[Dialogue] 5//29/14, Spong: Two Popes Made Saints in a Dramatic Act

Thu May 29 07:03:03 PDT 2014

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Two Popes Made Saints in a Dramatic Act
It was an exciting day in the Vatican on April 27, 2014, probably the most exciting day since the election of Cardinal Bergoglio of Argentina to be Pope Francis a little more than a year ago. Prior to that only dark shadows seemed to envelope that church and its leadership. The scandal of sexually abusive priests, which was world wide and systemic, had drained this church’s credibility. That scandal was topped, if that is possible, by the second scandal, which was, for many, even more disillusioning. I refer to the massive cover up that not only embraced the hierarchy, but even threatened to reach the level of Benedict XVI. The fact that Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, perhaps the most guilty person in the American hierarchy of orchestrating the cover up, had been appointed to a prestigious post in the Vatican instead of being sentenced to time in an American jail, was symptomatic of the depth of the problem. In addition a financial scandal involving mismanagement, if not malfeasance, of Vatican finances was obvious. Finally, a sitting pope resigned “for reasons of health” we were told, but such a resignation is hard for Catholics to understand. The claim of possessing ultimate authority in the papal figure is difficult to preserve when there is more than one living ultimate authority.
Much of this negativity was pushed aside in the choice of Cardinal Bergoglio to be Pope Francis. From the moment he appeared on the balcony at St. Peter’s Square, he projected a very different image. He declined to appear in royal vestments. We learned that in Buenos Aires he had lived in a humble apartment, not in a cardinal’s palace. He did his own cooking and rode the bus to work. His passion was not for status and authority, but for the poor. His integrity and common touch charmed the world. National leaders everywhere paused to notice.
Next Francis began to signal new Vatican attitudes. It was not that he made vast changes, but he gave birth to a new emphasis. “Who I am to judge?” he said, when asked about homosexuality. His predecessor had defined homosexuals as “deviant.” That sounded pretty judgmental to millions of gay Catholics. He began to say conciliatory things toward Roman Catholic scholars who had been silenced or removed from their official teaching positions by Vatican leaders. No, the stigma of their condemnation was not fully removed, but it was loosened considerably and the world of Catholic scholarship began to sense a new day coming.
In regard to other “hot button” church issues, such as the ordination of women, divorce, birth control and abortion, no official changes were announced, but a shift in emphasis was obvious and new possibilities began to seem real. Dealing with the poor, addressing wealth inequality, providing hospital care for all simply because they were human began to appear as priorities. The Vatican gendarmes were not called off the rebellious American nuns, but that story did slip quietly to the back pages. Roman Catholic Republican politicians like Paul Ryan, Newt Gingrich and even Jeb Bush began to feel the sand shifting underneath their feet. A hard right wing economic budget might now receive papal opposition, so a note of caution entered the debate. Perhaps the gap between the rich and the poor and immigration would become more important issues than closing family planning clinics or forcing more guns into public life.
While the more progressive Roman Catholic voices were elated and energized by this new pope, those who had been in power since the death of Pope John XXIII began to grow apprehensive. How could both wings of this church be brought together without either winners or losers became the obvious primary agenda of the new pope. The two most memorable popes of the twentieth century, who represented Catholicism’s two polarities, offered that possibility.
The first was John XXIII, who was born Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli in 1881 in the little village of Sotto Il Monte in the province of Bergamo. He was oldest child and first son of a sharecropper in a family of thirteen children. One year ago, my wife and I visited his place of birth in Italy. Like the man himself, it was humble and unpretentious. Roncalli received an education only by the intervention and financial resources of his uncle, an act of kindness and generosity that was destined to change the world. Ordained priest in 1904, this man from a peasant background would rise through the ranks of both higher education (he had more than one earned doctorate) and ecclesiastical power. He became a bishop and archbishop in 1925 and served as the apostolic visitor to Bulgaria for eleven years. After a number of other diplomatic posts, which included the opportunity to deal with the Holocaust and its victims and to remove those bishops who in France had cooperated with the Nazis, he was made a cardinal in 1952 by Pope Pius XII, the patrician aristocrat he was to succeed in 1958. It was not an easy election for Roncalli. It took eleven ballots and he was clearly a compromise candidate. The Vatican was in crisis then, not to the extent it is today, but in crisis nonetheless. Pope Pius XII was widely believed to have been pro-Nazi during the recently ended war. He certainly did nothing to help stop the Holocaust and one Catholic author entitled his biography of Pius XII Hitler’s Pope. Compromise candidate or not, in John XXIII’s four year and seven month papacy, he was destined to shake up the Roman Catholic Church more dramatically that it had been shaken in centuries.
