Don’t believe the hype: Pope Francis can’t walk on water

Pope Francis’ regular global tours, hoisted on his flock’s shoulders, and his perceived progressive sheen have heightened the unholy trinity of unenlightened thought: Indomitable gullibility, servile conformity and intellectual laziness. For what else can be made of this outpouring of admiration based on the belief that he is shaking up the Catholic Church and ushering it into the 21st century through revolutionary edicts, comments and acts?

You don’t need to be a theological scholar, an investigative journalist or even overly intelligent to see through what is a highly sophisticated PR campaign – a level of spin any blue-chip company or political party would be proud of. 

You take a humble, simple and charismatic man who is largely uncontroversial and appoint him leader of a profoundly controversial corporation at one of its lowest points. 

You open a Twitter account in his name that is followed by millions. He preaches platitudes about things like the perils of greed, global warming, eradicating poverty and combating intolerance, while preferring to ignore hot-button Church topics like gay rights, abortion and contraception. 

Nevertheless he makes a number of statements about those topics that are hailed as transformative by the left-leaning media but are obfuscated or softened to camouflage the astringent reality. 

That’s how you convince people desperate for hope that a 2,000-year-old organisation presided over by a conclave of mostly ultra-conservative and conservative old men – the aider and abettor of pederast priests over the millennia, among a litany of grave crimes – has in a few short years begun a sea change.

Not everyone is buying it. The BBC’s long-time Vatican correspondent David Willey recently said: “Despite the headlines, despite the almost universal perception that Pope Francis has brought a whiff of fresh air through the corridors of the Vatican, I detect no undue haste to undo the teachings of his predecessors.”

Willey’s comment followed February reports that the pope had hinted it may be acceptable to use contraception in cases of Zika virus risk, a nebulous remark hailed in the media as a liberalisation of the contraception ban in Catholic doctrine. 

The tenor of much of the reporting was inaccurate given what was actually said. Is it liberal to warn, as the pope did, that one should not “confuse the evil of avoiding pregnancy, by itself, with abortion”? Abortion is “what the Mafia does”; “It is a crime, an absolute evil.” In his mind, using contraception is evil – just not as evil as abortion.

Donald Trump said women should be punished for having an abortion if the practice were illegal; the pope indicated they deserve to burn in hell. The former was pilloried, the latter applauded. 

Pope Francis suggested Trump was being un-Christian in wanting to build a wall between the US and Mexico. But surely not doing anything to help reverse the endless cycle of misery driven by the Catholic Church’s stance on contraception and abortion is exponentially more immoral: the spread of HIV/Aids, the disempowerment of women and overpopulation among the grave associated issues. 

The latest papal proclamation – a long-awaited apostolic exhortation on Catholic family life released this month – is in keeping with the pope’s “reformer” standing, his failure to go a step further and change doctrine and his propensity for vagueness regarding sensitive Church issues like, in this instance, allowing divorced or remarried Catholics to receive communion.

In the same document he also said every person, regardless of sexual orientation, should be treated with respect and consideration, before adding that there are “absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family”. 

In other words, he considers gay relationships inferior to heterosexual relationships. So forget about the Church supporting same-sex marriages or unions any time soon, and forget about much of the goodwill generated among the LGBT community by the pope’s famous “Who am I to judge” remark and others that seemingly heralded a softening of the Vatican’s stance toward that community.

To be fair, he does steer an institution rooted in centuries of misogyny, homophobia and an aversion to change – the ultimate men’s club. Trying to spark a revolution in that environment would be almost as futile as trying to walk on water. Pope Francis is no miracle worker, and he’s no liberal.