Pope Francis’ “Mere Christianity” In The Screwtape Letters, Uncle Screwtape advises his tempter-demon nephew Wormwood that, The real trouble about the set your patient is living in is that it is merely Christian. They all have individual interests, of course, but the bond remains mere Christianity. What we want, if men become Christians at all, is to keep them in the state of mind I call “Christianity And.” . . . . If they must be Christian, let them at least be Christians with a difference. Substitute for the faith itself some fashion with a Christian coloring. (Letter 25) Screwtape wants people to turn their faith into something divisive, something that sets them and their beliefs off from others. The fallout from Pope’s Francis recent interview makes it seem that Pope Francis is doing just this. Slate magazine, for example, claimed he was “a flaming liberal”. I agree with so many others who insist that this is not what Francis is doing (a point effectively made by Charlie Camosy, Mark Shea, and many others.) What is the Pope doing? Francis seems to be addressing not a left-right problem but an inside-outside one. Our church is afflicted by groups—and they can be from the right, middle, or left—that use one aspect of the gospel as a shibboleth to distinguish the inner circle from the outer, the righteous from sinners, and the justified from the damned. Pope Francis seems concerned with bridging these divisions (the pope is supposed to be the pontifex maximus, the ultimate bridge-builder, after all) by focusing on the faith behind all of them. But the proclamation of the saving love of God comes before moral and religious imperatives. Today sometimes it seems that the opposite order is prevailing. . . . The message of the Gospel, therefore, is not to be reduced to some aspects that, although relevant, on their own do not show the heart of the message of Jesus Christ. And again . . . This is pure Gospel. God is greater than sin. The structural and organizational reforms are secondary—that is, they come afterward. The first reform must be the attitude. The ministers of the Gospel must be people who can warm the hearts of the people, who walk through the dark night with them, who know how to dialogue and to descend themselves into their people’s night, into the darkness, but without getting lost. For Francis, this “saving love of God” and “pure Gospel” is what binds us all in communion with one another and together with God.
Posted on: Tue, 01 Oct 2013 17:08:41 +0000
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