Francis: “making all of the wrong people happy”

So Archbishop Chaput has received a lot of emails, he says in a column posted at CatholicPhilly.com, in reaction to the big Francis interview. One email that the Archbishop thought worth mentioning comes from a priest who wrote that “the problem is that [the Holy Father] makes all of the wrong people happy, people who will never believe in the Gospel and who will continue to persecute the Church.”

I don’t know if Archbishop Chaput replied to the email by scolding this priest for his nasty and judgmental comments (he doesn’t really say what he thinks of them), but he should have.

Indeed, a vast amount of people have been made quite happy by the Francis interview. Among them are the Cardinal Archbishop of New York, whose first response was (he says) a “Yippie!” and a desire to “to sing out a loud ‘Alleluia!’” The Cardinal Archbishop of Washington (a more restrained personality) has said that what Francis had to say in the interview is ”a gift” and ”precisely what the church needs today.”

Would the priest who wrote to Chaput include these two among “all the wrong people” who are delighted by the Pope? Perhaps not.

Of course, we know there are a great many others among his Catholic brothers and sisters who have also been thrilled by the contents of the interview. Surely among them are the more “liberal” among the Catholics in the United States today, people who have been saying for years exactly what Pope Francis said in his interview, and who have been treated almost (and sometimes precisely) as heretics because of it. (I’m not suggesting I’m among them; I’m a bit farther to “the right” of many of these brothers and sisters of mine, so I have not had occasion or needed the courage to take the sort of risks that some of them have in voicing their convictions.) Not that they often are heretics, but a narrow, stingy, and ahistorical version of Catholic orthodoxy has insisted that they are. Lisa Fullam comments:

For much of recent history, (say, 30 or 40 years,) if you asked random people on the street what the Catholic Church teaches, you’d likely get a pretty short list: no contraception, no women in authority, no abortion, no remarriage after divorce (without annulment,) no marriage for priests, no gay sex, and (more recently,) certainly no same-sex civil marriage. These teachings had become a tidy para-creed often used to label those of us who quibbled with any of these items “heretics.”

Pope Francis has made no changes to any of these para-credal doctrines, as the preachers of that creed are quick to point out. What he seems to have done, however, is to remove their status as inerrant indicators of the “true Catholic.”

Are these the “wrong people” the aforementioned priest had in mind?

Of course, there’s another group of folks delighting in the Pope’s words that our priest friend may have in mind. It’s all those other folks, the ones who don’t come to church, who have left the Church, or who simply don’t believe the Church has anything worthwhile to say, whom the priest probably means, the ones he calls “people who will never believe in the Gospel and who will continue to persecute the Church.” (People who “will never” believe in the Gospel, Father? John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the great protagonists of the New Evangelization, would likely be disappointed with the attitude.) Call them what you will, it’s no secret that Pope Francis has for six months now been impressing even many of these folks with his humanity, his simplicity, his kindness, his deep respect for even those who do not agree with him.

Here’s the thing. These sad comments from the email that Chaput mentions come not just from a disgruntled layman, but from a priest, someone who is probably leading a parish somewhere in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. This is a guy who apparently sees everyone but the most faithful Catholics around him as the enemy, the opposition, the bad guys. He thinks there really are people who should not ever like a damn thing the Church has to say, and if they do, then we’re probably not saying it loudly or harshly enough. He thinks (contrary to the official teaching of the Roman Catholic magisterium) that there are no fundamental values, and certainly not a great many of them, that faithful Catholics have in common with reasonable people of good will everywhere and that when we talk about these, therefore, a great many people outside the Church should be pleased.

Some Catholics have been spending a great deal of their time in recent days explaining why what some people think the Pope said is not really what the Pope said. We see it here and here, for starters. But what if Fr. Antonio Spadaro, the Jesuit who conducted the big interview, is quite right to insist (as he does in a Catholic News Agency interview), “I don’t have to interpret the Pope. The words are there. It’s absolutely clear”?

What if people know what Francis is saying and what’s not saying, and they still like him, love him, embrace him. What if they know he’s not throwing Catholic ecclesiology overboard (he’s not), he’s not repudiating Catholic teaching on abortion or marriage or anything else (he’s not), but they simply love him and respect him, even with the serious disagreements? What if the scary thing is that what this is teaching us is that the world would have been a lot more open to what we’ve been saying all along, if we’d only said it with a little more respect and love for those around us and lived what we say we believe with a little more authenticity?

Much easier to think it’s not us, though, isn’t it? It’s Francis, dammit, who is the problem, Francis who obviously is saying things wrong. After all, he makes all of the wrong people happy. Um, but not you, Cardinal Dolan … he didn’t mean you.