A SPEECH FOR THE POPE 2018

My dear friends,  I thank you for the warm welcome you have given me to your beautiful country. As you know,  I am here to join with  our friends in the World Conference of Families during their annual international meeting.  Not long ago when we talked about Families we meant Father, Mother and children born of this  union of man and woman. But today - and this is one of the changes in our lives many of us may  find difficult to accept - we recognise a Family as a group of people who are bound together by love of each other and the promise to love each other until death and in such a family there may be members who love each other within the whole spectrum of love from heterosexual to homosexual and all the subtle and beautiful grades of love in between. Today I am asking that we all recognise the reality of what is happening and give our respect and love to those who have the generosity to give each other such a pledge of love for life. This is no easy change to make in our attitude and in our friendships. But through many centuries there  have been changes we could never have foreseen, changes we welcomed, changes we did  not welcome, changes which in the end we accepted  because we knew that we, as Catholics, as Christians, and as people of spiritual and intellectual strength we had  the power, the ability, the desire to live with  generosity towards all our people, in whatever way our lives developed. I have no need to tell you good friends  that we, the Church, and we the friends of the church, have often not only avoided but have opposed change. Sometimes we were right, sometimes we were wrong, even gravely wrong.   I,  Pope Francis make no claim to an infallibility that can say with absolute certainty what is right and wrong in any given  time in history.  I can say what our learning, our traditions, our mind and spirit have told us was right and proper for the age we lived in.

But there is another age, another time. And so I ask you today to look with honesty on what we have created for ourselves and for our children. What has been done wrong  is only too clear. There are even some of us who seem to despair of things being any different. They can be different. But not if you are working for change by yourselves and I am working for change by  myself -- even though the changes we want are the same. There is little use saying - Pope  Francis, good for you, you are going the right way, what are you going to do for us  next? No. the right question is -  Pope Francis, if what you are doing is good, what can we do to help, if what you are you doing is wrong or useless or sinful, what  can we do by using our influence, small or large, to rebuke and make right what is wrong ?  Please do not think that I as pope can do whatever  I want to do; no, I am surrounded, just as you are, by people some of whom will say Yes and No but do nothing or continue as before. So let us understand not just our strength but our weakness, your's and mine. You must create a world in which goodness, generosity, recognition of the dignity of  children, women and men is fully respected no matter what the pope says or does; the pope must reach out, not dominate, call upon the wisdom and experience  of the whole people, not rely on an infallibility which  he himself does  not claim for more than perhaps half per cent of what we believe in and stand for.

There have been many times in  history when it seemed that criminals had seized on the very heart and soul of our church. We have never been without conflict and struggle for the recognition of the dignity of all God's people. Nowadays the struggle is just as intense as ever, but it is a conflict of a different kind, of greater, much greater intensity. Please do not think the Pope can change evil into good by some magical power that he does not have ; but be certain that he, like you, can be an instrument of change - provided that you and he and those inside and outside the fellowship of the church are struggling together and openly, either in open agreement or open disagreement according to conscience. Please do not keep saying  "Too little too late" in  all this ebb and flow  of failure and success.   What is done is little, it may be late, but it is never too late. That is, provided we are united in our work to make the world worthy of our children and all of us.

I have already said to you in my video message :  "Young people are the future . It is very important to prepare them for the future , preparing them today in the present but also rooted in the past ". So I want you to know that there is one thing very close to my heart that I must  ask you to do. I promise  here and now to lead the way and I promise  that I shall demand it of every person with whom I have influence.  It is this: We have placed too great a burden on our children. We have provided for them a religious and moral  education we thought  suitable for their needs and their development. But we made mistakes in this as we made mistakes  in so many other things. The worst of them was  that some of the very people who should have been  enriching the children's learning and life became their predators and destroyers .

We educated  the  children and  told them to bring the Faith with them into their adult world. It would have been far better to do what Jesus Christ did -  speak to mature adults , speaking in the open and in private, speaking to each other as adults in our houses and our places of work and worship with a message  that is not fit just for children but fit for revolution in a world that dearly and deeply needs revolution based upon our maturing  knowledge and generosity. While the children listen and learn.

Our Catholic church community at all levels should be the source and nourishment  of  lifelong learning -  enlightened and wonderful, visionary and practical for all our people, lifelong learning about what our Faith means, about what our world needs in this world that is forever changing, evolving physically, intellectually, spiritually. So our children, seeing this, will ask their own questions in their own way, and we, all of us, will be able and willing to share a Faith with them that is real, not with childish answers but showing them a  wonderful vision of life and how to protect themselves against those who would selfishly corrupt  both  them and their Faith.

Never be afraid to contest anyone who corrupts the vision and beauty of your children , talk openly about it if it happens, and if  it happens, demand of your church , your schools, your workplaces , your   government , your pope, everyone, that they must match your open and courageous way of life showing your families and your children how to protect themselves  long before they have to ask  help from others, even from a pope.

