New Year's house cleaning

One doesn’t picture the pope with a dust rag or Hoover, but Francis did a little housecleaning at the Vatican last week in time for New Year’s. An annual assembly of red-capped prelates in the Apostolic Palace who expected traditional warm and fuzzy Christmas greetings from their leader found coals rather than treats in their stockings. Martin Luther’s disgruntled “Ninety-Five Theses” nailed to the church door in Wittenberg, Germany, in 1517 is regarded as the launching of Protestantism. Pope Francis’ list of more-naughty-than-nice points is in hopes of salvaging Catholicism.

It is interesting to me that the papal complaints boil down to indictments of bureaucratic corruption. Interesting because the New Testament warned of that from the beginning. The church of Ephesus, after a wonderful start of reputed love and faith (Ephesians 1:15), became a beehive of activity that lost its first love (Revelation 2:2–4). Relationship was reduced to programs and sterile doctrine.

Not holding back much, Pope Francis excoriated the cardinals, bishops, and priests for thinking themselves to be “lords of the manor.” Jesus had warned of that also in His parable of the man who owned a vineyard and “leased it to tenants, and went into another country” (Matthew 21:33, ESV). The vineyard is the Church, the journey to another country is Jesus’ ascension into heaven, and the tenants are church leaders. There is a tendency for tenants to start acting like owners, and for gratitude to morph into entitlement.

“Spiritual Alzheimer’s,” “spiritual petrification,” “pathology of power,” “existential schizophrenia,” a “double life,” “satanic assassination” (i.e., gossip), and “advancing spiritual emptiness which degrees or academic titles cannot fill” were cited by the Roman Catholic leader as problems his audience should examine themselves for. “These and other maladies and temptations are a danger for every Christian and for any administrative organization … and can strike at both the individual and the corporate level,” said Francis, in a statement that casts its net wider than the royal court of Rome, reaching even to you and me.

You don’t have to be a Catholic to feel the ripples of the Theses hammered to the door. New Year’s is as good a time as any to do a little housecleaning:

“Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith. … Or do you not realize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless indeed you fail to meet the test!” (2 Corinthians 13:5, ESV)