What a Difference a Week Makes (Air Force One or Vatican One?)

Anyone notice that it was exactly a week between the second Republican debate and the Pope’s arrival in Washington?  The number of ways in which the two events contrasted is innumerable, but a few struck me as particularly telling.  The first is, in that misused word of political spin, the “optics.”  The debate at the Reagan Library, featured the bizarre backdrop of Reagan’s Air Force One.  My first thought was that the Dozen Dwarfs and the Ice Princess were simultaneously paying homage to St. Ronald, and showing symbolically how tiny they are in relation to Reagan’s hyped legacy. 

            Then came the Pope, in his Vatican Fiat, or Vatican One, as its license plate says.  Setting aside the absurdity of preserving a whole plane just because a president rested his butt in it, the symbolism is obvious: political power is just that: power, dependent on size, muscle, weapons, and so on.  Spiritual power is entirely different: from the original Francis to Mother Teresa, Gandhi, this Pope, Dorothy Day, the Dalai Lama, and an endless chain of exemplars in every faith I have heard of, and many I haven’t, spiritual leaders send the message that their kingdom is not of this world, or in the words of the Hebrew Bible, that God came not in the wind, nor the earthquake, nor the fire, but in the still, small voice. (Perhaps this should be a so-called “litmus test” in religion: the bigger your personal stature, the greater your accouterments, especially those garnered by you for yourself, the less likely you are to be a genuine “saint,” however we define that term.)

            A second contrast is between the canonized figures symbolically present at each event.  Roland Reagan’s ascent to the pantheon of Republicanism, replacing even Abraham Lincoln, depends in large part on ignoring who he was and what he did.  Reagan’s tax increases, Medicare expansion, immigrant amnesty, and so forth, are now anathema to Republicans, who have created a false idol if ever there was one.

            On the other hand, Junipero Serra, the so-called “controversial saint,” was canonized by a church that took full account of all his actions, and elevated a complete human being, who lived in his time and place.  If we go by the standards of our time, who should “‘scape whipping?” as Hamlet says.  Not violent Joan of Arc, participant in a dynastic war that no one today would label just, heretic-burner Thomas More, maybe not even Patrick, who also imposed a religion on a native people. 

            For all the claims that religious individuals are deluded believers in a comforting unreality, the past week suggests that the Pope in particular has a more clear-eyed view of who he is, of what the world needs, and of what really matters, than any of the politicians who sought to be sainted last week.