Our Chatty Pope

So the question of the moment is: does this guy know what he’s doing?

The word is that Pope Francis is a dab hand at managing the press, but is he? Or are we simply seeing what we saw with John Paul II—which was the collective decision of the media to adore what was a staunchly conservative, repressive theologian who never admitted that there was a sexual abuse scandal in the church. So he got a free pass, as he has even in death, since he was allowed to pass the miracle test with a 50% score. Under church rules, two miracles are needed to establish sainthood. But either Pope Francis or Benedict waived this rule, and allowed John Paul II to be declared a saint based on only one miracle.

So from the beginning, the press has liked this pope. Confession—I generally regard likable popes as more dangerous than disagreeable popes, so Benedict was my man: a completely prissy, probably-way-closeted pope who drove people out of the church faster than sounding a fire alarm. Perfect!

Second confession: though I think it‘s completely nutty, I appreciate theological conservatism on logical grounds. Consider the policy, as my friend Harry once told me, about getting a sperm sample, when needed for infertility counseling. Normally, guys go into a room, in which usually there are some well-thumbed and hopefully not too sticky men’s magazines. But how can a good Catholic give a sperm sample, since absolutely every sexual act must be undergone—considered using the word “endured”—for the sake of procreation?

Right—there’s a procedure: the man goes to bed with his wife, but using a condom, into which a pin has been pricked. There is thus the theoretical chance of procreation, and you get the sample. See?

I love this sort of lunacy—who wouldn’t? But I find it seriously screwy when a pope drifts back to talk to reporters, on the way home from Rio, and sends people’s eyebrows an inch north and their jaws several inches south. Because the five words that everybody associates with this pope is, “who am I to judge?”

Answer—you’re the pope.

It occurred to me, just now—I know what the problem is. Having worked in Human Resources for Wal-Mart for seven years, the answer came to me with my first sip of double espresso. Here goes:

The pope doesn’t have a job description!  

That’s gotta be the problem, because if he did, there would probably be some sort of nonsense in it, on the lines of:

Consistently and rigorously articulate, uphold and champion key components of the Catholic faith, as defined by scripture, tradition, and the entire canon of the faith.

In short, the pope is supposed to get up in the morning and sit down and make moral judgments. That’s why people are dropping the bills in the collection plates.

OK—so the most recent controversy? The pope apparently made a 10-minute call to an Argentinian, Jaquelina Lisbona, who is legally married to a divorced man, and who has been told that she cannot take communion. Why not? Because she is living in sin with her husband of 20 years, since he has divorced, and his first marriage has not been annulled. So the pope grabbed the phone, called her up, and told her, in essence, to shop around for a more sympathetic priest. And that it would be fine to take communion.

One of the most bizarre things about the Catholic Church is how little its faithful know about it. Nor do I, but this much I know—and to make sure, I googled “state of grace communion.” Try it, and you’ll get your answer.

What’s weird is that this is Catholicism 101—and the pope is saying it doesn’t matter?

Predictably, the millions of divorced Catholics went wild—the pope was signaling that the Church was changing! There were winds of modernity galling through the now open doors of the medieval church! Did the pope plan to announce major changes when the meeting of bishops occurred later in the year?

Just as predictably, the conservatives were howling, and here I have to say—who can blame them? Because the church’s teaching on marriage is bedrock.

Of course, it’s also bogus, since a suspiciously high number of marriages are getting annulled, nowadays: a byzantine procedure that requires two tribunals to decide that, no, a marriage never existed at all. Some of it anyone can go along with—if papá is standing over you with a gun, there’s not much consent involved. But life is messier, in general, and the church is increasingly willing to nullify a marriage because, well, your husband turned out to be a drunk. Oh, and guess what? It doesn’t hurt to throw a little money at the problem, and pay for “advocates” who can…well, advocate.

So how many marriages are getting annulled? Here’s Wikipedia:

Diocesan tribunals completed over 49000 cases for nullity of marriage in 2006. Over the past 30 years about 55 to 70% of annulments have occurred in the United States. The growth in annulments—at least in the US—has been substantial. In 1968 338 marriages were annulled. In 2006 27,000 were.[17]    

In fact, both JPII and Benedict repeatedly called for crackdowns on giving annulments, especially at a meeting of the Roman Rota, which typically hears cases for annulment. Here’s what one source said:

In 1991, when Pope John Paul II wanted to defend marriage against what he perceived to be emerging threats, he used his speech to the Rota to lay out a natural-law case for marriage. He acknowledged that marriage is shaped by culture, but contemporary secular culture, he warned, had now become hostile to marriage. Freedom had become "absolutized," and the pontiff wished to make clear where the boundaries lay.

