God Will Provide A Pope Ready To Lead Our Church Of 'wheat And Weeds'
This past Friday and Sunday, with the snow and sometimes sleet coming down, my replacement rental remained in the church parking lot at St. Matthew’s Church, Mt. Vernon. No sense taking any chances to find another slick spot on the highway! Once in a lifetime is one time too many.
Perhaps the article “Priest abuse victims lose hope: Say new pope won’t matter” on the front page of last Sunday’s Evansville Courier and Press caught your attention like it did mine. From now until the new Pope is elected, many of us will read whatever we can find about the Pope or anything connected with the papacy or the papal elections.
One can only have deep empathy for the woman being interviewed, Ann Hagan Webb, who – according to the article - was a survivor of sexual abuse for years by her childhood pastor in the mid-2000s. The pain of child sexual abuse is, thankfully, to me unimaginable. The shame that children carry with them for years and decades is horrible. They often speak of being “robbed of their childhood.” Sometimes the embarrassment, shame, guilt and silence are so great that some abuse victims even commit suicide. Our hearts go out to sexually abused children. Changes are being made in the Church, and many still express a need for official apologies from the hierarchy.
Webb, who was once very active in the Church and hoped to change it from within, has given up on changing the Church. She is quoted as saying, “At this point, my opinion is they are corrupt to the core and there’s not a single Cardinal we can find who would be a good pope because there’s no such animal.”
Although my heart goes out to Ms. Webb for her past abuse, as a priest I do not hold her opinion that the entire church is corrupt to the core and that a good Pope cannot be found among the Cardinals. All one has to do is pick up a book on Church history and read about the 265 popes elected since Simon Peter. We find some extraordinarily holy men; and, at the same time, other popes cared more for the pleasures of the office than for the ministry. Some popes fathered children, then ordained them as bishops, named them Cardinals, some of who also eventually became pope (“nepotism” is the correct word for this). While other Popes lived exemplary lives of goodness and service to the poor.
Certainly in my lifetime, good Pope John XXIII was a wonderful pontiff (others think not because of all the changes he made by calling Vatican Council II). He was a man of faith who possessed a cheerful spirit and a great sense of humor. He was a “peoples’ pope” who could understand the ordinary man and woman – perhaps because he was born in poverty.
Paul VI had great compassion for priests who decided they wanted to leave the active ministry of the priesthood. A priest who preached during the Good Friday Service in St. Peter Basilica while Paul was pope condemned such priests as “Judases!” That priest was never invited back into the Vatican again! While unfortunately, Paul VI may be remembered mainly for his letter on birth control, he also authored two of the most profound papal documents ever written. One dealt with “Evangelization in the Modern World” (a must-read for anyone involved in the RCIA process) and the other is “Ecclesiam Suam,”which lays out the dynamics for good, healthy dialogue among Christians and between Christians and other religions (a must-read for all Catholics, from laity to bishops).
The Church is both sinful and holy; both endowed with the Holy Spirit and tempted to sin. We are a church of “weeds and wheat.” I don’t think Jesus meant for us to look at others and say, “That person is a weed or that person is good wheat.” Weeds and wheat grow in each one of us. He calls us to get rid of the weeds that choke the wheat. This is not meant to justify what any pope, bishop, priest or layperson has done or does, but only to point out the reality that when one looks over the whole span of the last 2,000 years of Church history, we can say that God must truly be guiding this very human Church. Otherwise it would have foundered a long time ago.
It’s easy to be scandalized by our history. But let us not lose hope that God is still sovereign. I trust God will provide us with a pope needed at this time in our history. One thing certain is that whomever is elected will not be perfect, as neither you nor I are perfect.
