I find Pope Francis to be a really compelling guy.
It's weird, because usually when you bring up the Pope or a specific Pope,
especially the ones we've had recently,
atheist react negatively. We cringe at the names,
we get defensive like, "I want to take this Pope down."
And yet, when Pope Francis speaks
about atheism, which he's done a few times or, you know,
gay, lesbian,
LGBT movement issues, too,
he's been surprisingly candid and like
not evil about it. It's very weird.
But I think a lot of people misinterpret a lot of what he's saying. So,
most recently he wrote this long-- He responded to an Italian,
you know, a former editor-in-chief of a newspaper in Italy.
And they published his letter, this long letter where he talked, among other things, about
you know, "What about atheists? How do you respond to atheists?"
And he said, you know,
a while ago he said, "Atheists too can achieve salvation
in a sense."
And the Vatican almost addressed-- They responded and said like, "Well, that's not exactly right."
Because the truth is, what the Pope meant is like,
"Well, yeah, atheists can be saved."
"They just have to accept Christ. They have to believe in God."
But he didn't say that, he just kind of said: "They too can achieve salvation". And more recently he said, you know,
"What do you think about atheists?" He wrote in this letter:
"Well, atheists too can-- I mean, of course they can do good. They have to--"
"They also have sinned in their lives,"
which I know is debatable, but he said:
"They have to choose between doing the right thing and the wrong thing, and
hopefully their heart is telling them to do the right thing."
And, you know, that's good. And they too can--
Again, he kind of said they can achieve salvation that way.
Just to be clear,
all of this--
Because the pope is Catholic
and because church doctrine says
you can only achieve salvation if you accept Christ into your life and if you believe in his resurrection and all that.
The Pope doesn't talk about that a lot,
but that is the underlying message there, like, "Of course God isn't going to judge us, of course God loves us."
But only if we accept Him, which atheists aren't about to do.
But I think the Pope is very practical about this, which is to say
he probably knows that we're not about to become Catholic, or even Christian, or even
religious in that sense. So what do you do with that segment?
If you're the Pope, do you totally ignore them?
Or do you say, "Hey, I understand where you're coming from"?
I hope you come see it my way,
but if you don't, I still hope you do good.
That's about the best thing you could say if you're the Pope, and that's what he's saying, and it's unbelievable that he's saying it because now,
every time the Pope says something about atheism, people don't know how to respond.
You have Catholics who are loving it because he makes them look great.
You have atheists like, "Oh well, I can't believe he said that."
But wait, he's the Pope and he represents this horrible organization.
But what he said wasn't that bad and...
It's weird, because there's not a lot of
over condemnation of this Pope.
It's not that we love this guy,
and it's not that he's saying things that are any different from what any of the popes have said in the past.
At least, when it comes to beliefs.
But the rhetoric he's using and the tone he's using
is very striking and it's very different.
And it's kind of awesome.
I love the fact that he's talking about the poor and actually doing things like,
you know,
meeting with poor people and calling people. I think he said he's going to do a baptism for this random lady who
had some issue with that or something, but like
he's being one of the people.
He's not sitting in his
castle, on his throne, with his high hat and the popemobile.
He's like getting out into the world, and meeting people, and
good for him for doing that.
It's weird, because when the last
pope, Pope Benedict,
he started his Twitter account.
And I remember reading through those Twitter feeds because he would post like once a day.
And my initial thought was, you know what? Every time he posts something,
it is so easy
to like retweet it and add something snarky to it. It is so easy to do that with that guy.
And as soon as Pope Francis came around and started tweeting things as well,
I'm reading his things. It's like:
"Pray for peace" or, you know,
"We don't need any more war"
or, you know, "Do good among the world".
It's a lot of stuff where I'm like,
"I don't disagree with that. That's a good thing." I mean,
I want to be snarky,
but it's hard to be snarky with this guy because
he's not a jerk.
So, I hope it stays that way. It's funny.
Bill Maher, on his show,
has even said, you know, he believes this Pope is an atheist.
I wouldn't go that far,
but he's doing a lot of things we are not used to seeing Pope's doing. And I hope he can set a precedence
for, you know,
the future of the papacy because we would all be better off if the leader of the Catholic Church
and the leader of, you know, supposedly the leader of a billion Catholics worldwide,
if they could follow this guy's lead,
that would be pretty amazing.
And I realize the Pope is Catholic and I realize
he is still holding onto those Catholic beliefs, a lot of which
I think are really horrible beliefs. And not just wrong, but bad for society.
And I hope he changes his tune on that.
But the tone he has taken on a lot of these serious issues
it's a welcome change.
And I hope there's more of it to come.
My name is Hemant Mehta and I write at FriendlyAtheist.com
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