The Pope, ‘60 Minutes,’ and Looking for Hope in All the Wrong Places
Author: Stan Guthrie
May 23, 2024
Earlier this week on “60 Minutes,” journalist Norah O'Donnell interviewed Pope Francis on everything from surrogate parenting, to gay blessings, to the international migrant crisis. And, as usual, the spiritual head of the world’s 1.4-billion Roman Catholics said some good things, some not so good things, and some controversial things.
It was one of the softest interviews you’ll ever see on “60 Minutes.” Closing the interview, O’Donnell asked him, “When you look at the world what gives you hope?” Here’s the pope’s answer:
Everything. 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. And people are fundamentally good. We are all fundamentally good. Yes, there are some rogues and sinners, but the heart itself is good.
The Roman Church has the magisterium—seen as the exclusive and binding authority to teach religious doctrine—church tradition, and even Scripture itself. And this is the answer he came up with? O'Donnell teed up an easy question for him—“What gives you hope?”—and he whiffed, unprepared to do what Saint Peter said: “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have” (1 Peter 3:15, NIV). She walked away from the interview no closer to the truth than when she began. And that’s tragic, not only for her, but for the millions who were watching the program and who turned it off, confirmed in their sins.
The great G.K. Chesterton knew better when he reportedly said, “People reject the idea of original sin when it is the only doctrine of Christianity that can be empirically proven.” Yes, human beings were originally created in God’s image, with good hearts and without sin. But we fell, our innocence shattered, and have been trying to pick up the pieces ever since. Certainly Scripture—in both the Old and New Testaments—teaches this doctrine clearly. Just a couple of examples among many:
The heart is deceitful above all things,
and desperately sick;
who can understand it?
- Jeremiah 17:9
For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
- Romans 3:23
While O’Donnell had no further questions for the pope, I have a few. If I worked for “60 Minutes,“ I would have asked him, “If most people are fundamentally good, why did Christ have to die for us? Do people really need a Savior? Why do we need the church? And why do we need a pope?”
Augustine of Hippo (354–430) rejected any idea of fundamental goodness in human beings. The great theologian believed that the will, originally created good, has been corrupted by sin to such a degree that human beings cannot obey God. After the Fall, Augustine said, man is non posse non peccare, not able not to sin. Even after a millennium and a half, this sharp-edged doctrine is hard for many to swallow. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, for its part, states in Paragraph 405 that original sin “is a deprivation of original holiness and justice, but human nature has not been totally corrupted.” David Shibley, a leader in the Pentecostal wing of the global church, said on my Facebook page in response to the comments of Francis:
The most obviously verifiable of biblical doctrines—that all people are tainted by sin—is the truth that seems to be most vehemently attacked. Flawed humanity desperately wants to pat itself on the back and, like little Jack Horner, pronounce, “What a good boy am I!”
And of course the pope’s position is truly incomprehensible when we consider the death, destruction, disorder, and dysfunction in a world filled with “fundamentally good” people. But Francis can’t even stay true to his own anthropology for the length of the interview. The contradictions are just too great. When asked about the church’s openness to sinners, Bergoglio replied, “’That so-and-so is a sinner…?’ Me too, I am a sinner. Everyone! The Gospel is for everyone.”
Yes, the gospel is offered to all. But according to the pope, only a few exceptional “rogues” are really sinners—and he confesses to being one! No wonder so many people are bewildered when Francis speaks. I don’t know what is in his heart, and perhaps the pope will yet again clarify his confusing words. But for now, the warning of Jeremiah 6:14 seems to apply:
They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace.
O’Donnell’s question deserves a better answer than the anodyne, humanist pap served up by the Holy Father. Where do we find hope in a broken world? We find it in the good news of a God who rises from His throne, comes to us in sinless human flesh, dies on a bitter Roman cross to atone for our sin, and rises again on the third day so that we might be forgiven and live with God forever. As Romans 5:1-5 puts it:
Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.
Now there is hope, for this world and the next!
Stan Guthrie is the minister of communications for New Covenant Church in Naperville and author of God’s Story in 66 Verses: Understand the Entire Bible by Focusing on Just One Verse in Each Book.
Photo by Ashwin Vaswani on Unsplash.
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