Can Pope Francis impose a moratorium on the use of “mystery” in Catholic discourse? Can he ban it from official and semi-official Catholic journalism and the chatter of priests and prelates until further notice? It would be a salutary move, because these days the term has lost its precise theological meaning and morphed into a sort of ecclesial fog machine, used to bury difficult topics under a thick haze of pseudo-religious bosh.
Take a recent interview with Fr John Jenkins, president of Notre Dame University, with the website Crux. Commenting on the Theodore McCarrick affair, Fr Jenkins urged readers not to see Uncle Ted and other clerical abusers as “monsters”. The ex-cardinal’s double life of predation and service to the Church, he said, was rather an example of “the mystery of human freedom and human failure”.
