I’m not looking to pick a fight with my Catholic brothers and sisters, but I’m not sure Pope Francis has ever read his Bible.
I’m even less certain of it today than I had been, after his interview with “60 Minutes” that aired Sunday, but I began to wonder about his biblical literacy back in 2019, when the pontiff told Italy’s TV2000 channel that the Italian version of the Bible that rendered one line The Lord’s Prayer as “[a]nd do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one” was “not a good translation.”
I’m not a scholar on the subject, but I know enough Greek to know that that’s a perfectly good translation, actually, except that “evil” should most likely be rendered “the evil one,” i.e., Satan.
(By the way, The Western Journal typically quotes from the English Standard Version of Holy Scripture; I’m using the New Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition, which is approved for use by the Catholic Church, which the ESV is not.)
“It is not a good translation because it speaks of a God who induces temptation,” Francis told the network in 2017, according to The Irish Times. “I am the one who falls; it’s not him pushing me into temptation to then see how I have fallen. A father doesn’t do that, a father helps you to get up immediately. It’s Satan who leads us into temptation, that’s his department.”
All Francis would have had to have done was to back up two chapters in Matthew to find Himself contradicted by God’s Word itself. “Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil,” Matthew 4:1 reads.
So, no, Your Holiness: God doesn’t Himself tempt us. But He led Jesus literally into temptation — which would be performed by the devil — and He’s certainly under no obligation to treat us any differently. He won’t tempt us, but He’ll lead us to where we can be tempted, because God is closest to us when we are most in need of Him, and there is nothing that He wants more than to be close to us.
Now, seven years later, my respect for Francis’ biblical knowledge has been dealt another blow, this one even more significant.
Francis was asked in the “60 Minutes” interview what “gives him hope” in a world filled with darkness.
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First off, Francis didn’t point to the actual source of hope — the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ (you know, his purported boss?) — but at the broken world itself, according to the show’s translation of his answer.
“Everything,” he said, gave him hope. “You see tragedies, but you also see so many beautiful things. You see heroic mothers, heroic men, men who have hopes and dreams. Women who look to the future. That gives me a lot of hope. People want to live. People forge ahead.”
In other words, Francis seems to derive hope from … other people’s hope. I’m not even going to try to understand the logic behind that; I’m not sure my brain would ever recover. Sadly, however, it actually got worse.
“And people are fundamentally good,” he added. “We are all fundamentally good. Yes, there are some rogues and sinners, but the heart itself is good.”
If you don’t believe me, you can watch the clip for yourself below.
“We are all fundamentally good. Yes, there are some rogues and sinners, but the heart itself is good,” says Pope Francis. https://t.co/MmLPBhWVU2 pic.twitter.com/7Be2GrKrdB
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) May 19, 2024
Um … no.
Granted, the Catholic Church was never much of a believer in the Calvinistic doctrine of man’s total depravity, but you don’t have to agree with Calvin to understand that man is capable of doing good without being fundamentally good.
Scripture, in fact, almost precisely rebuts Francis’ claim that “the heart itself is good” in Jeremiah 17:9 (again, I’ll quote from the NRSVC) —
The heart is devious above all else;
it is perverse —
who can understand it?
I’m even less of a Hebrew scholar than I am a Greek, but I doubt that the Hebrew word translated “perverse” here (rendered “desperately wicked,” “exceedingly corrupt,” and “extremely sick” in other translations) can also be rendered “fundamentally good.” (Another translation approved by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops” calls the heart “beyond remedy” in this passage. If the heart is “fundamentally good,” what need would there even be for a “remedy”?)
But Jeremiah is hardly unique in his thinking. Jesus Himself said in Mark’s gospel, “No one is good but God alone.”
David in Psalm 53 declared, “[T]here is no one who does good, no, not one.”
And many evangelicals will be familiar with Paul’s frank statement in Romans 3:23 that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
I suppose it’s linguistically possible to say that someone could be “fundamentally good” but still a little bad — i.e., that I might sin sometimes, but that doesn’t make me a sinner. But Francis staked out a much more dramatic — and erroneous — position than that. He said that “some are sinners and rogues, but the heart itself is good.” Either he means that everyone’s heart is fundamentally good, regardless of their behavior, or he means that some are sinners and rogues, while others are not.
That’s sort of true, in the sense that sinning doesn’t make me a sinner. The truth of Scripture is that I am not a sinner because I sin; rather, I sin because I’m a sinner.
“If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us,” John wrote in his first letter. We are all sinners, and anyone who claims otherwise, John says, deceives himself. His heart, Jeremiah might have written, is being devious again.
That’s the bad news.
The good news is that there actually is hope — not a hope derived from a dark and broken world (that, yes, having been formed by a good and loving God, still has many points of light that show the beneficence of its Creator) — but hope in the perfect, unchanging Son of God.
“If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness,” John continues in his first letter. Francis seems to miss the significance of this truth — that Christ came to earth and died for us because we were sinners, not because we were “fundamentally good” and therefore somehow worthy to be saved. God’s love for us is so great that He sent His Son to die for us while we were still sinners, Paul wrote — and even knowing, as I often append to Paul’s argument, what sinners we would continue to be after His death.
So no, Your Holiness, humanity is not good. But God is good. All the time.
And — say it with me, now —
All the time, God is good.
