by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist
Citizen Journalist
There was a very good editorial by journalist Michael Gerson
in yesterday’s Washington Post entitled “Pope Francis the Troublemaker.” Gerson’s commentary was a critique of an
interview that the Pope gave to the Jesuit publication, America.
Some of the Pope’s comments in that piece have been in the
news this week. The interview was the
forum where he criticized the church’s moral police for focusing solely on
issues of abortion, gay marriage, and contraception. Pope Francis said that these issues should
be raised “in context” and “not all the time.”
He compared the Church to a field hospital after battle, noting that
when someone is carried in on a stretcher with war wounds, “you don’t treat his
high cholesterol.” He said, “You have to
heal his wounds” before talking about everything else.
The Pope’s remarks were about accepting and loving the whole
person in much the same way as Christ demonstrated two millennia ago. “The proclamation of the saving love of God,”
Pope Francis proclaimed, “comes before moral and religious imperatives.”
As Pope Francis endeavors to paint the Catholic Church with
the broad brush of acceptance and break down institutionalized walls of hate,
he is truly making trouble in the hoary old Church – much as Christ angered and
made trouble with the clerics of his day.
The pontiff is another damned zealot, one that recognizes
the power of love and acceptance.
And he is such a breath of fresh air over Benedict XVI!
I’m sorely tempted to go back to church.
1 comment:
Every once in a while (John XXIII), the Catholic Church comes up with a winner, and Francis seems to be cut from that cloth. His relations with the Curia are, however, problematic and those guys are not to be trifled with (John Paul I).
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