Tomorrow much of the world celebrates the day that Jesus became Christ.
Certainly in Catholic Latin America – and increasingly north of the border – Pope Francis’ “radical” steps to transform the Church are bringing back many Catholics whose faith had become frayed. That is to say a faith wounded badly by the Vatican, accustomed to lavishly dominating that religion from its headquarters in Rome. (For readers offended by this reality: Rome, from the beginning had a hard time deciding what it was as an inexperienced religious institution. And once it did, it was soon corrupted by often religiously confused, ignorant or hopelessly debased opportunist popes (the Borgias weren’t the only ones.)
Reared a Catholic, I landed in the libraries of Los Angeles in my late my teens. A modest and meanly unappreciated Great Plains priest taught me to look carefully at the Church’s teachings, its high and admirable goals as well as its self-created disasters and cruelties – the inquisition, its bigotries, the realities of the consequences of the crusades, etcetera. The etc. included a close look at the lives of the popes – not cheerful reading for the naive.
But now, at last – hopefully – the Church has a Bishop of Rome, Pope Francis, who evidently truly believes with both head and heart in Jesus’ and Christ’s teachings.
More miraculous-seeming to sincere believers, he seems to behave in a manner that displays a fairly keen knowledge of, and an embrace of, what Jesus was up to.
The reason this seems miraculous to some faith-battered Catholics (and some Christians of other faiths), is the hard, undismissable fact that Jesus was a hard guy to understand by conventional thought of his time – and evidently of this time as well.
The man of Nazareth was given a seemingly impossible task of trying to teach what God was, what ‘“Our Father” was really up to, what His truths were and meant, and how they functioned. Our generally pedestrian ideas regarding what Jesus was trying to tell people who wanted and expected something other than a spiritual, behavioral revolution, confused Christ’s followers then and now.
A number of people, who came into view once I left my small home town, were a different kind of Catholic (or generic Christian) than any I had known. They talked of the confusion Jesus had sown in his travels, during his years of teaching.
For one thing, the Catholics argued that those who were to become the “Apostles” didn’t understand him. Their late-night college-time conclusions: We insist on misunderstanding Him. That was pure laziness, they said. “We” included all of us and our fellows – students, teachers, parents, Catholic priests. That was shocking news. I didn’t argue, just listened. We were an eclectic mix of Catholics, and people who for one reason or other had brushed shoulders with Catholicism; a mixture of protestants, two Jews, one of whom had escaped from Germany just in time, the other had escaped earlier. A Catholic Army vet who had been wounded in Europe. Another member of this group had joined and then left the Jesuit order while very young. All were either GI-Bill students or teachers at the same university. These debates could be called mere college BS sessions, except they seemed densely erudite. Everybody spoke at least one foreign language. For Catholics it was Latin, though they, as did others, also spoke French. Three of the regulars spoke German also. They were relentlessly well read. And I kept silent.
Though that was in another time, they were brushing against the idea of Jesus as a very different being than I had ever heard of. Later the direct translations of the rough koine Greek in which the Gospel story was originally written became available. This is the opposite of the “churchly” idiom of the majority of biblical translations. And it portrays a very different Jesus than the one so widely popular today. Savvy analysts point out that koine Greek best presents the “brutal linguistic earthiness” and “rough-hewn majesty” to “recapture the radically subversive life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus.”
Jesus was a homeless man of the “margins,” author and one of Christianity’s foremost scholar\analysts Garry Wills notes. He was “... anything but respectable.” For an increasing number of independent “Jesus scholars,” the Nazarene is close to what Wills has indicated: “(A) sign of contradiction and a threat to political power who in his salvific mission as the Son of God ‘took up the burden of all mankind.’” People who’ve come – often reluctantly – to this point of view see Jesus as “a radical egalitarian who saved his harshest criticisms for those who wanted to exercise spiritual authority over others” (a point of view that Pope Francis often seems to reflect). “He regularly broke religious rituals, mocked external purity, and violated social taboos to demonstrate that God in his lavish and indiscriminate love never excludes people because they are unclean, unworthy or “unrespectable … No outcasts were cast out far enough in Jesus’ world to make him shun them, including Judas.”
This seems very similar to Francis’s view. Particularly regarding “those who wanted to exercise spiritual authority over others.” Francis has delivered a series of unexpected shocks to the hierarchy of the Church. The Vatican bank was caught in a money laundering scandal in 2010. January 15, Francis fired all but one of the cardinals running the Vatican bank. Just eleven months before they’d had their positions renewed by Francis’s predecessor, Benedict XVI. One of them was the former Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone.
March 26, Francis “accepted the resignation” of Franz-Peter Teboartz-van Elst, bishop of Limburg, Germany. The bishop’s extravagant spending on renovations of his personal residence angered his congregation. Which, these days, means a collision with the more Christ-like religious philosophy of the present pontiff – a message of humility and of acts aimed at emphasizing the needs of the poor. The Limburg diocese said October, 2013, that Bishop Tebarts-van Elst, 54, had spent more the 43 million dollars in the renovation of his residence and Church buildings.
March 31, the archbishop of Atlanta, Wilton Gregory, unaware of the term ‘bleak irony,” announced plans for a 2.2-million-dollar, 6,000-square-foot mansion built on land bequeathed by a not very aware nephew of Margaret Mitchell, author of the pro-Confederate novel, “Gone With the Wind.” Whoa up there, y’all! Wrong time, wrong pope!
Advisers evidently told the mentally and morally inert archbishop this obvious truth. A truth any seriously inquiring Christian student of Christ has branded on the tissue of his/her brain. March 31, Gregory bowed to his congregation’s criticisms, conceding that the Church has changed. Really?
Gregory was still besotted with Benedict’s reign. Jesus taught nothing about Pope Benedict‘s grotesquely deformed idea of why Jesus was here on earth. Evidence is all over the place. “My reign is not of this world.” Regarding those who will enter into heaven, said Jesus – whose own life is an exigent example – will be those who helped “the least of us.” His simple definition of this seems to have been forgotten, ignored, or found too demanding for many who call themselves Christians, including Vatican City folks. It was “How you treated the least of your brothers and sisters,” which he broke down for followers: “I was hungry and you fed me, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was imprisoned and you visited me.”
In Newark, lay people slammed the planned 500,000-dollar expansion – sporting three fireplaces and an indoor pool – of Archbishop John J. Myers’ weekend home. In Camden, New Jersey, and in West Virginia, bishops hit trouble with congregations – and the Pope. Yet U.S. Church leaders have about a ten-year jump on many of their foreign peers in such matters.