A review in the 20 December 2014 issue of the Economist calls attention to an interesting book by Austen Ivereigh entitled The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope. I don’t know that I’ll ever get around to reading it — it weighs in at 445 pages — but I wish I could.
Ivereigh lived in Pope Francis’s native Argentina as a doctoral student in the 1990s, focusing on religion and politics, and he describes the environment out of which Jorge Cardinal Bergoglio emerged to become the first pope from the New World.
He observes that Pope Francis has delighted liberals and secularists with his denunciations of the free market and his expressions of understanding for homosexuals, abortion, and assisted suicide, though without actually changing the Catholic Church’s stance on such things. Francis still insists, for example, on the sanctity of life at both its beginning and its end, and, as the Economist puts it, he “opposes adoption by same-sex couples because, to his Catholic mind, it seems like a project of middle-class secularists to deny children the right to have conventional parents.”
Ivereigh notes influences on the Pope from Marxism and perhaps even Leninism — I’m not alone in regarding his attacks on the free market as at least somewhat wrongheaded — but I’m sympathetic to what the Economist’s reviewer identifies as “a common theme in the life of Pope Francis” as he’s portrayed in the book: “suspicion of any earthly ideology (from Marxism to liberal capitalism) which seems to have an answer for every question.”
I’m told that John Adams once defined “ideology” as “the science of idiocy.” And I’m reminded of an old comment by the English conservative political theorist Michael Oakeshott (d. 1990) about “rationalism in politics,” which he denigrated as “the pursuit of perfection as the crow flies.” Such pursuit has killed scores of millions of people.
“The pope’s counterproposal,” says the Economist‘s reviewer, “is a kind of Christian humanism, which insists that no problem affecting mankind can find a solution without considering the practical consequences for ordinary people, and without discerning the will of God.”
I’m comfortable with that, as I am with the review’s conclusion:
Francis “has acknowledged the integrity of people, including atheists and Marxists, whose beliefs differ from his own; and the respect is often mutual.”
I hope for the day when the disputes surrounding Mormonism will reach that same level of charity . . . and maturity.
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