AT the end of the Extraordinary Synod on the Family on October 19, Pope Francis thanked all the participants, especially those who went at each other’s throats: progressives and conservatives who had enlivened the proceedings with their wrangling. In so doing, they brought out insights that would have stayed hidden in a convivial synod.
And then the pope reminded them who had the last word, who was boss, and castigated them both. The synod, Francis said, is like a journey: by turns smooth and rough, and beset by perils and promises both. On the one hand, by the fear-driven temptation to be inflexible and stick to the written word, refusing to be “surprised by God,” he said, quoting a famous Protestant, C.S. Lewis.
On the other hand, the pope said, there is the destructive tendency to show excessive goodness and indiscriminate mercy, “thereby binding wounds without curing them first,” which makes them fester. There is the temptation for progressives, he said in a happy turn of phrase, “to turn stones into bread” to break the long fast, but which
results in moral obesity. There is also the
temptation for traditionalists to turn bread into stones for throwing at the weak and the sickly, who never recover and die under the hail of missiles.
There is the temptation to come down from the cross, Francis said, to shake hands with the people and be popular, instead of hanging up there “to fulfill the will of the Father.” And finally, there is the temptation to neglect the depositum fidei, to regard oneself “as owner and master of the faith,” rather than its humble guardian, or to neglect reality, using euphemisms or smooth words that can mean anything and, thus, mean nothing.
“They call them byzantinisms,” Francis said. I call them neologisms, or invented words, like those found in the Bangsamoro deal, so that the parties can come to an agreement on what neither side really knows, such as what was really conceded and what was really held back. In the end, it is the Philippine Army that would settle the meaning in the manner that peace agreements are meant to avoid, because when the guns speak, laws fall silent and all inhibitions fly out the window.