Nitpicking distracts from the point of the late pope’s life.
Nitpicking distracts from the point of the late pope’s life.
‘T he one who has hope lives differently.” That comes from Pope Benedict XVI’s 2007 encyclical Spe Salvi (“Saved by Hope”). (When he came to the United States in 2008, the Archdiocese of Washington took out ads on buses and trains with the quote.) He wrote:
The Gospel is not merely a communication of things that can be known — it is one that makes things happen and is life-changing. The dark door of time, of the future, has been thrown open. The one who has hope lives differently; the one who hopes has been granted the gift of a new life.
If we only took that away from the life of Pope Benedict XVI, it would be more than enough. And yet he has books and talks and scholarship, some of which haven’t even been translated from his native German. As pope, he talked regularly about holy men and women and the how and the why of their lives. It was the same how and why of his life: Jesus Christ.
As people were paying their respect to him, and Pope Francis celebrated his funeral Mass, the House of Representatives was embarrassingly trying to elect a speaker. Some of the press coverage of the Church suggested a similar dysfunction. In the wee hours of the morning, Americans critiqued the length and the substance of the pope’s homily for his predecessor. Some apparently had high expectations for an effusive eulogy. Instead, the pope talked about Jesus Christ — just as Pope Benedict, I have no doubt, would have wanted.
And about Benedict, Francis first quoted from St. Gregory the Great, who “urged a friend to offer him this spiritual accompaniment: ‘Amid the shipwreck of the present life, sustain me, I beseech you, by the plank of your prayer, that, since my own weight sinks me down, the hand of your merit will raise me up.’’ Francis observed: “Here we see the awareness of a pastor who cannot carry alone what in truth he could never carry alone and can thus commend himself to the prayers and the care of the people entrusted to him.” About the funeral he said:
God’s faithful people, gathered here, now accompanies and entrusts to him the life of the one who was their pastor. Like the women at the tomb, we too have come with the fragrance of gratitude and the balm of hope, in order to show him once more the love that is undying. We want to do this with the same wisdom, tenderness, and devotion that he bestowed upon us over the years. Together, we want to say: “Father, into your hands we commend his spirit.”
I’m not sure that he could have said anything more important.
All too often we treat funeral Masses as consolation for those who are living. Which is fine, so long as it isn’t false consolation. Catholics believe in purgatory; we believe in purification. So it’s a disservice to always assume that everyone — or anyone who has died — has gone straight to Heaven. We pray that the Lord is making them worthy of seeing the face of the Father. In this way, Pope Francis’s homily was catechetical. Even holy Benedict can use prayers for his eternal rest. And, hey, if we’re wrong and he went straight to Heaven, God uses those prayers where they are needed. No prayer is ever wasted.
PHOTOS: Pope Benedict XVI
During the mourning days, I read about “bereft conservatives” who were supposedly lost without their leader. Here, too, is a misunderstanding. I’m a conservative. I loved Pope Benedict. I was sad when he resigned, but I was also in awe: Here was a man who had worldly power — head of state, head of the Catholic Church — and walked away from it. And he did so because he believed that was what God was asking of him. This is what prayer is about. This is what the Christian life is about: spending time in prayer to know the will of God for you. And you follow that will, even if people will think you are crazy. People were disappointed in Benedict. But here we were getting a window into the prayer life of a pope.
Just two months before he resigned, I was in a smallish audience with him, of various Catholic leaders from throughout the Americas. I was a little surprised to have him lovingly admonish us: If you are not encountering Jesus Christ daily in prayer, you are not living the Christian life. You can be working for the Church, doing Christian, even charitable work, but if you do not go to Jesus, you are not going to bear the kind of fruit only Jesus can make manifest. It is an awful conventional joke that Catholics don’t read the Bible and don’t know Jesus as their personal God and Savior. And sometimes that has a ring of truth. I apologize for that, because the world needs more of the Beatitudes, not less. And they only truly make sense if we work to know Jesus by spending time with him and with people who want to know Him.
And that was the point of both Pope Benedict on hope and Pope Francis in his homily at Benedict’s funeral Mass. For the Christian, it is not about us, it is about God. I don’t know whether politicians can ever learn that lesson, but could at least the Christians be Christian?
This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.