A news interlude dominated by speculation about “golden showers” and a graceless president who described his latest detractor as an “untruthful slime ball” invites us to search for higher moral ground.
So it might be providential that Pope Francis chose to make news last week in two ways. First, he did something that comes very hard to most public figures, and particularly to the current occupant of the White House: He apologized fervently for “grave errors.”
He also issued a remarkable document on holiness that seemed made for the moment—and, by the way, noted that we can “waste precious time” by being caught up in “superficial information” and “instant communication.”
Francis continued to preach his gospel of economic justice by warning that it is a “harmful ideological error” to cast “the social engagement of others” as “worldly, secular, materialist, communist or populist.” On the contrary, he saw holiness as demanding an engagement with “the destitute, the abandoned, and the underprivileged.”
And he lifted up words from Leviticus that we are unlikely to hear cited by President Trump: “When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress him.”
It’s not often that public figures hold themselves to the standards they apply to others. There was thus an instructive symmetry between what Francis said in his apostolic exhortation Gaudete et exsultate (“Rejoice and Be Glad”) and his own moment of necessary penance.
In the document, the pope declared that “the lack of a heartfelt and prayerful acknowledgment of our limitations prevents grace from working more effectively within us.” Humans—every single one of us—fail, falter, and fall. We do far better when we admit it.
And this is what the pope did last Wednesday when he apologized for his terribly misguided defense of a Chilean bishop accused of covering up abuse by an infamous pedophile priest.
Many of us who admire Francis feared his apparent standing up for the indefensible was a sign that the eighty-one-year-old pontiff was incapable of recognizing the church’s profound breach of trust when it placed institutional self-preservation above a concern for the suffering of those abused by priests.
Sometimes, your friends need to tell you how wrong you are. In this case, the task fell to Cardinal Sean O’Malley, a close Francis ally. O’Malley was appointed Archbishop of Boston to begin healing the deep gashes left by the scandal there, and he read Francis whatever the Roman equivalent of the riot act is.
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