Very much like Pope Francis, John XXIII had the common touch, but he also had a vision of a church renewed and dealing creatively with the issues of his day. He convened the Second Vatican Council and then presided over a reformation process that matched the intensity of the Counter Reformation of the sixteenth century. He called into leadership the very generation of new creative Catholic scholars who would later be condemned by his successors. One thinks of such people as Hans Kung, Edward Schillebeeckx, Charles Curran, Leonardo Boff, Matthew Fox, Margaret Farley and Elisabeth Schussler-Fiorenza. As the winds of change blew through this church, it inevitably inspired a reaction among those who had lost power. When John XXIII died, tragically and prematurely, of stomach cancer in 1963, he had become known as “The Good Pope” and he was mourned by Catholics, Protestants, Jews and ordinary people the world over. In his own church, however, the conservative counter attack began almost immediately and the windows through which the new reform breezes of the Second Vatican Council blew were quickly and firmly closed. The Roman Church began a slow, but dramatic, march into yesterday. His successor, Paul VI, shut the door on rethinking attitudes on birth control. Paul VI’s successor, John Paul I,9 was also a liberal and humble man, who might well have carried forward the reforms of Vatican II, but he died only 33 days after being elected. The College of Cardinals then turned to the Cardinal Archbishop of Krakow in Poland, who, after taking the name John Paul II, swung the church hard back to its most uncompromising traditional stands. John Paul II completed the process of closing down the work of Vatican II. It was time for the conservative polarity of this church to have its day. When he chose as his chief deputy the ultra-conservative German prelate, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who would someday succeed him, it was clear that the spirit of Vatican II was dead at least for the foreseeable future.
John Paul II traveled to more than a 120 countries in an effort to revive and to reinvigorate the faithful. He was instrumental in toppling the Communist rule in his homeland of Poland and was rightly recognized and applauded for that work. He was, however, very much a hardline, right wing pope. Together with Cardinal Ratzinger he implemented an ultra-conservative agenda for this church. That agenda included silencing Catholic scholars and thus ending Catholic creativity. He made the campaign against birth control, abortion and homosexuality so total and so uncompromising that they became the marks of Catholicism. He also built the structure of secrecy and denial out of which the child abuse scandal would evolve.
John Paul II filled ecclesiastical posts, bishops, archbishops and cardinals with traditional-thinking Catholic leaders. He was as powerful a champion of conservative Catholicism as John XXIII had been of an open, progressive Catholicism. Because these two popes stood as polar opposites, together they gave Pope Francis a rare opportunity. He paired them and declared both of them saints of the church in a very public celebration. That action, more than any other, would send a signal through the ranks of this church that this new pope was erecting a new foundation for Catholicism upon which he could build a new future. He needed both of these iconic pillars to make his plans work. The traditions of this Church could not be abandoned so he needed the emphasis of John Paul II, but if this church were ever to move into the future, he also needed John XXIII’s commitment to the emerging world, its people and its poor. Pope Francis thus placed them into sainthood together and in doing so brought unity and hope to the Catholic world.
Will it work? I hope so. Will Pope Francis live long enough to make the changes lasting ones? Time alone will tell. Can those Catholics for whom John XXIII was a hero tolerate the coupling of the “Good Pope” with John Paul II, who in their minds made intolerance a virtue? It will not be easy, but given the political realities of this church, it was probably essential. Pope Francis’ action reminded me of that time in American history when a free state could not be admitted into the union unless it was coupled with a slave state. No one is helped, however, when the largest Christian body in the world is in disarray as this church has been in recent years, so if this action pulls them together and heads them in a new and positive direction, many will rejoice. At the very least by lifting John XXIII into sainthood, even with John Paul II, Pope Francis has legitimized the good pope’s values and given them new status in this church. We shall watch him with hope.
~John Shelby Spong

