiating the First World War which swept all the monarchies of Europe before it. Those crowned heads that had tried to control the papacy and the Church had by then all separated from their royal shoulders one way or another.  The monarchs were gone, but the tyrants were not. 

The “isms” and dictators of the twentieth century waged unremitting war on the successors of Peter. The only major voice to persistently resist Hitler and the Nazis was that of the papacy, no matter what you’ve heard. Eugenio Pacelli, later Pius XII despised national socialism and worked tirelessly against it. He was credited, in the 1967 book, “Three Popes and the Jews,” by the Israeli historian and diplomat Pinchas Lapide, “...with saving at least 700,000, but probably as many as 860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi hands.”  Hitler so hated Pius that he tried to have him kidnapped and deported to Germany where he could dispose of the pope as he pleased. 

“Wait a minute,” I hear you saying, “everybody knows Pius XII was an anti-Semite!” 

Everybody knows that because Stalin, the Marxist dictator of Russia who starved millions of Ukrainians, both Catholic and Orthodox to death, and who tried to erase religion from Russian life as a prelude to erasing it from the world, realized that after the Second World war, the only force capable of resisting the Marxist takeover of Eastern Europe was the Catholic Church. He started a disinformation campaign to discredit the Church, particularly Pope Pius, and infiltrated seminaries and religious institutions, especially in places like Poland. That didn’t work either. Poland  clung to its faith and the Polish pope brought European Marxism and its slave empire to the ground by simply saying, “Do not be afraid” when he returned to Poland in 1979. When Churchill reminded Stalin to consider the Catholicism of Poland, Stalin quipped “Why? How many divisions does the pope of Rome have?” It turns out he didn’t need divisions of soldiers. 

Chairman Mao, Fidel Castro, and all the petty tyrants of the 20^th century have tried and failed to control or to eliminate the Church and the papacy. We have a new kind of government in the modern world. We are ruled by the arbiters of fashion in the entertainment and news media who tell us what to think, how to act, whom to marry and whom to elect. Government by Media. I call it the Mediacracy (pronounced mee-dee-AH-kruh-see). They decided that it is time for the Catholic Church to change its ancient beliefs about the sanctity of human life and the nature of marriage. One hundred fifteen cardinals went into a locked room and two days later came out having elected a complete surprise. A man hated by -- guess who -- his leftist government which is trying to turn Argentina into the next Venezuela.

When one looks at the long list of 266 popes,  you can only come up with around ten who were scoundrels, but there are ten times as many popes who are revered for exceptional holiness, 94 certifiable saints among them (78 canonized, 16 beatified, 33 martyrs) and we Catholics are pretty picky about canonized saints.  The so called bad popes were those few who were the result of the desire of the ruling class to control the papacy whether it was Italian duke or German emperor or powerful Roman family. 

Now we have the Mediacracy trying to elect a pope pleasing to it.  Do you for one minute imagine that the mediacracy will give us a holy pope?  From Nero until now, the powers of this world have tried to control the church of Christ and the papacy that Christ established to govern it. Thus far they have failed. I doubt that the rich and fashionable, the sybarites and the media chic who think themselves above the law of Christ and His church will succeed either. 

“Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” (Matt. 16:18) Christ’s promise has held true 265 times so far. I am confident for the 266^th. 

Viva el Papa Pancho! Viva Cristo Rey!