My dear friends, you have heard the old saying, "Charity begins at home" . Indeed it does. And so does the protection of your dignity and that of your children. The first witness to any violation of the child is the child. So the first line of defence must be with the child. It is for the rest of us to be attentive, respectful, determined. An institution can make rules and laws, contracts and treaties, but it is in the hearts and souls of real people that real change begins.  We are a people in transition, in time of change so rapid that we sometimes seem to prefer stagnation. We need not let that happen. Don't be afraid again. We have had enough of fear, entering a new phase of personal and family responsibility.

As I leave your beautiful country in a few days time, let your thought be, not "the Pope has given us strength", but rather, "We have given  our Pope and ourselves all the strength we need by recognising his dignity and ours, his weakness and ours, his place in our world and our place in his.

May God bless us all as we bless each other.   

 

 

 

A SPEECH FOR THE POPE 1979

Before the visit of Pope John Paul the Second to Ireland in 1979 an Irish daily newspaper asked me to write a speech I would like him to give in Phoenix Park. It was published but I'm sure his speech writers did not notice ........

 "My dear friends of Ireland, I thank you for inviting and welcoming me to your country.  When we thank God for the gift of His Creation, let us thank Him especially for the gift of our own country, the great gift of our own people.

All of us in our own way worship this creating and redeeming God - generation after generation of us finds new, fresh, enlightened ways of worshiping Him are possible than we have dreamed of.  We Jews, Muslims, Christians, Humanists and so many others with rich and varied traditions, beliefs and customs are very precious to each other, because we have so many insights to share with each other, so many experiences of how God has accepted and responded to our worship.  

Let us appreciate each other.

I am aware that there is in Ireland today a feeling of self-disgust.  Even your own writers are competing with each other in saying that you are evil people, prone to violence, hypocritical.  My dear friends, you are none of these things, any more than your brothers and sisters in the rest of the world.  We, you and I, are as Paul remarked about himself with pride, citizens of no mean city.  Always remember that, and remember too that many of those who bitterly attack their fellow citizens today would become friends with the same people tomorrow, would share if their fortunes would be increased by doing so.  It is the way of the world, and those of us who belong to the Christian Church have many centuries of experience of what the world's ways can be.

We also – and I speak of Christians because I am one of them – have often done what we criticise in others, used the world's ways shamelessly for our own advantage, pretending it was God's will that we should beat and steal and conquer.  

But Jesus Our Lord said that He “knew what was in man”.  Indeed He did and He has passed on to us some of that insight and knowledge, which in spite of our materialistic values we have never completely lost.

I know that among those who kiss my hand today there are some men who are unfaithful to their wives, who would betray their friends, would do almost anything for money and power.  I have heard it said that I too, your Pope, desire power and the good life more than justice.  Please do not think I come to your Country, which has its own poverty still, although I am permitted to see little of it, pretending that I do not live in splendour at home or pretending that I would have considered refusing to become Pope because a Pope has to live in a palace while most of his friends live in insecurity, some in misery.  Perhaps I should have refused, and said, No, I cannot be one who dresses in fine linen, because that is the kind of person you find in Kings' houses....  No, I cannot become your Pope, you surround your Pope with ambassadors, and merchants, and important people…

Or perhaps I should have said, Yes, I shall become your Pope provided you prepare a house for me, a house on a corner with two storeys and small rooms.  

Some of you, my friends in Ireland, join with your brothers and sisters in other countries asking, sometimes demanding, that your Pope and your bishops leave their fine houses, their palaces, give up the trappings of power and in this way show that we are coming nearer to Christ.

 My dear friend Archbishop Helder Camara says plainly and bluntly, “One of the tasks of the Church is to liberate the Papacy.”

I come to you, dear friends, as a slave.  So I look with sympathy and longing on those men and women who find it necessary to kiss my hand now and expedient to tell lies to their friends by evening.  Because we share a common humanity which needs not flattery but sympathy.  Paul said, Who can set me free from this kind of death? Only Christ.  So it is Christ in all His majestic simplicity that I propose to you today as one who by what He has said, and done, and is, can liberate us, you from your slavery, I from mine.

You are not particularly violent people.  You share the violence, but every human being inherits violence and lives and dies with it.  So do not condemn too easily those among you who are called so readily “the men of violence”, as though they were the only ones.  We all carry weapons with us.  Even I, your friend, your Pope, carry a weapon with me wherever I go.  It is the weapon of words.  What destruction it causes!

I know that there is more destruction, of minds most often, of bodies sometimes, done in Ireland by words than by any other weapon.  What a shame that the pulpit which raises preachers high above the heads of congregations should ever be used to make a destructive weapon more destructive still.  All our words should be healing words, not words of fire, and threat, of frightening and intimidation.  Do not be too ready, my friends, to condemn the “men of violence”, because in doing so you may be condemning yourselves; it may have been your pulpit, your school, your refusal to grant the recognition of man’s dignity to every one of your citizens, your destructive words that made your armed brothers what they are today.

