Cathal Barry‘One-liners’ may be misunderstood
Pope Francis might be a master of the ‘one-liner’, but Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin has warned that the popular Pontiff is in danger of being easily misunderstood.
Archbishop Martin said that, even though people might think they liked what Pope Francis was saying, they could be mistaken about the Pope’s message.
“One of the biggest difficulties is that we all like what Pope Francis says… when [what] he says is what we like. Even there, I would have to qualify that statement and say rather that ‘when [what] he says is what we like’ with ‘when we like what we think he says’.
“We all have much to learn about the way in which Pope Francis speaks,” the archbishop said.
Archbishop Martin made his remarks during an address at Pennsylvania’s Villanova University in the US last week.
He noted that while Pope Francis’ style of communication was “ideal for Twitter”, the problem with one-liners was that they “are like the parables”.
“They have one message and if you get it, you get it. But if you do not get it or try to hyper-analyse it, you have lost it totally,” he said.
Referring to the Synod of Bishops, the fortnight-long gathering in Rome last month to discuss Church teaching on topics such as marriage and the family, Archbishop Martin said: “The Synod of last month was not the Synod of Confusion, yet there are many who seem to think that this was the case. Why such talk of confusion? Most would draw the line at criticising Pope Francis directly, though some came somewhat close to doing so.
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“There are those who do not like some of Pope Francis’ comments on social and economic questions either. Regarding the social teaching of the Church, some, as the Pope himself mentioned, have called him a communist. Others say that his vision and experience are limited to the specific problems of Latin America or even only of Argentina and that he does not understand the market.
“We are all trying hard to put Pope Francis into categories, but these categories are most often our own categories,” he said.