Does Being Catholic Change How I Write About Pope Francis?

The first thing that happened was a lecture given by political geographer John Agnew at the Association of American Geographers’ Annual Meeting in 2014. I was chair of the Geography of Religions and Belief Systems Specialty Group at the time, and we wanted to invite a big name in the discipline to give a keynote for our group. We knew that Agnew had written on religion before (although I did not know that Agnew had written explicitly about Catholic political geographies until I literally read his article on the bus to the conference hotel an hour before the lecture). Of course, we were all surprised when Agnew not only said yes to our group, but also said that he was going to talk through the specific case study of Popes Pius XI and Pius XII’s dicey political relationship with the Italian fascist regimes as these politics played out in Rome’s urban landscape.

Agnew is not Catholic of any sort (at least that’s what he told me), but his talk completely threw me for a loop because it made me think through explicitly how the theological outlooks of the various Bishops of Rome played out in real spaces. It also struck me when he put up a picture of Pius XI on his PowerPoint that Francis uncannily resembles Pius in physical appearance, a happy convergence that is motivating me to dig deeper into how similar (and perhaps also different) the social teachings of Pius XI and Francis are to each other. In Agnew’s story, Pius XI is a good guy, outsmarting Mussolini at many turns, though regretting that he wasn’t smart enough to take him down completely. I imagine that Francis has similar dilemmas about other contemporary authoritarian figures.

More seriously, though, Agnew’s lecture made me think about papal geopolitics more generally. For example, I found myself asking: how did St John Paul II’s devotion to the Divine Mercy play out in how he did Catholic politics in the world? So when Francis first announced the Year of Mercy, my first thoughts on reading the papal bull were actually: what does mercy do geographically? I was very moved while thinking through this question because I then stumbled on a passage in John Paul II’s 1997 encyclical Redemptoris Mater (28): ‘One could perhaps speak of a specific “geography” of faith and Marian devotion, which includes all these special places of pilgrimage where the People of God seek to meet the Mother of God in order to find, within the radius of the maternal presence of her “who believed,” a strengthening of their own faith.’ On the same token, I was asking: what does Francis’s geography of mercy look like? I am, after all, a human geographer.