{"id":253,"date":"2014-04-30T05:00:34","date_gmt":"2014-04-30T05:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sjcmetheology.wpengine.com\/?p=253"},"modified":"2014-04-30T05:00:34","modified_gmt":"2014-04-30T05:00:34","slug":"253","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sjcme.edu\/theology\/253\/","title":{"rendered":"Going for Two"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thirty years ago, a great college football team faced an awful choice.\u00a0 Expected to win a championship game handily, they instead found themselves playing catch-up throughout.\u00a0 With less than a minute to go, though, they scored and trailed by only one point.\u00a0 Thus their choice:\u00a0 play it safe and kick an extra point to tie the game and probably still win the championship, or go for two points, risking everything to win clearly.\u00a0 The team and its coach never hesitated; they lined up for the two point conversion but fell tragically short<\/a>.\u00a0 The other team won, and ever since experts have mused \u2018what if\u2019 the expected winner hadn\u2019t overreached.<\/p>\n

\"Saints<\/a><\/p>\n

On Divine Mercy Sunday, the Universal Church celebrated the canonizations of two recent\u00a0popes:\u00a0 John XXIII (Angelo Roncalli, 1881-1963) and John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla, 1920-2005). The Church<\/a>\u00a0prepared<\/a> for this remarkable day<\/a> with great anticipation. \u00a0All sorts<\/a> of Catholics offer their devotions<\/a> to John and John Paul<\/a>.\u00a0 Their legacies appear where the Church<\/a> now grows fastest<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Still, similar \u2018overreach\u2019 questions<\/a> have emerged. \u00a0What does it mean<\/a> that two popes enter the Communion of Saints on the same day?\u00a0 In the conventional wisdom, John XXIII and John Paul II represent two loci of the post-Vatican II Church.\u00a0 John XXIII<\/a>, who convened the Council but then died before the Second session started, stands as the great hope of liberals or at least those who seek greater reforms in the Church.\u00a0 \u201cGood Pope John\u201d wrote passionately about socio-economic justice and peace.\u00a0 On the other hand, the same stereotype casts John Paul II as the great restorative hope for conservatives.\u00a0 Elected as a young, vibrant fifty-six year old, the Polish pope quickly restored<\/a> the Church\u2019s teaching and spiritual authority following the decade-long fallout from Paul VI\u2019s Humanae Vitae<\/span><\/i>.<\/p>\n

Of course, the nay-sayers offer counter-narratives.\u00a0 John\u2019s Council welcomed the very Modernist innovations<\/a> condemned so vigorously by Popes Pius IX<\/a> and St. Pius X<\/a>.\u00a0 John Paul\u2019s concern for restoring authority suppressed the Council\u2019s reforming zeal, especially regarding women\u2019s ordination<\/a>, and ignored clear signs<\/a> indicating clergy sexual abuse.\u00a0 How can these two popes stand, let alone enter sainthood, together? Thus in \u201cgoing for 2\u201d the dual canonization appears as overreach or, perhaps worse, a confused message about papal legacies.\u00a0 Well-read Catholic critic Paul Elie sees (mistakenly, I think) Francis slyly undermining Benedict\u2019s legacy<\/a>.\u00a0 How then would this dual canonization aid that quiet revolution?\u00a0 (If anything, Benedict will perhaps enjoy the canonizations more than most.\u00a0 After all, he worked for and with both saints!)<\/p>\n

Investigation reveals the myopia of such concerns.\u00a0 For all his zeal about the Council\u2019s aggiornomento<\/i>, John XXIII conserved as much as he inaugurated.\u00a0 Reading John\u2019s body of work (short, compared to John Paul II\u2019s exhaustive writings) challenges the customary view that John\u2019s Council turned its back on Catholic history.\u00a0 Roncalli clearly saw himself standing on the shoulders of giants.\u00a0 His early encyclicals in 1959 and 1960 teem with references to Pius X and Pius XI, especially. This makes sense; St. Pius X had ordained Roncalli to the priesthood and both men came to the papacy through Venice.\u00a0 Furthermore, John saw aggiornomento<\/i> following Pius X\u2019s motto:\u00a0 Instaurare Omnia in Christo<\/i> (To Restore All Things in Christ).\u00a0\u00a0 Likewise, John Paul II cannot be dismissed as a ham-handed reactionary.\u00a0 His five-year lecture series on the Theology of the Body thoroughly reconstructed the Church\u2019s teaching on human sexuality and continues to inspire new research<\/a>, especially among women theologians<\/a>.\u00a0 His extensive writings on work and freedom contributed directly to the downfall<\/a> of the Iron Curtain, starting in his own beloved Poland.\u00a0 John Paul II also boldly added the Luminous Mysteries to the Rosary<\/a>, that most Catholic of prayers.\u00a0 Tellingly, the most frequent citations in John Paul II\u2019s own writings?\u00a0 Scripture and the documents of Vatican II.<\/p>\n

So instead of overreach, perhaps Francis chose, following John XXIII\u2019s own example, to celebrate two of the popes who most formed his own ministry.\u00a0 If that\u2019s the case, we should expect more citations from both as long as Francis remains pope.\u00a0 Given their heroic challenges to unreflective conventions, this cannot be bad.<\/p>\n

From what Pope Francis has shown us thirteen months into his own ground-breaking papacy, celebrating the saintliness of these two predecessors reaffirms the Church\u2019s catholicity<\/i><\/a>\u2014its universality and inclusiveness.\u00a0 Both John XXIII and John Paul II celebrated the joy and hope the Gospels give the entire human race, not solely Christians or Roman Catholics.\u00a0 The canonizations also remind us of God\u2019s surprising providence.\u00a0 That God might call a humble Italian or an orphaned Pole, both of whom worked clandestinely against the Nazis, should alert us to God\u2019s unexpected presence in our own lives.\u00a0 A glance at Pope Francis\u2019 Twitter feed<\/a> reveals the same utter reliance on God\u2019s grace.\u00a0 Why play it safe?<\/p>\n

Guest blogger Jeffrey Marlett<\/strong> blogs at Spiritual Diabetes<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thirty years ago, a great college football team faced an awful choice.\u00a0 Expected to win a championship game handily, they instead found themselves playing catch-up throughout.\u00a0 With less than a minute to go, though, they scored and trailed by only … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":48,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,24],"tags":[48,150,151,248],"class_list":["post-253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-saints","category-the-pope","tag-canonization","tag-john-paul-ii","tag-john-xxiii","tag-second-vatican-council"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sjcme.edu\/theology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sjcme.edu\/theology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sjcme.edu\/theology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sjcme.edu\/theology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/48"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sjcme.edu\/theology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=253"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sjcme.edu\/theology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sjcme.edu\/theology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sjcme.edu\/theology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sjcme.edu\/theology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}