Pope Francis increasingly resembles a gust of fresh air blowing through the musty chambers of the Catholic Church.
He looks and behaves like a normal human being.
He wears shoes instead
of red velvet slippers.
He has good taste in books: Dostoevsky,
Cervantes.
And he has a more humane attitude towards homosexuals, even
if he has not opposed church doctrine on sexual behaviour.
But the most astonishing thing that Francis has said, in a recent letter to Italian newspaper La Repubblica,
concerns non-believers. A non-believer is safe from the fires of Hell,
the pope assures us, as long as the non-believer listens to his or her
own conscience. These are his exact words: "Listening [to] and obeying
[one's conscience] means deciding about what is perceived to be good or
to be evil."
In other words, neither God nor the Church is
really needed to tell us how to behave. Our conscience is enough. Even
devout Protestants would not go that far. Protestants only cut out the
priests as conduits between an individual and his maker. But Francis's
words suggest that it might be a legitimate option to cut out God
Himself.
The Catholic Church
would not have survived for as long as it has if it had not been
prepared to change with the times. The Pope's statement certainly is in
accord with the extreme individualism of our age.
But it is nonetheless a
little puzzling.
After all, a Christian believer, as the Pope must be,
would have to assume that questions of good and evil, and how to behave
ethically, are prescribed by church doctrine and holy texts. Christians
believe morality is a collective pursuit.
I do not know whether
Edward J Snowden, the American former intelligence contractor who
exposed official secrets in protest against his government's snooping on
its citizens, is a Christian.
Perhaps he is an atheist.
Either way, he
fits perfectly the new pope's view of the moral person.
Snowden
claims that he acted according to his conscience, to protect "basic
liberties for people around the world". His view of the collective good
was entirely individual.
Perhaps in a secular age ethical
behaviour has no other basis than one's own conscience. If sacred texts
can no longer tell us the difference between good and evil, we will have
to decide for ourselves.
Liberal democracy cannot provide the answer;
nor does it pretend that it can. It is no more than a political system
designed to resolve conflicts of interests lawfully and peacefully.
Questions about morality and the meaning of life lie outside its scope.
Might there be new ways to establish a moral basis for our collective
behaviour? Some utopians believe that the internet will do so by
creating space for new citizen networks to transform the world. In the
sense that social media can be used to mobilise people for good causes,
there is some truth to this.
Thousands of Chinese idealists, inspired by
bloggers and social media, helped their fellow citizens after a recent
earthquake, even as their government was suppressing the news.
But the internet is, in fact, pushing us in the opposite direction. It
encourages us to become narcissistic consumers, expressing our 'likes'
and sharing every detail of our individual lives without truly
connecting with anyone. This is no basis for finding new ways to define
good and evil or to establish collective meanings and purposes.
All the internet has done is make it easier for commercial enterprises
to compile huge databases on our lives, thoughts and desires. Big
business then passes this information on to big government. And that is
why Snowden's conscience drove him to share government secrets
with us all.
Perhaps he did us a favour.
But I cannot imagine that he
is quite whom Pope Francis had in mind when he was trying to bridge the
gap between his faith and our age of unbound individualism.