Three years later, in 1994, Pope John Paul II admonished the Rota against the ease with which annulments were being granted. Judges must know the truth, and the truth "is not always easy." Avoid "the temptation to lighten the heavy demands of observing the law in the name of a mistaken idea of compassion and mercy."

Ah, for the good old days!

Right, so what did Francis do? Well apparently he drifted in and gave a seven-paragraph address. Here again is Charles J. Reid on the subject:

What he delivered was a beautiful meditation on Jesus and the qualities of the good judge. The judge, he began, must be fully and maturely human. He or she (and canon law permits women to exercise the judicial office) must never be legalistic, must avoid dry abstractions, and must instead serve the ends of real justice. And justice, he stressed, required full awareness of the needs of the persons before the court. Attend to the person, he emphasized, in his or her "concrete realities."

As Reid writes, the most important message—the take-home, as we used to say at Wal-Mart—was the judges must be pastoral, not judicial. Which leaves me wondering—if the judges are not to be judicial, well, who is? The answer, as I read the article, is nobody: since Jesus had focused his life on the pastoral, everybody within the church is supposed to be pastoral.

Well, the Vatican press office, who must be salivating for the days of Pope Benedict, came out and said that a private call was not a policy shift, not a realignment on doctrine. Which is probably true; there’s an old Roman saying: popes come and go, the curia remains forever.

And this pope needs to be careful, because if he puts out all these hints, and then doesn’t come through? If his bishops hang tough and say, “sorry, but divorced Catholics cannot take communion?” Look at the trouble in the Anglican Church over the ordination of a gay bishop—it would look like Queen Elizabeth’s tea party in comparison to the fight over remarriage of divorced Catholics.

I’m an old atheist, so I tend to scoff at the whole thing. Still, I do sort of wonder…

…should somebody yank the telephone out of the Holy Father’s office?

The Priest Who Couldn't Be Bought (Part 1)

It’s the stuff of movies.

He was a man of God, a man with a mission, a man who stood firm against the narco-traffickers who were using children—“children!” he exploded, when he first heard of it—to act as runners in the drug trade. As they grew up, they rose in the organizations, gradually working the puntos de drogas, picking up the drugs from the cigarette boats (so-called because they were low, to escape detection by radar, and resembled a box of cigarettes) as they skimmed over the emerald waters of the placid Caribbean.

He was in another world, a world far away from his native Poland, from his town 200 miles south of Warsaw, a town where his family had lived for generations, and where each day, his mother would rise at 5:30, dress hurriedly to the sound of church bells, and start her day by attending mass at the Holy Trinity Catholic Church.

The church—how much had he loved the church! The scent of incense, the swishing of the priest’s cassock as he waddled to the altar, the altar boys lighting candles, their eyes raised in adoration at Father Jozef. The mothers at mass were surging with pride. One day, vowed little Wojciech, it would be he standing at the altar, helping the priest, smelling the incense, feeling the heat of his mother's love as she watched her beloved boy.

There was never any question of it. Did anyone doubt that this quiet, solitude-loving boy had a vocation? He was as much a fixture in the church as the altar itself. And what an exciting time to be Polish, as the whole world fell in love with the first Polish pope, who had stood up to the Communists and won, who travelled the world so that the multitudes could roar the approval and love! He entered the seminary as you and I enter our homes.

There were hints of it, of course. A priest would be moved suddenly, sent off to a distant parish. Wojciech himself had had various priests keep their hands just a bit too long on his shoulder; gaze into his azure eyes just a bit too long. Had he done something wrong?

Later, he would know more about the filth, the corruption that had crept into his beloved church. There were the priests who organized the camping trips—just the priest himself and five or six boys. Never any parents to sleep in the tents or the cabins; why, wondered Wojciech? And a boy who had left sunny and mischievous, afraid of nothing and no one, would come back sullen and inward.

The day of his ordination, the happiest day of his life! All his family there, his mother beaming, telling Father Jozef, now so old but no less fat, how happy she was to give her son to the church.

“My child, you have made the greatest sacrifice to the Church. Wojciech may travel far, to distant lands, spending years toiling in the meanest, poorest hamlets, bringing the light of our holy church, shining the beacon of our Lord Jesus Christ. God will reward you, my dear….”

But in his first years, he had stayed in his beloved Poland, endured its winters, rejoiced in its lissome spring, and most, savored its rich food, and swum in the comfort of his native tongue. His family he saw frequently, his parishioners claimed him as their own.

