A Note to the Pope
Sermon by Steve Edington
May 1, 2005
In the late spring of 1976 I received an invitation to attend a reception for a European Cardinal of the Catholic Church who was on an American tour. I was the Protestant campus minister at a state university in Stevens Point, Wisconsin at the time. Stevens Point is a community with a very heavy Polish Catholic population. Would I like to attend a reception for Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Krakow, Poland at such and such a time and place later that summer when he would be in town to celebrate a community-wide Mass? The invitation was sent to area clergy of all faiths. I checked my calendar, discovered that I had an out-of-town conference on at that time, and mailed back my regrets that I would be unable to attend.
I didn't think anything more about this until October of 1978, when John Paul II became Pope, following a Papacy of only a few weeks by John Paul I. I read the newspaper accounts of who John Paul II actually was. He was, or had been, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Krakow, Poland. The name was vaguely familiar. As I re-wound my brain tape back a ways I came to the realization that two years earlier I had missed whatever chance I'm sure I'll ever have to meet a Pope - a future Pope in this case - face to face. So, when it comes to whatever I might want to say to a Pope, I had my chance and blew it. I did wonder, as I though back to that invitation of two years earlier, what I would have said to the Cardinal, now Pope, had we had a chance to meet and talk for a few minutes.
Over twenty-six years later Cardinal Wojtyla/Pope John Paul II has passed away and a successor has been named. German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger has become Pope Benedict XVI (the 16th). I'll say right off the bat that he would not have been my first choice, but nobody asked me - and for very good reason. No Pope has ever had to pass muster with a Unitarian Universalist minister, after all. To the best of my memory I was never invited to meet Cardinal Ratzinger, as I was Cardinal Wojtyla, so I don't have to speculate on how a conversation with him might have gone. His elevation to becoming Pope, however, has given me a chance to reflect a little on my relationship, as a liberal religious leader, with Catholicism - and what the dawning papacy of Pope Benedict XVI might mean for that relationship. I do not mean "relationship" in a personal sense now. I'm thinking now of the place and role Catholicism, under its new Pope, will have and will play here in the United States and around the world, as a part of the larger communion of persons of faith everywhere, and people of many faith persuasions.
But I'll start with the personal. I don't know of how much interest it would be to him, but if I were to relate to Pope Benedict my journey as it has crossed paths with Catholicism it would go like this: I grew up in a setting - that setting being a bastion of southern Protestant evangelicalism - where Catholics were suspect. We were told, "You've got to watch out for those Catholics" without really being told what it was we were supposed to be looking out for. I never heard the Pope branded as the "anti-Christ" in the church in which I was raised, but such sentiment was clearly in the local cultural air. Since those days Catholics and Protestant evangelicals have largely made their peace with one another, but that was not the case in the American south of the 1950s.
I got to college just as the winds of Vatican II were blowing across the American religious landscape, and my personal religious landscape was also being transformed. The religiously liberal thing to do in those days, and for someone of my near-fundamentalist upbringing, was to go on ecumenical retreats where we Protestant and Catholic undergrads would share how much we had in common, and come up with joint worship services that would involve the use of guitars and drums and such as that. It was great fun really. If you'd been raised as a super-conservative Protestant, hanging with Catholics was considered as pretty edgy thing to do. It was also quite unsettling to my father who decided I was being seduced by the evils of liberalism. He was right, actually; but that's another matter.
In seminary I found myself shoulder to shoulder with Catholic seminarians and lay leaders, women and men, in the peace movement at the time of the Vietnam War. One of my more lasting memories from my seminary days was a evening spent in Father Daniel Berrigan's apartment in Ithica, New York shortly before he was sent to jail for his anti-draft activities - and listening to him explain how his training as a Jesuit priest had led him to take the stance he had. From those days until the present day I've been pleased to make common cause with Catholic individuals and congregations with it comes to certain issues of social justice. I'm pleased that we can work in partnership with some of the Catholic congregations in southern New Hampshire through the Granite State Organizing Project in seeking to improve the quality of life in this region when it comes to things like health care, affordable housing, and fair employment wages.
So, I consider myself Catholic-friendly, and I regard the new Pope in this spirit. Practically speaking, I guess I'd better be Catholic-friendly since most of my in-laws are good Catholics. On a more serious note in this regard, I was very honored several years ago to be asked to offer the eulogy at the Funeral Mass for my mother-in-law; and I was able to do so at the invitation of her family's kind and generous priest.
Much of my relationship with Catholicism, then, has been with the dimension of this faith that leans towards the universality of religion itself, and that seeks to channel the energy of faith towards the ends of peace, the alleviation of human suffering, and the advancement of social justice and the common good. My hope is that Pope Benedict will hold that dimension of Catholicism high; whether he will or not, of course, remains to be seen.
I'm also aware that Catholicism, like most religions, has its shadow side. During my years in this liberal religious ministry of ours I've listened to my share of horror stories of psychological and emotional damage done to persons who were made to feel inferior or worthless or laden down with guilt because they would not, or could not, follow certain practices or doctrines. I've learned that "recovering Catholic" is not just a cute or snide phrase, but speaks to some very real and painful issues in many persons' lives. I've listened to gay and lesbian persons who were made to feel deep shame for just being who they are, since who they are is supposedly antithetical to the teachings of the Church. This tragic phenomenon is far from limited to Catholicism, of course. On a less intense level, we get a number of our members from the ranks of those who have come to feel disaffected from the Church due not just to beliefs a person finds difficult to accept, but due to its attitudes towards women - particularly when it comes to matters like birth control and access to abortion.
