A layman’s view: The Church will live forever and ever
Credit to Author: MARLEN V. RONQUILLO| Date: Sat, 02 Mar 2019 16:39:31 +0000
Many Catholics — relapsed, devout and those one step away from agnosticism — still remember a contemporary event that took place in Argentina at the time Jorge Mario Bergoglio was still archbishop of Buenos Aires.
A powerful figure in the Vatican came to visit, resplendent in his magisterial robes and his imperial airs. Everything was routine and copacetic, until a photo was snapped. It showed Archbishop Bergoglio focused, with disgust and loathing shadowing his face, on the gold Rolex watch of the visiting Church mandarin.
Archbishop Bergoglio, known for his simple life and humility, would have been censured for such display of contempt toward one so high and powerful in the Church. In the tradition-bound institutions, Archbishop Bergoglio’s behavior was unacceptable.
A cabinet member censuring US President Donald Trump for his constant lying and vulgar ways would be hounded out of the cabinet. Instead of censure and relegation to a lesser role, the archbishop of Buenos Aires was elevated to the papacy a few years later.
Thus, the great story of the commuter-archbishop (he commuted on the Metro buses of Buenos Aires) and his rise to the papacy.
Pope Francis archived the whole foundation of theological conservatism that guided the Church during the reigns of Pope John Paul 2nd and Pope Benedict 16th for more openness and tolerance. Then the Laudato si (Praise Be to You) was promulgated as Pope Francis’ second papal encyclical.
The break from tradition was not only on the theological direction and his concern for the poor. Pope Francis opted out of the lavish Apostolic Palace for the more austere Domus Sanctae Marthae papal guesthouse.
By the way, he also called the sacred economic theory of the US Republican Party, the trickle-down economic theory, as “ bunk.”
Do you know of any institution that could abruptly adopt a radical break, in both leadership and creed, without triggering a self-destructing rupture? The answer is the Catholic Church, supposedly an archaic and timebound institution. President Rodrigo Duterte said the Catholic Church would cease to exist in about 25 years.
You know what? An institution that could undergo such radical break and shift without one stone wobbling on its far-reaching edifice is bound to be timely and timeless.
This is just a layman’s view, the view of a relapsed Catholic like me who returned to the faith after the ascendancy of Pope Francis, but it is true. The capacity of the Church to absorb shocks and shifts, changes and epic movements, all guarantee that the Church will survive forever. Forever and ever. And Amen to that.
The hope of many Catholics is this: the next 25 years will be spent purging the Church of sexual deviants and misfits, the rethinking of celibacy, the loosening up of its rigid code on the LGBT people.
This is also a Church, remember, that survived the horrific folly of the Inquisition and the tremors brought about by the Reformation. From the 20th century hence, the Church has been a vast tent and that vastness gave it the strength and the resilience to accommodate the debates on what should be the core theology and courses of action.
During his presidential run, John Kerry did stray from the bedrock doctrines of his Catholic faith and supported abortions rights. Yet, no crazy mob, no far-right Catholic zealots, drove him out of his Church and there was some sort of modus vivendi. The conservatives shunned him while the progressive Catholics supported him.
In the Philippines, there are Catholics still politically leaning to the Falange of Francisco Franco, while on the other end, there are priests in the revolutionary underground, all within the broad umbrella of our version of the CNL, or the Christians for National Liberation. Of course, those in-between, those with no politics or very little political leanings at all, make up the great majority of Philippine Catholics.
Economists-cum-conservative Catholic academics based at a university in Metro Manila suck up to whomever is in power, the never-say-die prophets of economic boom.
These economists never got anything right but they have a mastery of the development jargon and the principals have fancy academic degrees. On the opposite pole, there are progressive academics with the Jesuits and the La Salle brothers who always speak of truth to power.
The grandness of the Catholic Church is its refusal to convince its flock to do the undemocratic, unchristian bloc voting, which is basically eroding the basic capacities of the faithful to exercise the freedom of choice and the freedom of political expression. The Church leaders loath to express their political stand except when human lives are threatened, or — learning from the Catholic Church’s timid stand during the brutal years of Franco’s Spain — when autocrats and demagogues rise to power.
From the original Church of Peter to the Catholic Church in the 21st century, the question of extinction has never been really an issue within the Church. Its tolerance for zealots and revolutionaries, reformers and vanguards of the status quo, the devout and those forever in doubt, vests the Church with the capacity to evolve and adapt.
For those prognosticating on when the Church would be rendered obsolete and irrelevant, here is a sound advice — make a fearless forecast after 30 more centuries.
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