De-Crypting Jonas's Sign: Semaphore From the Belly Of Leviathan

As I say, I am head over heels for the new pope so far based on what little I have heard or seen. My gut is telling me that he's the bees knees.  I'm really very pleased.

But..

There have been a few discordant notes that I have marked.  The most important is a comment Cardinal Bergoglio made in what is an otherwise inspiring interview, that can be found here.

I'll excerpt it, because it is very interesting, and worth a read and meditation.  The interviewer's questions and interjections are bold face, he begins by asking Cardinal Bergoglio what he would have said to a recent consistory of Latin American bishops he has just missed if he had had the chance.  Cardinal Bergoglio had been called to Rome and then become sick while there, forcing him to miss the consistory where Benedict XVI had addressed the bishops. This is his response:

BERGOGLIO: I would have spoken about these three key points. 

Nothing else? 

BERGOGLIO: Nothing else… No, perhaps I would have mentioned two things of which there is need in this moment, there is more need: mercy, mercy and apostolic courage. 

What do they mean to you? 

BERGOGLIO: To me apostolic courage is disseminating. Disseminating the Word. Giving it to that man and to that woman for whom it was bestowed. Giving them the beauty of the Gospel, the amazement of the encounter with Jesus… and leaving it to the Holy Spirit to do the rest. It is the Lord, says the Gospel, who makes the seed spring and bear fruit. 

In short, it is the Holy Spirit who performs the mission. 

BERGOGLIO: The early theologians said: the soul is a kind of sailing boat, the Holy Spirit is the wind that blows in the sail, to send it on its way, the impulses and the force of the wind are the gifts of the Spirit. Without His drive, without His grace, we don’t go ahead. The Holy Spirit lets us enter the mystery of God and saves us from the danger of a gnostic Church and from the danger of a self-referential Church, leading us to the mission. 

That means also overthrowing all your functionalist solutions, your consolidated plans and pastoral systems …

BERGOGLIO: I didn’t say that pastoral systems are useless. On the contrary. In itself everything that leads by the paths of God is good. I have told my priests: «Do everything you should, you know your duties as ministers, take your responsibilities and then leave the door open». Our sociologists of religion tell us that the influence of a parish has a radius of six hundred meters. In Buenos Aires there are about two thousand meters between one parish and the next. So I then told the priests: «If you can, rent a garage and, if you find some willing layman, let him go there! Let him be with those people a bit, do a little catechesis and even give communion if they ask him». A parish priest said to me: «But Father, if we do this the people then won’t come to church». «But why?» I asked him: «Do they come to mass now?» «No», he answered. And so! Coming out of oneself is also coming out from the fenced garden of one’s own convictions, considered irremovable, if they risk becoming an obstacle, if they close the horizon that is also of God. 

This is valid also for lay people… 

BERGOGLIO: Their clericalization is a problem. The priests clericalize the laity and the laity beg us to be clericalized… It really is sinful abetment. And to think that baptism alone could suffice. I’m thinking of those Christian communities in Japan that remained without priests for more than two hundred years. When the missionaries returned they found them all baptized, all validly married for the Church and all their dead had had a Catholic funeral. The faith had remained intact through the gifts of grace that had gladdened the life of a laity who had received only baptism and had also lived their apostolic mission in virtue of baptism alone. One must not be afraid of depending only on His tenderness… Do you know the biblical episode of the prophet Jonah? 

I don’t remember it. Tell us. 

BERGOGLIO: Jonah had everything clear. He had clear ideas about God, very clear ideas about good and evil. On what God does and on what He wants, on who was faithful to the Covenant and who instead was outside the Covenant. He had the recipe for being a good prophet. God broke into his life like a torrent. He sent him to Nineveh. Nineveh was the symbol of all the separated, the lost, of all the peripheries of humanity. Of all those who are outside, forlorn. Jonah saw that the task set on him was only to tell all those people that the arms of God were still open, that the patience of God was there and waiting, to heal them with His forgiveness and nourish them with His tenderness. Only for that had God sent him. He sent him to Nineveh, but he instead ran off in the opposite direction, toward Tarsis. 

Running away from a difficult mission… 

BERGOGLIO: No. What he was fleeing was not so much Nineveh as the boundless love of God for those people. It was that that didn’t come into his plans. God had come once… “and I’ll see to the rest”: that’s what Jonah told himself. He wanted to do things his way, he wanted to steer it all. His stubbornness shut him in his own structures of evaluation, in his pre-ordained methods, in his righteous opinions. He had fenced his soul off with the barbed wire of those certainties that instead of giving freedom with God and opening horizons of greater service to others had finished by deafening his heart. How the isolated conscience hardens the heart! Jonah no longer knew that God leads His people with the heart of a Father. 

A great many of us can identify with Jonah. 

BERGOGLIO: Our certainties can become a wall, a jail that imprisons the Holy Spirit. Those who isolate their conscience from the path of the people of God don’t know the joy of the Holy Spirit that sustains hope. That is the risk run by the isolated conscience. Of those who from the closed world of their Tarsis complain about everything or, feeling their identity threatened, launch themselves into battles only in the end to be still more self-concerned and self-referential. 

What should one do? 

BERGOGLIO: Look at our people not for what it should be but for what it is and see what is necessary. Without preconceptions and recipes but with generous openness. For the wounds and the frailty God spoke. Allowing the Lord to speak… In a world that we can’t manage to interest with the words we say, only His presence that loves us, saves us, can be of interest. The apostolic fervor renews itself in order to testify to Him who has loved us from the beginning. 

For you, then, what is the worst thing that can happen in the Church? 

BERGOGLIO: It is what De Lubac calls «spiritual worldliness». It is the greatest danger for the Church, for us, who are in the Church. «It is worse», says De Lubac, «more disastrous than the infamous leprosy that disfigured the dearly beloved Bride at the time of the libertine popes». Spiritual worldliness is putting oneself at the center. It is what Jesus saw going on among the Pharisees: «… You who glorify yourselves. Who give glory to yourselves, the ones to the others». 


So,  on one hand this may perhaps be the best exegesis of the book of Jonah I have ever read.  I really  like the story, and have always thought it amusing that God's chosen prophet is an angry pill.  I've commented on this before, here on the blog.

Cardinal Bergoglio- our new pope -  helps us here to really inhabit Jonah's perspective, and explore his motivation:  Jonah is not slothful.  He's not afraid. I used to read the book superficially thinking that Jonah is like me, in that sloth and fear are most often my motivations for avoiding what I believe God wants me to do, and projecting my sins onto him.  I'd rather not inconvenience myself, I'm afraid of criticism and failure.

I don't often consciously find myself wanting to actively frustrate what I think God wants..

But that is precisely what Jonah wants to do.  He doesn't want to preach mercy to Ninevah, because he hates the Ninevites.  He doesn't want them to be saved.  (I always found that amusing, and odd.. ) I've always thought that "the sign of Jonas" was a sign meant for the sinners in Ninevah, ignoring the irony that what the story may be signifying is that the really great sinner here is Jonah himself.   He flees to frustrate God's desire to show mercy to those he hates.

(Aside: I do not want to imply that my sloth and fear are less sinful than Jonah's hatred - hatred, even if sinful, is at least not lukewarm, and in Jonah's case is rooted in Jonah's righteousness - I think he hates the Ninevites because they truly are evil; not merely because they are from Iraq, inscrutable proto-muslims, and different than him.. )

The sign of Jonas is therefore perhaps also a sign to Jonah himself, maybe in the essential sense.  It's a sign unto the pharisees,  of whom Jonah is the prophetic forerunner.

Cardinal Bergoglio says the scripture is warning us not to let our pride; our sense of propriety, orthodoxy, our need to control things, judge things, to sit in Moses' seat over others; keep us from loving our brothers, and so keep us from loving God.

That's spot on, I think, and beautiful.  Judge not least you be judged.  Forgive, and you shall be forgiven.  Love, and you shall be loved. For to love is to have God. We are meant therefore to love everyone, especially our enemies and those we are tempted to hate.. For God is love. That's the gospel in it's purity.


But, on the other hand..  Two things he says give me pause:

So I then told the priests: «If you can, rent a garage and, if you find some willing layman, let him go there! Let him be with those people a bit, do a little catechesis and even give communion if they ask him». A parish priest said to me: «But Father, if we do this the people then won’t come to church». «But why?» I asked him: «Do they come to mass now?» «No», he answered. And so! Coming out of oneself is also coming out from the fenced garden of one’s own convictions, considered irremovable, if they risk becoming an obstacle, if they close the horizon that is also of God. 

I've also read Cardinal Bergoglio calling priests who refuse to baptize babies born to unmarried mothers  pharisees, as well.  It's the same theoretical principle.

