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Popes are not saints. They are not prophets. They are not world leaders, or media stars, or even theologians. They can be these things, but none of these things are essential to the pope’s job. Joe Heschmeyer, author of Pope Peter, explains why this is good news.
Cy Kellett:
A less stressful way of looking at the papacy today on Catholic Answers Focus. Hello, and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers podcast for living, understanding, and defending your faith. Remember to subscribe to Catholic Answers Focus wherever you get your podcasts, whether that’s Apple podcast, Spotify, Stitcher, I don’t know where the other ones are, but wherever you sign up and subscribe, you’ll be notified when we have new podcasts and that’ll be good for you. And if you leave us a five star review, that’ll be really good for us. We’d appreciate it if you would.
This week, we talk about the papacy with the man who just wrote the brand new book, Pope Peter, all about the papacy. And here’s the deal, Pope Francis is stressing a lot of people out. A lot of people stress out about the things Pope Francis says on airplanes, some of the actions he takes, all that kind of thing. Well, look, if we’re going to be honest about it, Pope John Paul the Second stressed a lot of people out, a lot of people. If you were around in those times, you’ll remember a lot of stress about him.
Pope Benedict stressed a lot of people out, maybe fewer, maybe because he only had a few years in there, but you get the idea. The modern papacy, it’s going to stress somebody out. And part of that stress comes from the fact that we actually misunderstand the papacy. We expect it to do things that it wasn’t designed to do by God, and we expect it to have competencies, just to succeed in ways that God never promised that it was going to succeed. So if we have a more tempered view of the papacy, if we get a little clearer understanding of what did God actually promise this would be about, we can maybe settle down a little bit about stressing out about when the papacy is not meeting our personal expectations. Just get those personal expectations in line with the divine promises, there’ll be a lot less stress in our lives. Here’s Joe to talk about that.
So Joe, with the book, Pope Peter, a lot of reflection on the origins of the papacy, what the papacy is, but we want to talk with you about what the papacy isn’t. First of all, what’s the primary thing we get wrong about the papacy, would you say?
Joe Heschmeyer:
I think we’re expecting the pope to be something that pope is not promised to be, and I think there’s kind of two ways we could talk about that. The first is we hope the pope is a Saint. We hope the pope is a brilliant theologian. We hope the pope is a beautiful speaker and a charismatic personality and all of those things, and in the history of the church there are plenty of popes who fit that description. You know what? There are also plenty of popes who haven’t fit that description.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And so one of the things that we get wrong, it’s kind of this expectation that every word the pope says is going to be carefully chosen and is guided by the Holy Spirit for the illumination of the church and that is the best way it could have been said or some variation of that, and that’s just not something we’re promised, not something we’re guaranteed. If that happens, great, that’s wonderful. But if you’re expecting that, I think that you’re in for a world of hurt in a way. The analogy I’d use is to marriage. If your spouse is a rom-com spouse where it’s just like perfect happily ever after, that’s amazing-
Cy Kellett:
Like my wife’s husband.
Joe Heschmeyer:
I was going to say… Like your wife’s husband. Nice. Nicely done. Does she have an annulment case I don’t know about?
Cy Kellett:
No. No. I was talking about myself. Okay. Go ahead.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Exactly that. If you get all those features, that’s wonderful. I think a lot of the pain comes then when you go in expecting it’s going to be like that and then it’s not.
Cy Kellett:
Ah, so we’re causing our own suffering.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Exactly.
Cy Kellett:
By kind of expecting what God didn’t promise you said.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Exactly.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. So what would be the minimum way of expressing the promise then? I remember one time I think somebody asked Pope Benedict something about one of the councils of the church or maybe the [inaudible 00:04:07] pope, and he said basically the promise comes down to you won’t ruin the thing. He gave a really minimum, but I don’t know. Where would you put it?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, I think that the reason we get this wrong is because we think of something like papal infallibility as something belonging to the pope or for the pope’s own good, and that’s just wrong. That’s not the way that papal infallibility works and it’s not for whom papal infallibility works. In a nutshell, I’d say the minimum case for papal infallibility sounds something like this. Jesus at the Last Supper, John 17, prays that we’ll all be one. And so there’s this call to unity very explicitly not for just the first generation, you can see in His prayer, it is the only prayer that’s explicitly for us, because He prays not only for those present but for those who will believe through their testimony. So that’s us.
