The Anticlerical Pope

Pope
Francis greets Slovenia's Prime Minister Alenka Bratusek during a
private audience at the Vatican June 13. (CNS photo/Maria Grazia
Picciarella, pool)

The Anticlerical Pope | Russell Shaw | CWR blog

Is
Pope Francis our first anticlerical pope? Technically speaking, he isn't--his
two predecessors also were more or less critical of clericalism--but he is well
on his way to being the most outspoken one.

Consider
a widely circulated quote from a 2011 interview he gave while he was still
Cardinal Bergoglio of Buenos Aires. In case you haven't seen it or have
forgotten it, the key passage goes like this:

"As
I have said before, there is a problem: the temptation to clericalism. We
priests tend to clericalize the laity. We do not realize it, but it is as if we
infect them with our own thing. And the laity--not all but many--ask us on
their knees to clericalize them, because it is more comfortable to be an altar
boy than the protagonist of a lay path….

"The
layman is a layman and has to live as a layman with the strength of his
baptism, which enables him to be a leaven of the love of God in society…not
from his pulpit but from his everyday life. And the priest--let the priest
carry the cross of the priest, since God gave him a broad enough shoulder for
this."

These
are strong, bracing words. But besides the words, Francis's manner and
lifestyle--unpretentious, simple, direct--constitute a kind of living
repudiation of certain clericalist conventions. (Lest there be any doubt--many
other good priests also speak and live this way.)

The
essence of clericalism in the sense in which Pope Francis (and I) use the word
is a way of thinking that takes for granted that the clerical vocation and
state in life are both superior to and normative for all other Christian
vocations and states.

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