Back in the 1960's, shortly after the Second Vatican Council, Rome announced modifications to the Friday abstinence from meat, which was in effect for the entire year, not just during Lent. In essence, Friday was still to be observed as a day of penance in commemoration of Our Lord's Passion, but one could substitute some other appropriate penance for the ordinary practice of going meatless. Individual dioceses were also able to modify the observance in light of local customs. But not eating meat was still considered the ordinary way of observing Friday as a day of penance, with the Lenten practice of meatless Fridays remaining in force. This is still the prescribed discipline of the Church today. By the time the secular press got hold of the story it was reduced to VATICAN SAYS: HOT DOGS FOR EVERYONE ON FRIDAYS. That meat was now permissible fare on Fridays, without any of the nuances, was all most of the faithful, and even many priests, ever heard about the change. As one priest who lived through that period told me, most Catholics, including priests, got their news about the Church from secular tabloids like The New York Daily News more than from the L' Osservatore Romano. To this day most Catholics think the Church changed Her long standing discipline without qualification. I will admit that in the big picture whether you eat meat or not on Friday may seem like a small matter, but the example is illustrative of how the secular press often over simplifies stories about the Church, and sometimes just gets them plain wrong.
This past Friday I was on my way to the airport and saw a man standing on a median at a traffic light selling the paper. It was the Sun-Times, which is the tabloid daily here in Chicago. He wore a nylon vest with a see-through panel on the front and back that housed the front page. The headline was bold and succinct as you would expect from a tabloid: POPE RIPS FOCUS ON GAYS, ABORTION. The Sun-Times was making reference to an interview of Pope Francis published last week in several Jesuit journals around the world and here in the States by the Society of Jesus' flagship publication America. I read the interview finally, after hearing and reading much about it and can say that the Holy Father "rips" no one. His comments about gays, abortion and contraception were less than a paragraph of a rather lengthy interview that covers a variety of topics. He isn't supporting same sex marriage or suggesting abortion is OK. In fact the day after the interview first appeared His Holiness met with a gathering of Italian OG-BYNs and spoke of the evils of abortion and the need to promote the Gospel of Life. So what did the Pope mean?
What the Holy Father is saying that what comes first and foremost is the proclamation of the Gospel message of salvation and repentance. We live in a wounded world with people who are spiritually injured and these wounds need to be healed first. He likens the Church to a field hospital. In a triage situation where a person has a compound fracture and is bleeding to death you don't ask about his cholesterol and blood sugar - to use Pope Francis' example. There is time for that once the patient has been stabilized. But the first proclamation of the Gospel needs to be about God's love and mercy. Once the person has been introduced to Jesus Christ, and has that personal encounter with Him then the doctrines and moral teachings can be introduced in a more systematic way. Once the person knows Jesus, has a relationship with Him the doctrines will be better understood and seen as flowing naturally from being a disciple, as opposed to being a "disjointed" collection of moral imperatives that don't seem to have a link to life in general, let alone to life in Christ.
The Holy Father is at once subtle and clear that we are to always separate behavior from the person. In the case of homosexuals, the teaching is clear on homosexual acts, and as a son of the Church the Pope holds to them. But we also have the person who is a child of God who needs to be treated as such; with respect, dignity and love.
Is the truth of the Church's teachings on human sexuality to be taught and proclaimed? Yes. But so are Her teachings on social justice, respect for the environment, the dignity of the disabled, the proper care of the sick and the need for an active and deep prayer life, to name a few things. We need to preach it all, but as Pope Francis said, we don't have to preach it all at once. So when the Pope talks to gynecologists he'll speak about abortion, and when he speaks to the unemployed in Sardinia, as he did the other day, he'll speak of the dangers of globalization and the need for an economic system that puts people and their right to work ahead of greed. He will chose the right time and place to proclaim the message needed in the moment, and he is reminding all of us charged with preaching to do the same.
In the end the reaction to the Pope's interview highlights our contemporary crisis of a politicized Church, with people taking sides as liberals and conservatives. With his words of conciliation and talk of mercy many liberals see an ally in Pope Francis, hoping that the changes they've been waiting for since 1965 are finally on the way. Conservatives, stung that the Holy Father is seemingly not as stringent on liturgy and "hammering heretics" as his immediate predecessors are scrambling to explain what the Pope really meant. This misses the point. We are neither a liberal nor a conservative Church in the way that the world understand
And one final message to everyone out there: beware stories about the Church appearing in the secular news services, be they print, radio or television. They usually over simplyfy things and force bloggers like me to slave over posts like this.
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