Does This Pope Really Matter?

    My  friend is gratified but not overwhelmed by Pope Francis' groundbreaking style. He says he'll believe real change is afoot when the Catholic Church gives all its treasure to the poor and sets up headquarters in a pole barn.
    My friend is not given to jaundiced views. But neither is he given to glossing over fundamentals.  Pope Francis has abandoned none of the harder doctrines that have troubled his denomination and divided public attitude. In its blood and bones, the Catholic Church remains itself.
     Yet this pope has caused a surge of reaction among Catholics, Protestants, and even people who might deem themselves irreligious. Pundits parse his words. Analysts try to peer inside his head and heart.
    What is going on here?
     One commentator says Pope Francis has changed the tune if not the words. And the new tune has resonated with people of all sorts. Or startled them. In an age that politicizes nearly every human transaction (and thus adulterates any useful understanding of politics) the Pope is commonly rated on a liberal/conservative scale. But I think a better measure of his impact may lie elsewhere. My hunch is that he has galvanized attention because his demeanor of loving, inclusive humility clashes with widely shared perceptions of the established church -- Protestant and Catholic alike.
    Consider the not-incidental context.  Church affiliation is in broad decline. People have been voting with their feet. Dorothy L. Sayers, who wrote far more than crime fiction, ventured an explanation. In a collection of essays called Letters To A Diminished Church, she suggested that the church is complicit in the accretion of a damaging image of Christian faith.
    She offered a mock catechism.  An abbreviated sample:


    What does the church think of God the father?  He is omnipotent and holy. He created the world and imposed on man conditions impossible of fulfillment; he is very angry if these are not carried out. ...
    What was Jesus Christ like in real life? He was a good man -- so good as to be called the Son of God. ...  He had no sense of humor. ... If we try to live like him, God the Father will let us off being damned hereafter and only have us tortured in this life.
    What is meant by atonement?  God wanted to damn everybody, but his vindictive sadism was sated by the crucifixion of his own Son, who was quite innocent and therefore a particularly attractive victim.  ...
    What does the church think of sex?  God made it necessary to the machinery of the world and tolerates it provided the parties are (a) married and (b) get no pleasure out of it.
    What does  the church call sin?  Sex (otherwise than as excepted above); getting drunk; saying "damn"; murder; and cruelty to dumb animals; not going to church; most kinds of amusement. "Original sin" means that anything we enjoy doing is wrong.
    What is faith? Resolutely shutting your eyes to scientific fact.
     What are the seven Christian virtues? Respectability, childishness, mental timidity, dullness, sentimentality, censoriousness and depression of spirits.

    Sayers continued: "Somehow or other, and with the best of intentions, we have shown the world the typical Christian in the likeness of a crashing and rather ill-natured bore. ...
    "Let us in heaven's name drag out the divine drama from under the dreadful accumulation of slipshod thinking and trashy sentiment heaped upon it ... ."
     We should be careful here. Organized religion is vulnerable to caricature.  Friends favor images that are easy to swallow. Foes favor images that are easy to condemn. The truth lies elsewhere, and is as complex as life.
    The record of the church through the ages is therefore mixed. And while the mix plentifully includes sacrificial service of good by exemplars of the highest kind, I think today's church does deserve charges of complicity in its own struggles.  Pope Francis' denomination remains itself. Its doctrines on birth control and abortion, to name only two, are a direct cause of much suffering.  Other denominations favor their various versions of narrow, judgmental and exclusionary piety.
    Today's church at large displays a taste for rule-mongering and doctrinal calisthenics.  In this it is an edifice made with hands, and reflects human foibles all too clearly. Add to this in some quarters an unseemly appetite for political power, and we come to a melancholy juncture: People of clear mind and good heart can feel that the posture of the established church is out of tune with the spirit of the Christian gospels.
    This formulation necessarily presupposes an appetite -- or at least a respect -- for the spirit of the Christian gospels. We cannot be offended by abuse of an ethic we hold in no regard.
    And so along comes Pope Francis, who reveals something in us by touching it.   Millions are energized by his example of loving, inclusive humility.
     I think the phenomenon is not trivial.