WE NEED THE POPE - 2

                                                              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)