Cy Kellett:
That’s us.
Joe Heschmeyer:
So He’s not just saying be united in the first century, He’s saying be united in the 21st century and in the 31st century and so on. So we have this call to unity, and the flip side to that is in Galatians 5, Saint Paul talks about schism and party spirit as works of the flesh and those who do them won’t inherit the kingdom of God.
Cy Kellett:
So everybody on Twitter.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yes, exactly.
Cy Kellett:
Will not inherit the kingdom of God.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Otherwise it wouldn’t be Heaven.
Cy Kellett:
Right. If they let any of those Twitter people in, it won’t be Heaven.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yes, they’ll be blue checked off of the list. So it’s this idea that you have to be united as Christian, you have to be, but heresy is also a mortal sin. You can’t have that unity at the expense of truth. There is a Methodist scholar, Ben Witherington, who talks about how from the Protestant perspective they’ve chosen truth at the expense of unity and Catholics have chosen unity at the expense of truth, because they think we’re wrong. The first thing I say to that is I’m glad that he sees that they have given up unity in their pursuit of truth. But the second thing I’d say is there’s no way that could be the right answer, because Christ has said, “You can’t give up truth and you can’t give up unity.” You’ve got to hold to both.
Cy Kellett:
Right. You’re exactly right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
So it’s got to be unity in the truth. Because otherwise you’re saying you don’t believe at least one part of the gospel, the part where He said we can all be one.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Okay. I’ve never, ever thought of it that way before. Okay, so the pope then at the minimum is the sign of this unity, is the cause of this unity, is the what?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Some of the Eastern Fathers call him an icon of unity.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Joe Heschmeyer:
So he’s kind of the focal point of the unity of the church, and the way this works kind of negatively is the Holy Spirit prevents the pope from requiring anything that would cause us to have to sacrifice truth to obey. So the pope says, “You have to believe X,” X cannot be heresy. Because if X is heresy, we’re in this catch 22 where we have to choose to obey at the expense of truth or disobey at the expense of unity and neither of those are permitted to us.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Joe Heschmeyer:
So we know if the pope says you have to do X, it can’t be false, therefore it must be true. So infallibility, like that’s how it works. It’s not everything the pope says is brilliant. He could give 20 homilies about the topic and just butcher them, but you’re not required to say, “Oh, the way he worded it in the homily is the best way.” In other words, think of infallibility not from the pope’s perspective, but from the believer’s perspective. Infallibilities protect you and me.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
It’s to keep us from having to choose between truth and unity.
Cy Kellett:
Right. As long as I stay in union with him, then that’s all right. Okay. Then I’m all right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
Right, right. Because he has been promised not to be so far field that it’s heretical. I mean, he could be a far field in a pastoral sense, is that correct?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
Or even in a prudential sense.
Joe Heschmeyer:
We can even go one further.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, go ahead.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Pope John XXII gave homilies in which he suggested the beatific vision wasn’t enjoyed immediately after death, and this is wrong. I mean it wasn’t a defined doctrine of the church, but he was still wrong and quickly the theologians of the University of Paris corrected him and he retracted it and then subsequent popes dogmatically defined the correction as being the right answer. But he can even get stuff like that wrong in a homily, because it’s not in the authoritative position of defining a matter on faith and morals. In other words, if you can disagree with the pope and still be a good Catholic, we’re not in the realm of papal infallibility.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. All right. But let me… Maybe here’s another way of getting at what the pope is not then. So the pope, you use the Orthodox term, which I’m very happy to hear, because Orthodox Christians do accept the special role of… I don’t know that they accept the name pope all the time. I’m not sure actually of their theology, but are you?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Well, so it comes from papa. Actually, originally the Bishop of Alexandria was called pope, just meaning papa. It means father. So the same word gives us abbot in other languages.
Cy Kellett:
Right. But Orthodox Christianity does not deny the special role of Peter or the successor of Peter, just maybe gives it a different spin than you’ll get in the Latin rite or even the other rites of the Catholic church.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. The only thing I’d add to this is when we’re quoting the Eastern Fathers, this is something that at the time they were not Eastern Orthodox. I mean, from the Catholic perspective at least. They were in union with the pope. They recognized that role in a way that some of their descendants in the East haven’t. But of course there are a lot of Eastern Catholics who do accept what the Church Fathers accepted about the pope.
