Who let the dogs out?

There are at least two ways to imagine what religion does, and how it operates. In a strange way, they fit together,

complimentary but oddly opposite. We might characterize them as lock and key.

A lot of religious experience is or can be characterized as exclusionary. Us versus Them. We have the goods, and

we’ve got to protect them. We have the Truth, and we must safeguard it. Religious law and canons can easily

become vaults filled with old texts and practices, arcane and stuffy. We have what theologians call “the deposit of

faith,” accumulated wisdom and customs that is kept in the safe, the strongbox of tradition. The air easily gets

musty inside.

Pope John XXIII, a conventional Italian cardinal, was elected in 1958 to replace Pope Pius XII. Pius, a member of a

family of high-ranking Vatican lawyers and bureaucrats who were part of the Roman ecclesiastical “black

nobility.” He was a severe, cerebral, and cautious bureaucrat and diplomat, a learned canon lawyer. Change did

not come easily to him.

John XXIII, on the other hand, was one of 13 children of a sharecropper family in rural northern Italy. He

attended seminary on a scholarship, was drafted into the Italian Army during World War I. He worked for a

socially conscious bishop in Bergamo before pursuing a career in diplomacy. He served as a papal delegate in the

Balkans, Turkey, and Greece, and as papal nuncio in Paris and as the Holy See’s first permanent observer at

UNESCO. Rewarded with a red hat and the See of Venice, he was elected as a placeholder pope after Pius XII’s

long reign. Contrary to all expectations, he convoked the Second Vatican Council, a decision he explained in

simple terms: “I want to throw open the windows of the Church so that we can see out and the people can see in,

and let the fresh air of the Spirit blow through.”

It’s always risky to compare and contrast leaders, yet the history of the church has been a slow, rhythmical alternation between closed vaults and opened windows, between tradition that binds and the Spirit who looses, between “it’s always been this way” and “let’s try something new.” We esteem our rich past, of course. There is no corporation older and more experienced in the Western World, with such rich experience and perennial wisdom. Yet in the alternative styles and attitudes of Pius and John, Benedict and Francis, we recognize that sometimes, as our gospel says today, things are bound, and other times things are unloosed. We believe finally that the institution is more than a strongbox preserving the past; it also holds keys of understanding and grace that can unlock the doors that

separate us from one another and from our world.