The Deacon's Bench
That’s how John Allen sizes up yesterday’s headline-grabbing interview with Pope Francis. His take:
In political terms, Francis says something out loud that arguably had already become clear, but with a degree of candor that popes don’t often provide: “I have never been a right-winger.”
At the level of content, there’s not much groundbreaking in the interview with respect to his hour-and-20-minute press conference aboard the papal plane July 28. He offers the same blend of traditional doctrine with a deep emphasis on mercy, stressing that the church needs to be more pastoral and less judgmental in engaging questions such as abortion, homosexuality and women.
Francis offers extended reflections on his Jesuit vocation and identity, and also some insights into his personal reactions to the experience of taking on the Catholic church’s top job. The full English translation of the 12,000-word interview, which was conducted in Italian, can be found here.
Standing back from the details, what seems clear — not just from the interview, but from the balance of the pope’s first six months — is that the election of Francis in March did not just signify the rise of the first pope from the developing world or a rejection of patterns of business management in the Vatican held responsible for the leaks scandal and other meltdowns.
Perhaps most fundamentally, it represented a breakthrough victory for the Catholic middle.
Truth be told, the liberal wing of the church will be cheered by the new pope’s language — his rejection of a “restorationist” mentality in Catholicism, for instance, and his insistence that “thinking with the church” cannot simply mean thinking with the hierarchy. At some point, however, they’ll demand movement from rhetoric to policy, and on that front, many may be disappointed.
Francis has twice now uttered a firm “no” to women’s ordination to the priesthood, and he’s unlikely to radically change teaching on matters such as gay marriage, abortion or contraception. A desire to project a more merciful tone on those matters isn’t the same thing as disagreement with their substance.
Meanwhile, for at least some on the Catholic right, it must now seem powerfully obvious that this just isn’t their pope. Francis is determined not be a cultural warrior, meaning he doesn’t intend to use his bully pulpit primarily to fight political battles. He acknowledges some conservatives are disappointed he hasn’t been more forceful on the life issues, but insists church teaching is already clear and he doesn’t intend to go around repeating it. He also underscores that this won’t be a terribly disciplinary papacy.
That leaves the Catholic middle as the pope’s natural constituency.
UPDATE: Allen’s colleague, Michael Sean Winters, has another view, zeroing in on the episcopacy:
Like Bishop Thomas Tobin of Providence, RI, I am disappointed with Pope Francis. The release of his interview for a group of Jesuit magazines prevented me from enjoying my nap yesterday as the phone rang off the hook. As I said to one friend, “my butt is sore from falling out of my chair as I read through the text.”
Of course, the mainstream media focused immediately on the Pope’s explaining why he has not spoken much about abortion, same sex marriage and contraception. Conservative complaints to the contrary, that probably is the lede here precisely because it is such a break from the stance of so many U.S. bishops and from the bishops as a body. Remember, this interview was given before Bishop Tobin published his article expressing his disappointment that Francis did not spend more time talking about abortion. Tobin is not alone. We did not have a Fortnight for Immigration Reform or a Fortnight against Poverty or, perhaps what Francis would really like, a Fortnight for Mercy. As one wag said yesterday, “Has anybody checked the roof at the USCCB, because I am pretty sure the fifth floor just went through it.”
Pope Francis’ comments are not such a break from the teaching and theology of Pope Benedict. One of the central intellectual concerns of Joseph Ratzinger and, as well, the entire Communio project, was to end the manner in which modernity sought to reduce our religion to ethics. That reduction has been a principal concern of mine at this blog. Pope Francis says it neatly: “The dogmatic and moral teachings of the Church are not all equivalent….We have to find a new balance; otherwise even the moral edifice of the Church is likely to fall like a house of cards. The proposal of the Gospel must be more simple, profound, radiant. It is from this proposition that the moral consequences then flow…The message of the Gospel, therefore, is not to be reduced to some aspects that, although relevant, on their own do not show the heart of the message of Jesus Christ.” Again, when Robbie George devised the “five non-negotiables” for the Church in the public square, was that not precisely the reduction of religion to ethics (and to politics) that the pope is here warning against? Was one of those “non-negotiables” the “mercy of God”?
My favorite part of the interview, however, came when the Holy Father discusses certitude and mistakes. Francis states, “Yes, in this quest to seek and find God in all things there is still an area of uncertainty. There must be. If a person says that he met God with total certainty and is not touched by a margin of uncertainty, then this is not good. For me, this is an important key. If one has the answers to all the questions—that is the proof that God is not with him. It means that he is a false prophet using religion for himself…Our life is not given to us like an opera libretto, in which all is written down; but it means going, walking, doing, searching, seeing…. We must enter into the adventure of the quest for meeting God; we must let God search and encounter us.”
Oh, my. How is one not to understand this but as a rebuke to a certain style of culture warrior bishop of the kind we find so prominent here in the U.S. I read those words and my first thought was of Bishop Olmsted in Phoenix, issuing a two page statement revoking St. Joseph Hospital’s right to call itself Catholic and declaring that Sr. Margaret McBride had excommunicated herself because the hospital had permitted a procedure Olmsted believed was an abortion. I actually think the hospital may have made the wrong call in that case, but what I remember most was that Olmsted’s statement mentioned canon law two or three times and the ethical directives of the USCCB a few times. It did not once mention the mercy of Jesus Christ.
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