Cy Kellett:
Right. But that’s a difference of… It’s a different difference than a rejection of the papacy. That’s not a rejection of the papacy. It’s a rejection of the form that the papacy has taken, which we might say, “Okay, let’s have that conversation because there might be some stuff we want to give up of the current form of the papacy.” I would imagine. Because it’s not a matter of the faith for example, that… I don’t know, that there has to be a Vatican Curia I suppose.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. Pope John Paul II actually encouraged this kind of conversation to happen. He said look, basically things worked pretty well with the papacy in the first millennium, from either an Eastern and Western perspective, there’s a lot of… it was a very productive time. There were a lot of theological nuances hammered out. There was a lot of unity, even in the midst of tremendous suffering. Heresies were faced, persecutions were weathered, this was kind of a golden age in the church. If there’s some kind of excess, then by all means let’s have that conversation. That’s not a matter of rejecting some part of the faith.
The example I’d give is the role of a parent, especially the traditional view is the husband is the head of the family. That shouldn’t be understood in a dictatorial sense, and where it causes so much controversy is if you’re throwing your weight around, either as the husband or just as a parent in general, if you’re doing it in such a way that you’re not doing something like servant leadership, then maybe you need to have a hard conversation with the family and say, “What could I be doing differently so that I can be more of an icon of unity rather than of disunity?”
Cy Kellett:
I have the sense, my own personal sense is, I don’t know, say a hundred years from now, and maybe that’s hopeful but I don’t think it’s that hopeful, when Christians are unified again, Eastern and Western Christians are unified again, we’ll look back on this time and say, “Well, a lot of things needed to be worked out. Both sides had points.” I’m not saying that it’s all… I mean, I don’t know what the answers and solutions are, but it does seem like it’s a marital conversation, one that can get worked out over time and then both sides can acknowledge later, “Okay. We needed to give on that. Or I needed to give on that. You needed to give on that. I was holding onto this too tightly, maybe you were holding onto that too tightly.” But for many, many Christians here in the United States and around the world, but I think that the US being the primary… I mean, we’re both raised here. This is a Protestant country. There’s been a general rejection of the papacy.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
So what is the pope in the view of those in your understanding that you could also say to them, “Well, that’s not what the pope is.”
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. So there’s this idea of the pope as kind of dictator in chief.
Cy Kellett:
I got you.
Joe Heschmeyer:
That is just not accurate. And so one of the objections, this one’s always the giveaway for me, when someone says, “Well, if Peter really was the first pope, why did the Council of Jerusalem meet in Acts 15 to settle the Judaizer controversy?” And it’s like, well, we have Vatican II. That didn’t mean that John XXIII wasn’t the pope.
Cy Kellett:
I see.
Joe Heschmeyer:
The presence of an ecumenical council only disproves the papacy if you think the papacy means nobody else gets a seat at the table, nobody else gets a voice. It’s just monomaniacal. And of course reject that version of the papacy, but that’s such a caricature. It’s not even like you could say, “Oh, well in the Middle Ages it was kind of like that.” No, in the Middle Ages church councils met more often and one of the ongoing disputes was whether a church council was even more powerful than the pope, because councils were such a common feature. In terms of just frequency, the role of bishops and councils was not smaller in the medieval church.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, of course.
Joe Heschmeyer:
So whether we’re talking early church or medieval church or right now, it’s never just been the pope and love it or leave it, only one voice is going to be at the table. It’s never been a monologue other than in kind of fake Protestant apologetics attacking a straw man version of the church. I was reading a 19th century poem against the papacy. I have too much free time.
Cy Kellett:
It does sound like an awfully good poem though. If I’m going to read poetry, that anti-papal poetry is the place to start.
Joe Heschmeyer:
It’s the best.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, so what?
Joe Heschmeyer:
One of the things he says is, “Well, if the pope is the pope, why at the last supper when they’re arguing, doesn’t He just say, “You all need to bow and serve Peter?” And it’s like first of all, what a radical misunderstanding of the papacy.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. We’re not serving Peter.
Joe Heschmeyer:
But second, what he does say in Luke 22 is you’re not supposed to lord over your authority like a Gentile, but they do have real authority. He confirms that. He says they’ll even have this authority in thrones in Heaven. And then He says to Simon Peter to strengthen his brethren. So He challenges this whole idea that authority is to lord it over other people and says it’s servant leadership and then calls Peter to serve the others. Totally inverts, totally inverts our understanding of the papacy, right? It’s not let me lord this power over you look like a Gentile warlord. It’s how can I serve you?
Cy Kellett:
Right. Right. Okay. So let me ask you this then, because the pope is also a temporal leader, he’s kind of this world figure, the Vatican has a seat at the Vatican. It’s an observer seat I think.
Joe Heschmeyer:
At the UN.
Cy Kellett:
At the UN I mean. The Vatican has a seat…
Joe Heschmeyer:
Also has a seat at the Vatican, many seats.
Cy Kellett:
At the UN is what I meant to say. But it does seem like, you almost get a sense that Providence, that God arranged things so that the pope in the modern world would have a temporal seat, but it would be the most physically minimal possible space as if to say, “Yeah, you’re going to need that to function in the modern world, but I don’t want you to have that. I do not want an earthly ruler.”
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. George Weigel talks about the loss of the Papal States as being providential, that the church is stronger now without having this chunk of Italy that’s being ruled over by [crosstalk 00:15:53]
Cy Kellett:
Does he call it the loss of the Papal States or the theft of the Papal States? Because it’s not the first, it’s the second.
Joe Heschmeyer:
That’s a good point.
Cy Kellett:
But yeah, sometimes having things stolen from us is good for us.
Joe Heschmeyer:
It was liberating in a sort of providential unexpected sense.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
One way to think about it is in the Middle Ages, the person everyone listened to was the king. When the pope appears as king among the people, they understand what that is and they listen and he’s able to use that to witness Christ to the people. In the modern age, what do people listen to? They listen to celebrity. And so the last several popes have sort of been celebrities.
Cy Kellett:
Kind of like celebrities. Yeah, you’re right. Since John XXIII actually.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And that’s not something that’s essential to the papacy, but if there’s a way of using celebrity like royalty to the glory of God, basically you speak to people in the language they know about Jesus Christ. And if the language they know is celebrity. Now of course, the caveat here is anytime you’re presenting these things in a new language, you’ve got to make sure stuff doesn’t get lost in translation. When missionaries arrived in China, they had a lot of trouble explaining the gospel in a language that didn’t have words for God or a lot of the concepts we were trying to use.
Cy Kellett:
Right. [inaudible 00:17:04] , right? They had so much struggle with the word [inaudible 00:17:05].
Joe Heschmeyer:
Well done. Yes, yes. Matteo Ricci and that whole controversy. So you don’t want to lose anything in translation. In presenting the gospel in the language of celebrity, you need to make sure what’s being preserved is the gospel and not the celebrity.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. One is loathe to criticize Saint Pope John Paul the great, but he certainly promoted this celebrity pontiff thing to a degree that borders on the dangerous, and may cross the line of the dangerous. And he may have been the kind of personality that could manage those dangers, but it’s certainly not the case that every pope that follows him is going to have the kind of personality that commands those dangers.
Joe Heschmeyer:
In a way it’s the situation of Leo the Great. So Leo discovered Rome just abandoned by the Roman Empire and so it fell to him to take care of a lot of the temporal responsibility, to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and all of those things and he built up civil society in Rome. It wasn’t some sort of power grab, it was just there was a total vacuum of society.
Cy Kellett:
I see. Yeah.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And so the church stepped in to take care of everything and from this emerged immense worldly power that proved very dangerous for a lot of folks.
Cy Kellett:
That’s where we are with the celebrity power I think. That’s a good analogy actually. So what are we going to do about it? Because at a certain point that worldly power that the popes accumulated really ate the papacy in many ways and did lasting damage to the church. I mean, damage that we still live with today. So it also did a great amount of good. I don’t want to deny. I’ve been in St. Peter’s. I really think it’s great and it should stay there forever. I hope it stays there forever. And that was built by the worldly power of the papacy.
Joe Heschmeyer:
I think that your answer is actually right there in St. Peter’s.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, go ahead.
Joe Heschmeyer:
So in St. Peter, you would expect it to just be like this amazing tribute to how awesome the pope is. You’d expect the art to be like that because it’s built during this, like literally the building of St. Peter’s is inseparable from the story of the Reformation for reasons we don’t have time to get into. But the resulting art and everything in there speaks a very different story. So the first thing you see when you come out of the sacristy as the priest or the bishop or the pope, and when you process in, you’re presented with the mosaic called The Altar of the Lie, and what it is is, you know the scene in Acts when the couple lies about how much their property sells for? I think it’s-
Cy Kellett:
Ananias and Sapphira.
Joe Heschmeyer:
I thought it was them, but I always get them confused with the good couple, so I didn’t want to venture.
Cy Kellett:
Oh okay. I think so.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. I think you’re right. Ananias and Sapphira, and they lie about this and they’re struck dead. And so the message is, if you’re about to give less than a hundred percent, it’s not going to go well. It’s a terrifying message. Then you get up to the front of St. Peter’s, there’s a beautiful throne, the bronze thrown by Bernini. There’s the famous stained glass window of the Holy Spirit and it looks like the throne is being upheld by four doctors of the church stand at the four feet. But if you look closely, they’re each only holding out a finger to sort of give some sort of token support. The actual support for the throne is coming from the giant bronze Holy Spirit window in the back. Meaning all the great personages in the church aren’t really what is keeping the church afloat. It’s the Holy Spirit.
Cy Kellett:
It’s the Holy Spirit. Yeah.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And they’re providing like a finger’s worth of effort in comparison. On the far end, you have the famous statue of Saint Peter holding up his fingers and blessing, but if you look closely his arm’s in a sling because he’s carrying the keys and it’s too heavy for him to carry on his own.
Cy Kellett:
So what is the lesson there in this celebrity pope thing?
Joe Heschmeyer:
That you have to be constantly turning this immense weight over to God or you can not do it on your own.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Okay.
Joe Heschmeyer:
I mean look, Catholic Answers produces brilliant stuff, and there’s great authors and publicity and all of that, and that can be spiritually poisonous too, right? It’s not just like, Oh, the pope needs to watch that. All of us, if we’re doing anything good for God, the devil just goes like, “Oh, take credit for that. Give yourself a little… Pat yourself on the back a little more, you know how well that went.” And that’s when a good thing becomes a bad thing.
Cy Kellett:
I want to take back my earlier comment about what a great husband my wife has. I’m seeing that maybe there… I might’ve given into a temptation on that one. I see what you’re saying, but how are you going to convince the pope of that if you get a pope who’s not good at it, maybe doesn’t know he’s not good at it? And I know-
Joe Heschmeyer:
Pray like heck for him. I don’t know.
Cy Kellett:
Because people are going to think, “Oh, he’s talking about Pope Francis.” And in a certain way, I suppose I am talking about Pope Francis. But Pope Francis is like… if you had to divide up the popes into good popes and bad popes, he doesn’t even come close to the bad pope category. He’s not even in the ballpark of bad popes. So what happens when we get one of them? Does that concern you?
Joe Heschmeyer:
I mean, yes and no. On a human level, of course it concerns me.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, okay, yeah.
Joe Heschmeyer:
But in the same way that… it’s just like if you marry badly, you’re going to be in for a longer, harder walk, but you’re not promised that it won’t be. This doesn’t speak, fortunately, to either of our situations. We’re not promised that it’s going to be a bed of roses.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. So I see, so you’re not promised that it’s going to be a bed of roses, but a couple things that… because our conversation is about what the pope is not, the pope is practically and at this moment a temporal leader, but he’s not in essence a temporal leader.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Exactly.
Cy Kellett:
The pope is at this moment a world celebrity, but he’s not in essence a world celebrity.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Right.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. Give me some… Are there any other more like that?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. Saint, unfortunately. I wish… Here’s just a startling fact. Not every pope in history is canonized.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Right. You’ve got to be kind of bad not to though. I mean, it’s like the most canonized job in the world.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. About the first two dozen are canonized, then there’s a break. I don’t know enough of the story about the first one to not make the list. It’s a real thing that like hopefully the pope is a witness by his sanctity as well as by-
Cy Kellett:
Not necessarily.
Joe Heschmeyer:
No. Aquinas distinguishes this. The obedience we owe is obedience to office as well as obedience to person. So if someone is your authority, your boss, your bishop, your pope, you owe them obedience on account of their authority. If someone is very holy, you might owe them obedience on account of their holiness and their personal integrity. Or if they’re brilliant at whatever it is you’re trying to do, those two things don’t always go together. You obey both. Sometimes you’re fortunate enough that the smartest person in the room, the holiest person in the room is also the person in charge. But we’re not guaranteed it. In the Holy family, the only person with sin is the one put in the church.
Cy Kellett:
Oh that’s a good point, although I think he had overcome sin by the time he was-
Joe Heschmeyer:
There’s an argument that he had no actual sin, but either way he had original sin. He’s the least qualified spiritually.
Cy Kellett:
Right. The only one that can be called a sinner is Joseph.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, I had never thought about that, but he’s put in charge. Right. There’s a certain way in which we have to abandon ourselves to Christ’s headship of the church and say, “Well, He’ll make sure it comes through.”
Joe Heschmeyer:
And God will use… You know, a lot of the great saints in history were saints at a time when the pope maybe wasn’t canonized.
Cy Kellett:
So let me ask you this though. So what if there… Okay, so I’m a Catholic… let’s just make it a hypothetical. I’m a Catholic radio host.
Joe Heschmeyer:
I’m trying to visualize this.
Cy Kellett:
Try to imagine that. Then comes along a really bad pope, somebody who says bad things, who does bad things, who you’re just like ashamed that that’s the pope. What are you supposed to do? Can you say, “Hey, this guy’s a bad pope or can you not say it? What’s your position?
Joe Heschmeyer:
I think there’s kind of a nuanced position. Definitely you should pray for them. Definitely you should pray for them to be more the person God wants them to be. You should also pray for the fact that maybe you’re judging them too harshly.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Joe Heschmeyer:
In this case, maybe you’re not such a bad guy. I mean the pope [crosstalk 00:25:19] this hypothetical person we’re trying to imagine. That would be one answer. That’s the easy answer, right? There’s also a time and place, and Aquinas talks about this in the Summa. There’s a time and place to speak out if you see someone above you acting improperly and the model for this is in Galatians 2. St. Paul talks about opposing Peter face to face. Now the whole reason that he writes about it in this style, he’s presupposing that Peter’s above him, because Paul talks to people beneath him all the time. I think Paul will regularly denounce people who he thinks haven’t done a good job and he doesn’t write later like, “I can’t believe I did this.”
Cy Kellett:
You don’t say, “I said right to his face” about a person who’s lower than you.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Exactly.
Cy Kellett:
You’re making a point. I stood up to this person who’s higher than me.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Right. And so he does that. Now it should be done rarely. It should be done humbly and it should be done in the appropriate manner. Now he still goes right to him. He doesn’t just like blast him on the internet. He doesn’t just write about what a stupid thing Peter did. No, he does publicly acknowledge what he did wrong. But Peter I don’t think would disagree with that. He takes the confrontation and it seems to have made an impact.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
So that’s the second thing, but people want to hear… there’s two groups of people on this issue. There are people who are afraid of saying anything at all and there are people who are way too quick to say things, and you’ve kind of got to know which extreme do I err on. Because there is a time in place to acknowledge when an impropriety has been done and to confront it, but that should not be the default mode. And so the other concept, and this can be easily abused, but it’s important to talk about because it’s something we don’t talk about enough, is what’s sometimes been called covering the nakedness of Noah.
Cy Kellett:
Oh yeah. Like his sons did.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. His sons. They walked backwards.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Because rather than humiliating him by exposing him, they covered for him in a way that dignified him. Every bishop, priest, deacon, every pope, every lay person has things that they’ve done that they wouldn’t want to see the light of day because they’re sinful. There’s a reason we have the confessional seal. It’s a way of protecting our own dignity. So one thing to keep in mind with this is we don’t have to constantly be policing the pope. And not only do we not have to, it’s not spiritually healthy to, to constantly be second guessing and saying, “How would I do it if I were pope?” Well, if you were the one meant to be pope, I’ve got a feeling God would’ve made you the pope.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Joe Heschmeyer:
I’d say bear that in mind. Do it with grace, do it with humility, and do it rarely because if it’s happening frequently, if your default is anger for instance, if your default is invective, that’s not a healthy spiritual disposition.
