A guide for processing the latest bombshell from Pope Francis

Monday, March 13th, 2017

So many aspects of Pope Francis’s personality either delight or consternate people, depending on their perspective, that it seems almost reductive to single out one element.

If you were going to put all those things on a list, however, pride of place almost certainly would have to go to his endless capacity for soundbites.

Time and again over the last four years, Francis has uttered an arresting phrase – in a press conference, in a media interview, in a Q&A session, during his morning homily – which has been launched out of a media canon, firing both imagination and controversy.

Here’s my personal “Top Five” list of those quotable quotes to date.

“Who am I to judge?” – en route back to Rome from Brazil in July 2013, spoken in the context of gay persons.
“God is not a Catholic” – attributed to Francis by Italian journalist Eugenio Scalfari in a September 2013 conversation.
“If [a close friend] says a swear word against my mother, he’s going to get a punch in the nose” – on a plane from Sri Lanka to the Philippines in January 2015, in response to a question about the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris.
“Catholics don’t need to breed like rabbits” – returning to Rome in January 2015, in the context of a question about birth control.
“Most marriages today are null” – spoken at a pastoral congress on the family in Diocese of Rome in June 2016, later amended by the Vatican to read “some.”

Naturally, there’s plenty of other material, but those examples suffice to make the point.

We got another entry on Wednesday in a new interview with a German newspaper, in which Francis denies seeing American Cardinal Raymond Burke as an “adversary,” signals a cautious opening to discussion about married priests, voices alarm about the rise of political populism in Europe, and takes a gentle swipe at what he calls “fundamentalist Catholics.”

Whenever these bombshells explode, pundits and commentators go into overdrive trying to explain (and sometimes spin) what the pope actually meant.

Less noticed, however, is the grassroots pastoral challenge they create, as parish priests and other Church personnel scramble to answer people’s questions about what was said and what it might mean. Continue reading