When he was quite young, he had a strange conversation with a friend who presented herself as a good Catholic. This medium-long conversation soon became a discussion touching on ethics and morality. It ended with the girl telling him, “I will pray for you.” Which warmed him initially and even planted inside him the seed of a thought that she might have liked him in a romantic sort of way. Which pleased him as she was quite pretty. And then she came up with the rejoinder: “The way you’re thinking now you will end up in Hell!”
He still remembers her now. Especially, how pretty she was. But more than this, he wonders where she is now. He does not worry he will end up in Hell. When the final reckoning comes, he will welcome the chance to come face to face with his maker. He will have a lot to say. Whether or not he will be sent to Hell for all he believes in seems to be of the least concern to him. They will have more important things to talk about.
The conservatives of the church make the claim that media is taking wrongly what Pope Francis has said. They mean to say that Pope Francis has really not said anything new or fundamentally different from what the previous popes have said, that everything will stay the same for the Catholic church. And of course this gives away their intention that nothing should change with the Catholic church. They mistake Catholicism for the edifices institutional Catholicism was always wont to build, hard stone, huge, monumental, unmoving. The buildings, whether squat Romanesque or tall Gothic reaching up to the skies are not only a symbol, they are icons which manifest an historical attitude. The attitude embodies an attachment to temporal power. We are a big church with a universal reach. We are a rock that never changes over geographical space and historical time.
And yet, the scriptural Christ was never contained by edifices either of stone or of institution. The scriptural Christ spoke wherever his feet carried him. He spoke in open fields to people in their homes while they celebrated everything from weddings to deaths. He condemned no one, neither Gentile nor Roman. He sought out people wherever they were. In a way, he saved them where they stood and for whatever they were. And he never charged a fee for anything.
Which ought to remind us that the church is not the stone edifice. It is not even bishops and priests. It is the congregation itself, the ritual gathering in the name of a single faith, a single persuasion. The church is not the institution, it is the people themselves which constitute the body of Christ in the here and now. And as people are not stone, which never changes unless by erosion and only towards degradation and decay, then the church renews itself as people always do. Because they are alive. They are living. The stone itself is dead.
He reminds himself that one of the biblical uses of stone was for tying around one’s neck before the big leap into the void. Which is what Pope Francis is suggesting might happen to the church if the conservatives continue their current obsession with condemnation. The term “pro-life warrior” is a dead giveaway. Instead of loving and forgiving, they would rather make war with those whom they call anti-life and anti-family. They fall short of anti-Christ. But he suspects they might only be trying to be diplomatic. It might still come to that.
Still it is arguable if he has read Pope Francis correctly as the conservatives in the church claim. Words are after all always open to subjective reading. The less so, behavior. When Pope Francis comes down from the palaces of the Vatican to talk to people, when he calls some of us up, it does not bother us the same way it bothers those who think this is not appropriate behavior for a pope or even a bishop or even a proper priest.
How wrong they are. the pope we most need in this day and age is just the sort of pope who much like Christ himself walks among us, talks to us, gives us a blessing of understanding and forgives us our sins. Though we are sinners and will still sin again before the cock crows out the birth of another sinful tomorrow. He will forgive us more than seventy times seven times, as it has been written. And then he will tell us: Though we may not be as Catholic as him, it is possible we will still see each other in Heaven for as long as we are good people whatever people we are: atheists, gay, divorced or poor. He condemns no one. He prays for us that way. Pope Francis has already changed the church in ways we are only beginning to understand.