I love what follows from Léonie Caldecott, who writes with eloquence and effect about the need for the Church to do what it takes to draw in those who need her (and know it not) and those who need her (and know it full on):
The overall point that the liberal consensus, whether inside the Church or outside of it, fails to grasp is that true conservatism may sometimes speak with a self-critical voice. This is because to conserve what is of value, let alone what pertains to eternity, you sometimes have to take a radical peek at why it is failing to convince, and thus failing to conserve. The Church has been massively harmed by a number of things: the child abuse scandals, power struggles within her ranks, and most of all the hypocrisy at the heart of powerful and supposedly conservative “movements” such as the Legionaries of Christ. Benedict XVI saw that for all his extraordinary intellectual gifts, he was too frail to oversee and adequately respond to the dogged determination of forces such as these to resist all attempts at oversight and reform. Such is the double-think of people who are wedded, not to Holy Mother Church, but to their own cliques and “lobbies” and personal ambitions, that no amount of gentle Germanic shepherding could prevail with them.
Perhaps it is going to take a bit of passionate Hispanic butt-kicking to shift the situation. And in
Bergoglio, the Cardinals knew they had someone who had a track record of doing this without losing sight of the essential perspective for lasting renewal: the perspective of mercy. He knows that what he is up against is not, in the end, some human conspiracy, but the battle of powers and principalities whose common denominator is a lack of that divine vision which transforms everything. “The thinking of the church must recover genius and better understand how human beings understand themselves today, in order to develop and deepen the church’s teaching.” A statement worthy of Blessed John Henry Newman – another ecclesial genius much misunderstood by the factions which surrounded him at the time.
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Unless we convey the core reality of the Christian faith, a reality which has nothing whatsoever to do with politics, we cannot hope to convey, far less enable activation of, the moral teachings of the Church. If Pope Francis sounds like a liberal, it is because he is self-critically applying liberal spurs to the flank of the conservative position. By empathising with the poorest and most alienated, he is not posturing. He is seeking to create, and thus to conserve, conditions under which their lives, both now and in eternity, can achieve the freedom of the sons and daughters of God.
Our new Pope is precisely an imaginative, rather than a prescriptive, conservative. He has the conservative’s sensibility that each individual must make a free choice to adhere to what is best for all, and the conservative’s concern to apply only necessary medicines for the present crisis. One of those medicines is humility. When conservative forces face the humiliations and failure that has been meted out to them in recent years, it is perhaps necessary to reflect deeply on the roots of those problems, which may indeed require thinking, imaginatively, outside the box. To quote again from the interview:
“Tradition and memory of the past must help us to have the courage to open up new areas to God. 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.”
And surely ideology is the enemy of true conservatism, not to mention a living faith?
Bergoglio, the Cardinals knew they had someone who had a track record of doing this without losing sight of the essential perspective for lasting renewal: the perspective of mercy. He knows that what he is up against is not, in the end, some human conspiracy, but the battle of powers and principalities whose common denominator is a lack of that divine vision which transforms everything. “The thinking of the church must recover genius and better understand how human beings understand themselves today, in order to develop and deepen the church’s teaching.” A statement worthy of Blessed John Henry Newman – another ecclesial genius much misunderstood by the factions which surrounded him at the time.I urge all to read the piece in its entirety.
The lesson offered, in my mind, is simply.
The Holy Spirit is at work in this Pope and through this Pope. Are we open to that work? If not, why not?
Answer not quickly.
There's a lot at stake.
Carry on.
