... another papal document is announced! Since I'm blogging from a new tablet and have not yet cracked all its intricacies, I cannot provide the link that is circulating online to the announcement by the Vatican press office. You'll find it. If you want to, that is. My betting is that by Friday we will not be able to avoid it very much. Or will we? Prepare for a two-paragraph tangent on my favoured hobby horse...
See, that's the problem with the information age. It always assumes you are ready to hear the news and that you will want to know the news. Indeed, it always assumes you need to know the news and that any news out there is good for you.
One of the major problems with all those assumptions is that the information age is absolutely indifferent to whether news is true or not. Notice the language used about false news: it is not called false but 'fake' news. Could it be that this is no misnomer? If they called it false news, then the news consumer could rightly demand true news. But the opposite of fake is not true; the opposite of fake is authentic/original. And the problem with that Greek looking word is that it is full of German subjectivist guff about the supremacy of sincerity (not meaning to knock sincerity obviously). No, the information age does not offer true news! It offers authentic news, sincerely meant, honestly fabricated from sources verified by no lesser moral authorities than journalists, many of whom are even honest souls. But none of this produces true news; only authentic news, quality sourced and - ooh err, feel the love! - responsibly reported. But I digress...
Assuming this announcement about a new papal encyclical is both true and authentic, my simple question is: why read the story? Why get drawn into the whole sorry storm of fawning idolisation and incoherent rage that will no doubt attend the letter's publication? We all know what will happen. Spadaro et al. will gather around to talk about a new parallel theology or a quantum interpretation of the moral law or perhaps a bio-evolutionary rereading of theandric hermeneutics or some such. They will hold the largest levers of the information pump. Meanwhile, the Christians,
...a declining band
Will point with monitory hand,
and say what we are now accustomed to saying repeatedly, desperately, fruitlessly about Pope Francis's utterances (I here abstract from all carefully made distinctions about magisterial authority about which I profess my incompetence). Need I go on?
I'm not advocating incidentally that the best response is one of blythe indifference - the response that no doubt 97% of the world's population will have - or a well-studied yawn. Heaven forfend.
I'm not quite sure what to label my strategy, if I can stick to it (which I doubt). But I'm minded to call it the "post-coenam" strategy. Don't panic. This is the kind of moment lived by the disciples while Christ was in prison overnight. We sometimes think - I know I'm tempted to think - that the wheels have finally come off the Catholic Church and that this papacy is proof that whatever is true, it's not what we thought. That is not a wholly unfaithful thought but it is a dangerous one without tethering it to the gospel.
In which case, in my view our patrons now are the disciples after the arrest of Jesus. Jesus is in prison; Peter has betrayed him; everything is in disarray; the glory of Palm Sunday is long gone and the sense of power from Jesus' miracles is a thing of the past, a mere dream. We've never been in such a sorry mess, you say? Well, we haven't but the disciples have. Those special friends of Jesus with hardly two acts of courage to rub together in the early hours of Good Friday. Is that over dramatising things? Maybe. But I've known people give up on the Church seemingly for less.
So, friends, that's my advice (not that you were asking). Walk this mile with the disciples. Perhaps it's better to call it the post-Gethsemane hour. The only question now is whether you are going to stick with him.
We keep looking for light in the wrong places; that's human. But if you want to face the probable debacle of this Thursday with some peace, don't follow the news trails. Read the gospel. The age of innocence is long gone.
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