His Holiness, Pope John XX
St Kopernik Cathedral, Albertus Magnus Square, Frombork
Easter Sunday 2007

My dear Brothers and Sisters,

Christus resurrexit! Christ is risen.

Welcome to all who have made the journey to Frombork to share with us this wonderful day. We come from all the continents of Earth. From Australia, the two Americas, from Africa and Asia, we have come. Others have come from around the corner. Welcome all.

Our Church stands now on foundations nearly two thousand years old. We have suffered through a terrible time of late, and there are brothers and sisters among us who fear that our foundations are cracked. But it is not so. The foundations of Our Church do not rest on dogma, however important that may be. No, our foundation lies in the heart of a man who was born to this Earth to preach love. So long as love is in our hearts and reason is in our minds, we stand plumb with the foundations of our Church.

I say this in the light of the Council of Greenwich and the strain it has placed upon the Church. But the Church is not broken. We have healed from much greater discords in the past. With an honest eye, we must judge our history to be a mixed one. Much as the Church would like to claim inerrancy and ultimate moral rigour, there can be no hiding from the past. We have survived the theological war that followed the Council of Niceae and nearly cost us the Eastern Church. We have survived the Fall of Rome, and the Orthodox Schism that did cost us the Eastern Church. We have had antipopes appointed by temporal powers that wished to undermine the Church’s message. At times official popes, too, have strayed from God’s Love. The papacy has been bought and the papacy has been sold. Popes have instigated wars and conspired to murder. Tomás de Torquemada was appointed Inquisitor of Spain by the hand of Innocent VIII. And let it not be forgotten that the Church has been host to some of the most macabre scenes of history. Pope Formosus, having died in the year 896, was disinterred a year later, dressed in papal vestments, and tried by his successor Stephen VI on charges of being unfit for the position of Pope. Unable to muster a defence, the corpse of Formosus was duly convicted. The corpse was stripped of his robes, and three fingers of his right hand were cut off for the sin of having been used in his consecrations, and what remained of him was tossed into the Tiber. Let us not forget these moments when we popes claim the spiritual power and wisdom of Saint Peter. Inerrancy is for God alone.

And yet the Church also has a great tradition of wisdom and humility. This very cathedral is named after St Kopernik, the man who taught us that the world is not the centre of the vast universe. Let it not be forgotten that Mikołaj Kopernik was a canon of the Church when he wrote De Revolutionibus, nor that the book’s sponsors included the Bishop of Kulm. Let us not forget that one of my dozens of namesakes, John XXI, died when the roof of his personal scientific laboratory collapsed upon him. Recall also that Roger Bacon lived as a Franciscan friar throughout the most productive period of his life, and that he was allowed to publish against the orders of the Franciscan Order by the personal request of Pope Clement IV. Let us not forget St Albert the Great, whose name lives in this square, and his student St Thomas Aquinas, men steeped in natural philosophy whose renown reaches even to nonbelievers.

For all the Church’s failings, as all organs of imperfect humanity must fail from time to time, we also rest on a great tradition of intellectual curiosity and scientific endeavour. It has always been a struggle of the Church to reconcile the answers we find in the fabric of the universe with the answers we thought we knew. At times we have failed, as with the early suppression of St Kopernik’s text and Galileo Galilei’s experimental verification of it. We have struggled to come to terms with heliocentrism, cosmology, and evolution, and yet the Church of Love stands. No doubt future sciences will pose new difficulties for us. Yet we will stand.

And so I say to my brothers and sisters who would fight against the findings of the Council of Greenwich, that the new Creed recognises the great tradition of scientific inquiry within the Church, and that the Church will survive better by recognising the Hand of God in the modern world than by rejecting the facts of nature by which He manifests Himself.

And so we have overturned the prohibition on reproductive technology. We have done this because we cannot see the Love in forbidding people from bearing children simply because they need medical help to do so. It has been said that foetuses die in reproductive technologies. This is not true in all cases. Artifical insemination is a counter-example. But even in those technologies for which foetal loss is unavoidable, the Greenwich Creed is informed by the scientific fact that natural conception leads to as many miscarriages and foetal deaths as live births. At all costs, the life of a foetus should not be destroyed deliberately. That much is non-negotiable. But if the loss of a foetus is really to be seen as the ultimate proscription against an activity, then all people of the Church should swear to celibacy and allow ourselves to wither from the human adventure. Instead, the Church is working with respected medical specialists and ethicists to develop codes of practice to allow Catholics to use reproductive technologies within Church teaching. Just as Jews have kosher and Muslims have halal to guide their faithful through modern food preparation and banking practices, we are creating procedures that will allow the faithful access to the greatest range of technology without breaking central matters of conscience.

We have overturned the prohibition on many forms of contraception such as condoms, surgical sterilisation, and hormonal anovulation (commonly known as “The Pill”, although it takes many other forms). We have done so because these methods are not abortifacent. Life is not destroyed by these methods. They prevent conception, and thus are no different in any meaningful way from menstrual rhythm methods, or indeed celibacy. As H. L. Mencken said, “It is lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.” Mencken, it must be said, was an adversary to all religion who specialised in sarcasm, but it is also true that the most shameful errors in our conduct are more often revealed by our critics than ourselves or our friends. And let me not sanitise this. Our conduct in this regard has been shameful. It has been to the Church’s eternal discredit that we have allowed a matter of unsupportable doctrine to undermine efforts at restricting the HIV epidemic, especially in Africa where we aligned ourselves with the forces of ignorance such as witch doctoring and post-colonial dictatorial misinformation. As a scientist, I could not stand by as my beloved Church turned its back on the evidence. As Pope, I could not stand by as we helped dig a million graves, and then stood at the foot of those graves giving comfort to a million widows and a million orphans.

The most inflammatory finding of the Greenwich Council is that communion should be offered to homosexuals openly living in sin. There were scientic arguments presented, most cogently with respect to the naturalness of homosexuality. But in this case it was not the science that held sway. After all, sin is natural. Nature does not allow the Church to resile from speaking against sins just because they may be conducted in the wild. Here, it is fair to say, the overiding concern was not scientific. It was simply that it was time for the Church to abandon its role as gatekeeper to God. When we offer communion, we offer it now to all who wish to partake. It is up to God and the supplicant to reach communion. It is not for priests to decide with whom the Spirit communes and with whom He does not. Open communion is common to many Christian denominations and it is time the Catholic Church joined them. We still ask that supplicants respect our rituals, and that they understand that the communion rite holds deep meaning only to the baptised supplicant in a state of grace. But it is also a long tradition that the bread and wine become Host regardless of the status of the person who receives, and that the Spirit may confer graces upon the nonbeliever who has accidentally taken communion. It is also true that no priest can ever know that a given supplicant is truly in a state of grace. It is an inescapable fact that, throughout our long and tortuous history, communion must have been given to unconfessed murderers and other sinners. Since neither priest nor sinner has been seen to be consumed in righteous fire, it follows that the validity of communion rests with the conscience of the supplicant and should not be refused even on the most doctrinally defensible of grounds.

As Pope, I have strived at all times to embrace both Reason and Love. It is a time of great fear and uncertainty for many, I know, but it is also a time of great promise. For those who feel Fear, let us return to where we started. The Church has survived the Fall of Empire, the Great Schisms, sinner Popes and puppet Antipopes, the horrors of the Crusades, and the Scientific Upheaval. With Love and Reason, it will survive this too.

Christus resurrexit, quia Deus caritas est! Alleluia!