UNITED STATES
Washington Post
Posted by Melinda Henneberger on March 19, 2013
All sorts of Catholics — the hurt and the whole, the progressive and the traditional — want to believe our eyes and trust all the positive signs and signals out of Rome in the week since Francis was chosen to succeed Benedict: “It’s like falling in love,” one friend said. “God help me,” another agreed.
It’s been a long, bruising decade since the height of the clerical sex abuse scandal here in the U.S. in 2002, and this new pontiff’s message so far, in both words and symbolic gestures, is a welcome one for many of us who chose to stay anyway, denying nothing.
“How I would like a church that is poor and for the poor,” he told reporters, and a little bit of my “wait and see,” posture gave way. “True power is service,” he tweeted Tuesday. “The Pope must serve all people, especially the poor, the weak, the vulnerable.” Amen, of course.
He took the name of Francis of Assisi, he has said, as “the man of poverty, the man of peace, the man who loves and protects creation; these days we do not have a very good relationship with creation, don’t we?” Oh my, and an enviro, too? Don’t fall before all the facts are in, I told myself, but with limited success, I’m afraid, as I read that he had real reform in mind, and had announced that no one in the Curia should feel too safe in his current job. All assignments, he said, were only donec aliter provideatur — “until other provisions are made.”
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