NICOLE WINFIELD of the Associated Press reported recently that Pope Francis had urged Catholic theologians to listen to ordinary folk and not just to themselves talking. “The primary subject of theological inquiry must be the word of God in Scripture,” Francis said. “But so also are the good words and deeds of laypeople.”
Because Revelation ended with Jesus, theologians themselves, citing Scripture, said the future must now be read in “the signs of the times.” This is to say, in the way people think and feel about how to cleave closer to Christ. Ordinary folk may be wrong, but sometimes they can be right.
So Francis urged theologians to listen to them, as well, although not when people just want more sex and money. In those cases, it is just the Devil talking through people, particularly the sponsors of the reproduction-health law, who wanted to legislate extreme sexual satisfaction into happening.
When Francis was Jesuit provincial, he sent candidates for the Society of Jesus to the slums to compete with priests espousing liberation theology in bringing help to the needy without patronizing them, like Marxists do. To be sure, the rightists just ignored them and hoped that, in their misery, the poor would accept any work condition and indignity just to make it from day to day.
He told them, in the words of Pedro Arrupe, SJ, the 28th superior general of the order, to “inculturate” themselves with the poor so that, by observing how they worship—ceaseless recitations of the rosary, endless novenas, pressing lips to the feet of statues of saints, caressing the wounds carved and painted on a wooden Christ, going on grueling pilgrimages with empty stomachs—the young Jesuits-to-be would be able to discern, through the manner of it, the true spirit in which the genuine faithful approach Jesus, which is to say, with total trust that He will save them: from illness, from hunger, from losing even whatever they have left, from anxiety over the fate of their children, from shame at what they have become and, finally, from a fatal anger at their oppressors among the rich and famous.
Francis said the people of God— though not the merchants of capital—share with expert theologians “the work of discerning God’s ways.” He called for “a theology on its knees,” and not on its crimson butt. Anyway, Francis rightly pointed out that the pope’s infallibility is always around to expand the intellectual parsimony of theologians and cut down the extravagance of emotion of laypeople in matters of God and salvation. Indeed, Christ promised Peter, the first pope, the keys of the Kingdom that bind everything in heaven and on earth with the right teachings, over which the powers of Hell cannot prevail. Indeed, again, the pope can never be wrong. That is the glory of being a Catholic: So long as we follow the pope, we can never go wrong.
Image credits: AP