As everybody knows, the first ever Jesuit pope became the first ever pope to choose to be named Francis -- in honor of St. Francis of Assisi. Should Pope Francis ever be filled with the spirit of St. Francis of Assisi, he might make certain concrete reforms in the worn out Roman Catholic Church. But if Pope Francis does indeed make any significant changes, they will be too little, too late. Basically, the old tree of Christianity is dead. No amount of pruning it of the anti-body views and attitudes and of the natural-law tradition of moral theory will save it. It's dead. The old Christ myth is dead, as are the old Christian doctrines based on it (e.g., the supposed divinity of the mythic Christ, the supposed divine trinity).
The ancient Jews who did not jump on the bandwagon for the Christ myth were sensible people. But this is not how the jumpers viewed the non-jumpers. As a result, the jumpers loaded certain anti-Jew expressions and attitudes into their scriptures. The rest, as they say, is history. See James Carroll's book Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History (2001).
However, Friedrich Nietzsche to the contrary notwithstanding, God is not dead. Neither the transcendent divine ground of being is dead -- nor is the inner experience that has been traditionally understood in Christianity as the experience of God's immanence.
As a matter of fact, the inner experience of the sacred is open to everybody -- atheists, agnostics, and people in all religious traditions -- even to Christians. Basically, this is the good news that the historical Jesus was proclaiming to his fellow Jews in the ancient Jewish homeland.
So the memory of the historical Jesus is still worth preserving and commemorating, as the Jesuit spiritual director from India, Anthony de Mello, S.J. (1931-1987), commemorates his spirit in his posthumously published book of meditations The Way to Love: Meditations for Life (reissued 2012).
Concerning St. Francis of Assisi, see Eloi Leclerc's perceptive book The Canticle of Creatures: Symbols of Union: An Analysis of St. Francis of Assisi (1977; French original 1970).
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