When Pope Francis
was elected last March, even doctrinally dissident Roman Catholics like
me cut the former Argentine cardinal some slack.
“I want to believe,” I wrote then,
“that his history as an advocate for the poor will bring him to see
that today’s church is spending an inordinate amount of time, energy and
ultimately moral credibility persecuting homosexuals, feminists and
other ‘heretics,’ while it’s de-prioritizing its core Christian (and
human) mission of compassion and redemption.”
I think I made the right call. In an interview that his fellow
Jesuits published last week, the Pope seemed to answer the prayers of
Catholics who are frustrated at seeing their faith increasingly defined
by intolerant retro dogma.
“We cannot insist,” Francis said, “only on
issues related to abortion, gay marriage
and the use of contraceptive methods.”
He criticized his church’s mania
for “small-minded rules” and urged it instead to emulate Jesus’
emphasis on serving the indigent and unfortunate among us.
Francis even clarified a remark he made over the summer regarding
homosexuality — “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has
good will, who am I to judge?” — by confirming that he wasn’t speaking
only of gay priests but of all gay men and women.
That’s not just a
welcome change of tone from Francis, who as an archbishop called
Argentina’s 2010 legalization of gay marriage a Satanic “anthropological
regression.” It’s potentially a theological game-changer.
At a minimum it’s a fresh, humane perspective — and one that should
be taken especially seriously in the Pope’s native region of Latin
America, where the church hierarchy seems more obsessed with eliminating
condoms than alleviating poverty.
A good way to start, at least from a
potent symbolic standpoint, is to push particularly hard, from Tijuana
to Tierra del Fuego, for the canonization of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar
Romero.
Romero was assassinated — gunned down inside a chapel in 1980 as he
celebrated mass — for practicing then what Francis is advocating now.
As
civil war flared up in El Salvador in the 1970s, Romero had publicly
called on the country’s reactionary oligarchy and its military enforcers
to stop brutalizing the poor.
In his last Christmas Eve homily, he
implored Salvadorans to find the infant Christ among the nation’s
hundreds of thousands of “children who go to bed with nothing to eat,
among the boys who sleep covered by newspapers in doorways.”
Although Romero was no left-winger, everyone knew that even he was
now a target of El Salvador’s right-wing death squads.
But at that time,
the Vatican was spooked by a Marxist trend among many Latin American
clergy known as liberation theology.
Rome made Romero even more
vulnerable by seeming to lump him in with that wave — Pope John Paul II
all but snubbed him — and 34 years after Romero’s martyrdom, church
conservatives still campaign to prevent his sainthood.
The church definition of martyrdom, in fact, is their preferred
technicality: They insist that Romero was murdered defending not his
faith but his politics.
But Francis last week defined
exactly what Romero was defending – Catholicism, not communism.
His
Holiness may as well have issued confirmation that Romero was a
20th-century Thomas Becket.
At this point, it’s simply a matter of
rendering “Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?” into Spanish.
Until last April, efforts to beatify and canonize Romero had been
blocked inside the Vatican.
And it’s even more apparent now that
Francis’ elevation as pontiff the month before played a large role in
unblocking the process.
The next step is for the Pope, who in May
received a piece of Romero’s blood-stained vestment from Salvadoran
President Mauricio Funes, to formally declare Romero a martyr.
The next step for the Latin American church should be a lobbying
campaign on Romero’s behalf before the Vatican’s Congregation for the
Causes of Saints.
But more important, that church needs to embrace
Francis’ latest admonishments, especially if it wants to stop the mass
exodus of Latin American Catholics to evangelical and other Protestant
congregations.
I’m not naive enough to overlook the fact that Romero, like Francis,
was ultimately loyal to Vatican doctrines that polls show most Catholics
disagree with today.
He publicly objected, for example, when El
Salvador liberalized its abortion laws in the 1970s to allow it in cases
of rape, incest or when a mother’s life is in danger.
(The Vatican
still bans abortion even under those circumstances.)
But, also like Francis, Romero seemed to understand that the church
above all has to confront the destitution that so often prompts women in
developing regions to seek abortions in the first place.
Unfortunately,
the Salvadoran church since Romero’s murder has been far more
determined to reverse the country’s reproductive reforms than its
poverty rate, which remains above 50% in rural areas.
Abortion is now
illegal again in El Salvador under any circumstance — and the country
has hundreds of women in prison for having abortions, some serving
sentences as long as 30 years.
In Latin America, that benighted situation is hardly unique to El
Salvador.
Which is why the region’s bishops and priests need to do more
than bring samples of Romero’s bullet-torn vestment to Rome.
They need
to do a better job of carrying his example, and now Francis’, to their
own backyards.