I could not help but get sucked in to a little bit of the drama of the new Pope stuff.
For a really great overview of the importance of the Church to Catholics and the timelessness of this institution, check out Mark Steyn's beautiful reflections on Pope John Paul II. It's lovely and has been updated with some thoughts on today's Pope.
"The root of the Pope's thinking – that there are eternal truths no-one
can change even if he wanted to – is completely incomprehensible to the
progressivist mindset. There are no absolute truths, everything's in
play, and by "consensus" all we're really arguing is the rate of
concession to the inevitable: abortion's here to stay, gay marriage will
be here any day now – it's all gonna happen anyway, man, so why be the
last squaresville daddy-o on the block? We live in a present-tense
culture where novelty is its own virtue."
And furthermore:
"Among liberal "Catholics" in Manhattan and Boston, the pontiff may be a
reactionary misogynist homophobe condom-banner but, beyond those stunted
horizons, he was a man fully engaged with the modern world and shrewder
at reconciling it with the splendor of the eternal truth than most
politicians. Western liberals claim the Pope's condom hang-ups have had
tragic consequences in Aids-riddled Africa."
(The Lubavticher Rabbi was also someone like this, in my opinion-he was very well educated in the secular world and embraced technology-every form-to get the word out.)
"The Dark Continent gets
darker every year: millions are dying, male life expectancy is
collapsing, and such civil infrastructure as there is seems likely to
follow. But the most effective weapon against the disease has not been
the Aids lobby's 20-year promotion of condom culture in Africa but
Uganda's campaign to change behaviour and to emphasise abstinence and
fidelity – ie, the Pope's position. You don't have to be a Catholic or a
"homophobe" to think that the spread of Aids is telling us something
basic – that nature is not sympathetic to sexual promiscuity. If it
weren't Aids, it would be something else, as it has been for most of
human history."
Anyway, I'm not too involved in the topic, but I did think that this was a very positive gesture:
Pope Francis reaches out to Jews.
So far, so good!
