The Radical Reverse Engineering of Pope Francis

“Foolery, sir, does walk about the orb like the sun. It shines everywhere.”  

Pope Francis writes too damn much. It really doesn’t matter how much pastoral wisdom and warmth one emanates, a 300-page document will only be read by those who have a career-interest in reading 300 pages — bloggers, ideologues, headline-hawkers and conspiracy theorists. Given that, for these careerists, What Anyone Says About Same-Sex Attraction will sell more effectively than What Anyone Says About the Divine Image Present in the Family, Amoris Laetitia is a recipe for reduction. (I, for instance, could write one of two posts: “Francis Changes Church Position on Sex, Gays, Divorce” or “Francis Appropriates John-Paul, Benedict in Creative Re-telling of Church Teaching.” Let’s not play about which one will make me money.)

And so Amoris Laetitia has been reduced. James Carroll, a writer God loves with an infinite passion, misreads the exhortation like he’s being paid for it. His work, The New Morality of Pope Francis, is so glutted with ambiguous nuggets of would-be-wisdom (“everybody in the Church knew that ‘Humanae Vitae’ was a moral teaching with no center”) it may as well have come from an ex-priest essay-generator. He takes the stance that, because of Frank’s change in “tone” and his emphasis on “individual cases” rather than “general rules,” the Church (who will not change her doctrines) will return to the moral underground of the 70’s. We will “quietly defy Vatican dogma when the situation [seems] to call for it” tacitly agreeing that “this nearly universal choice to disobey the Church not be spoken of.”

The Pope is framed as the guy who wants a new morality, but can’t change Church doctrines. Thus, impotent to be the American-style liberal that Carroll and the bulk of the Press slaver for, the New Pope encourages everyone to “figure it out for themselves.” The goal of “new” moral norms is achieved by a collective “meh” towards old ideals. The Catholic in the modern age is a man gently haunted but ultimately unconcerned with a 2000-year tradition of moral teaching, knowing that he can always engage in some minor-league casuistry with an almost-dead confessor and, walking out of his fading, suburban church, feel relieved by the new words of absolution: “Morality is complicated. The rules may not apply.”

There is a grotesque pessimism at the heart of these hopeful interpretations. Scratch the effort to ennoble man with grand democratisms like “moral discernment belongs to the people” and you’ll find a quiet despair that holds the human person incapable of genuine moral vision — of recognizing truth when it is proclaimed. For Carroll, this impotence to be inspired by a clear-sighted vision of an ideal is a step in the right direction: “The doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage, however much it is still held up as an ideal, will not grip the moral imagination of the Church as it once did.” That is to say, we will get what we want (divorce without consequence) not through any positive change in doctrine, but through the de-emphasis and dissolution of guiding ideals and values.

This, I would argue, is not the method of Pope Francis. His aim is not to dim the ideals of the Church, but to accentuate them in an age that abhors them with all the seedy bitterness of post-Christianity.  Carroll may laud “Pope Francis’s emphasis on mercy toward the divorced and remarried” as detracting from the ideal of indissolubility, but the gaze of mercy either presupposes the actual failure of the recipient of mercy, or else it is no mercy at all. This is missed by a culture that conflates mercy with allowance and forgiveness with acceptance: An increase in mercy is an accentuation and not a cloaking of moral ideals. Mercy is a negative proof of moral guilt. We recognize our guilt more fully in the gaze that forgives us than the gaze that condemns us and has rush to make excuses. (To anyone who thinks an emphasis on mercy is a turn away from our encounter with objective moral values and the subsequent demands they place on the human heart, I can only recommend Crime & Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky — that or a more careful reading of Francis.)

When he first splashed into the pool of our ideological self-indulgence, Francis argued that the Church needed to check its undue attention towards abortion, homosexuality, and other pelvic issues — a window-opening declaration, by all accounts. This was predictably lauded as a step towards the New Morality — that is, a blurring of moral demands that will allow for exceptions without actual doctrinal change. But no one read what he said:

Proclamation in a missionary style focuses on the essentials, on the necessary things: this is also what fascinates and attracts more, what makes the heart burn, as it did for the disciples at Emmaus. We have to find a new balance; otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel. The proposal of the Gospel must be more simple, profound, radiant. It is from this proposition that the moral consequences then flow.

