Nope To The Media’s Ideal For A New Pope

Before the conga line of secular journalists lines up to pronounce that the Roman Catholic Church needs a new pope in line with the recently departed Francis in order to further modernise the church, let’s take a bit of a breather and examine what is behind that call.

Let’s ask whether any of the highly secular progressive media who lauded the enunciation of the more liberally minded South American, Francis, some twelve years ago, after the conservative European Joseph Ratzinger gave up the role (though not the ghost), ended up joining the faith.

I mean, after all, that was the breathy promise of so many as they bade good riddance to the ailing and conservatively brilliant scholar Joseph Ratzinger: “You know, with a pope such as this one, who knows, perhaps even I might end up going to church?” Oh, go you good thing!

I think the assumption of such types was that within his pontificate, universalism would hold sway (he did in fact teeter on that edge) and that Pope Francis would not only give blessings to same sex couples, but would finally take on the sexual revolution holus bolus, and allow priests to marry the person of their choice and the gender of their choice. In other words, that this new pope would cast the church in their own secular image.

This would become a Roman Catholic Church they would not be ashamed of.  That they might, you know, even attend! Though ashamed for who, and about what, is perhaps the bigger question. Themselves or the hundreds of millions of faithful around the world who did not read The New York Times (or anything in English for that matter)?

As it turns out we are going to get the same columns again from the same people again with the same wish-fulfilment again, and who ended up NOT joining the church, or even really contemplating it.

And for all of the accolades coming the late pope’s way, the shift in the West towards a more crunchy form of Christianity, including a return to more liturgical and demanding expression of the faith, is more likely to be the future of the church. The pope’s desire for a more modernist church was not necessarily shared by the faithful or the new-to-faith.

The direction that anyone coming to faith in the West, or reinvigorating the faith of their youth, is not the more liberal direction. Even our very own ABC in Australia reported that the Latin Mass services in major metropolitan centres were being attended by young people from all across the cities.

And the late Pope was dead against such services. Refused to recognise them.  Yet the progressive wings of the Catholic Church are pretty much in the same state as the progressive wings of the Protestant churches. They’d love to see a swathe of young people attending, but they’d rather die than return to mere orthodoxy. And they will! Die, that is.

A sanitised, secularised religion is both no religion at all (not in the sense of religio – duty or obligation), as at its heart the law is to one’s own heart. My rules my way. Your rules your way. That’s the orthodoxy of the mainstream media.

And for all of the crazy statements by the increasingly crazy Candace Owens about the huge return to Roman Catholicism, the stats don’t bear that up. People returning to the Christian faith are far more likely to join a Protestant church than the Roman Catholic Church.

Now to be fair to the late Pope, he was never really going to change the basic doctrines of the church, and nor could he even if he so desired. It was a public relations exercise, because today that’s the pope’s role. He was keen on making pronouncements that kept people guessing. Perhaps that was his genius and his weakness at a time when moral clarity was required on matters such as what it even means to be human.

Yet his prevaricating and equivocation on many matters of culture were not welcomed by many, including those who have been at the coalface of criticism of the Roman Church for caving into the cultural zeitgeist. Have a read of First Things. Have a listen to the likes of Matt Fradd.

For all of the pontificating of the pontiff, it has been the likes of the fair more theologically robust “Social Media Barron” – Bishop Robert Barron, and his cut-through expository teaching from Scripture that (with a healthy Protestant squint) is right up there in terms of orthodoxy.

Indeed, not just in Rome, but across the church world and from former atheists, agnostics and wildcards such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Russell Brand, it is not the vanilla version of the faith, devoid of transcendent, regulations, practices and prohibitions, that is making headway. It’s actually the rum and raisin version that the kids all fear at the ic-cream shop. Full of bits and choking hazards.

While it is still early days in the West, there is a definite return to orthodoxy that sees little hope, and few solutions, in the progressive framework of our popular and elite culture. The vibe shift in the US put paid to vanilla at political level in the same way that the returning, surging tide of faith put paid to the idea of paddling in spirituality’s shallows.

So let’s see what happens next. But whatever happens, just ignore the writers at The Guardian and The New York Times, who bleat on about how they might even be tempted to join if the kind of pope that they thought reflected their secular values a little more, was announced. They didn’t do it in the twelve years since Francis was elected. They’re not likely to do it now.

Oh, but if you are going to take religious advice from a columnist at The New York Times, have a read of Ross Douthat’s Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.  Crafty, careful, crunchy and, above all else, Christian, albeit in a Catholic way!