To move to a more global angle, there is no question that human want, need, and suffering have been greatly alleviated by the relief and development efforts of Catholic agencies and parishes world-wide. But it is also true that the spread of AIDS, especially in Africa, has been accelerated in part by the Church's opposition to the use of condoms. And for all of the positive marks that can and rightly will be attributed to the papacy of John Paul II, I think that from an American perspective, at least, the thing he'll be most faulted for was his somewhat muted response to the issue of sexually abusive priests, and his providing sanctuary, in effect, to an American Cardinal who knowingly moved pedophile priests from one parish to another in and around the Boston area for decades.
These, in part, are the highly mixed bag of thoughts I have in witnessing a new Pope assume his office. His faith communion, of course, is not mine; if it were I certainly wouldn't be here. But I am a religious leader in a liberal religious movement, and I seek - to the extent that such can be had - a congenial and collegial relationship with those of Pope Benedict's faith communion. He is only two or three weeks into his Papacy, so I don't know what is in store for Catholicism in America and world-wide under his leadership.
I do know some of his past. I know that while the face of Catholicism world-wide for the past quarter-century has been in good measure the friendly, good-natured, good-humored, generous, loving, and courageous face of John Paul II; hovering just a couple of steps behind him was his "Enforcer," Cardinal Ratzinger. With apologies for a worn-out metaphor - but one that still works I feel - Cardinal Ratzinger, for close to 20 years, has been the hard fist inside the Pope's velvet glove. Or, to use yet well worn analogy, and with absolutely no disrespect intended at all, John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger had a very well functioning good cop/bad cop arrangement in place in the many years they worked together. And now the Cardinal has been put in a position that calls for the good cop. If, and how well, he can take on that role is, again, something that remains to be seen.
My dealings with Catholics have been almost exclusively with American Catholics, which are something of a separate species within the Catholic realm itself. They, most of them, take their faith seriously; and they - again, most of them - revere the Office of the Pope as well as the person who occupies it. But, and this is not exactly breaking news, American Catholics are out of sync with many of the Church's positions. Here's some quick markers: Just prior to the death of John Paul II a CNN poll of American Catholics revealed that 78% of them feel the new Pope should allow for the use of birth control; 63% think priests should be allowed to marry; 55% believe women should be priests; and more than half think that Catholic teaching should allow for a more flexible attitude towards the use of stem cell research. I do not expect Pope Benedict to find common ground with the majority of American Catholics on these matters; my question is will he at least try to find some middle ground? Again, time will tell. My chief concern as Pope Benedict XVI assumes the leadership of Roman Catholicism world-wide is not, however, over how much rigidity or flexibility he shows when it comes to the doctrine, the teachings, and the practices of the Catholic Church. For all of my opinions on these things, in the end they're none of my business in any in-house sense. To use a colloquialism from down where I grew up, I don't have a dog in that fight. But there is a fight in which I do have a dog, and this is it:
One common thread that has been running through several of the sermons I've given this past year has to do with role and place of religion in the larger workings of our nation and world. Last week, in speaking to the Justice Sunday event put on by the Family Research Council, I said that the divide in this country when it came to matters of religion was not between people of faith on one side and hard-and-fast secularists on the other, but rather between those who take a partisan, narrowly sectarian, I'm-right-you're-wrong approach to religion, and those who see faith and religion in a more universalistic sense, and as a way of bringing together persons of good will, who wish to work for the greater human, and planetary, good. This fault line was well described by Dr. Jessica Stern in her book Terror in the Name of God in this way: "Religion has two sides - one that is spiritual and universalist, and the other is particularistic and sectarian."
As the leader of one of the world's largest religious bodies, the question and challenge for Pope Benedict is which side of that line will he seek to align his Church. Yes, he's going to uphold the particularities of his faith; that's his job, after all. With how much strictness, or with how much flexibility he does that is not an issue for me to get caught up in. I have a feeling that he'll be hearing it from American Catholics enough that the last thing he'll need would be a Unitarian Universalist butting in. But the face of Catholicism that he shows to the larger religious, and secular, world is crucial, and that is something I feel persons of any and all faiths, around the world, have a stake in.
In a world where that particularistic and sectarian side of religion, to which Dr. Stern refers, is becoming increasingly strong and increasingly dangerous, the best thing that Pope Benedict XVI could do for the whole global human community would be to use his position to call not only the people he purports to lead, but all persons of faith, to first bring forth those aspects of their faith that advance the well being of humanity itself, and then move beyond their particularities in search of a greater global good.
As strongly as he feels about fidelity to Catholic doctrine and teachings, I have to assume that Pope Benedict has to wisdom to know that the world in which he has now become a pivotal figure is not, in toto, going to come round to his faith. That being the case then, the question and challenge for him is how he will use his faith for the greater good of the world when it comes to peace, liberty, and justice for all. Will he bring his voice and the voice of his religious body to a larger conversation of persons of faith in calling us from our brokenness, our folly, and our fallen selves to greater levels of wholeness and reconciliation.
While Pope Benedict has his own canon of truth to uphold, the larger truth is that revelation is not sealed, that new truths are waiting to be discovered and new light is yet to shine. Even as he stands within his own tradition, will this new Pope also make way for new truths and new light? My faith is not his faith, but I am ready to join him, and all those whom he leads, in keeping that light of ages and of nations aglow.
Stephen D. Edington
May 1, 2005
Copyright © 2005 by the Unitarian-Universalist Church of Nashua NH. All rights reserved.
