3 SURPRISING REASONS THE NEW POPE MATTERS
Dan Wilt, M.Min.
There are many reasons the faithful believe the new Pope matters – and others do not. Here are my top 3 for why roles like this must exist to balance out the thrusts of random spirituality and disembodied hope in our generation.
1. There are few institutions and leaders today whose imperfect language and imperfect systems at least hails to point to Love as the central causality of the cosmos and of human life.
May Pope Francis I stand for this – that a random universe does not exist, but a designed one does, and that, by Love – and Love incarnate.
2. People respond to fellow, incarnate people. Leaders with flesh and blood lead people with flesh and blood.
May Pope Francis I seek to embody the way of Jesus in a complex world, and in the imperfect world of Catholicism. We need more than leaderless communities, despite all the attempts of postmodernism to celebrate the unfounded glories of leaderlessness, to move forward.
3. The battle will always be around a specific King with an all encompassing sphere of authority, and the powers of every age are disarmed only by One who has trumped spiritual, emotional, psychological, relational, and physical death.
May Pope Francis I love people of every faith, respond to human suffering with wisdom, compassion, and resource, and confront the power-brokers of our age with a vision of the future that transcends the capacities of human achievement via the impotent language of human social evolution.
Cheers to Easter, the New Creation, the Lord of the Cosmos – and to the election of an imperfect spiritual, international leader with an unrelenting, singular focus on Jesus, a pastoral and diplomatic skill set, and a wisely-chosen name.