As I Think about Pope Francis

As someone who is a traditionalist Catholic in terms of the liturgy (I love Latin, candles, novenas, sacramentals, and communion at the railing and on the tongue), I have had some trouble with the Catholic Church, not with the late Pope Francis so much as with the Church’s cynical lust to be “relevant.” To me, Church authorities forgot that sometimes, one of the best answers to suffering is majesty. They had the Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor Adorno rolling over in his grave by dumping some of the most sublime sacred music for ersatz folk rock. I agreed with Pope Benedict XVI on that principle, and I find false humility (an intentional downplaying of majesty for the sake of being “just folks”) to be dangerously close to the sin of pride. I thought Church authorities underestimated the need for the sublime, for something greater than the ordinary “just folks” aesthetic. I am old enough to have taken my first communion in a church that still had high masses in Latin. Bring them back.

In terms of “the poor,” the broken, those who are outcast, who do not fit in with a middle-class poster for Catholic family values, I have a great love. So, my Catholic faith pleases neither conservatives nor liberals (and I really confuse moderates). I am happy not to please anyone. To me, belief is the cross itself, and the cross remains a scandal under the signs of both lowliness and majesty. Both are absolutely necessary. It is in this contradiction that I weigh Pope Francis.

He flunked for me as someone who could have reconciled himself to the fact that he was not a parish priest. He tried so hard to symbolize a pope who was just a parish priest. I think he did this out of a true desire to be humble, but I do not think it escaped the performative. This often annoyed me. It annoyed me the way priests on brochures often take photo-ops with developmentally disabled children—especially kids with Down syndrome. I had a brother who was brain damaged. I never saw a priest within one hundred yards of him. The picture was not the reality. The church doors remained locked to vagrants all over the world. My own children, who have autism and are developmentally disabled, were called a disruption at a Mass, and I was asked by one unsympathetic person not to bring my daughter to church. So, when I saw the pope kissing babies (so to speak), my heart grew antsy. Much of this was my own experiential hurt over the distance between what my Lord, Jesus Christ, wanted, and what middle-class propriety endorses.