‘God is not Catholic…’

ROME – Over the past week and a half, I have traced the journey of the apostle St Paul from Israel through Greece, Turkey and Rome. Persecuted and thrown to prison by local authorities for preaching the Good News of salvation through Jesus Christ, he was brought to Rome because he invoked his right as a Roman citizen to be tried and judged according to Roman law.

This is not my first visit to Rome and the Vatican but I am excited to be here at this time. Ironically, I am here now as part of an evangelical group, Christ Commission Fellowship or CCF on a Bible study tour rather than as a Catholic, the religion I was born and grew up in. Exposure to CCF made me realize how little I know of the Bible, the basis of our Christian faith.

Like many thoughtful Catholics back home, I had increasingly become disenchanted with our bishops and other church leaders. I had long ceased feeling they were feeding my need to know more about my faith. Their forays into politics irritated me a bit too.

Up until a year or so ago, I still attended Sunday Mass regularly but stopped about the time the debate on the RH bill became vicious. I felt intellectually insulted by most of the homilies on the subject or on many other subjects priests talk about in their homilies. To me, Catholic bishops and priests more and more looked like the Pharisees that Jesus denounced during his time for their emphasis on form and rituals rather than on the substance of our faith.

It isn’t just the Church position on population issues that drove me away. I increasingly found the Catholic hierarchy out of tune with the needs of today’s society. The way Church traditions are upheld over people and their needs didn’t seem to be in the spirit of Christianity I thought I learned from the Gospel.

Then came Pope Francis! I realize that nothing has changed with Church dogma… the Pope is still not about to embrace the RH law. But for some reason, the Jesuit Pope is saying all the right things about how Church leaders and laity should view their faith and their earthly mission.

 Some of the things the Pope is saying are guaranteed to make my religion teacher in grade school faint. I am sure many of our bishops aren’t too happy with the Pope’s putting people ahead of religious rituals. But that’s just being Christ-like.

Pope Francis invited a known atheist journalist to interview him recently. In that interview published by La Repubblica, an Italian newspaper the Pope said that “I believe in God, not in a Catholic God. There is no Catholic God, there is God and I believe in Jesus Christ, his incarnation.”

Many of us Catholics already know that from the spirit of Ecumenism that grew out of Vatican II. But many of our more traditional brothers and sisters are bound to be scandalized by the way the new Pope has expressed himself.

In a way, he just blew the foundation of the Catechism as I remember learning it… As a kid studying in a Catholic school, we were told that there is no salvation outside of the Catholic religion. I am sure some old bishops and lay leaders out there still believe this.

As related by Eugenio Scalfari, the co-founder and former editor of La Repubblica and a proclaimed atheist, he asked Pope Francis to elaborate on his God is not Catholic statement because he was confused. The pontiff reportedly replied, “‘God is universal, and we are Catholic in the sense of the way we worship him. I believe in God, not in a Catholic God.” He essentially took a dig at the Catholic Church hierarchy, Scalfari observed, by condemning its “Vatican-centric view.”

That interview with Scalfari essentially revealed a Pope attuned to the times. Being from Argentina, the hotbed of Liberation Theology, the Pope couldn’t help but understand the problems of real people in the world out there… far away from Rome.

Take the Pope’s view of the world as related by Scalfari: “The most serious of the evils that afflict the world these days are youth unemployment and the loneliness of the old. The old need care and companionship; the young need work and hope but have neither one nor the other, and the problem is they don’t even look for them any more.

“They have been crushed by the present. You tell me: can you live crushed under the weight of the present? Without a memory of the past and without the desire to look ahead to the future by building something, a future, a family? Can you go on like this? This, to me, is the most urgent problem that the Church is facing.”

Bravo, Pope Francis. The persistence of poverty in predominantly Catholic countries in Latin America, in our case and even Spain and Portugal in Europe have often been blamed on a religion that preaches enduring sacrifices for the present in anticipation of everlasting joy. Nothing wrong with that on the surface… But tyrants in and out of governments have exploited this gospel of poverty for their advantage through the ages.

Now we have a Pope who is also concerned with life on this earth, wretched as it might be. He preaches that the obligation of anyone who calls himself Christian to ease the pain and help carry the burden.

I also like a Pope who breaks with the pomposity and hypocrisy of Church rituals.

Pope Francis washed the feet of 10 young men and two young women during the Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Holy Thursday this year at the prison for young people. Not only did he wash the feet of 12 young people of different nationalities and faiths, among them are two Muslims, who are housed at the juvenile detention facility.

Back to the Scalfari interview, the Pope was asked: is there a single vision of the Good? And who decides what it is?

The Pope’s reply: “Each of us has a vision of good and of evil. We have to encourage people to move towards what they think is good… That would be enough to make the world a better place.”

As Scalfari relates it, the Pope stressed that “The Church is or should go back to being a community of God’s people, and priests, pastors and bishops who have the care of souls, are at the service of the people of God.”

Hmmm… my thoughts exactly, Your Holiness. The Pope should really come and visit Asia’s largest Catholic country and say all those things to an assembly of our bishops, priests and Opus Dei types who seem to have forgotten the basic mission of the Church.

The Pope, Scalfari says, made him feel comfortable enough for him to call him Francis… “I allow myself to call him that because it is the Pope himself who suggests it by the way he speaks, the way he smiles, with his exclamations of surprise and understanding  -  looks at me as if to encourage me to ask questions that are even more scandalous and embarrassing for those who guide the Church.”

Scalfari reminds him that Jesus, as the Pope pointed out, said: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. Do you think that this has happened?

A candid answer from the Pope: “Unfortunately, no. Selfishness has increased and love towards others declined.”

The atheist journalist had been impressed by the Pope. In closing, he said “Your Holiness, you are certainly a person of great faith, touched by grace, animated by the desire to revive a pastoral, missionary church that is renewed and not temporal.

“But from the way you talk and from what I understand, you are and will be a revolutionary pope. Half Jesuit, half a man of Francis, a combination that perhaps has never been seen before.”

I share the view of Chit Roces Santos who exclaimed in a recent article that “Finally, a Pope, unsurprisingly a Jesuit, who seems genuinely looking for a way to give us back our space in the mother church’s embrace.”

I expect our visit to the Vatican to be a cultural and religious one. The group I am now with may not be Catholic but strongly Christian and like it or not, they have a strong claim to the Christianity at the bedrock of this Church in Rome.

I dare say they know more about the teachings and the life stories of St Peter and St Paul than the average Catholic. And that’s why we are here now to trace the journey of St Paul back to Rome and his martyrdom for the faith.

I imagine they will show us the treasures of the Sistine Chapel and the Basilica of St Peter. But I am hoping to catch a glimpse of the Pope in this visit to Rome. It is a long shot that will happen but stranger things have happened to the Church of my birth in recent months… like a Jesuit Pope. So, I may just be so lucky.

   Smiling nuns

The Pope has urged nuns and sisters to be like joyful mothers to the church, caring for its flock, and not act like they’re “old maids.”

“It makes me sad when I find sisters who aren’t joyful,” he said during his Oct. 4 visit to a cloistered convent in Assisi.

“They might smile, but with just a smile they could be flight attendants!”

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco