Healers

Pope Benedict XVI had an interesting image to drive home his message about humanity’s need to find its way amid the darkness of our times.

“Today, we can illuminate our cities so brightly that the stars in the sky are no longer visible. Is this not an image of the problems caused by our version of enlightenment? With regard to material things, our knowledge and our technical accomplishments are legion, but what reaches beyond, the things of God and the question of good, we can no longer identify.”

There is only one true light, Pope Benedict said. That is faith.

That was his homily last Easter Sunday. Before that, he had come out with guns blazing, metaphorically speaking, against detractors within the Church calling for an end to the ban on priests marrying and women becoming priests.

Well, first off, I rather thought Cat Stevens put the contrast between how far we have gone toward taming the universe and how little we have gone toward taming ourselves more poetically in a song called “Where Do The Children Play?” It goes: “Well I think it’s fine, building jumbo planes/ Or taking a ride on a cosmic train/ Switch on summer from a slot machine/ Yes, get what you want to if you want, ’cause you can get anything./ I know we’ve come a long way/ We’re changing day to day/ So tell me, where do the children play?”

That was of course before Cat Stevens became Yusuf Islam, and deprived the world of his songs. Talk of the day the music died.

Pope Benedict’s stance on married and women priests was of course no different from Pope John Paul II’s, however the latter was hailed as the pope of modern times. But I don’t know that it doesn’t sound more jaded at this time. Unfortunately, the same technology that has made possible the illumination of the world without the illumination of the self has also made possible the illumination of the darker chapters of Christianity.

One recent TV series, entitled “The Borgias,” which has gained a good audience, has done that. In fact the atrocity of married clergy, if not female ones, that Pope Benedict rails against has a historical precedent not in priests but in popes. Pope Alexander VI was one such. Technically of course, he wasn’t married, he had mistresses. The longest being Giovanna who bore him four children, Giovanni, Cesare, Lucrezia, and Goffredo, all of whom he acknowledged openly. He even made Cesare a cardinal. If this version of history is to be believed—a thing Filipino politicians should particularly find interesting—Rodrigo Borgia (Jeremy Irons in the series) became pope by spending more than the other candidates to buy the cardinals’ votes. And poisoning a rival to boot.

The Borgias would go down in history as being corrupt, but that appears to be the handiwork of their enemies—the Roman oligarchy—Rodrigo having Spanish origins. In any case, what that oligarchy violently objected to, and found scandalous, was not that the pope had a family but that he had the nerve to subvert them.

As to the darkness surrounding the world, a bit of self-examination, as shown by Pope Paul II when he apologized to the world for Christianity’s own atrocities, might be more than what the Great Healer ordered. I just finished reading Hilary Mandel’s “Wolf Hall” (Booker winner for 2008), which is a retelling of Henry VIII’s reign, particularly the period of his marriage to Anne Boleyn and break with the papacy. A retelling which we would be at pains to recognize. It takes a sympathetic view of that break. Thomas More doesn’t come off here anywhere near Robert Bolt’s man for all seasons, he comes off as an inquisitor, sending heretics (Luther’s influence was beginning to spread to Europe) to the torture chambers.

It gives you a great feel of how it was to live in those times. How excommunication was as powerful as an invading army, if not more so, kings cowering at the thought of it. (A thing you find too in Ken Follett’s “Pillars of the Earth,” set in an earlier, more benighted, time, the awesome, often tyrannical, earthly powers of the Church.) Until the first editions of the Bible translated in English reached England, the owning of which was seditious, most folk hadn’t even heard of St. Paul or the miracles of Christ. What they knew of the Bible, which was in Latin anyway (which made it inaccessible to them), they got only from the Church. Knowledge is power, and absolute knowledge is absolute power. It was Luther’s heresy to insist that Christians had the right to know what they believed in.

The irony in any case is that Pope Alexander VI, the presumably corrupt pope, left a legacy of statesmanship (apart from support for the arts), with his refusal to go to war when diplomacy would do, while Pope Clement VII, the pope in Henry VIII’s time, left Christendom in disarray with bad alliances and a policy of evangelizing by the force of arms.

None of this is to disparage Christianity or Pope Benedict’s message. Every faith has skeletons in its closet, some more than others. All of this is to encourage more introspection, from Christians above all. Two things flashed in my mind upon reading about the Pope’s homily, neither of which gave me insights into resurrection. One was an image of us as schoolchildren praying during Mission Month for the lost souls of those who lived in dark Africa and those who lived in the even darker non-Free World. And two was the thought of the same bishops who gave Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo a lease on life, or power, picking up the tune and telling the rest of us not to live in the darkness but find the light in their teachings.

Thankfully, there is a passage found in St. Luke’s, and the Bible being available now in all languages, including Italian and Filipino, there is no reason not to know.

It says, healer, heal thyself.