Not sure if conclave should be
capitalized, so let me start by apologizing if I get it wrong. Last night
I watched the second installment of the five-part mini-series, The Bible on the History Channel. While the first
installment was more interesting on the surface, the second installment was
much deeper on reflection (and by reflection I of course mean a night of weird
dreams).
The character of Saul in the Old
Testament is one that I have never given much though about. He was always
the guy before the most important Old Testament person, King David. After
all, King David was the boy that killed Goliath, he wrote a great many of the
Psalms and was the genetic line for Jesus. Who was Saul other than, well,
"not David"? Oh boy, did last this last episode open my eyes.
Before I get into my thoughts on
Saul, a couple of side notes. First, you can tell that Catholics made
this series. In coming back to my Catholic faith as an adult I have grown
to understand how much my reality has been shaped by a Protestant mind set –
not surprising given that I grew up in the South. My experience with Protestantism is that they
focus much more on the New Testament and not so much on the Old. In the New they tend to focus more on Paul,
partially I think it is because he wrote half the New Testament, but also I think
there is a whole lot of him being, well, “not Peter.” But this series spends four of the five
episodes on the Old Testament – a very Catholic thing in my view. The other aside is that I am using a Year of
Faith companion book from Magificat.
This booklet contains daily reflections on Faith and in doing so
profiles over 120 Biblical characters.
Interestingly, Saul is not among them.
Anyway, back to the point. As I said before, not much of an Old
Testament kinda guy. But this series has
allowed me to rediscover Old Testament stories and sort of read along to get a
more complete understanding. What I read
and watched last night about Saul has me fascinated. Granted, it is only one night and more accurately
a few hours, of what can only be loosely called study but Saul seems to be deep
inside me. On the surface Saul thinks he
is a good king and honest servant of God.
However, he seems to know deep down that he is anything but. He seems to want to portray and even believe
that he is a good person but does things that demonstrate otherwise. More important in my reflection is that Saul
seems to want to really believe that he is doing the Will of God, a sort of
belief about the person he wishes he was and not the person he actually was. I can relate to that. It has been less than three years now that I
have come back to my Catholic faith.
Where I was prior to that was very Saul-like. I wanted to pretend that I was a devote
Catholic. I wanted to put on the airs,
even to myself, that I was something more than a CINO (Catholic In Name Only). However, deep down I knew that I was a
dangerous Catholic, dangerous because I knew just enough to believe I could
defend my faith, but too ignorant to truly do so. I have spent the last three years growing in
my faith and in my understanding of what the Church teaches, trying to become
less Saul and more Peter.
Since the announcement of the
resignation of Pope Benedict I have had this uneasiness about the direction of
the Church and the next Pope. I have
been fearful that the next Pope wouldn’t be as good as the last few (in my life
time I have only known two popes, so I can’t really say much about those prior,
other than they seem to have been good and devout men). I am of course
prayerful that the Cardinals will follow the Holy Spirit and elect a good,
strong Godly man, but I wonder (and I will admit a lack of faith plays a some
part in my thoughts) if the Cardinals will allow Saul to infest the conclave
and elect a Pope that seems to be good on the surface, but knows he is not up
to the task.
I guess a lot of this trepidation
comes from how the Church has handled the sex abuse crisis. Seems to me that there is a large part of the
political Cardinals, for lack of a better way of putting it, inside the Vatican that do
not demonstrate a strong enough faith that “the gates of Hell shall not prevail”
against the Catholic Church. This leadership
appears to be hiding behind large doors and beautiful art and not projecting
itself as leaders that believe that Jesus will guide His Church. My take is that the people who run the Church
now do not want their failings as human beings exposed in a way I think would
be cathartic to a lot of the faithful. I
pray that I am wrong. I pray that this
attitude will not overtake the conclave, that the Cardinals will let the Holy
Spirit and not the ghost of Saul dominate their deliberations and guide their
voting.
"If you want to be happy, really really happy, use your talents to serve others." - Eduardo Verastegui