The Vatican announced the canonisation of two giants of the 20th-century Church last week: Pope Paul VI and Archbishop Oscar Romero. Observers speculate that they will be canonised on the same day during this October’s youth synod.
There is a precedent for such a pairing: in the year 2000, Pope John Paul II beatified Pius IX and John XXIII. The former is, of course, a hero among traditional Catholics and the latter among liberal ones. The joint beatification was seen as a way of uniting these disparate groups.
If Pope Francis decides to canonise Paul VI and Oscar Romero on the same day, he will be accused of performing a similar balancing act: offering Pope Paul to conservatives who admire his encyclical Humanae Vitae and the archbishop to left-leaning Catholics who honour him as a martyr for social justice.
Others will argue that Francis is seeking to reconcile two great activist movements in the Church: pro-lifers and justice and peace campaigners. The Holy Father, they will point out, never separates “life issues” from social questions. What better way to emphasise this than by raising Paul VI and Romero to the altars on the same day?
But these interpretations are rather crude. For both the pope and the archbishop were complex personalities who didn’t fit neatly into ideological categories. Paul VI was a hesitant and anguished figure, who nevertheless forced through dramatic changes to the liturgy and the Roman Curia. Romero, meanwhile, is often portrayed as a quasi-Marxist revolutionary. Yet his diaries reveal a sober and doctrinally orthodox figure unsettled by some of the changes unleashed by Vatican II.
Romero sought spiritual direction from Opus Dei, then considered a formidable base of opposition to liberation theology in Latin America, and appealed to Paul VI to beatify the personal prelature’s founder, Josemaría Escrivá, shortly after the latter’s death in 1975.
Romero’s spiritual journey was hardly straightforward. In 1966, a doctor diagnosed him as an “obsessive-compulsive perfectionist”. He responded by drawing up a numbered list of demanding resolutions that included wearing “a penitential chain from rising after siesta until after prayer” and use of the “discipline on Friday nights”. That he was able to redirect his obsessive tendencies towards the good of others should give us all hope. After his canonisation, Romero could be considered the patron saint of those with anxiety disorders.
Ultimately, Romero does not embody left-wing activism, but something far more radical: he practised both love of God and neighbour to an exceptional degree. The first seemed to come naturally to him; the second required immense effort. The Church today sometimes seems split between those who emphasise the first of these commandments and those who elevate the second. Romero shows that the true goal of Christian life is to live out both with courage.
Mary McAleese, the former president of the Irish Republic, has lambasted the Catholic Church for being an “empire of misogyny”. In particular, she criticised the way that few women were in leadership roles in the Church, and argued that a hierarchy that is “homophobic and anti-abortion is not the Church of the future”. She added that there were few female role models for Catholics.
The Church has heard these criticisms before now, and the answer that most Catholics would make will not have changed over the years. The Church’s teaching on sexual morality and the sacredness of life is a positive teaching: it is part of a comprehensive vision of human flourishing. This teaching is addressed to the whole of humanity in a spirit of dialogue and love. There is nothing inhumane about being anti-abortion (or as we would rather put it, pro-life).
As for the other criticisms, Mrs McAleese seems to overlook the fact that the Church herself is female, a mother and teacher, mater et magistra, both of which are deeply feminine roles.
Moreover, as for the lack of female role models, apart from the Church herself, the towering figures of our own age have often been female: one thinks of Thérèse of Lisieux, Edith Stein and Mother Teresa of Calcutta, among many others. Nor are these women proposed as role models by men. Rather it was the faithful as a whole who were the first to recognised their heroic virtues.
The Catholic Church – with its global reach, with its mission to empower ordinary people to recognise themselves as God’s children and as such to become aware of their innate dignity – has done more for women (and for men too) than any other organisation on earth.
Mrs McAleese, who has risen to be a head of state herself, ought to admit that the holding of office is not the chief or only way of measuring human dignity.
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