According to the Roman Catholic Church, Jesus Christ is a failure. For over 2000 years, Christ has not finished the race. He is still striving to reach the finishing line, His resurrection. The Church still considers the man Jesus traversing the 14 stations of the Via Dolorosa or rather the way of suffering on His way to Calvary, scourged, drenched in blood, beaten, and wearing a crown of thorns with a culminating epilogue of the agonising pain Jesus suffered nailed to the Cross. This is manifested in more ways than one, primarily by the celebration of the daily sacrifice of the Mass and by the images of the macabre crucified Christ found in every nook and cranny wherever the Church has jurisdiction and not only.

The only symbol of Christianity, the Cross, is found in artwork as in paintings and sculptures. It is also found in jewellery, worn as ornaments made of gold or silverware or of various other materials. It has become the custom of tattooing the human body with all manner of religious figures prominent of which is the Cross, also found in written publications and advertisements. One can still come across the occasional monk of a certain religious order having the Cross roped around his waist, dangling from one side to the other of his habit nearly touching the ground.

What I find bizarre was the introduction by Pope Paul VI in the sixties of the bent or twisted Cross on which is displayed a repulsive and distorted figure of Christ which the black magicians and sorcerers of the Middle Ages used to mock Jesus Christ. The successors of Paul VI, the two John-Pauls, Benedict XVI, and Pope Francis carried and still carry this Cross held high to be revered by the crowds. On two separate occasions during his state visits, the globe-trotting Pope Francis, the Jesuit, spoke about the crucifixion. One such occasion was at St Patrick's Cathedral in New York City. He spoke about the suffering and death of Jesus Christ and related them to human suffering. What baffles me is the way he addressed the suffering and crucifixion of Jesus the Son of God by saying, "we are followers of Jesus Christ and His life humanly speaking ended in failure, the failure of the Cross." This was no slip of the tongue or off the cuff statement since he was reading from a script. What I find mind boggling is that the congregation gave him a standing ovation at the end of this statement. The dictionary defines the word failure as 'a person or condition of not meeting a desirable or intended objective, incapable of success, a loser.' In the Old Testament, the Prophet Isaiah in around 700 BC wrote: "HE was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; by HIS wounds we are healed."

On another state visit, this time in Kenya where he met young people in Kasarani stadium, he had the audacity of showing a booklet  and calling it 'a small way of the Cross' and referring to it as 'the history of God's failure'. Why small. Can the greatest event in human history, the passion and the resurrection of Jesus Christ with the specific purpose that man could have eternal life, be given the diminutive small? This booklet which he said he always carries in his pocket, features, as he explained the 14 stages Christ suffered, from 'when he was condemned and ends to when he was buried'.

There is no mention in his little booklet of the risen Christ or a hint about the resurrection. This time instead of calling Jesus a failure, he purposely and intentionally referred to God as the failure. To me this is blasphemy of the highest order coming from the man who pretends and professes to be the vicar of God. Can this God of wonders, the creator of our orderly universe which is governed by irrefutable unchangeable laws in existence be a failure, when evolutionists cannot tell us their origin? 

Francesco Simon Mercieca

Fgura