‘Who am I to judge?’

Just when I was about to give up on the Catholic Church, Pope Francis happened. Almost overnight, the Jesuit Pope from Latin America gave my Church a shot in the arm, a relevance I thought it had lost forever. He arrives here tomorrow and I join the entire nation in giving him a warm welcome. He is truly heaven sent.

And while he is in the country, I hope he gets enough time with the bishops and priests to make them see the mission of the Church the way he does. I am afraid the Philippine Catholic Church is far from the Church of the Poor the Pope had been talking about. It is a Church that caters to the rich and influential. Eight bishops and seven priests officiated in a recent celebrity wedding, even as many poor parishes are without priests.

The Pope will be visiting Manila, one of the world’s richest archdioceses. Rappler reports that the value of stocks of the archdiocese and its subsidiary companies parked in different companies listed in the Philippine Stock Exchange amounted to more than P30 billion. The archdiocese is the fifth largest stockholder of the Bank of the Philippine Islands or BPI.

It is the Pope’s humility and simplicity of life that will be a difficult example for our local Catholic Church hierarchy to emulate. It is common enough to see priests and bishops scandalously enjoy luxurious living. Questions have also often been raised in the handling of parish funds. Pope Francis said it himself: “The first reform must be the attitude.”

I have had my problems of conscience being in a Church that emphasizes rituals and traditions, dogmatic about its manmade rules and seem remote from the social problems affecting its members. When they started to demonize one of their own, Tony Meloto, for trying to make the Church relevant to the poor, I knew something was awfully wrong.

The stirrings in my conscience were proven spot on when Pope Francis started to speak up and insisted on the substance of Christianity rather than its forms and traditions. Pope Francis punched his message right through the thick wall of hypocrisy separating the Gospel message of Jesus Christ and what has largely become of the Catholic Church today.

In his 217-page document, “Evangelii Gaudium” (The Joy of the Gospel), Pope Francis called for big changes in the Roman Catholic Church. The Pope said the church needs to rethink rules and customs that are no longer widely understood or effective for evangelizing. 

He proceeded to lead by example. As Pope, Francis has simplified the Renaissance regalia of the papacy by abandoning fur-trimmed velvet capes, choosing to live in a two-room apartment instead of the Apostolic Palace, and replacing the papal Mercedes Benz with a Ford Focus.

Instead of the traditional red slip-ons, Pope Francis wears ordinary black shoes. He declined to order a new set of fine tableware from Leone Limentani, the high-end Roman porcelain company that, since 1870, has supplied every Pope from Pius IX to Benedict XVI with crest-embossed table settings.

All that should not be surprising. As Archbishop of Buenos Aires, he chose to live in a small apartment rather than the Archbishop’s Palace and moved around by public transportation. He encouraged his best priests to live in the slums, joining them for Mass and often walking through the shantytowns.

In his interview with La Civiltà Cattolica, Pope Francis said, “My choices, including those related to the day-to-day aspects of life, like the use of a modest car, are related to a spiritual discernment that responds to a need that arises from looking at things, at people, and from reading the signs of the times.”

I like his response when asked about the alleged “gay lobby” of homosexual Vatican employees. He replied, in part, “A gay person who is seeking God, who is of good will — well, who am I to judge him?”

He spoke of a particularly powerful word in the Gospel: judge. Remember how Jesus himself refused to judge a woman said to be of ill-repute and about to be stoned to death, by daring those who is without sin to cast the first stone.

“The person who judges,” the Pope said, “is wrong, is mistaken and is defeated because he assumes God’s place: He who is the one and only judge.”

So the Pope says: “What kind of love do we bring to others? . . . Do we treat each other like brothers and sisters? Or do we judge one another? The Church’s purpose was more to proclaim God’s merciful love for all people than to condemn sinners for having fallen short of strictures.”

An article in the New Yorker two years ago written by James Carroll is a must reading to understand the mission and orientation of Pope Francis. It spells out why and how he is different. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/ 12/23/who-am-i-to-judge

Carroll explains that “his break from his immediate predecessors — John Paul II, who died in 2005, and Benedict XVI, the traditionalist German theologian who stepped down from the papacy in February — is less ideological than intuitive, an inclusive vision of the Church centered on an identification with the poor…

“Of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics, about 41 percent live in Latin America. Catholicism has declined in Europe and the United States, but the pews of churches throughout the developing world are crowded. The election by the College of Cardinals of the first Latin-American Pope is a signal of the Church’s demographic pivot.

“Francis’s place of origin alone would make him a historic figure, but the statements he has made, and the example he has set, with gestures of modesty and compassion, show a man determined to realign the vast institution with the core message of Jesus.”

Pope Francis: “We want to enter fully into the fabric of society, sharing the lives of all, listening to their concerns, helping them materially and spiritually in their needs, rejoicing with those who rejoice, weeping with those who weep; arm in arm with others, we are committed to building a new world.”

According to Carroll, Pope Francis views the Church as a field hospital after a battle. “The thing the Church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful,” he said. “It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds.”

Carroll points out that Pope Francis seemed to reverse long-set Catholic attitudes, if not actual doctrines, when he said “I have a dogmatic certainty: God is in every person’s life.”

Pope Francis anticipated traditionalists’ objections, saying, “Not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone!” For Francis, the Church’s purpose is not to bring God to the world, but simply to emphasize God’s presence — already there.

In an open letter to the prominent Italian journalist and atheist Eugenio Scalfari, he wrote, “I would not speak about ‘absolute’ truths, even for believers... Truth is a relationship. As such, each one of us receives the truth and expresses it from within, that is to say, according to one’s own circumstances, culture, and situation in life.”

When Pope Francis was asked about the great changes in society, Pope Francis read from a fifth-century saint’s writings on the laws governing progress: “Even the dogma of the Christian religion must proceed from these laws. It progresses, solidifying with years, growing over time.”

Then Francis commented, “So we grow in the understanding of the truth. . . There are ecclesiastical rules and precepts that were once effective, but now they have lost value or meaning. The view of the Church’s teaching as a monolith to defend without nuance or different understandings is wrong.”

Carroll asked Fr Federico Lombardi, S.J., the spokesman of the Holy See how things have changed for him in his job since Pope Francis. Lombardi broke into a broad smile. Then he said, “We experienced for years — and for good reason, also—that the Church said, ‘No! This is not the right way! This is against the commandments of God!’

“The negative aspect of the announcement . . . this was in my personal experience one of the problems… The people thought I always had a negative message for them.

“I am very happy that, with Francis, the situation has changed. Now I am at the service of a message . . . of love and mercy. ‘How I would like a Church which is poor and for the poor,’ he declared in his first week as Pope.”

Welcome to the Philippines, Pope Francis!

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is[email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco