UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
Michael Sean Winters | Sep. 20, 2014
Perhaps it was a coincidence. Last night, watching the fifth installment of Ken Burns’ “The Roosevelts,” Jon Meachem was explaining that, as happens at key moments in history, in FDR and Churchill, the moment had found the men it needed. Also last night, my cell phone and emails were on fire as the news broke that Bishop Blase Cupich was to be named the ninth Archbishop of Chicago. Again, the moment found the man.
Let’s start with the moment. In a little more than a year, Pope Francis has completely changed the public face of the Catholic Church. Instead of Vatileaks, we have people, including many non-Catholics, who feel good about the Church, who love the pope, and who demonstrate time and again their responsiveness to the Gospel call to be with the poor and the marginalized. Instead of a Church closed in on itself, fighting over the liturgy, and more interested in ferreting out heretics than in seeking converts, we have a Church that is urged, repeatedly, by Pope Francis to go to the peripheries and encounter Christ by encountering the poor. Instead of a culture war style, we have a Pope who is calling the Church to engage the culture, accompany people, not uncritically as his comments on socio-economic realities make clear – “This economy kills” – but with love. Just last Sunday, we heard in the Gospels that God so loved the world He sent His only Son. We did not hear that God was so appalled by the secularization in the world that He filed a lawsuit. Pope Francis has brought the joy of the Gospel back.
Not everyone in the United States has been thrilled with Pope Francis. How many times in these past eighteen months have we heard his conservative critics undertake their “What Pope Francis meant to say” routine. We have seen prelates adopt a grudging tone, that Francis is the pope we need even if he is not the pope we want. (And, thank you very much, Francis is very much the pope some of us want!) We have heard the sneer that Francis is blinded by his parochial, Argentine experience. The divisions within the American episcopate, already obvious, have become more pronounced, not less, by Francis’ revolution.
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