Through a Glass Darkly

There is a timely reminder on Fr Hunwicke's blog:

 It is therefore the duty of each of us to gloss his [the Holy Father's] words with such a hermeneutic as to be able to read them as being not contrary to what was taught by Vatican I.

I can't help feeling that at the moment the Holy Church of Christ is a bit like an ancient motor car that is being driven so fast and over such rough roads that bits, including some of its passengers, are beginning to fall off. It serves no-one, let alone Christ or Charity to disturb the faith of the 'little ones' - millstones come to mind.

We, in the English speaking world, hear and see what the Pope says 'through a glass darkly'. Unless we are Italian speakers or Spanish speakers what we hear from the Pope is always glossed, and often by the unscrupulous and unpleasant. The most influential English speaking journalists are invariably the one's with a certain agenda of their own, often belonging to a lobby that is set to undermine the truths of the faith.

There are obviously difficulties with Pope's style, like most Italian parish priests he tends to favour an informal style assuming that his listeners are perfectly orthodox and will hear him and understand him in perfectly orthodox way. The problem is of course that he forgets that they are often uncatechised and listen to him with a great deal of baggage of their own.

One of the problems the Pope has, and I sympathise with him over this, is that most Catholics receive their adult formation and information about the Church through the secular media, which as we saw during the previous Ponitificate is far from sympathetic to the Church and its teaching, therefore whatever message the Pope puts out has to be tailored to what they will tolerate.

A friend, who was commissioned to review the Pope's latest book length interview, "The Name of God is Mercy: A Conversation with Andrea Tornielli", says he was surprised by both its dullness and its orthodoxy. Yes, it is Francis through the dark glass of Tornielli and Tornielli tends to now see his life's work as being the glossing of Francis. Those on the right, as with those on the left, find it all too easy to read what Francis says with 'their own lusts' and  'itching ears'.

The Francis effect for many Catholics is confusion but then I suspect for many Popes through out history the effect has been confusion, that is of course if ever people knew who the Pope was (during the Avignon exile we might have been praying for two or three Pope's during the Canon of the Mass) and before the modern era in many parts of the world it might take half a year to know of the death and election of a Pope, even longer to hear of any development in teaching.

Fr Hunwicke is of course right when he points out that we must examine what the Pope says today in the light of Vatican I's

"The Holy Spirit was not promised to the successors of Peter so that, by his revelation, they might reveal new teaching,
                                                  BUT
                                                              so that, by his assistance, they might devoutly guard and faithfully set forth the revelation handed down through the Apostles, or in other words, the Deposit of the Faith."

The Orthodox have a receptionist approach to Oecumenical Council's: it is of God only if it is accepted by the Churches. The same maybe said with us Catholics and the magisterial deposit of faith laid down by the Pope's, there might be immediate juridical implications of what a Pope says or laws he enacts, these are tested in practice and by jurisprudence but its theological implications are also tested, most obviously by his immediate successors. If he is ignored, it is as if he might not have existed. As a venerable member of the College of Cardinals said, "Pope's are always old men, they do tend to die", nowadays they also retire of course.