{"id":25495,"date":"2013-09-29T16:05:57","date_gmt":"2013-09-29T21:05:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/voxnova\/?p=25495"},"modified":"2013-09-29T16:05:57","modified_gmt":"2013-09-29T21:05:57","slug":"parsing-papal-popularity-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/voxnova\/2013\/09\/29\/parsing-papal-popularity-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Parsing Papal Popularity, Part I: Good, Bad and In-Between Reasons for Loving Francis"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

As Pope Francis\u2019 pontificate\u00a0passed the six-month mark<\/a>, it was observed with a level of enthusiasm that shows a large-scale honeymoon still going strong.\u00a0\u00a0His ongoing popularity\u00a0contains tremendous opportunities for the Church in both its internal life and its proclamation of the gospel.\u00a0 These opportunities, however, are not quick fixes but require a good deal of collective introspection and circumspection.\u00a0 As with many things, there is a flip side, which I point out not for the sake of being negative about a good thing, but in order to (hopefully) avoid the kind of backlashes that can end up feeding internal divisions and external misconceptions.\u00a0 I am not only referring to the way Pope Francis\u2019 reputation is sometimes played against that of Pope Emeritus Benedict, although that\u2019s part of it.\u00a0 But even aside from that, I\u2019ve been gradually noticing a tangle of factors, healthy and unhealthy and in-between, that it might be helpful to sort out.\u00a0 And to be honest \u2013 and to perhaps avoid taking myself too<\/em> seriously \u2013 this kind of sorting and parsing is my idea of fun.<\/p>\n

Much of the praise of Pope Francis, so far as I\u2019ve noticed, tends to fall into three overarching and sometimes overlapping categories.<\/p>\n

1. His witness to the simple life.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This, in my opinion, is the best reason to like Pope Francis.\u00a0\u00a0His word-and-deed witness\u00a0contra the pervasive\u00a0\u201cthrowaway culture\u201d<\/a>, evident\u00a0in the priorities he demonstrated as Archbishop of Buenos Aires and has more famously continued into his pontificate, embodies this Sunday\u2019s lectionary readings<\/a> and the broader biblical themes they contain.\u00a0 By eschewing luxurious living quarters and celebrating Maundy Thursday at a juvenile detention center, to name two famous examples, he teaches us something about what it means to be content with enough, to honor those on the margins of society as the first in God\u2019s Kingdom.\u00a0 That\u2019s living the gospel, quite apart from the often distracting debates over the Holy Father\u2019s liturgical wardrobe<\/a>.\u00a0 It\u2019s up to all of us to carry his inspiring example beyond ecclesial PR into a lived response to what Cardinal Dolan recently called<\/a> \u201ca challenge, and in a good way, like Jesus is a challenge.\u201d<\/p>\n

2. His extraversion.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is neither good nor bad in itself, but it surely factors into his popular appeal.\u00a0 According to his own explanation, it\u2019s also one of the reasons he chose to live in the Domus Sanctae Marthae<\/a> rather than the papal apartments,\u00a0referring to\u00a0his own personality\u00a0to explain why living\u00a0with a steady stream of interactions\u00a0is important to his mental health.\u00a0 It may also explain why, on the plane from Rio to Rome<\/a>\u00a0after World Youth Day, John Allen was \u201cawed by the energy of the 76-year-old pontiff, who had just finished a grueling seven-day trip to Brazil yet seemed capable of going on almost indefinitely.\u201d\u00a0 For someone like me, \u201cgrueling\u201d would likely have been a fitting descriptor for a trip like his, not to mention the in-flight press conference.\u00a0 But if he gets energized by being around people, he was probably riding a massive energy buzz.<\/p>\n

Pope Francis shares this trait with World Youth Day initiator John Paul II, although this hardly seems to prevent the latter from being lumped in with Benedict as the anti-Francis in some circles.\u00a0 To compound the irony, critics of a \u201ccult of personality\u201d around John Paul II\u2019s long pontificate are showing none of the same\u00a0reservations about\u00a0the popularity of Francis\u2019 personality.<\/p>\n

I confess there is a personal dimension in this for me.\u00a0 I certainly don\u2019t fault Pope Francis (or anyone else for that matter) for being an extravert, and I myself can\u2019t help being charmed at times by his outgoing manner.\u00a0 But when someone like Benedict XVI is faulted for not<\/em> being an extravert, when extraversion becomes equated with being incarnational and introversion with being removed, well, I can take it rather personally.\u00a0 Maybe too personally, I admit.\u00a0 Still, every pope, just like every layperson, has valuable traits with which to serve the Church, and so\u00a0the comparisons along those lines are not always fair.\u00a0 I love Pope Francis, not because he kisses more babies than his predecessor did, but because of the substance<\/em><\/a> of his witness<\/a> and leadership<\/a>, including outside of the spotlight<\/a>.<\/p>\n

3. Creeping infallibility.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Popular misconceptions equating the pope\u2019s every utterance with an earth-shattering doctrinal pronouncement have led to a recurring pattern of sensationalism and backlash<\/a>: the pope says something unexpected, it\u2019s heralded as a historic event, other church leaders try to put it in perspective, this in turn gets heard as some form of ecclesial backpedaling, and all of the above statements are torn to pieces in a massive soundbitten spin-doctoring frenzy among competing ideologies.<\/p>\n

At\u00a0the root of this pattern is a na\u00efvely\u00a0maximalist understanding of papal infallibility.\u00a0 It\u2019s an easy mistake, for a public that is by and large unfamiliar with the intricacies of Catholic doctrine, to assume a\u00a0far more overreaching notion of papal infallibility than was pronounced at Vatican I.\u00a0 When the secular press\u00a0reads more\u00a0into an off-the-cuff papal statement than is really there, and even when some commentators act betrayed<\/a> on discovering that the Church is not, after all,\u00a0turning on a dime, it\u2019s\u00a0often more a matter of ignorance than disingenuousness.\u00a0 And yet we\u2019ve been seeing, in any case,\u00a0how good PR based on false premises has a way of coming back to bite us.<\/p>\n

Of course, none of this should become an excuse to dismiss anything we hear from the Holy Father that may make us squirm a bit.\u00a0 Just because the pope is not speaking ex cathedra<\/em> does not mean that he isn\u2019t giving significant guidance, which after all is his job.\u00a0 As both\u00a0a spiritual father to millions of Catholics and the most visible public face of Catholicism to the world at large, the pope (whoever he is) bears a message worth paying attention to, whatever the level of authority he is speaking from at a given time.<\/p>\n

And whatever our own leanings may be, we should\u00a0all be wary of the temptation to overplay the authority of the pope when he says something we like and downplay it when he says something we don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Later: considering more specific challenges and opportunities, including responses to the blockbuster papal interview.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As Pope Francis\u2019 pontificate\u00a0passed the six-month mark, it was observed with a level of enthusiasm that shows a large-scale honeymoon still going strong.\u00a0\u00a0His ongoing popularity\u00a0contains tremendous opportunities for the Church in both its internal life and its proclamation of the gospel.\u00a0 These opportunities, however, are not quick fixes but require a good deal of collective […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2932,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[421,82,441,66,1165,93,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-authority","category-media","category-papacy","category-pope-benedict-xvi","category-pope-francis","category-pope-john-paul-ii","category-prophetic-witness"],"yoast_head":"\nParsing Papal Popularity, Part I: Good, Bad and In-Between Reasons for Loving 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