Catholic Means Universal

Pope Francis: A Man of his Word a film by Wim Winders.  ****

I was moved and inspired by the new movie about Pope Francis, which opened recently to almost no acclaim whatsoever.  The IMDb site has virtually nothing on it, including no quotations, and if any movie ever deserved to have quotations, like maybe every single thing the Pope said, it is this one.  It had only one showing per day at the multiplex where I saw it, and a sparse crowd attended.  Most people were at the place for such important films as Deadpool II.  But I shouldn’t talk, because it was my Catholic wife who suggested we go.  Otherwise I wouldn’t have noticed the film, though it was made by the great Wim Wenders.

As my wife said, the Pope is important primarily because of his role, and though the man shows through, it is the role that is most important.  There probably isn’t another religious figure in the world who has his influence; the Dalai Lama was the only other person we could think of, but his role isn’t nearly that of the Pope.  And of course the Catholic Church is unpopular at the moment, brought down by sex scandals and also perhaps by the fact that it changes at a snail’s pace.  Its sexual morality is still in the Middle Ages (not to bring up the controversial issue of abortion: the church still stands against the practice of birth control, on this planet where the population is entirely out of hand), and women are stuck in inferior roles, though that seems true in many religions.  Even the Latino people who have been the church’s mainstay are deserting it for evangelical religions, though there are still many Catholics throughout Latin America.

Zen Teacher Kosho Uchiyama, who died in 1989, said that he thought the 21^st century would be the great century of religion.  It is hard to imagine, eighteen years in, what he could possibly have meant by such a statement (and of course he was lucky enough not to live to see what we have).  I think of Uchiyama not so much as a doctrinaire Buddhist but as a deeply religious human being.  He read Buddhist teachings to death (Tom Wright tells of his having fourteen copies of one text, because he kept changing his underlinings), and wrote about them extensively, but he also continued to read the Bible all his life (he had contemplated becoming a Catholic monk before he became a Buddhist), and in a late interview said that if you could superimpose Buddhist teachings over Christian teachings, you would find the truth of religion.  Uchiyama wasn’t interested in maintaining some doctrine.  He was interested in the truth of life.  That was the same impression I had of Pope Francis, hearing him talk.  What is strange is that, at the same time, he is the spokesman for one of the largest bodies of doctrine in the world.

His role is to keep the religion together, to maintain the status quo.  But he keeps speaking his mind, from the heart of his understanding about God and humankind.  What he says is often startling.  I assume that a number of conventional Catholics will see this film, and I wonder what they will think.

He stated first of all that the Christian church is founded on poverty, a fact which the Catholic Church (and any number of evangelical churches) has been all too ready to ignore.  When the church isn’t based in helping the poor, he says, Jesus isn’t there.  He lectured the Bishops on their roles, citing various forms of obtuseness that can creep into any system that is based on a hierarchy.  He talked about the pace of life that the world lives at—“the accelerator is down all the time”—and how difficult it is to lead a spiritual life under those circumstances.  He spoke of the necessity of having open borders and taking care of migrants and refugees.  He talked about family life, and the need to slow down and enjoy life.  When parishioners spoke about their families, he asked parents pointedly, “Do you play with your children?”  And in one clip after another we see him visiting and embracing the poor and the forgotten and the untouchables, all the people that the power structures of the world have left out.  He wasn’t visiting Catholics, he was just visiting people.  He seemed to go to anyone who needed him.  He embraced Muslims; he embraced people of all faiths.  And he never seemed in a hurry to get away.

Many things he said sound like platitudes as I repeat them—“The world is mostly deaf.  We need to learn to listen.”  “Tenderness is not weakness, it’s strength”–but they don’t sound that way in the context of his larger conversations, and they all point to a vision of life that is simpler, slower, not based on consumerism and competition, but based on work, family, and care for the earth, which he talks about at great length.  The most abused being of all, he says, is Mother Earth, which has been raped and pillaged by humankind.  We need to start taking care of our mother.

I think that what Uchiyama Roshi meant when he spoke optimistically about the 21^st century was that, if religions are going to survive at all, they can’t do so by being petty, saying they’re right and others are wrong.  We see the problems with those attitudes everywhere we look.  But there is a religious attitude that is desperately needed in a world that is so intent on emphasizing differences, guarding turf, and keeping people who are different away.  Pope Francis is religious in a way that has nothing to do with being Catholic and nothing to do with being the Pope.  For the first time in my lifetime there seems to be a Pope who is the servant of his people rather than their master.  He doesn’t just show how the Pope should live.  He shows how we all should live.