Skip to main content

A new Pope



Apart from congratulating myself on my perspicacity on predicting a Latin American Pope on the basis that it needed to be shipped out of Europe safely and that meant to a place that mirrors Europe and speaks a Latin based language hence the Americas, I, like many, am pondering what this particular election means...

What it does not mean is any radical shift in the doctrinal teaching of the Church on matters beloved of liberals and obsessed over by conservatives. Sex remains conflicted. The Church will continue to exhort and the faithful will nod politely and continue to ignore the Magisterium.

The chinks of light are that Pope Francis is a Jesuit and committed to social justice.

The former gives him a commitment to a conscious, disciplined and structured pattern of spirituality that is designed and meant to deliver concrete results. Jesuit spirituality is not a path of exhortation and wishful thinking but a measured, thoughtful and imaginative path for evoking, responding to and channeling grace. The Church is, to quote St Benedict, 'a school for the Lord's service' and that pedagogy is meant to deliver results.

The latter gives the Papacy the opportunity, alongside a renewed emphasis on spiritual formation, to develop a real 'edginess'.

The truly counter cultural edge of the Church is not to be found rummaging through people's bedrooms but asking deep and meaningful questions about what they do at work, with the money they earn and about the structures of their economic life. 'Economic' life seen both as the organisation of the 'home' and of the 'polis'. It might not be seemly for a Jesuit to be seen consorting with a Dominican but if the Pope chooses a Franciscan mantle - of poverty and simplicity - he might like to add a Dominican one of deeply questioning the arrangements of the world that lead us away from St Francis' idealism.

He might care to begin with a global financial system ill-equipped to bring either stability or justice to the world.

I remember my first trip to Dublin and sitting on a bus and facing a fellow traveller (Dublin buses were designed to facilitate conversation) and being asked by him, brandishing a newspaper, 'Don't y'r think it usurious what these here credit card companies are charging?' (This was before the era of the Celtic Tiger and his subsequent extinction). "As St Thomas Aquinas says in the 'Summa Contra Gentiles'" followed by a swift and erudite criticism of the notion of 'interest."

It would be great if the new Pope took up these cudgels, not only the importance of focusing on the poor (in a charitable way) but of the rigorous Catholic social tradition that questions our modern arrangements that generate poverty, social inequality and ecological injustice.

A good attack on usury would be a great place to start for not only does it distort our economic relations but it places a crippling burden on our ecology!

Where better for a Francis to start. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age

Searching for paradise in the hidden Himalayas

At moments of dislocation and intense social uncertainty people will appear offering the possibility of another land where people will be blessed, liberated and genuinely at home. In this case, it was not 'Brexit' but a hidden land of actual immortality, enfolded within the mountain ranges around Mt Kanchenjunga on the Nepalese/Sikkim border. Unlike Shangri-la, Beyul Demoshong was not simply a physical space, carefully hidden (as imagined in Hilton's Lost Horizon) but an occulted place spiritually hidden. The person offering this journey and opening the way to it was the 'crazy lama', Tulshuk Lingpa. Lingpa was a 'terton' a finder of 'terma' which were texts magically hidden until discovered at the right moment for them to be of maximum usefulness to people's spiritual development. They were often hidden by Padmasambhava, the robust wonder-working bringer of Buddhism to Tibet; and, Tibetan Buddhism is alive with such discoveries (though und

Parzival and the neutral angels

Fresh from contemplating 'Lost Christianity', I read Lindsay Clarke's fabulous re-telling of Wolfram von Eschenbach's poem, 'Parzival and the Stone from Heaven' from which 'Christendom' is lost! Von Eschenbach was a sacred poet but one of ecumenical sympathies where not only is Parzival's final battle (unknowingly) with his brother, the piebald Saracen, Feirefiz, essential to his self-discovery but the two of them enter the Grail castle together and are granted together a vision of the 'stone' that is the Grail. When Feirefiz asks whether it is permitted to see this Christian  mystery, Parzival answers (in Clarke's version) yes for, "all Nature's increase is there, so I think that this stone from Heaven must be a living emblem of the earth itself, which is mother and father to us all." There are knights, ladies, sorcerers, hermits and wise old hags abounding in Eschenbach's world but interestingly for a mediev