26/04/2025

The Pope whose funeral takes place today was castigated by many for his remarks that were randomly reported by hovering journalists. One of them which caught my attention and opened the mind of the seventy something man that I was then, amounted to "Nobody witnessed the resurrection but it was and still is proclaimed".

In fact this was a statement of the facts of the event which I thought I already knew. However, each of the Evangelists narrate this conclusion of the bodily active life of our Incarnate Son of IAMFATHERSONHOLYSPIRIT in a different way. They all remember with differences of detail but all really do proclaim, they shout out for all the Temple to hear that True Man lives in the perfect human image and likeness, the first fruits of the new harvest that is still being nurtured two thousand years later.

Some time ago when I first became aware of the really rotten state of some clergy and tried to accommodate my hope-filled belief in the sacraments into our Church's insistence that Christ in Heaven does the deed that changes the substance of bread and wine and that the holiness or otherwise of the celebrant does not matter, I read through a "Dictionary of Popes" and their edicts as recorded in Denziger. 

I know that this only skimmed the thinnest of Historical Surfaces but my life is centered in the texts of the New Testament and God did make his Final Revelation to "uneducated common" fishermen and their families. I was shocked by how soon the Church founded on Peter had become a wheeler-dealer within the temporal power of the collapsing Western and totally identified with the Eastern, Byzantine, Empire.

I also have tried to understand what it was about the Temple Religion of the Old Testament that it required "so great a saviour". Was it any worse than the so-called Pornocrasy at the end of the first millennium  or at the time of the Crusades, the slaughter of Cathars and Waldensians or the burning of individual heretics.

Today, I also have to ask how it is that a Pope could want to avoid giving an answer offensive to the world of our times by the refusal of responsibility that is "Who am I to judge?" when questioned about fornication which has always been condemned as sinful by Our Father.

I can only judge my own deeds by the light revealed in the Scriptures, Old and New and explained by some of the "Learned and Clever" who are more attached to God than to their own egos.

It is at the moment of my death that I will know how I have conformed myself to the will of God and welcomed  the Love that was poured out for the sanctification of the whole world and located in "I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven"; "On this rock I will build my church", " Whatsoever you bind on Earth will be bound also in heaven" "Whose sins thou wilt forgive are forgiven also in heaven", "My kingdom is not of this world", "Woman behold your son, son behold your mother." "I will be with you until the end of time."

It is possible to reflect on and discuss the meanings of Jesus' words but Cross, Resurrection and Holy Spirit are facts of history that tower above all other historical events much more even than do the World's Skyscrapers over the war rubble of Gaza, Yemen and Kiev or do the natural physical features of our globe over the total man-built environment.