‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me’ – John 14:6
THE Pope needs to reassess his media strategy if he wants that question to remain rhetorical. As it is, with each impromptu press interaction it becomes less clear that he agrees with settled Catholic teaching and less obvious that he is in step with the overall Magisterium.
Set to one side the papal blessing of a block of ice. The accompanying endorsement of (near pagan) climate eschatology was jarring. The event (I nearly wrote ‘stunt’) occurred at something called The Raising Hope for Climate Justice conference near Rome. The aesthetic was unlovely, like one of those pieces of experimental theatre one is required to like because of levels.
Or is that harsh? We have the early example of St Paul at the Areopagus in Acts 17, where he sermonised the Athenian Stoics, Epicureans and believers in false gods out of their superstitious practices. Was Leo engaging with the Net Zero heretics with that example in mind?
Christians have always been good at the infiltration and appropriation of competing secular cultures, partly as a survival mechanism. Take Christmas, which come to think of it we did. Every ‘he-was-actually-Turkish’ grade secular faux intellectual will tell you has its origins in pagan culture. True enough. How did that turn out?
In this case, though, the suspicion is that the ambient liberal orthodoxy was evangelising the Church, and not the other way around. Hollywood went to the successor of Francis, in the preposterous person of the ‘naturally aging’ Arnold Schwarzenegger. Spiritual warfare doesn’t get more David Lynch than that.
At least it was possible to laugh at the whole shebang. Far more distressing was this.
In case you missed it, this was Pope Leo cosplaying a newly tenured liberal humanities college professor making every effort not to upset the progressivist student body or his faculty colleagues.
The reason for the performance? The decision by the reliably unhelpful Cardinal Blase Pucich, Archbishop of Chicago, to give an award to Senator Dick Durbin. What the award was for is a mystery to those of us who think the Church shouldn’t be in the business of sucking up to career politicians. In the case of the Senator from Illinois, rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s ought to involve the rendering of a cold shoulder or emphatic mockery. But what really made the whole thing controversial is Durbin’s views on the killing of unborn children. He seems to think that there isn’t enough of it. In saner times this would count as disqualifying.
Catholics believe that in certain very restricted circumstances, and even then relating only to faith and morals, the pope speaks infallibly. Most commentators look at the infallibility bit of that. Smarter people will note the flip side: that when not speaking ex cathedra he is as vulnerable to error as any superintelligent but finite human person.
Popes get things wrong. It’s almost written into the job description. Peter himself could be exasperatingly clunky and was called on it by Christ almost routinely, and in terms which were somewhat more robust than contemporary sanitised HR-friendly Lanyardese. The successors to Peter are similarly imperfect and entitled to a learning curve.
‘What is truth?’ Pilate asks Jesus, prefiguring the logical positivists and linguistic philosophers of last century. These are the thinkers who stress-tested the scientific naturalism which became voguish following the Enlightenment to answer Pilate’s question and came up with differently inadequate proposals.
Christians, though, know (or should do) that truth is not a property of statements, or a relation between propositions, but an activity of the Word within the whole of creation. When looked at this way, the true and the good are shown to be the same.
Thus: lying is wrong because the liar denies that things are the way that God has made them, even though he knows that they are, and relativism is evil because it asserts that His purpose lacks clarity. And ‘useful’ ambiguity can turn into theological mischief. Which is what has happened here.
What do I mean?
The worst thing Pope Leo says in that clip is that issues around ‘pro-life’ are complex. They are not. They are very simple. Or ought to be. If they seem otherwise that’s only because Leo has created ambiguity by bundling things together which are better left apart.
When disaggregated the issues of abortion, capital punishment, and border enforcement are treated specifically and differently within Catholic social teaching. When we take a pause, the ‘whataboutery’ move (which is just enervating relativism) looks unnecessary and even expedient.
There is no moral equivalence between abortion and capital punishment because the deliberate taking of innocent life in its most vulnerable moments is a uniquely evil act, and therefore not ‘equivalent’ to anything else. And when the most recent Catechism stipulates that the death penalty is ‘inapplicable’, this is just another way of saying that it is wrong as a practical or extrinsic matter. Not that it is wrong in and of itself.
Pope Leo knows more than anyone that language is the charism we are given to discern the activity and purpose of God in creation. Using words and concepts to turn the simple into the complex, the clear into the vague, or to conflate the morally timelessly true with the contingently prudent, can be a bad way of passing on that gift. Sometimes it is right to be ambiguous. But with linguistic vagueness comes some responsibility. The truth, in the end, is always simple.
Your Holiness, with all love and respect, next time speak simply or ignore the cameras.