Read the essay online here.

Question & Answer
Gregory A. Baker, via the Internet, writes:

Question:
I am finishing your book, Jesus for the Non-Religious and have found in you, Bart Ehrman and Tom Harpur…finally…people on the planet who explain Christianity humanly – totally unlike any other experience I’ve had in any “traditional” church. You refer to the Christian alumni…are you aware the single largest Christian denomination in the U.S. today is former Roman Catholics? The Church actually sponsors special programs to recruit them back even though the Holy See asserts it owns their souls and it’s a childish fantasy to think they can leave anyway.
I grew up in northern Ohio where we know there were Paleo-Indians living some 12,000 years ago on the very land of my family’s farm. The last of the great Pleistocene glaciers was retreating into Canada. These people I believe were every bit as human as you or I. Yet they were denied the story of Christ, as were millions of other ancient peoples on six continents because they lived before ANY of the Jewish and Christian faiths emerged.
I once asked a Baptist preacher (and I’m not making this up) what has happened to Ohio’s Paleo-Indians after death, since they couldn’t have known Christ and received grace and salvation. He grimaced and stated so regretfully that they are burning in hell for eternity; it’s what Christian faith teaches and demands, but he regrets their fate personally. Quite magnanimous, don’t you think?
Have you ever addressed in your writings the temporal question…why did any of the Torah and subsequent Christianity story appear when and where it did…and how to treat and interpret Christ for pre-history humans who had no exposure to a faith tradition that you emphatically embrace?

Answer:
Dear Gregory,
Thank you for your letter. I hope you realize that I embrace much of what you call “traditional.” I take it quite seriously. I lived my life as a priest in the Anglican Communion (known in America as the Episcopal Church) for 21 years and then as an elected bishop in that church for 24 years. I am still an active participant in the life of my parish church, St. Peter’s in Morristown, New Jersey. I say the creed every Sunday; I attend the Eucharist. What I don’t do is to take the language of my faith tradition literally. Religious language, religious creeds, religious liturgy, all of them point to truth, none of them captures it. God is not a being, which I or anyone else, can define. God is a presence in which I believe I can live. It is the presence of infinite love, of transcendence and of the deepest mystery. Of course, Jesus is human. The Christian Church has never denied that, but in and through that human medium the Christian Church has claimed that God is experienced as present calling us beyond our limits into what Paul Tillich called a “New Being.” Religion, at its worst, has historically been a barrier-creating activity. It divides the saved from the unsaved, the baptized from the unbaptized, the circumcised from the uncircumcised and the true believer from the heretic. Religious people also seem to consider themselves competent to take on the role of judgment that belongs only to God. That is why I try to introduce people to a Jesus “for the non-religious.” The divine task of judgment does not belong to human beings or to a human institution like the church. When Pope Francis was asked about homosexual priests in the church, he said: “Who am I to judge?” That is exactly correct, but religious leaders, including previous popes, have never been quite able to learn that lesson.
The fate of Pleistocene people who roamed the continents of the western hemisphere is God’s business alone; it is not the church’s business. Our task is not to build either religious institutions or even great empires. The only Christian vocation is to enhance life, to share love and to enable all people to be all that they can be. When one is devoted to life one quickly discovers that judgment never enhances life.
I view history, not just as the passing of time, but also as the unfolding of consciousness. Consciousness rises in different places at different times and in different circumstances. Human beings are today largely embarrassed at the way we once treated people of color, women, homosexual people, Jews and members of religions different from our own. Consciousness does not move backwards. No society re-enslaves those who have been set free, nor does it re-segregate those who have now broken that barrier. No society takes away the woman’s right to vote, to be educated, to enter the professions, or to control her own reproductive processes once those rights have been extended. No society ever forces back into their closets of anonymity those who have come out of those closets. We will not do that now despite the sound and fury of the new American “Tea Party” members. Those who cannot adjust to new changes in consciousness will simply die eventually as maladjusted people, but the world does not change to accommodate them.
I see human religious systems, including Christianity, as only a stage in human development. My vocation as a Christian is to go so deeply into Christianity itself that I will escape all of its human limits, including the limits of its creeds and of its theology. I do not get to that goal by opting out of my faith tradition, but by engaging it and transcending it. I cannot go backwards; I can only go forward. The frontiers of life, including the religious frontiers, are always scary, always anxiety producing, but entering them and crossing them will always be the only way forward. Those whose mission in life is to protect the past will always lose. Welcome to the journey.
~John Shelby Spong

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