Hey, how about that new pope?!(Religion) (Pope Francis I)

• Author: Puterbaugh, Dolores T.

"WHAT DO YOU think of the new pope?" Thus asks an acquaintance who boasts as much of being a "former" Catholic as of having had some peripheral involvement with fringe anti-war groups as a college student in the Vietnam era. Likewise, other Catholics and non-Catholics ask and offer their comments that Pope Francis is "really shaking things up," or, thinking to tweak my spiritual nose, they inquire, "How do you like all the change?"

I very much like our new pope--but there is no substantial change. There is a change in the superficial details of personal charisma and particular areas of interest My interlocutors, unaware that it is their willingness to listen that has shifted, at least for a few moments, erroneously assume the source, the Church, is what has changed.

"Heaven and Christmas Time be praised for this! I say it on my knees.... Golden sunlight; Heavenly sky; sweet fresh air; merry bells...." Charles Dickens' Ebenezer Scrooge awakens to find that the same, tired things--the bed curtains, the dishes, the cold of London, the clang of church bells--suddenly are new and bright due to his spiritual awakening. Scrooge was under no illusion that the world all at once had changed. It would have been a tragic waste of spiritual interventions had Scrooge's conclusion been that somehow the world was scrubbed shiny and new, rather than his dim and grasping perspective.

As unchanged as Dickens' London Christmas morning, the Roman Catholic Church remains the Roman Catholic Church. Since Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected to the Holy See on March 13, 2013, the Church is not changed, but for so many of the ill-informed, the Church, not themselves, seems to have changed. They would have been a frustrating project indeed for the ghosts of Christmas; they alternately are amusing and bemusing for this living Catholic:

There is no fundamental change in Church doctrine or practices. Each leader of the Catholic Church (indeed, each member of the Church) is but one glimmering plane of a multifaceted stone. Catholics believe that the Holy Spirit is involved, guiding the College of Cardinals in choosing the leader we need at a given time, absent a corrupt use of free will by the electors. A glance at the most-recent pontificates illustrates this well.

St. John Paul II offered one type of charisma and leadership, one the Church badly needed at that time: a voice and presence against communism and one to rally disengaged youth across the world. He was a vigorous 58-year-old when elected, boundless in energy, hiking through the mountains and skiing (and driving his security detachment berserk). A globe-trotting diplomat for Christ, he broke the law stepping out of his plane in...