The Little Interview

[McCall1981]

I think the issue here is not that Pope actually said anything wrong. The issue here is that he left out some of the important parts. Here is an atheist who probably has a malformed conscience and is seeing the Church teaching as against his conscience. To tell such a man to follow his conscience while leaving out the part that he has a responsibility to make sure it is properly formed is to give half the message.

On the same note, there is a deeper problem in atheism than other religions in that there is no way to say if a conscience is properly formed or not. The conscience can therefore be entirely formed on ones emotional experiences and preferences or any other arbitrary system one can think of.

With respect to other religions, the conscience can become distorted because every religion apart from Catholicism contains errors.

All of this is reason for us to want to convert others to the Catholic faith so that they can inform their conscience properly and answer God’s Grace. While they are outside the Church, there is a much higher chance of rejecting God’s Grace due to the malformed conscience and other temptations and snares of the Devil.

None of this was stated in the interview and in fact the whole need for conversion was thrown out as something to not be pursued.

Exactly! Its this same problem over and over and over

 

[Michael_Francis]

Closed pending review by moderator Thomas Casey.

 

[Thomas_Casey]

MODERATOR NOTICE

If you wish to share your thoughts on something that the Holy Father said in his interview, you may do so.

If you wish to respond to another person’s thought, without talking about the person, you may do so.

You may not use the forum to grandstand and analyze what the Holy Father should have said or said wrong according to your opinion and your understanding. The purpose of the forum is to discuss Catholic traditions and Catholic customs, not to criticize, question, analyze or attempt to correct those who are not here to engage in a dialogue.

Please read Pope Watch before you continue this discussion.

I’m cleaning out the thread of anything that sounds disrespectful.

Thank You

 

[AndyP2010]

Ok one of the more interesting parts of the interview is where Pope Francis turns the tables and asks questions. He asks Scalfari what he believes in, and the atheists says being. I will simply note that when Moses asks G*d his name the answer is I AM. Francis then gets him to elaborate a bit more. He doesn’t play gotcha, he just plants a few seeds.

The bold here is the interviewer.

You must ask yourself, of course, like everyone else, who we are, where we come from, where we are going. Even children ask themselves these questions. And you?"

I am grateful for this question. The answer is this: I believe in Being, that is in the tissue from which forms, bodies arise.
“And I believe in God, not in a Catholic God, there is no Catholic God, there is God and I believe in Jesus Christ, his incarnation. Jesus is my teacher and my pastor, but God, the Father, Abba, is the light and the Creator. This is my Being. Do you think we are very far apart?”

We are distant in our thinking, but similar as human beings, unconsciously animated by our instincts that turn into impulses, feelings and will, thought and reason. In this we are alike.
“But can you define what you call Being?”

Being is a fabric of energy. Chaotic but indestructible energy and eternal chaos. Forms emerge from that energy when it reaches the point of exploding. The forms have their own laws, their magnetic fields, their chemical elements, which combine randomly, evolve, and are eventually extinguished but their energy is not destroyed. Man is probably the only animal endowed with thought, at least in our planet and solar system. I said that he is driven by instincts and desires but I would add that he also contains within himself a resonance, an echo, a vocation of chaos.
“All right. I did not want you to give me a summary of your philosophy and what you have told me is enough for me. From my point of view, God is the light that illuminates the darkness, even if it does not dissolve it, and a spark of divine light is within each of us. In the letter I wrote to you, you will remember I said that our species will end but the light of God will not end and at that point it will invade all souls and it will all be in everyone.”

 

[Robyn_p]

Ok one of the more interesting parts of the interview is where Pope Francis turns the tables and asks questions. He asks Scalfari what he believes in, and the atheists says being. I will simply note that when Moses asks G*d his name the answer is I AM. Francis then gets him to elaborate a bit more. He doesn’t play gotcha, he just plants a few seeds.

The bold here is the interviewer.

Yup, that was awesome.

 

[JReducation]

There were a number of interesting sides to this interview. It was not a theology class, a sermon, a lecture, or a religious education class. It was an interview and not a formal one at that. The pope and the reporter have a relationship. The interview was really a continuation of a dialogue between them. As far as I’m concerned, the pope did not leave out anything that he should have said or include anything that he should not have said. He did not set out to teach. He set out to chat.

When I look at the interview as a chat between these two men, I find some rather interesting details. There is the part when he turns the tables as Andy has pointed out. I thought that was so Jesuit, to put you on the spot rather than answer the question.

At another point he sounded like Fulton Sheen. The reporter says that he does not believe in a soul and the pope responds with a simple one liner. “You have one.” It reminded me of the woman who told Archbishop Sheen that she did not believe in hell and the Archbishop responded, “You will when you get there.”

