Pope's Visit
Over the past few days, our
religious leaders have been reminding us that the visit of Pope John Paul
II is an occasion for us to renew our personal religious commitments and
to play a major role in the evangelization of our communities. The more
fervent commentators commend the 50,000 young people who committed themselves
to be chaste before marriage -- and urge us to make analogous commitments.
But these calls for personal
renewal will be dismissed as irrelevant by those Catholics who believe
that the major problems of our time do not stem from evil acts of individuals
but from the unjust social structures that favor the rich over the poor
and force the poor to do violence to one another.
For Catholics who accept
this position, the task of Christianity is to destroy the political and
economic institutional structures that are inherently sinful. For such
adherents of so-called liberation theology, the emphasis on personal renewal
at best is a pious irrelevancy.
The call for personal renewal
is also shrugged off by the many ``liberal'' Catholics who operate on the
naive assumption that everything will be all right in the Catholic Church
if it permits birth control, makes it easy to obtain marriage annulments,
ordains women and married men and downgrades the power of the clerical
caste.
Such ``liberal'' Catholics
are likely to be ``cafeteria Catholics,'' the kind of people who feel that
they are free to choose which doctrines of the Church to accept and which
commandments to follow -- and still proclaim themselves to be faithful
Catholics. Under traditional Catholic doctrine, such persons would be drummed
out of the Church either as heretics or as public sinners.
The message of personal
renewal also will be regarded as irrelevant by the many Catholics who already
feel that they have been saved because they have given their lives to Jesus.
There are many Catholics
in this category. Some belong to a rather secretive organization that recruits
rich people and intellectuals. The great bulk of them are poorer people
who believe they will be saved simply by showing up at the Luneta every
Sunday, listening to the sermons of a former real estate agent and dropping
money into the tithe baskets.
But all these people are
Catholics who say they are listening closely to the admonitions of the
pope -- and we have no reason to disbelieve them. Unfortunately, the very
human tendency is to listen selectively, understand selectively and recall
selectively. All these people will tend to magnify their areas of agreement
with the pope and minimize the areas of conflict. In the end, most of these
people will perceive the pope as by and large agreeing with them.
On the other hand, bishops
and popes are also human, and therefore, they share the tendency to be
selective in their perception, understanding and recall. To the extent
that this is true, we also should expect the pope and our church leaders
to overestimate the amount of agreement between them and the faithful.
Most people will tend to ignore differences while caught up in the enthusiasm
of the pope's visit.
This is why the real test
comes afterwards. The people who answered the call of the pope to renew
themselves and to evangelize the world around them will now be faced with
the task of living up to their commitments. As for those who feel that
their Catholicism must be manifested in different ways, they too have to
demonstrate how well they are living up to their own definition of Catholicism.
But there will be few conversations
among these people -- and these conversations will not be dialogues, but
multiple soliloquies. But that is the way it has always been.