A pope quote

I was going to say another big writing day but that is the way it is going to be for the next little while so I won't. Saying I'll be busy writing has an apologetic tone about it and there is no point in apologizing for what is normal.

Here is the quote from The Light of the World that jumped out at me yesterday:

Less clearly but nevertheless unmistakably, we find here in the West, too, a revival of new Catholic initiatives that are not ordered by a structure or bureaucracy. The bureaucracy is spent and tired. These initiatives come from within, from the joy of young people. Christianity is perhaps acquiring another face and, also, another cultural form.

That is real reformer talk. This is a Pope who expects and welcomes change. He isn't trying to drive and control change. He talks about it coming from somewhere else. Benedict is an old man and he knows he is an old man.

I remember when I did my first will, I had an instruction that required multiple steps to deal with conditionals. There was a piece of property i wanted to go to a certain kind of person, so I had this complicated set of steps. My lawyer looked at me and said, 'You can't legislate from the grave.'

I'm sure he has said this line before. It had a practiced ring about it. But it is so true. There is point where you have to let go of the world and it comes long before death. A big part of living successfully is dying successfully. If, like a certain recently deceased politician, you find yourself fighting for some piece of legacy legislation on your deathbed, you have failed at life.

Reading Benedict, you can see a man who has begun the renunciation necessary to die successfully long ago. He is ready to let go.

But perhaps the most telling, and true, line in that quote above is about the bureaucracy. That is the line about the people who haven't begun to let go, the people determined to legislate from the grave. The big irony of every generation is that the young Turks grow up to be Bourgeois. Jacques Brel has a song about this. Baby Boomers, however, refuse to accept that they are old, tired bureaucrats. Even now, when the youngest boomers are entering their fifties, they imagine that youth is on their side; they imagine that they have a natural affinity with youth.

But the old rebellion is now just an entrenched bureaucracy and, like all bureaucracies, it only cares about self preservation.

I was thinking last night about a friend of mine who was once quite the young rebel. She was, and remains, an anti-poverty advocate. She is a ,member of every anti-poverty group in the community. She hectors and badgers people to give more and accuses business people of being rich and selfish.

A few years ago, the Ontario government passed a law that said that a list of all the public employees paid over a  certain threshold must be made public along with their salaries. And my friend made the top ten list for her city. All ten were in the top two percent of earners for that city. The thing that staggered people, though, was that the others were administrators. My friend, however, is an elementary school teacher.

That, of course, was why she had gotten away with accusing others of being rich all these years. No one imagined that an elementary school teacher could make so much. One teacher who is also a union rep I met a few years ago, told me that the salary in question was impossible, pure fiction, when I told her the story. But it's not fiction. It's a matter of public record.

My friend still goes about hectoring "the rich". I suspect people take her a lot less seriously now that her status was revealed on page one of the local paper. She still takes herself as seriously as ever.

And so do the old "reformers" of the 1962 generation in the church. They aren't though. They are just another self-preserving bureaucracy.