Nat Hentoff, WND - I am an atheist, but have never wavered in my conviction that persons with religious beliefs are entitled to the same freedom of choice as I am. And in my vocation as a reporter, the person who has most influenced me was the late Frances Sweeney, a deeply religious Catholic editor of a penetratingly independent Boston newspaper where I first became a journalist in my teens.
Boston was then the most anti-Semitic city in the country, and in the Jewish ghetto where I grew up, boys knew if they walked alone down those streets at night, they could lose teeth from invading avengers of Christ’s death. I even lost some teeth.
Yet Frances Sweeney, in her newspaper and in public meetings, persistently criticized the city’s Catholic leadership for its continued silence on this bigotry. Threatened once with excommunication by Cardinal William O’Connell for her attacks, she nonetheless persisted in her criticism.
I was one of those teenage reporters who exposed some of the financiers of that anti-Semitism in her newspaper.
So I now have no hesitation, though still an atheist, in being drawn to a Catholic Church that, according to Pope Francis, “is poor and for the poor.”
In his first Apostolic Exhortation, “Evangelii Gaudium” (The Joy of the Gospel), presented last November, Pope Francis wrote: “Our faith in Christ, who became poor, and was always close to the poor and the outcast, is the basis of our concern for the integral development of society’s most neglected members. …
“It means working to eliminate the structural causes of poverty and to promote the integral development of the poor, as well as small daily acts of solidarity in meeting the real needs which we encounter.”
Then, a Pope Francis advance: “It presumes the creation of a new mindset which thinks in terms of community and the priority of the life of all over the appropriation of goods by a few. … This means education, access to health care, and above all, employment, for it is through free, creative, participatory and mutually supportive labor that human beings express and enhance the dignity of their lives.”
And dig this: “A just wage enables them to have adequate access to all the other goods which are destined for our common use.”
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1 comment:
I have begun to think that perhaps Nostradamus was, in fact, correct, and that Francis will be the last Pope of the Church as such -- simply because when Francis gets finished reforming it into a force for global peace and welfare, the Catholic Church the world has known since the Crusades may well no longer exist in a traditionally-recognizable form, having been shepherded and nurtured into something much more reflective of the Kingdom of God rather than the problematic entity it has been in recent centuries.
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