Curtain’s Up! Showtime at the Pope’s Theater

[Disir]

ROME, April 15, 2016 – Pope Francis must be given credit for an extraordinary theatrical flair, like a real Jesuit of the golden age.

His appearance on Saturday, April 16 on the island of Lesbos, on the landing shore for migrants on the Aegean Sea, will all on its own have a formidable impact on the global stage. The program for the day is sparse, but there will be nothing to explain and theorize, the scenery will suffice.

As already in Lampedusa at the dawn of his pontificate, Jorge Mario Bergoglio is reinventing for the modern-day global village the pedagogical theater of the Society of Jesus of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

That sacred baroque theater had its rules of spectacularity. It required a great deal of application from the actors and the public. With Bergoglio it is different. His performances are of extreme simplicity, capable of conquering the screen immediately, of reaching all.

The imposing Catholic liturgy of Holy Week he now concentrates into a single gesture, the washing of feet. Which with him becomes the video news of the day, condensed in the image of the pope with basin and smock, stooping down to the floor, washing and kissing the feet of lowlifes in prison, of refugees in reception camps, of Catholics and unbelievers, Muslims and Hindus, prostitutes, transexuals. He has done so four times already, and each time with different characters in different places, making every performance a debut.

With Francis even the jubilee year has its principal scene: the holy door. Indulgences and purgatory have disappeared, a modern Luther no longer has anything to protest against. The pope opened the first holy door not in Rome but in the depths of the black continent, in the capital of a Central African Republic in the throes of a civil war. A stage chosen to show what is that mercy of God which washes away all the sins of the world. And only afterward did Francis open the holy door of Saint Peter’s basilica. Followed by that of the hostel for the poor outside the train station in Rome.
Curtain’s Up! Showtime at the Pope’s Theater

For those of us that think this Pope has great PR, we are not alone in that thinking.

 

[Blackrook]

Public relations for the Catholic Church has always been one of the jobs of the Pope. This is a stupid article, and it is deliberately disrespectful.

 

[Disir]

Actually it came after a book on the theatrical flair of the Jesuits was published. The article follows along that line. Chiesa is Catholic.

 

[Blackrook]

The Jesuits are the intellectuals of the Catholic Church, and it takes 14 years of training to become a Jesuit. And most of them have advanced degrees. But the Jesuits have always been troublemakers within the Church, and unpopular with traditionalists because they challenge Church orthodoxy and customs. This Pope has already proven that elected a Jesuit was a bad idea. He is sloppy when he gives interviews to the secular press, who has given the impression that he is reversing 2000 years of teachings on moral issues. He is NOT changing Church doctrine on abortion, birth control, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, divorced and remarried Catholics, but many think he has because he is sloppy in talking to the secular press.