My Ol’ Fishing Buddy
Recently our human family laid to rest one of her favorite sons. Pope John Paul II, dearly loved and highly respected leader of the Catholic Church has gone to his eternal reward.
He has been called a good man, a great man, a man of peace, a brilliant man, a heroic man. I have no problem with any of those assessments of his character. His absence left a void in our hearts, he was, if nothing else, a likeable guy. If God would have saw fit to give the time-space continuum a little tweak John Paul and I could have been fishing buddies. I would have valued his friendship.
However when we begin to use adjectives like holy, pious, saintly and so forth to describe a human being, no matter who he or she was, we are on dangerous theological ground.
We go from bad to worse when we begin praying to these people. The notion of “patron saints” has no basis in Scripture. Actually we could use the Bible to make a strong argument against it.
We humans are so easily blinded by glitz and glamour, so easily swept away in the current of our own religious imagination. The more pomp the more piety we reason. The teaching and example of Jesus will guard us from error, but only if we let it.
If the next Pope is half the man John Paul was we’ll be lucky, but please remember he is just a man. Christ should be our example, not the Pope, no matter how beloved.