WE NEED THE POPE - 2
From its early
history, the Church was confronted and challenged by various innumerable
heresies like Gnosticism, Arianism, Nestorianism, Monophysitism, Monotheletism,
Apolianarianism, and other tongue-twisting errors. The Church did not react
with counter unpronounceable theologies; she simply fought back with the
ordinariness of the apostles, making the acid test of Christian belonging not
expertise in religious theory or secret knowledge, but simple sharing in the
Church’s public worship, obedient attention to her Scriptures, and communion
with her bishops, the administrators who had emerged as successors of the
apostles, handing on their teaching, and preaching that old-time
unsophisticated religion.
The bishops had
become a sign that God had tabernacled among his people, that the eternal had
entered, not into secret association with special people, but into the mundane,
the public, and the ordinary. So the apostolic witness of the Church, focussed
in her bishops, is a witness that the saving truth of God has been handed on to
sinful men and women like ourselves. The truth will not be found by walking
away from the community of sinners we call the Church, to lonely places, higher
morality and arcane doctrine. The apostolic witness can be found in the unity
of a shared and often a stumbling pilgrimage alongside other sinners, relying
not on superior resources but on the truth of God released among us and
proclaimed whenever Christians meet to hear the Scriptures and break the bread
of life together. The episcopate - and especially the papacy -
embodies the sheer flesh-and-blood, hard-as-nails humdrumness of
redemption, and the particularity of God’s presence in his world and in his
Church.
Catholics delight
in symbolising their unity in Christ around a person -
Pope, bishop - rather than basing it on a theology -
Calvinism, Lutheranism, and many other “isms”. We naturally assume that
bishops and popes are men of faith, hope and charity, knowledgeable and efficient.
And we have to hope that they will live up to the demands of the Gospel and the
trust we place in them. But in the last analysis, what matters most is that we
stick with them, not because they are clever or nice, but because they are
ministers of God. To whom shall we go in order to keep ourselves united and
strong? We need to
“Beware of letting go of nurse
For fear of finding something worse.”
And that is why we do not service to the Gospel by pretending that
our bishops or popes are superhuman, that they never commit sins, though some
have turned out to be heroes, geniuses and saints. But most of all, who can
seriously doubt the fundamental role of the papacy of holding together in a
single communion Churches with vastly different histories, priorities and
cultures? Consider the Churches of Europe and Africa, of the First and Third
Worlds; Churches, moreover, often separated by national and ethnic
confrontation or conflict of interests. It is the papacy which, more than any
other factors, holds all the Churches to a common vision, and helps prevent
them collapsing back into the parochialism of their own regional and cultural
agendas. Since must all live with the papacy, we are all enabled to live with
each other.
GOD
BLESS OUR POPE, THE GREAT, THE GOOD!
(concluded)
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