Staying with the Catholic ChurchI received a courteous email asking me what I considered to be a sincere question. It was proposed, I believe, by a Protestant who is considering joining the Catholic Church! He wrote,
Hello Mr. Ray, If Pope Francis was the pope at the time of your Conversion to the Faith, would you have converted? Thank, Ray
I responded kindly to his genuine question:
“Yes. Pope Francis is the Pope, even if he is a big disappointment.
“We’ve had a good popes and bad popes, ugly popes and handsome popes, smart popes and stupid popes, saintly popes and sinfully scandalous popes. But, the Church is not about the pope. The Church is about Jesus Christ and that’s why I joined it. It is his Church and He is building it used flawed human beings.
“The ship continues across the ocean to the Celestial City regardless of any particular pope. Jesus is the one who gets his Church to the other side and I’m going to be on that ship when it arrives.
A good quote from “Staying with the Catholic Church”:
“The Church’s structures, offices, and ruling authorities are necessary to keep Christ present in the world, but his presence transcends their limitations – including the moral failures of his own vicars. Christ, being God, knew his vicars would fail him, as he knew St. Peter would.” In other words, the Barque of Peter sails on. Or, as Hilaire Belloc so perfectly concluded:
“The Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine – but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight.”