“We have to talk about [certain issues] in a context,” the Pope says

The Pope’s Pro-Life Declaration “in Context”

by Dr. William Oddie

Do you remember all the chatter about the Pope’s first “hundred days”? There was a lot of talk, then as now, about the Pope’s huge pastoral effectiveness; and at the same time a certain amount of discontent in some quarters about his apparent reluctance to speak out on particular issues, almost amounting, some said, to a conscious policy to avoid taking on the secular world.

John Allen was all in favor of this policy. “Perhaps the key to resolving the conflict [i.e. that between those who liked Francis’s pastoral effectiveness and those who thought the pope’s main job is to speak out on the issues] boils down to this: Francis seems determined to function as a pastor, at least as much as a primate or politician, so the right model may not be the one used to assess chief executives. Rather, it’s how Catholics tend to think about a parish priest. Their basic question usually isn’t what his policy positions are, but whether he inspires. Perhaps the root lesson of Francis’s first 100 days is that when it comes to spiritual leadership, sometimes style really is substance.”

My own comment on that at the time was that spiritual leadership, like any other kind of leadership, sometimes has to include firm guidance about what one should believe and what one should not do. Sandro Magister thought there were dangers in the Pope’s popularity precisely because, he thought, it was causally connected with his failure as a matter of policy to speak out on the issues: this he, believed, “explains better than any other [reason] the benevolence of worldwide secular public opinion toward Francis… — his silence in the political camp, especially on the minefield that sees the greatest opposition between the Catholic Church and the dominant culture. Abortion, euthanasia, homosexual marriage are terms that the preaching of Francis has so far deliberately avoided pronouncing.”

I now quote with some relief what I then went on to say, because it has now been borne out. To Magister’s comment about the pope’s “deliberate” refusal to speak on these issues I commented “But that can’t continue indefinitely, can it? And I’m sure it won’t. Pope Francis is taking his time to ease himself into his papal functions, and I’m sure he’s wise to do so. It’s early days. I’m personally of a more impatient temperament, I want to see things happening. Of course, it’s pleasant to see our Pope so universally popular. But in the end, the honeymoon with the secular world will have to come to an end. It’s all about what Catholicism actually is, about its real vocation in the world. We are all of us (and above all the pope, whoever he is), in Pope John Paul II’s indispensable words, ‘signs of contradiction’—for if we are not, we are nothing.”

Well, now the Pope HAS spoken out, has indeed been a sign of contradiction: and on the most contentious secular question of all, abortion: so he wasn’t avoiding the big moral issues as a matter of conscious policy. That was what some thought he was still doing, in a long interview published September 19, which seemed to confirm Sandro Magister’s analysis. In case you missed reports of the interview, here’s part of it:

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