The Face of Mercy / Daniel Conway

We are Catholic atheists if our hearts are hardened to God’s word

We should listen to the word of God to avoid the risk of a hardened heart. That was Pope Francis’ message in recent homilies at morning Mass at Casa Santa Marta. The pope pointed out that when we turn away from God and are deaf to his word, we become unfaithful or even “Catholic atheists.”

A Catholic atheist is someone who follows the customs and practices of the Catholic Church but does not believe in God. It’s not clear whether there are many people who actually claim to be Catholic atheists, but Pope Francis believes that many of us have fallen into this condition by our lukewarm observance of fundamental Christian principles.

“There are those who say, ‘I am very Catholic; I always go to Mass; I belong to this and that association.’ ” But as the pope sees it, these same people should also say, “My life is not Christian. I don’t pay my employees proper salaries; I exploit people; I do dirty business; I launder money; I lead a double life.”

The Holy Father considers people who are Catholic in name but unchristian in their attitudes and actions as hypocrites, and he reminds us that Jesus did not tolerate hypocrisy. “There are many Catholics who are like this,” the pope says. “And they cause scandal. How many times have we all heard people say, ‘if that person is a Catholic, it is better to be an atheist.’ ”

Pope Francis’ reflections were inspired by a reading from the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah on the importance of listening to the word of God: “Thus says the Lord: This is what I command my people: Listen to my voice; then I will be your God and you shall be my people. Walk in all the ways that I command you, so that you may prosper. But they obeyed me not, nor did they pay heed. They walked in the hardness of their evil hearts and turned their backs, not their faces, to me” (Jer 7:23-24).

According to Pope Francis, this kind of hardness of heart is hypocrisy or practical atheism—no matter what we call ourselves. “When we do not stop to listen to the voice of the Lord, we end up moving away, we turn away from him, we turn our backs,” the pope says. “And if we do not listen to the voice of the Lord, we listen to other voices.”

The Holy Father suggests that if we do not listen to God’s voice, then in the end we listen to the voices of idols: “We become deaf, deaf to the word of God.”

Pope Francis often speaks about the dangers of spiritual deafness or blindness. He connects these sinful conditions to our inability to open our minds and hearts to God’s word and to our refusal to see our neighbors—especially the poor and marginalized—as messengers from God calling us to reach out and embrace him in our fellow human beings.

“All of us, if we stop a little today and look at our hearts, we will see how many times—how many times!—we close our ears, and how many times we have become deaf,” the pope says. “And when a people, a community, but we can also say a Christian community, a parish, a diocese, when they close their ears and become deaf to the word of the Lord, they search for other voices, other lords, and it ends with idols, the idols of the world, the worldliness that society offers. That community distances itself from the living God.”

Catholic atheists are those who have closed their minds and hearts to the living God even while they continue to go through the motions of religious observance.

“Each of us can ask ourselves today,” the pope says: “Have I stopped listening to the word of God? Has my heart been hardened? Am I far from the Lord? Have I lost my fidelity to the Lord, and do I live with the idols that offer me worldliness every day? Have I lost the joy of the wonder of my first meeting with Jesus?”

“O that today you would listen to his voice! Harden not your hearts!” the pope prays (Ps 95:7-8). We ask for this grace with Pope Francis: the grace to listen with open hearts, to be Catholics who are not atheists but true believers in the living God who live our faith and practice what we preach.
 

(Daniel Conway is a member of The Criterion’s editorial committee.) †