That bolt of lightning striking St. Peter’s Basilica on the day the Pope announced his resignation. Caught by Agence France Presse photographer’s Filippo Monteforte’s camera. Hmm we went.
The report, after it registered the uncanny, was quick to restore normalcy by explaining that the thing’s perfectly natural. It was the dome’s altitude and the fact that it’s made of metal.
Still.
For who says that God doesn’t speak in the language of natural events or phenomena?
Hmm we went again.
That announcement, itself a figurative bolt from the heavens, came on Feb. 11. Three days before Valentine’s Day. A kind of coded ‘I love you’ was it?
Our younger brother in Toronto, socialist in sympathy, wasn’t happy when, eight years ago, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger succeeded Pope John Paul II.
We never knew how our other younger brother felt about it because he went on no comment mode. He’s a member of Opus Dei.
The socialist brother found — God knows what you can’t find in the Net — a photo of the new pontiff that showed an amazing resemblance to the emperor in The Return of the Jedi.
Our own reaction to learning that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was the new pope was that we felt good.
That’s because Ratzinger was a theologian, a philosopher of religion, a pope of intellect. Pope John Paul depended on him, Ratzinger, to articulate the conservative positions against progressive theologians like Hans Kung.
Our enthusiasm cooled when we read about the ultra-conservative Opus Dei and how that secret and mysterious and esoteric organization (to laymen like us) enjoys a privileged position in the Vatican, how their goal is to protect the church from modernisms of all sorts (read contra the progressives of Vatican II).
Just as actually innocent as most everyone else this side of lost paradise, the only good thing we thought we sensed in this conservatism is the apparent drive to resist the agnosticism, if not atheism of our days.
And maybe that’s because we still believe.
It’s easier to believe in the pope than in papal infallibility, which appears to be far from noble handiwork, was in truth stratagem, of one Pius IX to possess utter power: “I am tradition. I am power.”
Fancy learning that this chapter in the history of the church was contemporaneous with Lord Acton of the famous “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Who in fact actively opposed it.
The Pope we admired greatly wasn’t the quite sensational John Paul II. It was John Paul I, ‘The Smiling Pope’ the briefest pope ever, who was pope for only 33 days.
The journalist David A. Yallop in his book In God’s Name maintains a conspiracy theory similar to that built by Jim Garrison re the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
How paradoxical that our boyhood Catholicism returned on discovering Pope John Paul I. We thought of having a T-shirt done with his picture on it. Still do.
An alternative Christianity that vanished from history was less hierarchic, more democratic, that allowed ‘the Spirit to speak through the least of us.’ Seems to be what the Reformation was mostly about, too. Luther: “Every man is a priest.” Not too far away from every priest is a pope and therefore, no more popes?
But when Jesus left, some or someone took over. There are those who say Peter being the founding bishop in Rome is just legend. Nonetheless, it is history that the Church in Jerusalem had Peter and James as its leaders.
Who will be changing into papal white in la sala delle lacrime soon?
