Image: Long Thiên from Wikimedia Commons
Pastor Hal MayerSpeaker / Director
Tuesday September 24th, 2024
The Catholic World Report, by Christopher R. Altieri: 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.
Pastor Hal MayerSpeaker / Director
Tuesday September 24th, 2024
The Catholic World Report, by Christopher R. Altieri: 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.