No matter what he does, a human person cannot lose his humanity, his essential dignity, he cannot become less human, because God has made us all something more than human.  No one can take dignity away from men and women and children, because God created and renewed them and that is their gift for ever.

I have asked my theologians and advisers to look at all your problems again – it will be a task carried out in the privacy of their studies, as monumental as the great public work of the Second Vatican Council – and most of all the problems of those of our friends who have least.  Sometimes I am afraid that what we believe and teach about work has more to do with glorifying the factories than liberating the workers.  It has been said to me that while we teach that to go on strike is a last resort we have not brought forward proofs that this is so, and therefore we impose conditions on workers in factories which should be unthinkable for the bankers or the industrialists.There are even those who have said to me, the strike may be a first, not a last resort.  It sounds like a dangerous doctrine.  All the more reason why we should face it, examine it and with real love and respect for each other find out what is the truth that will set us free.

I end as I began, dear friends, with thanks.  Thanks to those who enlightened me by disagreeing with me, who showed me ways of thinking different from my own, who

enriched my life because they were different, who were able to read so many of God’s secrets which would be forever a closed book to me had they not shared their knowledge with me.  We are precious to each other.

And my last word to you: By Monday evening I shall be gone and already half forgotten.  If there is to be any echo of my visit to your house, let it be these words : Because God has made us His friends, we have forgotten what the word “enemy” means.

Pope and Capital Punishment

Pope Francis has fulfilled his promise and  changed Catholic Church policy on capital punishment.

The official policy now is that capital punishment  is "inadmissible", the Church cannot accept it.  He is committing  the Church  to  work with determination to have it abolished  worldwide. This is a welcome step forward. Other important policy changes  may lie ahead.  Many of us hope that official, constant and determined opposition to war for profit will be one of them.  This will take a long time but it would be a welcome rebuke to centuries of tolerating  war as a profit-making going concern. We have being  doing that for far too long.

Church policy on capital punishment was based on the belief that in some circumstances it was needed to keep communities safely together.  Now , it is said, there are more hopes and even expectations that people who commit crimes can change, or be persuaded to change, or be held in safe surroundings in conditions worthy of their dignity as human beings.  Christians believe in conversion and so acting on that belief has become part of modern church policy : we know so much more about our human nature nowadays that we can deal with its problems without killing. The idea that Death Solves Problems  can be challenged. There are many presumptions here and dealing with crime by private enterprise building of supermaximum security prisons in the USA is a menacing warning not to become too optimistic about what modern ideas of "rehabilitation" or "national security" or "the common good" really mean when financial gain is available to those merchants who favour profit above human beings.  

Change in church policy means some change in belief, or some change in our evolving understanding of what our beliefs must really mean in our world. There have been changes in a church's public worship for instance , church buildings have been re-shaped , there is less separation of the congregations by  class,  architects sometimes  making concrete pillars look like concrete rather than pretending to be marble (no pretence in church please), re-designing of sanctuaries, the focus points of churches, a gradual change of emphasis on what  should be foremost in  worship - and therefore in belief. In a church at peace changes can be  slow and subtle, in churches not at peace change has often been violent.  At present the Roman Catholic Church is in a period of relatively peaceful - but sometimes hotly contested - evolution.

The Pope is saying  that whereas in the past people thought execution was necessary "to protect  the common good"  now we know more about human nature and what is needed for human beings  to live together without killing each other. This may seem a too optimistic view of the abilities of our modern methods of "rehabilitation" but it rests on the idea of an inherent dignity of human beings which nothing can take away. Christian belief is that no amount of good or bad can remove the fundamental dignity of , as Christians say, a person created by their God and renewed by divine presence  and lifted up by divine enlightenment.

This had to be said many times during recent conflict in Ireland when there were objections to church funerals for active members of political/military groups . It had to be argued - sometimes against church officials -  that the church, to be true to itself, must insist that no political association, no activity good or bad could take away or improve these basic divine gifts  the church believes we have. A church funeral was not about someone's membership of this association or that, it was about divine gifts given to this person that  no one - not even himself or herself - could take away.  It was often difficult  to get that  Catholic principle fully recognised by and for everyone.

The pope's statement about capital punishment  is a reminder that we do not change  our ideas of morality or ethics simply to  make life easier, but because we are now understanding better what we human beings need and what our real potential  is. We may get it right or wrong , but continual adjustment of our ideas may be necessary ( even changes to our changes!) but the better  we understand the meaning of  our potential and our needs the more likely  our changes will be honourable.

So when we are inclined to change our ways of worship , our understanding of our own beliefs,  our sensitivity to the meaning and demands of a moral code we have to take a good look at the reasons why. Are we really looking for a soft life ? Or for a life, hard or soft, suitable for our beautiful world and our human nature in it ?  That is, a  life recognising a relationship between the human, the divine and the superhuman about which Christians and millions of others are learning and understanding more and more ?

So with Francis are we watching a church coming of age then ? For a new age ?