Wanted from Pope Francis: More Company Manners

by Max Lindenman

While covering Pope Francis’ visit to Turkey for the Aleteia news outlet, it never occurred to me that anything about his self-presentation might be out of kilter. But, toward the very end, straining my eyes to make out the text of the speech he gave after Sunday’s Divine Liturgy, I realized: Hey, this is really hard work!

This is not, normally, the case with this particular pope. Normally, the zinger of the week has been tweeted from the Plata to the Tiber and back several times over by the time a pundit has gotten down his morning cigarette and coffee.

The hard part, usually, is contextualizing it, explaining it away, reassuring readers that Francis didn’t mean what he seemed to mean. No, dear. When the Supreme Pontiff ripped on neo-Pelagians and pickled prunes, he didn’t mean you.

Francis is a firm believer in the transformative power of “encounter”, by which he means meeting Jesus through other people. He’s also a firm believer in surrender to the Holy Spirit, especially when the Spirit is battering away at established habits. This accounts for his prejudice for the raw, the spontaneous, and the unconventional. When it comes to evangelizing, the Jesus who converts Peter and Andrew with a jaunty line like “Come ye after me, and I will make you to be fishers of men” is the Jesus Francis strives to imitate.

But during his Turkey trot, Francis proved that he knows how to fish for men (and catch headlines) without making, as he once put it, “a mess.” In the Hagia Sophia, he did not extemporize a heartfelt prayer fit for World Youth Day. Instead, he inscribed his prayers in the guest book, which Islamists and Kemalists apparently agree is the right place for them. Likewise, in the Blue Mosque, he clasped his hands and bowed his head in a moment of adoration that stopped well enough short of actual prayer to prevent any heart attacks.

The sections of the declaration he issued jointly with Bartholomew I, Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, dealing with the Crimean crisis, are a verbal walk over eggshells. There’s nothing about Russian or Ukrainian claims being “solemn nonsense.”

In Ankara, we saw no sign of the Pope Francis who compared Europe to “a grandmother, no longer fertile and vibrant.” Instead, the first American pope spoke with Italiante subtlety. His address to the assembled Turkish dignitaries began with flattering references to Turkey’s “history” and “regional influence” guaranteed to massage any neo-Ottoman into a receptive frame of mind.

Seeing Francis at his most considerate, it’s hard not to feel a little piqued on behalf “old maid” nuns who aren’t cheery enough or “evil pastors” who aren’t pastoral enough. As a Westerner who knows firsthand the transformative power of a few nice tchotchkes, I have to live with myself knowing that, in the pontifical view, I’m just a “pastry-shop Christian.”

For a Catholic, being exhorted to, or scolded, is par for the course. But being globally slapped with labels both catchy and reductive is quite new and, somehow, worse. Imagine the father in the Prodigal Son story planting a rubber asp on his elder son’s cushion, videotaping the moment of discovery, and broadcasting it on YouTube. At times, this is how life with Holy Father can feel.

The Francis touch – that occasional uncalculated gesture, fired from the hip or heart and capable of stealing any show – is nothing I’d forego completely. And it’s not like carrying out delicate missions turned the Holy Father into a hopeless stiff. After Francis and Bartholomew finished their Doxology Service, the pontiff bowed low for a patriarchal blessing and got a kiss right on the zucchetto. It was a lovely moment, deserving to survive in the public memory for as long as “Who am I to judge?”

It could be argued that the moment belongs to the patriarch. After all, his were the lips that bestowed the kiss. But Francis deserves credit for setting up the shot. Maybe the Holy Spirit prompted him. If so, I kind of like the Holy Spirit I saw at work in Turkey, the one who knows that less is sometimes more.

Max Lindenman is writing from Turkey. His Patheos blog archives can be accessed here.