Keep dreaming

Dear oh dear, how the consensus media spins and shakes as it tries to define Pope Francis within its own jejune, secular purview. Is he left, is he right, will he change the Church so that we in the relativist world are more comfortable with it? And now, forgive the pun, they’re all exercised about exorcism. Within moments of Pope Benedict’s resignation there was ill-informed speculation that a new pontiff would introduce sweeping reforms, which was really a euphemism for demanding that the Church be more like the average chattering class dinner party.

It just wasn’t going to happen. Better, just couldn’t have happened. No Pope is going to suddenly condone same-sex marriage, condom use and divorce — it’s always these issues you see — any more than he’s going to proclaim Mohammad as the final prophet of God. Hysterical wishful thinking is not the same as responsible journalism, which is something serious Catholics have come to realize every time there is a major story concerning the Church.

The papal exorcism incident is particularly intriguing. Pope Francis spent time with a severely handicapped 43-year-old man — identified only as Angel V — and appeared to be praying over him. The father of two has told the Spanish-language media that he can now walk, but is still possessed by demons. Well, half the job done I suppose.

Not sure what to make of any of this, and it’s likely we’re getting a shadow of a ripple of a rumour of what actually occurred. But what does amaze is how ostensibly incredulous people were that the Pope, the successor to St. Peter, should believe that there is such a thing as spiritual warfare, that Satan and devils do indeed exist and that God’s priests have the ability to combat and defeat them.
Truth be told, Hollywood believes this too. Every time there is another movie about the devil and an exorcist, the good guy, the hero, is never a United Church minister, never an Anglican enamoured with the works of Matthew Fox, and he’s certainly never a she. It’s always a Roman Catholic priest. So when the going gets tough, the toughs get priestly.

Of course the devil prowls around looking for meat. We can’t just believe the nice, easy bits of Scripture, and salvation doesn’t make any sense if we accept only half of the story. As C.S. Lewis said, there are two errors we can fall into regarding Old Nick.

One is to assume he doesn’t exist, the other is to think about little else and to obsess about him.

For those Catholics who assume the Church is merely a pressure group working for a higher minimum wage, clean energy and fair trade coffee, the reality that we’re fighting an eternal war against the forces of darkness might come as something of a shock. Sorry, but that’s the way it is. Life is great, life is fun, life is to be enjoyed and we should never live it in fear of the big nasty down below, but if we assume he’s a myth we are in deep, diabolical trouble.

So the new, Jesuit, preferential option for the poor Pope comes into office and within days he’s acknowledging the existence of Satan, giving homilies about sin and the struggle between good and evil, emphasizing that complete understanding of Christ is only to be found within the Church, and also — after a little clarification due to Vatican mistranslation and media misinterpretation — reminding the world that there is no salvation outside of the Catholicism. Popes rock, so to speak.

It’s going to be an eventful, exciting few years under the man from Argentina, and while he will never be, for example, as conservative a liturgist as his predecessor, he is a pontiff who loves the Church, truth and Christ with an intelligence and compassion that we can only admire and thank God for. I try not to take comfort in the anguish of my enemies — but I do, and

I suppose that’s what confession is for — but nothing proves the Pope’s genius more effectively than the anger of those who foolishly assumed that suddenly the Church would resemble some mildly theological version of the NDP. Dream on comrades, dream on.

(Coren’s latest book is Heresy: Ten Lies They Spread About Christianity. His web site is www. michaelcoren.com.)