Pope Francis wasn’t watering down the Christian faith; he was expressing existential humility. He was unwilling to state, definitively, the mind of God and to pass judgment on the souls of others. His words were surprising not because they were heretical in any way, but rather because existential humility contradicts the fundamentalist spirit of much of contemporary American Christianity. His words were less a declaration of truth than an invitation to introspection, a call to examine your conscience.
But what we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert — himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt — the Divine Reason. Huxley preached a humility content to learn from Nature. But the new sceptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn. Thus we should be wrong if we had said hastily that there is no humility typical of our time. The truth is that there is a real humility typical of our time; but it so happens that it is practically a more poisonous humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic. The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether.
Addendum: If there’s one thing I’m sure Pope Francis’s comment was not, it’s “a call to examine your conscience” — conscience doesn’t seem relevant to his comment in any way. But what was he saying when he said “Religions are seen as paths trying to reach God. I will use an analogy: They are like different languages that express the divine”?
He could have meant “All religions are people made in the image of God searching for the God who made them, so we Catholics, who have received the full deposit of True Faith, should respect others who search.”
He could also have meant “All religions are people made in the image of God searching for the God who made them, and none of us can know whether our way is closer than anyone else’s way, so we can but hope that God will be kind to us all.”
The former statement is consistent with Jesus’s claim that “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me.” The latter statement can only mean that Jesus is a way but not the only way nor even necessarily the best way.
So which did Francis mean? There’s no way to tell for certain unless he issues a clarification — or has he already done that? The following day he said, “the diversity of our cultural and religious identities is a gift from God.” If so, then most if not all evangelism is a rejection of God’s gift — and therefore surely a sin. The only exception might be preaching to atheists, but maybe in Francis’s view atheism is also part of the great “diversity of our cultural and religious identities.” Who knows?
My view, for what it’s worth, is that Francis hasn’t thought about any of these things very much. He’s just doing what he always does: speaking impromptu, off-the-cuff, saying whatever comes to his mind, a mind which doesn’t really care all that much about the issues at stake. I say that because this has been the hallmark of his pontificate: issuing confusing declarations when speaking informally, either in public or to journalists. He has never taken the trouble to be clear, in either his words or his thoughts. Another way to put the point: He just doesn’t take his job seriously. And at this point, given his age and his evident self-satisfaction, that is unlikely to change.
