“Mother is not marital status,” he explained, deplting prejudices against single mothers. “Who am I to judge?” He asked, referring to the practice of the Church to issue convictions to the gays. Francis will be remembered as a pope who cultivated empathy with ordinary people, with human life as it is. Instead of imperial edits on heaven and hell, virtue and sin, he chose the humility of doubt. I wanted to push the church out of the palace towards the streets. Their reforms, however, were almost circumscribed to the symbolic or scenographic scope.
Francisco faced the resistance of traditionalists to, with partial success, pave the way to the communion of divorced who get married again. He endeavored in the thorny mission of healing the wound of the church scandals in the church, but did not attack the roots of abomination. His warm reformism contrasts with the emotions raised by the figure of a pope averse to the sports holiness.
The “Bishop of the Favelas”, as Bergoglio became known in his Buenos Aires, never wanted to destroy the historical walls that the Church raised around its castle. The clerical celibacy and the veto to the ordering of women, essential topics for the future of official Catholicism, remained in the courtyard reserved for taboos.
Neither belongs to the sphere of dogmas or doctrine. These are rules of organizational discipline established by the time Rome raised Christianity to the status of imperial religion. The Synod of Elvira (Circa 305) imposed the celibacy and, little later, the first Council of Niceia (325) prohibited female priestly ordination. The “family of the church” separated from families, forming a hierarchical body apart from society. In those decisions are, by the way, the deep sources of the chronic abuse of minors in the ecclesiastical environment.
How to interpret the meaning of the deliberations of Elvira and Niceia? Under the influence of the Marxist vision, a theoretical current suggests that its purpose was to prevent the children of clerics from inheriting church assets, forming private dynasties. The thesis seems like a solid explanation for the peristentization of the two disciplines, but it does not pass the test of the historical circumstances in which they arose.
Elvira’s Synod was a precarious meeting of 19 bishops and 36 elders of the present Andalusia. Niceia gathered more than 200 bishops, but was held under the sponsorship of Emperor Constantine 1º. The church that was beginning to organize itself with significant heritage.
An alternative thesis sheds clearer lights. In the early centuries, Christianity was a revolutionary movement: a popular contestation of Rome’s power structures. There was no shortage of married preachers and women occupied the front lines in the diffusion of the new faith. But with Constantine’s conversion, what was revolution is set as an institution. At the beginning of the fourth century, the Church submits to the Order the Christian people, raises the Roman Basilics and incorporates the patriarchal culture of the Roman Empire.
The Church, a monarchy of imperial ambitions, survived Rome, medieval fragmentation, the primacy of the nation state, to the turmoil of modernity. The erasing Pope belongs to a tradition of multisecular adaptive changes. The past crushes the present: Elvira and Niceia are among us.
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