Inside the Jesuits by Robert Blair Kaiser

Author:Robert Blair Kaiser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Compare this to the words of Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Humani Generis, promulgated on December 12, 1950:

This deposit of faith our Divine Redeemer has given for authentic interpretation not to each of the faithful, not even to theologians, but only to the teaching authority of the Church.

This is as good a piece of evidence as any of how, as the world changes, popes change, too. Since Pius XII, an aristocrat through and through, was vaunting the exclusive right of the Church’s magisterium to give “an authentic interpretation” of the faith sixty-four years ago, most of the people in the Third World had turned away their colonial overseers and taken on the adult responsibilities of governing themselves, while the Fathers of Vatican II were in the throes of delivering a whole new definition of the Church as the entire people of God. History had embalmed many of Pius XII’s certainties.

Pope Francis is, as are most of us, a man of his age, a new age in which the people have a legitimate voice that must be heard. He doesn’t think his Church ought to be run by some kind of intellectual elite: other thinking Catholics ought to have a say as well. In the America/Civiltà interview, he said that we must be very careful not to think that this people power in the light of Vatican II (he even dared to call it a kind of infallibility) is a form of populism—whatever that means to Pope Francis (“populism” is an abstraction). In this context, I think he meant that the people should not feel they have sovereign power in the Church, nor should any pope. Christ’s pilgrim people should be on a journey together. At any rate, here is what he said:

No; it is the experience . . . of the Church as the people of God, pastors and people together. The Church is the totality of God’s people. I see the sanctity of God’s people, this daily sanctity. There is a “holy middle class,” which we can all be part of . . . holiness in the patience of the people of God: a woman who is raising children, a man who works to bring home the bread, the sick, the elderly priests who have so many wounds but have a smile on their faces because they served the Lord, the sisters who work hard and live a hidden sanctity.

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