“You do speak Spanish, don’t you?” asked the Monsignor.

“Hardly,” replied Wojciech.

“But you studied it in the seminary?”

The teachings of Paul, Sir Thomas Aquinas? Those he had devoured, his pursuit of Spanish was leisurely.

‘It was like being shoved into a sauna,’ he thought, as he remembered standing at the top of the runway steps, paralyzed by the heat and humidity, which the Dominicans behind him so much wanted to embrace, to frolic in. He looked out the window at a road well paved but carless. Indeed, the activity on the road was principally on its side, as streams of bikes and scooters—with several people clutching precariously atop them—whizzed by. The road was flat, but moving relentlessly to the Cordillera Central, the backbone of the island of Hispaniola. Shacks appeared now and then on the side of the road—men sat sitting on broken wooden chairs, seemingly with nothing to do. ‘Why aren’t they working the fields,’ thought Wojciech. In Poland, no man would have dared to be seen out of his house, sitting idle.

The car began to rise, to climb the foothills, to slow slightly as they passed villages—wooden shacks with rotting zinc roofs, the doors open and the barefoot, dirty children gazing out at the passing car. They passed dozens of villages; Wojciech’s heart thudded when he thought, ‘this car will stop, and I’ll get out in the infernal heat, and look around at the poverty and squalor, and that’ll be my town, until somebody tells me it’s not. My God, can I do this?’

He thought back to his homeland; the poor there did their best to hide it—keeping their clothes tidy no matter how old or how mended. They would have scorned to have junk in their yards, to be braying so blatantly their indifference to their own poverty. But these people! Their poverty was a sheet on the wash line, hung for all to see!

The car slowed, slowed more than it did merely to pass through the town. Wojciech’s stomach churned.

The church was the only thing that Wojciech could appreciate; it was erected with twin towers in the Italian style sometime in the 19^th century. The toadstools of huts had seemingly sprung up decades ago, and had refused to be eradicated.

His dislike of Padre Julio, standing to greet him in the rectory, was visceral—less a feeling than a blow. Sweat and grease and the stench of garlic oozed out of him, his eyes shifted away from Wojciech and drifted off to something more interesting—or was it an insult? A dismissal? Padre Julio spoke a greeting, not bothering to clean up his broad, coarse Dominican Spanish.

“Cerveza?” asked Wojciech, pronouncing his zeta with the Castilian th. Padre Julio snorted, and ambled off, not even bothering to show him his room. Though, it was obvious; opening one door, Wojciech saw a room strewn with clothes on the floor, an overflowing ashtray, beer cans resting where they had been tossed. The next room was hardly clean, but at least visibly unoccupied. Wojciech put his suitcase in the exact center of the bed, and began placing his shirts on hangers. They’d have to be ironed, of course, but they still had to be hung—one the right, as he had done since childhood. The pants, mostly, were permanent press, and might need just a firm hand to flatten out the wrinkles. Fortunately, the dresser was in good condition, and could receive his t-shirts in the top drawer, underwear below, socks underneath that….

Wojciech washed his face and stood facing the door. A clash of music from the several open bars slashed through the door. ‘Do I have to?’ a voice pleaded within him.

But he knew: if he didn’t face it now, he never would.

Note: I have written so much about the two Polish priests, the nuncio Jozef Wesolowski and Wojciech Gil accused of sexual abuse of minors in the Dominican Republic, that even I am tired of it. The Dominican government wants them extradited: Wesolowski is in the Vatican, which has no extradition policy; even if it did, Wesolowski is protected by diplomatic immunity. As for Gil, Polish authorities have refused to turn him over. Or as the Dominican press reports:

Más temprano las autoridades polacas informaron que no hay posibilidad de trasladar al sacerdote a República Dominicana para ser juzgado.

(“Earlier, Polish authorities announced there is no possibility to transfer the priest to the Dominican Republic to be processed.”)

Gil has claimed that the power drug lords have framed him, as he fought courageously in defense of the children who were being lured into a life of crime and violence. He pointed out that the computer on which the 500 photos of underage children engaged in sexual acts were put there by someone else—it was a shared computer.

And now, according to one account I read and now cannot find, after the denunciations of last May the village has gone silent. Why? Is everybody just tired of it? Or is someone putting screws? The drug lords? The Church?

I thought about it all over the joe of the morning, and thought, ‘well, what if?’ Jack, my newspaperman father, had been glowering—one of his talents—down at me for a while. Dig for the facts, tell ‘em straight, give both sides of the story, and then go hunt for the next story. Had I been doing that?

So here’s the other side….