I confess (if I may use the word in this context) that I had little regard for the late pope. I took against him, as it were, early in his papacy when I saw his reaction to some Muslim outrage (or outrage committed by a Muslim), whose precise nature I now forget.

The pope was in an airplane on the way to or from an international papal visit. He said that if someone insulted his mother, you would expect him as a son to strike him back, and he made a gesture as if to punch that person.

This might be true as a generalization of what we expect of the world as it is, but, though I am no theologian, it seemed to me not to be fully in accordance with the doctrine of the organization of which he was the head. It also seemed to me to oscillate between explanation and endorsement. In fact, I thought what he said both cowardly and stupid, and many of his pronouncements since in the realm of public policy seemed to me shallow and complacent.

That said, I was saddened by news of his death, as I am saddened (increasingly) by the news of any old person’s death; and particularly as he had suffered a prolonged illness but nevertheless adhered to his duty by appearing in public on the very verge of death. One cannot but respect him for that.

But I noticed in the wake of his death that he was praised for having modernized the papacy (though some criticized him for not having gone far enough in that direction). I found this interesting and, in a way, revealing, for it gave to modernization an automatically positive valency irrespective of any possible result.

But modernization is an intrinsically hazardous process for an organization that claims to be in possession of transcendent truth. As the Islamists well understand, once carping criticism of the supposedly indubitable is permitted, there is no knowing where it may lead: for example, rejection of the whole doctrine—lock, stock, and barrel—or, if I may be allowed a slight change of metaphor, a throwing out of the baby with the bathwater (assuming that there is a baby in the bathwater in the first place).

To modernize ritual, liturgy, and ceremonial is extremely dangerous from the point of view of any church that does it. Not only does it encourage the rationalist criticism that can easily undermine faith—why is any of it necessary, and why have we been following it for so long?—but, given the present state of our language and everyday comportment, modernization will lead inevitably to the complete banalization of the church. You have only to compare the King James Version of the Bible with the largely sniveling, completely jejune modern versions to see that this is so.

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