What did Pope Francis say in Singapore about religions as paths to God?

There’s a meme—or a class of them—been making the rounds on the innerwebz a good while now, riffing on a prompt: “You know you’re too [X] when …” etc. Someone needs to do one for last week’s Catholic Internet Kerfuffle over Pope Francis’s remarks to young people in Singapore.

Crikey, what did he say that was so awful?

Well, that is a reasonable question, it turns out.

It is two reasonable questions, as a matter of fact.

“What did he really say?” is one, and that wasn’t immediately clear to anyone who didn’t hear him say what he said and understand it.

“Was it really so awful?” is another, but the two got jumbled together and generated a whole lot of heat, including several accusations of heresy and even apostasy from people who ought to know better.

The crux of the matter, ahem, is the question of whether there is more than one path that actually leads to God. The answer to that is—or may be—a simple “No.” Still, the issue behind the question is the relationship of Christianity to other religions, and that’s … complicated.

Basically, Christianity is true: All salvation is through Christ, alone, and the Church that Christ founded teaches everything necessary for salvation; other religions attain at best a partial and distorted understanding of God and the universe.

What Francis said was: Tutte le religioni sono un cammino per arrivare a Dio. “All religions are path[way]s to reach God.” Msgr. Christopher Washington of the Secretariat of State’s English Section did an admirable job rendering the off-the-cuff remark in the moment, offering: “Every religion is a way to arrive at God.”

Notate bene: He did not say they all get a fellow where he’s meant to go, not on their own. His use of an extended comparison likening religions to “languages” or “idioms” may have suggested something like the idea that it is a matter of indifference which path one takes or happens to be taking just now. Accounting for that as a misimpression is fairly straightforward, even if Francis will bear all the responsibility and some of the blame for it.

Analogies limp, even the best-drawn of them, and this was not among those.

In any case, Someone in the Secretariat of State thought that remark needed a little massage, though, so the official Vatican translation added a verb and something that is either a participle or a gerundive, depending on how you diagram the sentence: “All religions are seen as paths trying to reach God.”

After a day or so of online invective and—presumably—more than a little back-and-forth within the Comms apparatus, a new translation appeared: “All religions are paths to God.”

By the time the new official version appeared, some folks had already done great feats of pseudo-intellectual gymnastics to explain what the pope had never said, and others had impugned the speaker as obviously guilty of gravely sinful error because why massage what he said if it wasn’t really bad?

To be perfectly frank, the official Vatican communications apparatus did not distinguish itself for competence or even basic honesty in the whole episode and, in fact, made things very much worse. If the comms outfit had acted with alacrity, they could have claimed their original was a hasty translation. Instead, the delay made it impossible to avoid the conclusion they were embarrassed first by their principal’s remark and then by their mismanagement of their very public embarrassment.

That is par for the course, and has been since well before 2013.

I remember refusing to Orwell changes to Vatican Radio news copy when they came down, but in those days it was easier—at least possible—to make such refusals and make them stick, since Vatican Radio was both juridically independent and editorially autonomous. “Semi-official” in the magnificent vaticanese nomenclature.

These days, not so much.

I’ve been doing this for a good long while now, and it is still astounding to me how ready people are to find fault with Pope Francis. It doesn’t help that his chief defenders appear to think like functional Mormons and behave like an Army of Renfields—both comparisons I’ve made before—or that Francis has made making a mess the standing order of his reign and has certainly led by example.

Le parole del Romano Pontefice vanno misurate col contagocce, as the old Roman expression says: “The words of the Roman Pontiff are to be meted out with a medicine dropper.” So much for that.

By the way, Francis arguably put himself in pretty good company when he said what he said in Singapore.

CS Lewis famously had help from his friends, Hugo Dyson and JRR Tolkien, who explained to him on a long walk how Christianity is essentially the “true myth”:

[W]hat Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: again, if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself . . . I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even though I could not say in cold prose “what it meant’. (CS Lewis, Letter to Arthur Greeves, 1 Oct 1931)

In The Everlasting Man, GK Chesterton got after much the same point. “[Paganism] is an attempt to reach the divine reality through the imagination alone,” Chesterton wrote:

[I]n its own field reason does not restrain it at all. It is vital to the view of all history that reason is something separate from religion even in the most rational of these civilizations. It is only as an afterthought, when such cults are decadent or on the defensive, that a few Neo-Platonists or a few Brahmins are found trying to rationalize them, and even then only by trying to allegorize them. But in reality the rivers of mythology and philosophy run parallel and do not mingle till they meet in the sea of Christendom.

There’s wisdom in that Roman adage I mentioned, but Pope Francis was giving a talk off the cuff and in a foreign language to a diverse crowd of mostly non-Christian adolescents with presumably non-existent theological training.

Cut him some slack.

While folks on every side may agree that “susceptible of an orthodox construction” ought not be the bar for papal pronouncements, Francis’s obiter dicta do not bother me overmuch. Whenever he starts talking, my scribbler’s sense knows there is going to be copy. My hackles go up when I sense he may be getting ready to govern something. Then, all bets are off.

Catholic World Report