In Catholic devotional talk, is "love"overdone? Plus "The Pope is Dead. Long Live the Papacy" and "What now, Holy Church?"

Barely touching the surface, a hint of what's to come . . .

First answer to “love” question: Hardly. It’s of the essence of the Christian message. Faith, Hope and Charity (Love) and the greatest of these is, what? Charity (Love). So let’s get that straight.

In any case, I speak of the word, that which repeated often enough, loses its punch. Have gone looking for a workable alternative for everyday use, helpful for an individual here and there.

Try for starters “respect,” as in Believe God, Trust Him, Respect Him — Faith, Hope, and Charity. Respect being the necessary prelude to love in this personal-relations context.

Moreover, it carries with it the reverence factor, God being closest of anyone to each of us but being so much more than mere friend as to call for some way special by way of addressing Him.

So what else on this 21st of April in the Year of Our Lord 2025? You’re kidding, I trust. It is the day of the Death of the Holy Father, about whom I pass on this concise, civilized assessment:

'Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, Archbishop Emeritus of Philadelphia, writing with a refreshing and necessary candor on the pontificate of Pope Francis: “In many ways, whatever its strengths, the Francis pontificate was inadequate to the real issues facing the Church.

“He had no direct involvement in the Second Vatican Council and seemed to resent the legacy of his immediate predecessors who did; men who worked and suffered to incarnate the council’s teachings faithfully into Catholic life. His personality tended toward the temperamental and autocratic.

“He resisted even loyal criticism. He had a pattern of ambiguity and loose words that sowed confusion and conflict. In the face of deep cultural fractures on matters of sexual behavior and identity, he condemned gender ideology but seemed to downplay a compelling Christian “theology of the body.”

“He was impatient with canon law and proper procedure. His signature project, synodality, was heavy on process and deficient in clarity. Despite an inspiring outreach to society’s margins, his papacy lacked a confident, dynamic evangelical zeal. The intellectual excellence to sustain a salvific (and not merely ethical) Christian witness in a skeptical modern world was likewise absent.”'

Beyond that, a world of comment. Here then a few.

From Crisis Magazine’s The Pope is Dead. Long Live the Papacy:

Having a bad pope can be good for Catholics in one sense: it forces us to better understand the theology of the papacy. During the Francis pontificate we’ve seen Catholics deny he was pope simply because they thought he was a bad pope.

He somehow crossed a line they themselves had determined a true pope can never cross. We’ve also seen Catholics praise everything he said and did, no matter how scandalous, even when these things were clearly not Catholic. It was “party Catholicism,” akin to a devotee of a political party supporting its candidate no matter how bad he may be.

Oh, how lines were drawn.

Both of these reactions to what was a trying papacy sprang from the same underlying problem: an exaltation of the papacy beyond what it is. We had such a long run of generally-good popes that many well-meaning Catholics came to believe—although it was never Church teaching—that we had to follow even the opinions of popes. We became the Protestant caricature of the dreaded “papists:” the pope was practically a cult leader whom we had to follow blindly.

Ouch.

A bad papacy like Francis’s, however, helps combat that error. The papacy is vital and essential to the Church, but the pope is not a divine oracle to whom we must give total obsequiousness. We should be thankful that God used this papacy to help clear up that error which had been growing within the Church since the 19th century. We can truly appreciate the papacy when we better understand its purpose and how it works.

He offered quite a study.

Pope Francis famously called on Catholics to “make a mess.” He surely did, and now it’s up to us to clean up. Pray for the soul of Pope Francis, pray for the next pope, and pray for Holy Mother Church.

Oh that “mess.” What it said about him, his personal history, his every move. Whence comes such another?

From the Vatican-watcher Monday Vatican:

Paradoxical and incomplete. The Pontificate of Pope Francis can be summed up in these two words. The time will come for all the excellent analyses apt to help us clarify whether Pope Francis’ revolution has given direction to the Church, or whether it was just a twelve-year tempest in a teacup.

In short, to determine whether the mentality changed with Pope Francis, or whether the Pope was the only revolutionary; whether people were taking advantage of the changes he wrought, or simply waiting for everything to pass around him.

Now begins the post-Francis vigil . . .