Plain speech

A few weeks ago we turned over our old car to our son; it required changing our insurance policy, transferring the title and canceling our plates so that he could register and insure the car in his own name. A friendly insurance agent helped us through the process—but it took 48 e-mail messages back and forth to establish the correct version of all the forms. With each revision, new errors crept in—the old garaging location substituted for the new, the model name Spoonerized, the zip code altered to the number of the Beast. Each data entry field was a pit and snare. In retrospect, I realized that it would have been much easier to visit the insurance office in person; a face-to-face meeting would have spared us endless misunderstandings.

Between e-mail messages, I followed the press coverage of the lengthy interview Pope Francis gave in August to Antonio Spadaro SJ, editor-in-chief of the Italian Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica, on behalf of several Jesuit journals, among them America magazine. After commissioning five experts to translate the Italian transcript, America published the interview in full for English-language readers; the result was a media sensation. The interview touched on the pope’s self-understanding (“I am a sinner whom the Lord has looked upon”), his experience of World Youth Day, his understanding of the essential mysticism of the Jesuit order’s founders, his painful realization of the difference between authority and authoritarianism, his hopes for ecumenism, his prayer life, his favorite artists and theologians, his sense of the holiness of ordinary Christians, and his conviction that what heals wounds, “fascinates and attracts” and “makes the heart burn” should be the touchstone of Christian proclamation.

A small part of the interview concerned sexual morality. Francis observed that sexual morality is not the centerpiece of Catholic moral teaching and should not be talked about incessantly—and the mainstream press, talking incessantly about this subject as it is wont to do, called it a papal bombshell. Francis reiterated the remarks he made in Rio about not judging gays and lesbians, and headlines announced that he had “sent shock waves” through the Roman Catholic Church. Comedian Chris Rock received close to 10,000 “likes” in 24 hours for posting on Facebook, “I might be crazy, but I got this weird feeling that the new pope might be the greatest man alive.” Such is the effect of hearing the gospel livingly communicated: shock and delight in equal measure, and, since we are human, no small amount of misunderstanding comes in its wake.