Rather than begin with moral consequences, Francis realistically assumes that we have lost the groundwork for understanding why the Church makes the moral demands that she does. He is a reverse engineer, advocating a discovery of moral consequences by way of a return to an original encounter with that goodness from which all moral demands flow. He is not indulging a shamefaced shuffling of awkward doctrines — as if his papacy amounted to a desperate search for an out-of-the-way cupboard in which to hide Humanae Vitae, Casti Connubii and all the rest. (The Joy of Love quotes Humanae Vitae more than most documents.) No, Francis is concerned with making “the heart burn” again. He is educating a gaze which has become dim, fearful, and blind to the values expressed by the Church; stony-hearted and suspicious of her ideals; immensely hurt by a culture of sexual violence that renders all this “joy” stuff ridiculous. Francis is not dismissing Church teaching. He is exhorting us to live the kind of life that can comprehend it. He is spitting in the dirt and making a paste that will open the eyes of a squinting people — a pedagogical paste of practical activity.

Praxis as Education

Francis, our Chief Reverse Engineer, does not expect our culture to intuitively grasp the value of indissolubility, unity, mutual service, or procreation in their own right. It was an optimism, and not some dark moralism, that had John Paul II boldly lay out the sexual ethics of the Catholic Church in the hope that her people would perceive and respond in accordance with their content. It is a certain pessimism, or better yet, a Jesuit-style caution that stays Francis’ hand.

Francis does not explain as much as he exhorts the kind of life that enables the eyes to perceive and the heart to respond to the teachings of the Church. Disappointed schismatics, happy-go-lucky liberals, and vague people who delight in vague things like “a place at the table” are just as disappointed with this method as hard-line, Conservative Catholics. Like middle-schoolers who heard there was a sex scene in their reading assignment, we all skipped to the exciting bits about divorce and homosexuality, where we either bemoan that they represent no change in doctrine or bemoan that they do not impress the Church’s doctrine with enough oomph and vigor. Both moans express the following: The real message is buried in fluff. For the denizen of Basic American Morality, this amounts to the (assumedly pleasant) feeling of investigative journalism: “You think he’s all about loving others, but look, hidden away in paragraph 343, he denounces gay marriage! Follow the money! Expose the lies!” For the Very Concerned Conservative Catholic, this amounts to the (equally pleasant) feeling of the man who knows what’s really important: “What the world needs is clear instruction, but look, hidden away in paragraph 343, shamefully snuck in a muck-pile about eating dinner as a family — he finally denounces gay marriage.”

What no one is considering is that the perception of value requires a heart of flesh — an openness to the realm of values. This is achieved, not simply by an intellectual workout — as if anyone has ever changed their life on the basis of the logical realization that a utilitarian ethic is “bad for society” — but by a life which regularly encounters these values through upright actions. How can we perceive the child as a gift, and respond to this value by rejecting the logic of surrogacy and IVF that would commodify the gift, if our daily education in the parent-child relationship involves bitter family feuding, resentment over each other’s imperfections, and an individualism that sees the family as springboard for self-fulfillment? How can we affirm that the family is the original cell of society, a domestic Church, if “in many cases, parents come home exhausted, not wanting to talk…many families no longer share a common meal [and] distractions abound, including an addiction to television”? How can we see that, as the Pope quotes, “God hates divorce,” if we do not have the simple virtue of friendship with our spouses, a groundwork of praxis in which we realize “the other person is much more than the sum of the little things that annoy me”?

These bits of pastoral advice may be dismissed as fluff, but they seem to me like method. Amoris Laetitia leaves no evil in our laundry-list of sexual fashions free from criticism. But Francis’ primary purpose is to exhort the kind of life that frees us to encounter these truths — to grow hearts capable of perceiving and responding to the values the Church holds up. He is a chemist where previous Pope’s have acted as philosophers — he begins with the parts that we might see the whole.

This, I’ll admit, annoys me. I am looking for arguments to silence doubts, zingers to silence naysayers, and what I get from my Pope is the practical advice to “take time, quality time,” to avoid suspicion and envy, to apologize and make peace with my family at the end of every day. But even as I steep in my own vices, I know that a virtuous life enables me to perceive and participate in the values and truths revealed to the Church while a continuous praxis of incontinence obscures my vision. Francis’ advice to sinners like me seems to be this: Live well, and the proper horizons of understanding will follow.