Whatever he means to be saying, Pope Francis sometimes seems to be strongly implying exactly the title of this essay: We Christians Don’t Do Truth But We Do Poor People and Immigrants. He’s in line with a good number of Catholics, including many of the bishops and Cardinals of the West and most certainly the leaders of most Western Catholic organizations in fields of corporeal charity and social justice. There are perhaps a still higher percentage of non-Catholic Christians who speak and act to devalue truth in various ways. And I’m sure most of those Catholics and other Christians of similar viewpoints do value the truth in some far region of their hearts; I’m also sure that they are at best only barely aware that they can’t speak coherently to that truth.
We are in a bad situation. We have no truth to witness because we, as a Christian people, haven’t valued the truth enough to have kept hold of it. We have chosen not to go through the difficult task of re-understanding God’s Creation in terms of all that has been learned about this concrete realm and all that has been discovered about abstract realms from which, in my way of speaking, the concrete realm has been shaped.
We are, in fact, missing a great opportunity. A radically honest understanding of our new knowledge about Creation is in line with the understanding of Creation by St John the Apostle and those of his followers who followed him, listened to him, and helped him to produce the Biblical works attributed to him. This is what modern physics and mathematics tells us: relationships create and shape stuff and things. Evolutionary biology adds: relationships shape living things in very complex ways.
God didn’t create the world and then decide to love it, or at least parts of it—as we would gather from nearly all Hellenistic thought and also the thoughts of Einstein and those modern Christians who accept his rational, pagan thought as simply “common sense.” God first loved the world, all of it and all things within it, and the world came into existence.
God didn’t create complex things and living things which fit cleanly into categories of the sort which can be listed in clean, schematic ways. God created simple relationships which gave rise first to simple things; complex relationships and things, including those of living things, came by way of evolutionary and developmental processes.
None of this is the dreams of philosophers; the deepest beliefs of our culture show up in our most basic understandings of reality and can be found in the plot-lines of television shows and the assumptions about, say masculinity and femininity, which drive the `meaning’ of books used to teach children how to read and, hence, how to think in terms which might mature into abstract reasoning. As a result of Christian refusal to deal with these very basic issues, modern culture has become so many alien regions to those who believe in the Bible and the Christian Creeds.
We feed the poor and we speak gibberish to our own children when we try to explain to them why the Bible teaches the ultimate truths, despite all those regions of space so empty of angels and all those disconcerting facts about human sexuality which show up in the science news. After all, we preach sexual morality from a Medieval and Hellenistic stance that men and women are categorically such when most modern adolescents, if not always their parents, are aware of scientific evidence that such isn’t true: see Sex and Categorical Reasoning in a World of Evolution and Development and What Makes a Male, Genes or Developmental Accidents?. We preach resurrection and don’t try to develop any images of what this could mean in terms of modern understandings of those realms of Creation we can explore: see Reality Bites Back but Maybe It Started Nibbling Many Years Ago for one of my many discussions of this issue. We should learn how to bring the truth to a more exact form in this mortal realm of evolution and development and then we can preach the truth in a coherent manner. See my freely downloadable book, A More Exact Understanding of Human Being for a discussion of one sort of created being where we need a more exact understanding based upon the more exact knowledge we have of empirical reality.
The God who allowed Himself to be nailed to the cross didn’t teach us to expect religious liberty or tolerance and He never led anyone to believe that poverty and suffering can ever be eliminated in this mortal realm. He did teach us to help ou neighbors and also to preach the truths He gave to us in terms of Jewish culture of 2,000 years ago. Over the previous thousand years or so, Jewish belief had developed out of the paganism of the Semitic peoples, a paganism which I understand as having some monotheistic tendencies. It was not a case of God revealing a schema of truths for all time although He did give a couple of absolute truths; it’s even a bit of a puzzle as to what God revealed to Moses about His own nature and more of a puzzle as to why more polytheistically inclined forms of Semitic religion continued to survive for centuries, showing up in the early books of the Bible in terms of mixed theological language as well as a struggle for power between priesthoods which developed into a split between the `Samaritans’ and the followers of the cult in Jerusalem. (The winners in Jerusalem may well have unfairly attributed polytheistic tendencies to the losers in the northern territories.)
It’s a puzzle, not because of any skepticism imposed upon a clear story of God vs the idols, but rather because the events of those centuries leading up to the birth of Jesus of Nazareth were as confusing, as chaotic or factual, as more recent centuries have been. God as a storyteller hasn’t gotten more sloppy over the years, but it is true that the world has changed. Men have changed; the environments to which modern men respond when shaping their own selves have changed; human acts and thoughts and feelings over the century have left their very particular marks in human traditions and cultures. Our minds are different from the minds of those who lived with Moses or with Jesus of Nazareth or with Thomas Aquinas; our minds are not just ahistorical human minds which happen to be attached to men who live in the 21st century and which are filled with more modern facts.
Those 2,000 years of Christian history are a narrative of the Body of Christ emerging, in its aspects of mind and heart and hands. It is a story being told by God in His freely chosen role as Creator. Men of the caliber of Augustine and Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas and John Henry Newman and Pierre Duhem and Stanley Jaki have tried to teach us respect for the thoughts God manifested in Creation, thoughts we now know a little better than did the contemporaries of Jesus of Nazareth. It is by responding to those manifested thoughts that we shape our minds to accord with the mind of God, that we learn to understand Creation as the manifestation of thoughts of its Creator, that we shape our own minds as being participants in the greatest of all human intellects—that of the Body of Christ. This process of understanding Creation is part of the growth of the Body of Christ, part of our efforts as individual human beings to be better images of our Lord Jesus Christ, part of our efforts as communal human beings to be better images of the Creator who is Father and Son and Holy Spirit.
