Zapping

Not much attention has been given to Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation Gaudete et Exsultate (Rejoice and Be Glad, The Call to Holiness in Today’s World) released on March 19, 2018, the Solemnity of St. Joseph. I liked it. One of the many things I like about Pope Francis is that he doesn’t churn out one encyclical after another. St. John Paul II had a hot pen. You never could keep up with him. Benedict XVI was restrained. Francis has followed Benedict’s example by not flooding us with a torrent of publications. But when it comes to personality and charisma, well, it’s a well to a waterfall. 

Rejoice and Be Glad (GE) was sufficiently engaging for me to revive my old academic practice of taking notes. 

As you see, my notes are encoded. With all the theft of intellectual property, you can’t be too careful.  

Now, what did I get out of GE beyond 14 pages (they were small pages) of illegible notes? I call this the “mud factor,” — i.e., what sticks.  
Francis calls attention to the contemporary guise of two ancient heresies. Harry who? Let’s skip the academic/theological term and just say: two ways in which faith is corrupted.  
The first of these corrupting influences is pelagianism. Wasn’t that the Black Death that almost wiped out Europe in the 14th century? No. Pelagianism was the teaching associated with Pelagius, a monk (an Irish monk!) of the fourth and fifth centuries who wiped out original sin and could have wiped out Christianity if his position had not been contested by the great Augustine.  

The other corrupting influence on contemporary faith is gnosticism. The error of gnosticism is more difficult to define because there was no monk named Gnosticus to pin it on. But here, I will use plainspeak to illustrate what Francis is getting at: 
• Pelagianism = Jesus was a nice man. 
• Gnosticism = I am spiritual, but not religious. Francis offers this critique of contemporary gnostics: They prefer a God without Christ, a Christ without the Church, a Church without her people. (n. 37) 

As for “Jesus, the nice man” as my interpretation of contemporary pelagianism, this amounts to the conviction that Jesus was a good man, a good example, but you can do it on your own. You have the right stuff. At least some of us do. Francis picks up this theme and shows its danger: 

Still, some Christians insist on taking another path, that of justification by their own efforts, the worship of the human will and their own abilities. The result is a self-centered and elitist complacency, bereft of true love. (n. 57)  

For further reading, I recommend C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity. 

I am violating the precept by which I bound myself in writing this column: Don't get preachy. So let me salvage matters with the other mud factor in GE from paragraph 167: 
All of us, but especially the young, are immersed in a culture of zapping.  
Zapping? For me, zapping is what I do to commercials in a program I recorded on my DVR. At least I did this before the cable box blocked my recorder. Thanks, Comcast. But what does the pope mean? “We can navigate simultaneously on two or more screens and interact at the same time with two or three virtual scenarios.” I’m lost. So, I consulted the Spanish version of GE. There we find: “Todos, pero especialmente los jóvenes, están expuestos a un zapping constante.” As a matter of fact, all Romance language versions of GE use zapping, as do the German and Polish texts. In the Arabic text, the Google translator gives “mobility” as the translation of the squiggle I cannot decipher. 

My last hope was the Latin text. GE was certainly not composed in Latin, but the Latin version is supposed to be the editio typica of ecclesiastical texts. How did the Latinist deal with zapping? He/she didn’t. There is no Latin text for Gaudete et Exsultate, at least none that goes beyond the title. Evidently, it has been zapped. If you have occasion to read GE, don’t zap it.