Scottish Catholic Observer

NO ONE may ever know how many people will be led to Christ by the little acts of humanity of this very human Pope of ours. In Florence last week to attend a once-in-a-decade congress of Church leaders and lay people, Pope Francis spoke of Christ’s humanity. But before the teaching came the action. We don’t know for how long Pope Francis will be spared but while he is he seems determined to show what practising what you preach ought to look like.

And so in Florence last week he spoke to workers and encouraged them to let Christ into their daily lives. Later he visited the city’s sick and shared his lunchtime with homeless people. When the time came to celebrate the sacrifice of the Mass he did so in a football stadium. His entire papacy seems to have been underpinned by chapter 13 of St Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians:

“If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.

“If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.

“If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.”

The Pope seems to have grasped and understood several of the principle reasons why some people reject religion and the conduct of mainstream politics. Indeed the political classes in our society are now experiencing the chill winds of indifference and outright hostility that have sadly buffeted the Christian churches in recent generations.

Some of this was manifest in the defiance of the people of Greece in the face of intimidation by political leaders who wanted to extort more and more returns in exchange for membership of their exclusively materialist club. It underpinned much of the narrative of the campaign during the independence referendum and the subsequent evisceration of the main parties of the Union.

It seemed that many people with deep reservations about the economics of an independent Scotland, nevertheless were saying ‘anything has got to be better than what we already have.’ What we have, as the Conservative Government have consistently demonstrated since last year’s referendum, is an austerity drive that is punishing the poor for the greed and avarice of the rich during the worldwide banking crisis. And what we will soon have are more bombing raids in Syria in which many innocent people will be killed and for which more young Muslims will feel they must rise up to avenge the slaughter.

Popular movements; untutored, unsophisticated and unorganised, are always reviled by the professionals. We saw this in the way in which the media dismissed the rise of popular, messy and profane nationalism. But there has been a backlash and we will see more of it in the global anti-austerity movement and the inevitable protests when the rich west’s indiscriminate bombing of Syria begins in earnest. When Christian leaders preach messages of love and forgiveness and weekly read texts from the pulpit about how Jesus showed compassion and mercy to sinners and the sick people want to see them live those messages and be seen to live those messages. Many of the Catholics with whom I was reared and educated have now turned away from the Church. They haven’t rejected Christ; simply a Church, they felt, that didn’t seem to practise what it preached.

Pope Francis, in his compassion towards homosexual people and in his sorrow for the hatred they have received from many in the mainstream, was asking those of us who are not gay not to judge and condemn and to accept them as equal and loved in the eyes of God. This message has been evident in his efforts to help separated and divorced Catholics find a route back towards the sacraments. He is practising what the Church has always preached: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.”

During his visit to Florence, Pope Francis said ‘we must not be obsessed with power’ or the Church ‘loses its way, loses its meaning.’

“Do not feel superior and place complete trust in structures and perfect plans,” he said. “This focus on the abstract and on security often leads us to take on a style of control, harshness, regulation. Christian doctrine isn’t rigid, its body moves and develops, it has tender flesh. Its name is Jesus Christ.”

In the 1990s I was a member of a Christian organisation who favoured an overt and evangelical approach to their worship. Their style of worship and praying wasn’t hidebound by attention to form and process and was all the more enriching and vivid for it. They were very good people. Sadly and inexplicably though, they allowed their Christianity to become hidebound by form and process and in so doing merely succeeded in complicating the simple messages of Jesus. The way people dressed; their personal habits; their patterns of speech; their television viewing habits; their taste in music and the character of the people they chose to spend time with: all of these were allowed to choke the simple messages of the Bible and prevented it reaching the ears of those whose hearts they wanted to unlock. They had discovered a treasure but chose to keep it to themselves.

I think the Pope wants to share the treasure of Christ’s compassion, forgiveness and love with as many people as possible before his time on this earth is finished. In this, I don’t see him fundamentally altering the teachings of the Catholic Church or shifting its doctrinal goalposts. I think he’s simply altering the tone of those teachings and encouraging his clergy not to focus on form and process but to focus instead on the goodness that exists in the hearts of all sinners. I am no teacher though, and these are merely my own thoughts.

— What do you think of KEVIN McKENNA’S comments Pope Francis? Send your points of view to the SCO. Write to Letters, SCO, 19 Waterloo St, Glasgow G2 6BT or e-mail [email protected]

— The views expressed in the opinion pages of the SCO are those of informed individuals and groups and not necessarily those of the newspaper or the Church.