A Brief Response to the Manufactured Outrage Over Pope Francis’ Latest Comments that All Religions are Paths to God

Deacon Doug McManaman

Christ has always been the center of Pope Francis’ life and writing. Furthermore, Christ is everything that the religions of the world are searching for. As G. Studdert Kennedy points out, the Messianic passion is not limited to the Jews; we find it in all the great religions of the world. Having said that, let’s not forget that the Pope is a guest in someone else’s home. They invited him there, they received him with great joy and great love. Now, if Francis believes what St. Paul wrote in his letter to the Galatians, namely that “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me”, then in receiving Pope Francis into their home with great joy and love, they received Christ with joy and love, whether they knew that explicitly or not. When you are a guest in another’s home, you do not say things like “Our religion is better than yours”, or “You have only a sliver of the Eiffel Tower, whereas we have the whole Tower”, etc. That’s just bad manners. Evangelization is not the same as apologetics. A pope is not a traveling academic, but a father, and his life is less about abstract theological problems than it is about relationships. As Christ said: “Whoever receives you receives me, and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me.” 

Here’s something that Studdert Kennedy wrote in 1920, 40 years before Vatican II will begin to move in this direction:

“I do not think there is any doubt that we have grossly underrated the moral and spiritual worth of other religions, and have allowed prejudice to blind our eyes to their beauty, and to the foreshadowing of Christ which they contain. It is a tragedy that we should have allowed a spirit of almost savage exclusiveness to have blotted out for us the revelation of God contained in earth’s million myths and legends, so that Christians have regarded them almost as though they were the inventions of the evil one. It is a disaster that we should have lumped all other faiths together and called them “pagan”—dismissing them as worthless. It is disastrous because it has distorted our missionary methods and delayed the development of the world religion. It has made us seek to convert the East not merely to Christ, but to our peculiarly Western Christ, and to force upon other peoples not merely our experience of Him, but our ways of expressing the experience. It is disastrous, too, because it has bred in us the spirit of intolerance and contempt for others which is one of the chieftest obstacles to the union of the world”.