I’m picking up a theme here, folks. When he met with journalists on the plane on the way to his meeting with hundreds of thousands of families in Valencia, Spain earlier this summer, he said it. Then last week, during an interview with three German reporters in preparation for his upcoming visit home to Bavaria, he repeated it. There’s a theme here, everybody … Pay attention!

Of course, I’m speaking of Pope Benedict XVI, and here’s the theme I’m detecting: the message of the church is overwhelmingly positive, not negative. “Catholicism is not a collection of prohibitions,” the Holy Father commented, “It’s a positive option.” The church is at her best when she says yes to all that is noble, decent, good, and life-giving. And when she does, on occasion, have to say no to whatever threatens to degrade us, that is but an entailment of an immeasurably greater yes.

This theme of Benedict is, in my mind, nothing short of brilliant.

See, we have a big PR mess in the church. Our critics love to caricature the church as a dour, scowling, nay saying killjoy. We’re against everything, this popular impression holds, and all the church can be counted upon to do is condemn things, crush new ideas, and warn about doomsday consequences. I’m afraid that sometimes we Catholics have justified this warped perception of the church as a crusty, scared, finger-wagging old crab.

Nothing could be further from the truth, claims the Holy Father. The church has something positive, not negative to say. She’s on the side of life, not death, love, not hate, freedom, not shackles, peace, not war, light, not darkness. She’s on the side of the angels, not of the demons.

Last week I was on retreat. Fr. Robert Barron, our director, was fond of quoting the early church Father, St. Ireneus, who wrote, Gloria Dei Homo Vivens, “The Glory of God is humanity alive.”

St. Ireneus knew what all the saints know, what Catholic theologians, poets, mystics, philosophers, artists, and story-tellers know, what Benedict XVI knows: that the church sees creation and creatures shot through with God’s love, God’s grace, God’s presence, and that the human project — the pinnacle of God’s work — is a breathtaking work of art, as every man and woman is made in God’s image and likeness.

The vocation of the church, then, is to encourage what is most true and worthy of humanity. And when the church confronts evidence of tendencies that tarnish and threaten to destroy what is most noble and uplifting in God’s creatures and creation — things such as war, destruction of babies in the womb, tampering with human life in the laboratory, poverty, drugs, promiscuity, just to name a few — her warning about those dangers is but the necessary flipside of her constant promotion of all that is honorable, pure, and uplifting in humanity.

So the church is not wagging a threatening finger, but applauding life, love, marriage, family, babies, elders, responsible sexual happiness, freedom allied with virtue, care for one another, compassion for the poor and suffering, an embrace of those in need, song, dance, laughter, sun, wine, celebration, education, seeing in all of this an invitation to affirm in reverent and grateful worship the God whose glory is — you and me, fully alive!

Keep at it, Holy Father!