But the two things strike me to be in practice different.  Baptizing an illegitimate child seems to me to potentially have strong pastoral justifications; to be a legitimate ekonomia, an act of gratuitous mercy.  While giving the eucharist to a person who is not actively trying to live a life of normal Christian virtue - the baseline of which is going to mass on Sunday - seems a very different thing.  Paul warns that if you receive unworthily you receive unto your own destruction.  I think that means at least a modicum eucharistic discipline is called for?  People should be encouraged to examine their lives and aspire to holiness - meaning living a life of some discipline in prayer and virtue - before receiving?


Then, and even more puzzlingly, he says "and to think that baptism alone could suffice." implying I think that ministerial priesthood is unnecessary, and conducive in any case to sinful clericalism.

That is another apparent radical denigration of traditional eucharistic theology.  Moreover, the ministerial priesthood is what makes the Apostolic churches.  Renouncing it is the existential hallmark of protestantism.  This is hugely problematic to me.


What the Holy Father says about "spiritual worldliness" - which is turning religion into essentially a mere ideology, a means of social control, a spiritual fetish that one uses to primp the ego and marginalize others who fail to meet our standards - is I think true and wise.  Well worth praying over.

But here's the thing: dogma and liturgy and tradition are not incidental. They are critical.  While it is clearly true that without charity - love - it is all dross, and that many people I think have fixated on tradition and liturgy and dogma in distorted spiritually destructive ways - I was, and perhaps still am one of them - it remains that the normative way that truth is expressed is through dogma, and that tradition and liturgy are organic realities that must be respected and nurtured as the rich soil in which the culture of our faith is renewed.  These things with charity are salvific, and without these things charity is endangered.

To value, and to seek to protect and promote them is not pharisaical. It's essential to being Catholic.


Asking people to come to mass, and encouraging them to fully participate in the life of their parish - which means things like asking them to make an annual confession, and not to miss mass without a serious reason - should be the norm.

The idea that someone unwilling come regularly to mass, who is not homebound or in some other serious way  prevented from coming regularly to mass, should be allowed to receive communion anyway while in an objective state of serious sin..  Well, that's scandalous.  I don't know what to say.

Maybe I do not understand all that the Holy Father meant there.  Maybe.  But if he meant what it seems he meant, I have some serious questions and reservations.


Look, I watch him talk in a clip like this,

And my heart melts.  I love him.  I do.


But.  But.   He receives the unconditional endorsement of the likes of Fr. Leonard Boff and Roger Cardinal Mahoney, and then does odd little things like quote an unnamed "German poet"

("es ist ruhig, das alter, und fromm.." It is peaceful, old age, and religious.. See his March 15th audience, 2nd to last paragraph for the context - again, I love this old man)

In one of his addresses, who turns out to be Fredrich Holderin.. Well, this as I say is a quibble, but old Friedrich is an early 19th century romantic poet and political radical; a supporter of the French Revolution and Napoleon, the German peer of Byron, Keats, Shelley; who went nuts and died painfully after having a insane affair with his patron's wife.  He had strong influences on the likes of Nietzsche and Hegel, and then later thinkers like Foucault, Derrida and Heiddeger..

Not a big thing at all, in itself really, but it strikes me as slightly odd, that citation being made publicly by the pope..


It all still makes me perk up a little bit and wonder if I should be concerned.


The people over at Rorate Caeli are going a little jigga-boo over all of this sort of stuff, and while I think it's beyond premature to get really upset, I still get why they are worried.


Because there is a popular apocalyptic backdrop to this election.

There's the entire Peter Roman and St. Malachi prophecy of the popes thing, most famously..

Then there's the controversy over the supposed suppression of the entirety of the 3rd Secret of Fatima gig, where the speculation is that Tarcisio (anagram of "Iscariot") Cardinal Bertone is hiding the part of the secret that prophesies apostasy in the curia and hierarchy..

And then there are the many other Marian apparitions prophesizing imminent tribulation, the most important being the apparitions at Medjugorje and Garabandal.

Google all that at your own risk.


All of that is way too lurid for me to spend much time on.  I used to be much more absorbed by such things.. In fact, Lourdes and Fatima are really two profound childhood influences that really incited my interest and faith, back then..

But to lend all of that too much attention and energy now, would be a mistake I think.  I'm just mentioning it here because it's there, and I think it bears some consideration.

We'll know soon enough if there really is anything to be actually concerned about.  In the meantime, I'm praying for our dear Holy Father.  I hope he's truly the mensch he seems to be.

Otherwise, things are going to really suck.



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