George Weigel thinks Catholic conservatives are spending so much time in petty bickering they don’t see the miracles in the Pope’s upcoming encyclical. We’re just like the Apostles battling over Zealots.
On and on they go for weeks, while paying virtually no attention to these episodes in the Lucan account: the Annunciation by the Archangel Gabriel and Mary’s Magnificat; the story of Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem; the presentation of the infant Jesus in the Temple, the prophecies of Simeon and Anna, and Simeon’s Nunc dimittis; the finding of the boy Jesus in the Temple; the Gadarene swine, possessed by demons cast out by Jesus, who go charging into the lake of Galilee; the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector; the story of Zaccheus’s conversion; the parable of the wicked tenants; the story of the Good Thief, whom Jesus forgives from the Cross; the story of the disciples who meet the Risen Lord on the road to Emmaus; and the ascension from Bethany. What with the spin battles over “Simon who was called the Zealot” — spin battles set in motion months before the Gospel was published — the combatants ignore almost everything that is unique, and most that is important, about Luke’s telling of the story of Jesus.
Which we would, I hope, think a shame: For the sake of scoring points in an ideological tug-of-war, the combatants missed the main point of Luke’s Gospel and the distinctiveness of its perspective on the life, teaching, ministry, and Resurrection of the Lord.
Something like this, I suggest, has been underway for months now in anticipation of Pope Francis’s forthcoming encyclical on humanity and the natural world. Late last year, a third-tier Vatican official with a taste for gauchiste politics and self-promotion gave an interview to the Guardian, suggesting that the encyclical would be, in effect, a papal endorsement of the U.N.’s approach to issues of climate change: a piece of spin the leftist British paper was more than happy to highlight, although doing so required the Guardian to take a brief break from its usual Catholic-bashing. Thanks to the Internet, an article based on that interview instantly leapt the Atlantic, and, just as instantly, Catholic skeptics about both climate-change science and Pope Francis went into panic mode, warning that the pope was going to write something that would align Catholicism with Al Gore, Tim Wirth, and the worshippers of Gaia. None of the parties to this dispute, which has now continued for almost half a year, has seen a draft of the encyclical. But all of them are quite sure that it’s a “global-warming encyclical” — just as my fictitious combatants in the first century were sure that Luke’s Gospel was all about the Zealot party — and have taken up the rhetorical cudgels accordingly.Nothing to see here.
An enormous UN conference, a series of meeting with the Obama EPA Chief, and a mountain of ridiculous statements are all just silly fears and fantasies. The Global Warming Encyclical will be a new deposit of Christian wisdom.
Weigel goes on to blame the blogs, blame the press, blame Francis, his socialist language, and his predecessors.
Finally he blames the Vatican Press Office then tells us we’re all going to miss the point.
But I’m also reasonably confident that a lot of this is going to be missed by those who have already made a huge investment of time, energy, and credibility in taking what will be one facet of a comprehensive papal discussion of humanity and the natural world and making it into the whole story. As I suggested a few months after his election, Pope Francis has become a global Rorschach blot, onto whom are projected an extraordinary number of hopes and fears, fantasies and anxieties. This Rorschaching of the Pope has gotten to the point where, now, it’s very difficult to find the real man and his authentic teaching amidst the pre-spin, the spin, and the post-spin. That the Vatican press office has proven incapable of coping with this is another sign that the deep reform that Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected pope to undertake has yet to be achieved in full. And that deficiency is, alas, likely to be on full display when the pope’s encyclical is finally released.
A Rorschach blot! I’m critical but I wouldn’t call Pope Francis that.