First, the thinkers with powerful intelligences and courageous spirits strike out into Creation, responding to all the wonderful and dangerous things and relationships. Then, the universal teachers begin to put the findings, the firm knowledge and speculations, of those great-spirited men into forms where the teachers at ordinary colleges and seminaries can begin to teach those who will in turn teach at high schools and at the individual communities of worship. The preachers and popular book-writers and poets and novelists, the musical composers and sculptors, the architects and urban-planners, the parents and uncles and aunts, can then begin to do their work in helping the youths to properly shape their minds. This process is suffering from logjams at every step; as a consequence, even some of the greatest and most absolute of truths is stated in terms of human knowledge which is implausible and sometimes downright false.
I’ve done my best to blow some of those logjams apart but the dangerous thoughts of a truth-seeker don’t register on the minds of modern men. Apparently, we modern Christians are the images of a God with a poorly developed mind and a great indifference to His own Creation including the truths which are the raw stuff of that Creation. I doubt that to be the God of Jesus Christ, but what do I know: I’m convinced Francis of Assisi would have lived out his life as a playboy if Augustine hadn’t struggled so hard in his studies of human history to find God’s teachings. If somehow, a faltering Western Civilization had been re-energized while Francis was partying, then it would have still been a pretty paltry revival if not for the efforts of Aquinas and Galileo and a host of others who struggled to better grasp what was in the things and relationships of Creations, things studied by philosophers and physicists and composed by musicians and erected by architects.
I don’t mean to denigrate St Francis for it was he, even more than St Dominic, who did re-energize European Christian Civilization, making possible St Thomas Aquinas among many others, architects and political actors as well as philosophers and theologians. But I would suggest that Christ is mind as well as heart and hands. Aquinas is as much a true image of Christ as is Francis.
We who have inherited such a magnificent civilization and have failed to even try to protect and nourish and advance it have much to answer for. I equate human civilizations with early versions of the Body of Christ as it develops in this mortal realm. If we don’t care for our human communities, most certainly that magnificent entity of Western Civilization, then we are failing to do our duty to Christ and to our fellowmen. Far too often, we modern Christians starve and stunt the Body of Christ and think to be doing the entirety of our duty by feeding the poor from the four corners of the world. We truly are the products of an age of textbooks filled with glossy images as well as numerous guides for the idiots and the clueless who are us by our own choice.
We failed to keep Western Civilization healthy and flourishing. We fail to give our children a reason to believe, have failed to build the structures of behaviors and belief and feeling, the physical and intellectual and spiritual, which would support a robust Christian civilization.
From at least the latter stages of the Enlightenment, we Christians of the West have used up the resources of our civilization by way of morally irresponsible acts and failures to act. The bank accounts are now almost empty.
I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place. On one side are alleged conservatives and traditionalists who seem to have forgotten that they’re supposed to be listening to the Creator and the vast majority of the Lord’s words come in the form of His acts-of-being in Creation, His creation of a world in which time and space are best described for now by Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, matter by the quantum physics of Schrodinger and Heisenberg and Dirac, human being by Darwin. Choose your favorite empirically oriented literary exegetes, historians, musicians, and painters and the picture is reasonably complete.
And the hard place? Well, there are the liberals who will to go to Heaven and to take everyone with them. Except for the good feelings they seem to feel at the very mention of Heaven, or other words, they often seem embarrassed by the very suggestion of a salvation granted by God; they seem to prefer the generosity of goodhearted men who have outgrown that tribal-god stuff. This mortal realm is as much a mystery to them as is any other realm, including Heaven. Surely, God made a mistake in putting us in a place of such suffering because He’s going to be merciful and save all of us in any case. Why? Because it’s too painful to think of other possibilities, often too painful to think. So it is that they join with somewhat like-minded conservatives to preach the simplicity of it all—remember all those guides for the idiots and the clueless. The liberals of Christianity watch God walk a tight-rope, not a step allowed to left or to right, that we might have the freedom to treat the world as being what we wish it to be.
In the end, my main criticism of Pope Francis and many other modern Christians, including the American bishops and the Catholic charitable workers, is that they know darned well that each and every member of their flocks has a duty to feed that poor child in Haiti or New York City but don’t seem comfortable with any claims that child’s mind should be shaped to accord with Christian truths; he’ll have too many rap lyrics to memorize and too many complex sports to understand.
We have religious liberty to protect us Christians from the refusal of governments to do poor people our way, from its apparent refusal to protect all men from any excessive claims of God. Maybe we went overboard when we protected ourselves and others from fanatic inquisitors? Maybe we protected ourselves from all claims to truth? Especially when those claims were, rightly or wrongly, made on behalf of the God of Jesus Christ?
In my previous article, When a Government Oversteps Its Proper Domain, I dealt with some of the very serious problems created when modern Christians began to misunderstand modern politics and their relationship, as one particular example, to the government of the United States. I believe American Christian leaders were and are deeply irresponsible in teaching their sheep to accept dependence upon governments which have taken on the characteristics of parasites and cancerous tumors. Yet, my still stronger claim is that it was truly unwise to support any government programs in areas where there is substantial moral differences within the population being served, those differences being more explicit in our time largely because liberty developed in the Christian West at the same time that various sorts of Christians turned away from strong versions of their own faiths.
For another but overlapping view of the problematic impressions made by Pope Francis, see this article, What Is Pope Francis Saying to the Right?, by John Zmirak, a Catholic writer of traditionalist tendencies. For a recent interview in which Pope Francis states his goals in his own words, see The Pope to Repubblica: How the Church will change under my watch .