Todos, Todos, Todos!
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops reported last year that “young pilgrims interviewed by Catholic News Service during World Youth Day constantly returned to the pope’s main point during the official welcome ceremony for World Youth Day, August 3 [2023]: in the church there is room for ‘everyone, everyone, everyone.’”
Pope Francis asked the jubilant crowd of flag-waving young people to repeat the refrain with him in Lisbon’s Eduardo VII Park, and shouts of “todos, todos, todos”—“everyone” in Spanish and Portuguese—spread throughout the crowd. “Please, let us not convert the Church into a customs office where only the ‘just,’ ‘good,’ and ‘properly married’ can enter while leaving everyone else outside. No. The church is not that,” he said; “rather, it is a place for ‘righteous and sinners, good and bad, everyone, everyone, everyone.’”
Asked during his inflight news conference on August 6 how the church can be for everyone when women and gay people are excluded from some sacraments, Pope Francis said that “the church is open to all, but then there is legislation that regulates life inside the church,” thus explaining some apparent irregularities.
Final Discrimination
When Jesus, on the other hand, was teaching about the gathering of people into his kingdom, he said:
The kingdom of heaven is like a dragnet that was cast into the sea and gathered fish of every kind (todos!), which, when it was full, they drew to shore; and they sat down and gathered the good into vessels, but threw the bad away. So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come forth, separate the wicked from among the just, and cast them into the furnace of fire. There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth. (Matt. 13:47–50)
Perhaps this sorting out by angels and burning in the furnace of fire of those who are bad fish (by customs office standards?) is what the pope meant by way of “legislation that regulates life inside the church,” once todos is without discrimination invited in, although, to be frank, the pope’s offer sounds a good bit friendlier than Jesus’. Elsewhere the Lord disappoints in a similar vein:
The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field; but while men slept, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went his way. But when the grain had sprouted and produced a crop, then the weeds also appeared. So the servants of the owner came and said to him, “Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have weeds?” He said to them, “An enemy has done this.” The servants said to him, “Do you want us then to go and gather them up?” But he said, “No, lest while you gather up the weeds you also uproot the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest, and at the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, “First gather together the weeds and bind them in bundles to burn them, but gather the wheat into my barn.” (Matt. 13:24–30)
Again, another reference to the everybody, everybody, everybody for whom the pope is more than willing to find a place being finally discriminated right out of the harvest and burned!
A Clear Choice
It may well be that the pope just forgot to tell Jesus’ version of the story to his generous-minded young fans, raised in a world where exclusion of others on account of their alleged lack of goodness is done only by very bad, very mean, judgmental people. For the whole story of todos, or inclusion, ends for Jesus (who also had this idea that the way to eternal life was difficult) with a definite downer. No doubt this caused a great deal of emotional pain to those who first heard him, for whom it could not have been good news. The pope, in comparison, is by current standards the far better man, the gentler and more considerate man, the man who avoids a multitude of thought-crimes by not telling the wise and idealistic youth that among the todos they champion are a bunch of people who are going to end up, by God’s judgment, in the fire, for Francis’s God is, unlike Jesus’, the Soul of Inclusion.
The unpleasantness of Jesus is no way to win friends among idealistic and forward-looking youth, who would much rather be commissioned to “make a mess” and be promised by the highest religious authority in the world that everyone should come in and get a prize.
In this place at least, a clear choice is given; it can’t be both: it’s either Jesus or the pope. If I were the youth of Spain and Portugal, I’d choose the pope for his friendly smile, open arms, and superior knowledge of the market—his price for goods reputed to be God’s is deeply discounted. As for Jesus, you’d think he wasn’t interested in selling at all.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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