There is another very telling moment in the interview. The Holy Father asks the reporter about his understanding of “being”. In the Italian, it’s quite funny. The English translation does not do justice to the dialogue, because satire and humor are not easy to translate, especially if you’re using software which most news media use today. What he actually said in Italian was, “I just wanted to know what you understood by being, not a lecture in philosophy.” It’s one of those tongue in cheek remarks that says that Pope Francis is not a man who is interested in sitting down and going into the most minute details of a concept in what he considers to be a non academic and informal setting.

He’s not going to give detailed responses, nor is he looking for detailed responses. That type of dialogue he seems to reserve for behind closed doors. This may sound silly to some people, but as a religious, it makes perfect sense to me.

Permit me to explain this in rather vulgar terms. Male religious, more than female religious, are trained to keep their cards close to their chest. The unwritten rule is simple. If you must speak, use a lot of words and say very little. This goes back to the idea of avoiding contamination with the secular world, meaning the laity and the diocesan clergy. But that’s another thread for another day. I’m just explaining the behavior that some people find confusing in these interviews.

I don’t get the sense that the Holy Father intended the interview to be a preaching moment, but more of a getting to know Francis moment. “This is who I am. This is how I speak. This is how I organize my thoughts. I have many things going through my mind and I’m going to throw them on the table in a stream of consciousness, but I can change my mind next week or formulate them differently.”

The one message that comes across very clearly is “NOT ON MY WATCH”. He keeps going back to the fact that there are some things that are wrong and he intends to fix what he can, minimize what he can’t fix and not allow what he can prohibit.

I’m not pope nor anything important. But I have been in many interviews related to my ministry and my community. There is a common system to planned interviews. Generally, you will received the agenda ahead of time. You can go with it or you can change it. Some reporters don’t like it when you refuse to go with their agenda and they cut the interview completely or they edit you when they report. Other reporters actually like to give you the freedom to take the lead, because they really want to know what makes you tick. They’re not looking for “knowledge” as we understand it.

Another important part of an interview is time. Generally, there is a time limit. I remember doing a two hour interview for a 30 minute segment on TV. I had to keep talking for two hours. A few months ago, I did an interview for EWTN radio where I had to summarize the mission of my community and its connection to St. Francis in 2.75 minutes. In both situations I knew the agenda ahead of time. But once the interview begins, it takes on a life of its own. If there is a chemistry between you and the reporter, you lose yourselves in each other and the interview becomes a conversation.

There is a positive and a negative to this. The positive is that there is no hostility between you and the reporter. You genuinely like each other and are genuinely interested in what each is thinking. The negative is that you begin to “chat”. When you chat, you become less formal and you become more dependent on body language, history that you share or future plans to continue talking. In the latter, the end report can have all kinds of holes in it or can sound disjointed to the person who was not in the room. Basically, it’s more of a transcript of a conversation than an actual interview. In conversations, we don’t always go into great depths.

The beautiful side of this is that every pope has a personality and each pope has a different relationship with the world. At the end of the day, the allegation that the Church is rigid is proven false if we just look at our popes.

Call me the eternal dreamer, if you wish. But I believe that there is always beauty and newness in every situation. I believe that such beauty and newness is part of God’s self-disclosure to us. I believe that if we really want to find fault, we’re always going to find it. There is nothing and no one that the human person cannot criticize, judge, and sentence, including Christ himself.

As I tell my brothers, “You will not earn heaven because you can repeat the Summa backward in Latin. You will only get into heaven if you conform your life to the Crucified Christ. Knock it off with the theology and get working on your soul.”

 

[D_Block]

It was a simple conversation between new friends. The Pope is trying to build a relationship with the man, and to the wider atheist community. I suspected the points that caught my attention: no catholic god, jesus christ in every soul, were due to faulty translation work. It seems I was right.

In the end the man was having an informal conversation, between two new friends, that was published.

I find it to be a real shame that people would lose their faith over a conversation.

The web’s rad trads are calling it the End Times

 

[Lion_IRC]

"…Ciascuno di noi ha una sua visione del Bene e anche del Male. Noi dobbiamo incitarlo a procedere verso quello che lui pensa sia il Bene”

Seeking to follow the thing that is good.
Very reminiscent of Psalm 38:20

Isnt it a statement of the bleeding obvious that if the ungodly, the atheists, the moral relativists, the selfish hedonists of this world, acknowledged the actual objective reality of good versus evil,
that would be a good start and an improvement?

Isnt that the epiphany which struck The Prodigal Son? Isnt that the starting point we all have when we make Confession, make our Confirmation, get baptized, recite the Creed, pray the Our Father…

 

[Origen52]

Fr Joseph Ratzinger (1967): Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II

Over the pope as expression of the binding claim of ecclesiastical authority, there stands one’s own conscience which must be obeyed before all else, even if necessary against the requirements of ecclesiastical authority.
This emphasis on the individual, whose conscience confronts him with a supreme and ultimate tribunal, and one which is the last resort, is beyond the claims of external social groups, even the official church, and also establishes a principle in opposition to totalitarianism.

Ultimately you can disagree with all of the Pope’s opinions.

