‘Is the Pope a Catholic?’ The rhetorical question that’s losing axiomatic power

“Is the Pope a Catholic?” is old and well-used rhetorical repartee. It doesn’t require and answer. Or it didn’t until recently.

After Pope’s Francis recent remarks about inter-religious dialogue in Singapore, theologians and laity are questioning whether what he said was authentically Catholic.

As so often, when the Pope shoots from the hip, he causes either excitement or chaos depending on how Catholic or secular the listener is.

His remarks at Singapore were so at odds with what might be expected from a pope that they have achieved significant global publicity – again.

Francis reflected out loud that “all religions are a way to arrive at God”, adding: “I will use an analogy, they are like different languages that express the divine.”

But are they?

Some responses have praised him for finding irenic words to help teenagers and young people from across a diverse religious spectrum revaluate the competition between the world’s religions and declare: “My God is more important than yours!”

This presents the Church with a number of serious problems, however.

The first is the difference between how the different religions understand themselves. Beyond that, Pope Francis appears to be taking an anthropologically prioritised approach to religion. He is giving voice to the familiar secular spirit of pluralism, so beloved of relativistic RE teachers over the last 70 years. He is overriding their claims to be different, with different understandings of the divine and the journey towards it, and insisting that they share the same goal.

The methodology of anthropology is different from that of a Christian theologian, however.

Functionally, it might well be helpful to the confused under-informed onlooker to understand the wide spectrum of religions in an anthropological way.

From a perspective of humanistic secularism, they do indeed provide a platform for constructing a journey towards whatever ultimate meaning the prime value is. But to describe the function of religion (as Pope Francis did) is not the same as evaluating the different claims and merits of the different religions.

Perhaps even more importantly, it is not the same as explaining to the world how unique the Christian experience and faith is; how different, astonishing and revivifying is the phenomenon of encountering Jesus.

Nor does it do any justice to the exclusive and absolutist claims of Jesus for himself.  As CS Lewis so pithily put it in Mere Christianity:

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was and is the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse … let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

And how different the claims of revelation the Church makes are from the evolution of other religious experiences and movements. There is the difference of revelation breaking in from the “outside”. The phenomenon of the Hebrew prophets is unique in the religious experience of mankind. And how this culminated in the claim of the incarnation; that the compassionate intelligence that sustains the universe and all our atoms in being has become human; and that this is wholly different from the slow functional development of superstition, ritual and imagination that has fuelled the development of other religions.

Part of the shock created by the Pope’s masterclass in religious relativism for teenagers was the rupture in tone, content and authority from the Magisterium of the Church in which he holds office. The CDF’s Declaration Dominus Iesus takes a wholly opposite view to that of Pope Francis.

“The Church’s constant missionary proclamation is endangered today by relativistic theories which seek to justify religious pluralism, not only de facto but also de iure (or in principle). As a consequence, it is held that certain truths have been superseded; for example, the definitive and complete character of the revelation of Jesus Christ, the nature of Christian faith as compared with that of belief in other religions …”

It is true that Francis was commended by some commentators for his encouragement of religious dialogue. But as Joseph Ratzinger pointed out, the theological heart of the process of dialogue is the desire and capacity to evangelise. How can one describe the salvific compassion of Jesus on the cross and the miracle and significance of his Resurrection to others who have not yet grasped what it means without a desire that they too should discover it mystery and power?

There was nothing of this in Pope Francis’ intervention.

The Catholic Church has always warned against “indifferentism” in part because it obscures the truth about Jesus, but also because it obscures the reality of the struggle between good and evil.  There is a dangerous and constant conflict between different world views in which competitive faiths and allegiances take offence at the claims of Jesus and try to punish, silence or kill Christians.

To be a Christian is too often to face the most severe opposition. Those who follow Jesus do so by rejecting other approaches and refusing to surrender their integrity by giving way or giving Jesus up when they are threatened.

In a world where Christians face more persecution that the followers of another religion, how does the Pope’s “indifferentism” explain this phenomenon? How does it help Christians who face martyrdom make sense of the ultimate sacrifice that Jesus calls his followers to?

As Bishop Chaput wrote so movingly in First Things: “To suggest, even loosely, that Catholics walk a more or less similar path to God as other religions drains martyrdom of its meaning. Why give up your life for Christ when other paths may get us to the same God? Such a sacrifice would be senseless. But the witness of the martyrs is as important today as ever. We live in an age when the dominant religion is increasingly the worship of the self. We need the martyrs—and each of us as a confessor of Jesus Christ—to remind an unbelieving world that the path to a genuinely rich life is to give oneself fully to another, to the other.”

Some have suggested that this off the cuff relativism was just a slip of the theological tongue by the present holder of the office of St Peter. The difficulty is that he has form (his own magisterium as Cardinal Fernandez describes it).

In the Abu Dhabi Declaration called A Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together, he signed his assent to the proposition: “The pluralism and the diversity of religions, colour, sex, race and language are willed by God in His wisdom, through which He created human beings.”

This is the precise opposite of what we are given in the New Testament from the mouths firstly of Jesus and then also of Paul.

It has become something of an oddity that so much of the friction with other Christian bodies that arose from the claims of the First Vatican Council on the infallibility of the papal office under some strict conditions, have morphed in our own age to an attempt to either explain or justify or negotiate the fallibility of the most recent Pope.

Some of course have moved further and claimed that if the incumbent of the Petrine office teaches heresy he can’t be pope; but sedevacantism is not an attractive or easily workable solution to the problems posed by Francis during his papacy.

Perhaps the question should but not “Is Francis the Pope” but “why doesn’t he want to act and speak as the Pope?”   

(Pope Francis kisses the hand of the Grand Imam of Istiqlal Mosque Nasaruddin Umar after an interreligious meeting with religious leaders at the Istiqlal Mosque in Jakarta on September 5, 2024. Photo by TIZIANA FABI/AFP via Getty Images)

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