Aching Heart-Burning Soul

...We were to obey the pope in all things without question. My opinion did not matter. What I thought did not matter. The pope was closer to god. God spoke to the pope. The pope knew God’s will. As I grew older it occurred to me that if the pope was really not capable of making a mistake, and his path to heaven the only path, I had to make a choice between my loyalty to my country and my loyalty to the Church. Was I really being asked to choose between democracy and totalitarianism?

Sister said we should remember Jesus’ words, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s." Our first obligation was to the Church. If the United States did not agree with the pope, we had to do what the pope told us to do. American Catholics should obey traffic laws and pay their taxes, but they should oppose laws that would permit birth control. Catholics should also oppose the repeal of laws prohibiting stores from opening on Sunday.

Pope Pius XII was the pope from the time I was born until I was in college. We were not told much about other popes. We knew about Saint Peter, of course, because he was one of the apostles and the first pope. We were told about Pope Gregory VIII because in 1582 he introduced the calendar that we still use today. We were told about Pope Pius X because he lowered the age for receiving First Holy Communion from twelve to seven. We were left with no doubt that the popes were in a class apart; all wise, all good, all holy, all divinely inspired, all directed by the hand of God, all incapable of error.

We were told that Pope Pius IX had warned us about the evils of the modern world, but we were not told that he opposed democracy and was responsible for the kidnapping of a Jewish child. We were told to pray for Pope Pius XII’s success in his battle against communism, but we were not told about his silence concerning the slaughter of 6,000,000 Jews by the Nazis and their allies. We were told about Pope Urban II, the holy man of God who called for the first Crusade to win the Holy Land from non-Christians, but we were not told about the atrocities for which the Crusaders were responsible. We were told that Pope Leo X excommunicated Martin Luther because he disobeyed the pope, but we were not told that Luther had been excommunicated because he spoke out against the sale of indulgences by the Church. We were told about Pope Paul V who censured Galileo for teaching scientific theories that did not agree with Church teaching, but we were not told that Galileo’s censure, which involved the assertion that the earth revolved around the sun, rather than the sun around the earth, still remained in effect over three hundred years later. In a word, the popes were godly men, not fallible human beings.

I was in college in October of 1958 when Pope Pius died. I was not overcome with grief. Rather, I was enormously curious about the process for selecting the new pope, about whom that man might be. Outside of the fact that he would be Italian, I had no further expectation. There was no thought of change. The Church was immutable. There was no thought of Conservative versus Liberal. I did not even have any real understanding of the meaning of those terms. Beyond that, the Church was above politics. God expected the pope and the College of Cardinals to be above such human frailties. I never questioned this principle. Even so, by this time, I was not so naïve that I did not suspect there were those who might be prone to introduce campaigning into the process. I knew that as a fail-safe the rules governing papal selection were constructed in such a way that politics were excluded from the process, or so I believed.

When Angelo Roncalli was chosen to succeed Pope Pius XII, I nodded my head in agreement. Yes, he was Italian, as it should be. After all, Peter had died in Rome. Rome had been the center of Church authority since its earliest days. Yes, he was old, as he should be. An older man was a man of wisdom and experience, able to shoulder the weight of directing the Church. My mind was so programmed to the cross of sadness and the loneliness the pope must bear, that, at first, I did not even notice that Pope John XXIII did not seem lost in the guilt of humankind, or sadness, or loneliness, or a stranger to happiness. I had never heard of such a thing; a pope that was not only happy, but joyful, a pope that smiled. This pope stressed his humanity, his limitations, even his fallibility. These were new concepts to me, ones that began to lift the dark shadows of a lifetime of conditioning from a mind largely incapable of independent or original thought. Drawn out of an oppressive abyss was a closed and, for the most part, intolerant and rigid mind. The light stung my eyes and made my head ache. Time passed. My eyes adjusted and my mind, sponge-like, set out on a journey that demanded, craved, absorbed, evaluated, questioned, and began anew each day to search for the roots of what it was Catholics were truly commanded to believe. The vista that opened for me during the brief papacy of John XXIII could have closed as a result of the retrenching that took place in the aftermath of his death, but by June of 1963 I was beyond the point of blind obedience.

In any discussion of the papacy one of the first things that comes to mind is the question of papal infallibility. Jesus never spoke of His infallibility, yet He carried an astonishing air of authority. He did not require the acceptance of any systematic doctrine. He did not concern Himself with either abstract theses or setting rigid limits, but rather with trust in God and right living.

After Jesus’ death the focus shifted from Jesus’ message, to the messenger Jesus, from teaching to teacher, from word to person. Among Jews, the declaration by Jesus’ followers that His death fulfilled the prophecies of the Old Testament, and among non-Jews the need to reconcile Jesus’ teaching with Hellenistic culture, elevated Jesus to divinity. With the passage of time, there were those who felt that the teachings of Jesus needed to be written down. "By the end of the fourth century the canon of the New Testament had been definitively spelled out."

During the time of the apostles and their followers and of Saint Paul and his followers, the number of communities of Christians grew. Each community had its own rule secure in the belief that the Spirit led them. But who was the final authority on what was to be included in a sacred book for Christianity, or for the ritual and practice that would honor Jesus and tie all these communities to Him and to each other? Who was the final arbiter of doctrine and uniformity?...