Cy Kellett:
Right. Or conspiracy theory or that kind of hyperbolic [crosstalk 00:28:16]
Joe Heschmeyer:
Right, exactly. I mean there’s a reason the eighth commandment forbids bearing false witness. That includes slandering people or defaming them or culminating them just by giving a partial truth and taking the worst interpretation of something. It certainly falls in that category.
Cy Kellett:
I have to say I think part of the spiritual temptation for wanting to correct the pope is that it’s… even when the worst popes were poping, and that is a verb, I believe.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Now.
Cy Kellett:
The Holy Spirit was creating saints left and right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
Just saints left and right. But that’s hard work. And so if I admit, look, there’s nothing that the pope, even if he’s the worst pope in the world can do today to stop me from doing the will of God, then that puts it back on me, and it’s way easier when it’s not on me. If it’s the pope is making a mess of everything, it’s not people like me who are just judgmental and…
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. It’s much easier to Monday morning quarterback the pope than it is to actually live out what I’m meant to be doing. And it’s a great diversion and it gives… Thomas Kempis has this great line in Imitation of Christ, where he says that it’s better to know mercy than to know how to define it.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, okay.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And this is a real problem with humility, that knowing a lot about humility can easily make you think you’re humble while you actually get puffed up by how much you know about humility.
Cy Kellett:
Wow. Yes, and I know a lot about humility too.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Expert on it.
Cy Kellett:
That’s very frightening. Yeah, I see what you’re saying. Like there’s always these little temptations to get led off a very simple path, which is be humble, be of service to the gospel, love Jesus, follow Jesus. We’ve given ourselves another job. We always want to give ourselves another job, even correcting the pope.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. And I would say in this, you should be very much thinking about like, why am I saying this in the forum I’m saying this in? I talked to someone about this who is regularly taking the pope to task for what this person thought the pope was doing wrong. And I said, “Why are you doing this?” And he said, “Well, I want him to learn from this.” I’m like, “He doesn’t follow you on Facebook.” This is not going to have the intended effect.
Cy Kellett:
Well I’m going to stop writing then, if the pope’s not following, why would I be writing on Facebook? I don’t have a lot more time with you and I’m sorry for that because I love time with you, Joe. But it does seem to me that you’re suggesting a spiritually healthy course, which is to have a minimalist view of the promises God made, but affirm confidence in those promises.
Joe Heschmeyer:
That’s a great way to put it. I think we often expect the pope to be everything, partly so that we don’t have to. And I think when the pope doesn’t live up to our expectations, even if he’s living up to what God’s actually promised, then we get troubled, then we get scandalized, then we start to say, “Wait a second. What did I sign up for?” And the answer is you signed up for the cross, and your promise that you won’t be put in a position to have to choose truth or unity. Short of that, you’re not promised your neighbor is going to make your journey easier.
Cy Kellett:
Pope Peter, Joe Heschmeyer. The book is Pope Peter. Thanks very much.
Joe Heschmeyer:
My pleasure.
Cy Kellett:
All right. I hope Joe has given you a little bit less anxiety about the pope and about the papacy. When our own personal expectations are a little more aligned with what God has actually promised us, we realize, look, it’s a hard job. It’s got all kinds of aspects. There’s only a few aspects where the Holy Spirit has promised us absolutely that He is on the job and making sure that no mistakes happen, and we can be grateful for those and not worry too much about the others. God designed the office. He did a good job designing the office. It’s going to survive when we have good popes, it’s going to survive when we have bad popes.
If you enjoyed this episode, if it relieved your stress a bit, let us know. You know what? If it didn’t relieve your stress and you’d like another talk about this or about anything, just reach out to us. Our email is focus@catholic.com. Don’t forget to subscribe to Focus, get those updates when new episodes come out and don’t forget about Zach, our video guy. If you’re watching on YouTube, you’ve got to like and subscribe. Zach’s job is on the line. The bosses here are really tough on Zach. I wouldn’t go so far as to say they’re mean to him, and if you don’t like and subscribe his job’s on the line, so like and subscribe on YouTube. Don’t forget, you can always support us financially at givecatholic.com. I’m Cy Kellett, your host. This is Catholic Answers Focus, and we’ll see you next time, God willing, right here when we do this again.