It’s become the pope quote heard around the world.
“If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?”
When Pope Francis uttered these words after World Youth Day, the media exploded. Liberals claimed that with one sentence the pope had overturned the Catholic Church’s teaching on homosexuality. Conservatives reached for the catechism, pointing out that the Holy Father had simply called for compassion, not any change of doctrine.
Nobody really talked about what the pope actually said. If someone is gay, he said, and searches for the Lord and has goodwill.
Actually, let’s break that down even more:
If someone is gay and searches for the Lord.
In fact, let’s pare that down as well:
If someone searches for the Lord.
There are volumes of theology, years of prayer, and and a monumental struggle against the self in that sentence. Because when anyone, gay or straight, sets out in search of Jesus Christ, they are not only not to be judged, they are to be praised and admired.
I’m not talking about a liberal search for transcendence, which is usually a yoga class or hippie vision quest and always seem to result in the same thing, i.e. the validation of the prejudices and narcissism of those partaking. Furthermore, many liberal elites don’t even have the basic good will that Pope Francis referred to as a requisite for acceptance; trashing Christianity is just too valuable a tool to gain and maintain status in their social circles, and to actually read Chesterton, or C.S. Lewis, with an open mind and heart would be a betrayal of their own secular faith. Bill Maher will never be bothered to read Mere Christianity. So if good will is required, you can instantly eliminate about half the population.
But the search for the Lord is also not, in my view, an evangelical born-again shot of love either. I don’t fully trust a conversion where in a matter of seconds a man goes from Anthony Weiner to Kirk Cameron. Such conversions are real, and the Holy Spirit may indeed be involved in many of them, but it tends to leave the believer in the platonic state of Forrest Gump: The Bible said it, I believe it, and that settles it.
No, the real quest to get to know Jesus is a journey that takes years, and once you think you’ve reached him you find there are greater depths — and depths beneath those depths. My own journey began over two decades ago, when began to ask the questions that are part of every human life. How did the universe come into being? What is consciousness? What happens when we die? Love is a tangible thing, a force that can take over your entire person. What is it, what is its purpose, and where does it come from?
In other words, by pilgrimage began as a philosophical quest, which is probably why I wound up returning to the Catholic Church, which tends to be more intellectual than other denominations. A pivotal point in the journey came when I came across a book called Transformation in Christ by a genius named Dietrich von Hildebrand. Von Hildebrand was a German Catholic philosopher, and anyone who thinks that searching for Jesus Christ means simply going to church throwing your arms up at a revival meeting needs to read Transformation in Christ. It is one of the great books of the 20th century, and arguably one of the great books of theology ever.
Von Hildebrand was the son of a famous sculptor, Adolf von Hildebrand, and would go on to become a great Nazi fighter during World War II, publishing an anti-Nazi newspaper until he was kicked out of the country by Hitler. Transformation in Christ was written in the 1930s, and has a tone of spiritual self-assurance that is bracing. Von Hildebrand makes it clear that in order to follow Christ we must be fearlessly willing to cast off the old man, empty ourselves, and let God live in us. Such a transformation does not mean eliminating the things that make us unique personalities; in fact, we will only become more fully ourselves.
It is not an easy process, which is why anyone who attempts what Pope Francis called a search for the Lord should be ready to endure a few battles, not least of which is the fight to confront your own self-serving psyches. In one section von Hildebrand criticizes people who have a “mincing aversion to call things by their proper names, interpreting his every mood and urge as coming from God”:
This person will mistake an emotional dullness in him, which may in fact be the consequence of chronic fatigue, for a sign of religious serenity. Another will believe himself devoured with a holy zeal for the House of God, whereas in fact it is a purely natural urge for correcting and admonishing others, a pedantic or governess-like disposition, which prompts him continually to upbraid and preach to his fellows. Another, again, will misconstrue what is simply his healthy temperament, his vitality, his sanguine vivacity, as an outflow of his imperturbable confidence in God. Even the rash blunder of mistaking one’s purely natural depression for the caligo, the dark night of the mystics, is by no means an unheard of occurrence.
So, to the liberals busy making up “Who am I to judge” t-shirts, and the conservatives telling Pope Francis what a really meant: Stop for a minute and read his quote again, this time carefully. The pope won’t judge someone who is searching for Jesus Christ. Because for those who truly search, who search with good will and honesty, may find themselves so transformed that they leave behind the things that made them so angry about Pope Francis in the first place.