Norah O'Donnell: When you look at the world what gives you hope?
Pope Francis (In Spanish/English translation): Everything. You see tragedies, but you also see so many beautiful things. You see heroic mothers, heroic men, men who have hopes and dreams, women who look to the future. That gives me a lot of hope. People want to live. People forge ahead. And people are fundamentally good. We are all fundamentally good. Yes, there are some rogues and sinners, but the heart itself is good.
More.
Your average American Catholic, however, has faith in a caricature of Jesus of their own making, as gooey and sentimental as any Protestant's, as Samantha Stephenson demonstrates here. Their common Jesus never called anyone to repent, never said few would be saved, never warned of impending wrath.
Between the errors of total depravity and fundamental human goodness lies the correct view, mixed human nature. Like the scholastics of a by-gone era, however, the pope splits hairs in the wrong direction from this, landing on the side of human nature being more of a good mixture than the not totally bad mixture emphasized by Paul:
We know that the law is spiritual; but I am carnal, sold under sin. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. So then it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?
-- Romans 7:14ff.
For his part Martin Luther, against the Reformed proponents of total depravity, affirmed that the Christian is simul justus et peccator, at the same time just and sinner, because of Christ.
The view was also Shakespeare's:
The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair if they were not cherished by our own virtues.