 

[choliks]

-snip-

Call me the eternal dreamer, if you wish. But I believe that there is always beauty and newness in every situation. I believe that such beauty and newness is part of God’s self-disclosure to us. I believe that if we really want to find fault, we’re always going to find it. There is nothing and no one that the human person cannot criticize, judge, and sentence, including Christ himself.

Similar to the Jesuit motto: “Finding God in all things.” If you learned this from St. Francis, then San Ignacio de Loyola is truly a fan of St. Francis.

 

[Lion_IRC]

T…At another point he sounded like Fulton Sheen. The reporter says that he does not believe in a soul and the pope responds with a simple one liner. “You have one.”

I much prefer the line often attributed to CS Lewis,
…You do not have a soul. You are a soul. What you have is a body.

 

[JReducation]

Fr Joseph Ratzinger (1967): Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II

Over the pope as expression of the binding claim of ecclesiastical authority, there stands one’s own conscience which must be obeyed before all else, even if necessary against the requirements of ecclesiastical authority.
This emphasis on the individual, whose conscience confronts him with a supreme and ultimate tribunal, and one which is the last resort, is beyond the claims of external social groups, even the official church, and also establishes a principle in opposition to totalitarianism.

Ultimately you can disagree with all of the Pope’s opinions.

Shhhhhh

I much prefer the line often attributed to CS Lewis,
…You do not have a soul. You are a soul. What you have is a body.

I never heard that one. I like it.

 

[JReducation]

Similar to the Jesuit motto: “Finding God in all things.” If you learned this from St. Francis, then San Ignacio de Loyola is truly a fan of St. Francis.

St. Francis is the “mystic of the Incarnation”. Remember his Canticle of Brother Sun?

Do you remember what St. Ignatius said to his companions about St. Francis? “We must want to be like him.”

 

[choliks]

St. Francis is the “mystic of the Incarnation”. Remember his Canticle of Brother Sun?

Do you remember what St. Ignatius said to his companions about St. Francis? “We must want to be like him.”

:sad_yes:

 

[McCall1981]

For the record, the accuracy of this interview is being called into question by Andrea Tornielli. Fr. Lombardi has commented on it too:

wdtprs.com/blog/2013/10/tornielli-calls-into-question-accuracy-of-pope-francis-interview-fr-z-asks-a-serious-question/

 

[AndyP2010]

Oh and what may be even more interesting is this statement by the Pope.

The first thing I decided was to appoint a group of eight cardinals to be my advisers. Not courtiers but wise people who share my own feelings. This is the beginning of a Church with an organization that is not just top-down but also horizontal.

emphasis added

I don’t know much about the men on this council and mainly by reputation only two, Cardinal Sean and Cardinal Pell. Cardinal Sean knows Pope Francis so there is no big surprise there but Cardinal George Pell!? His reputation and “share my own feelings” don’t seem to match.
This gives me two thoughts. First we are only just scratching the surface of what there is to know about this Pope, and only when we stop projecting our feelings on him are we going to learn more. Second a man’s reputation often does him a disservice and that we may be about to learn that a good deal of what we think we know of the men who guide our church is wrong.

 

[McCall1981]

---

Oh and what may be even more interesting is this statement by the Pope.

emphasis added

I don’t know much about the men on this council and mainly by reputation only two, Cardinal Sean and Cardinal Pell. Cardinal Sean knows Pope Francis so there is no big surprise there but Cardinal George Pell!? His reputation and “share my own feelings” don’t seem to match.

This gives me two thoughts. First we are only just scratching the surface of what there is to know about this Pope, and only when we stop projecting our feelings on him are we going to learn more. Second a man’s reputation often does him a disservice and that we may be about to learn that a good deal of what we think we know of the men who guide our church is wrong.

I had a similar thought. It’s an interesting group, not really sure what to make of it.

 

[Contarini]

“And I repeat it here. Everyone has his own idea of good and evil and must choose to follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them. That would be enough to make the world a better place.” - Pope Francis, from the interview.

Is he preaching relativism here?

No. Note that when Scalfari says “I don’t believe in the soul,” the Pope says, “You don’t believe in it, but you have one.” He’s not saying that truth is whatever you believe it to be. He’s saying that if you follow your conscience, then you are on the right path and will receive whatever fuller truth is necessary.

Edwin

 

[Contarini]

I much prefer the line often attributed to CS Lewis,
…You do not have a soul. You are a soul. What you have is a body.

But that line isn’t orthodox. A human person is a body-soul composite. I love Lewis and Lewis taught me to be a Platonist, but Lewis is occasionally a bit too much of a Platonist. The Pope is more correct.

Edwin

 

[Contarini]

The teaching on the absolute obligation to follow one’s conscience when one is certain what is the good is difficult to wrap our head around. I still don’t like it.

Why on earth wouldn’t you like it? And what is difficult about it?

If you disobey your conscience, then you can’t possibly be moving toward God. That seems obvious. There are many difficult Catholic teachings, but I don’t see why this is one of them.

Edwin