“Will the new pope make the Church more open?”

The Reform We Need

by Randall B. Smith

Amidst of all the joys of a new pope and my continuing wonder at the smooth transition effected by cardinals who pray deeply and follow a centuries-old tradition, there was one deep sorrow about the papal transition: being forced to read the repeated slanders in the press about my beloved Pope Benedict XVI. Media outlets such as The New York Times used the occasion of Benedict’s humble resignation to open up their pages to literally dozens of the worst anti-Catholic bigots in the country, most of them ostensibly “Catholic,” to spew their hate-filled bile. And beyond the editorials, there were the ostensibly “neutral” news articles, with their odious, unsupported accusations of a “failed” papacy.

Consider, if you will, this small example from a New York Times article that appeared on the morning after Pope Francis’s election: “By choosing the first pope from the New World, the cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church sent a strong message of change.” This reporter had no evidence to back-up that assertion of course, because by the time she filed this piece with her editors, none of the cardinals had yet had time to make any comments about the process. Indeed, she quotes not one single Church official to back up her little meta-narrative. But the tall tale she has decided to tell only gets more inventive as she proceeds.

“It was not yet clear,” she suggests, “whether Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio … will display the mettle to tackle the organizational dysfunction and corruption that plagued the eight-year papacy of Pope Benedict XVI.” Organizational dysfunction and corruption that plagued his papacy? What was her source or evidence for that assertion? There was none. It’s clear that, like the theater critic who writes his review on the way to the theater, our reporter made her story-line up in advance, and she was going to stick to it no matter what she found.

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Reform is about each of us living the Gospel more faithfully. And the place for that sort of reform to begin is within me, within my heart; and within you and your heart. Because here’s one thing you can be absolutely certain of no matter who is pope or what name he takes or what policies he sets: there can be no “reform” of the Church without the reform of human hearts. Fortunately, that can beginright here, right now. Unfortunately, it’s hard. If it weren’t, everybody would be doing it.


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