Two Years of Francis

Two years ago this month Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected pope. I want to talk here about faith and to do so in the context of this anniversary. Before I turn to my subject there are some other things I want to say. The first is that I continue to maintain, as I have done on the SBC website before now, that Pope Francis has done a superb job of what he was elected by the college of cardinals to do: get the world to talking about the Church once again as something besides a network of pedophile clergy. All Catholics who love the Church should be thankful for this. Instances of pedophilia and their cover-up had become a stick with which to beat her instead of being and remaining a source of shame, wrongs to be rectified, crimes to be punished.

I also want to say something about news and those who report it. Here I speak from experience.

News in our day thrives on conflict and sensation, including things a pope says spontaneously in an informal interview that could appear to be in conflict with Catholic teaching. How sensational!

As for those who report the news, which is to speak of men and women looking for conflict and sensation, the ones who cover papal trips are usually general assignment reporters about as ignorant of things Catholic as they would be of piloting the plane in which they ride.

Do you think I exaggerate? In 1987 I covered for The Wanderer a trip Pope St. John Paul II made through the Southern and Southwestern tier of states of the U.S. — not the first of his trips I covered for that paper. This one began in Miami. When we reached Los Angeles several stops later the traveling press corps was joined by some newcomers, including a thirtysomething network television producer. She was sitting behind me on a press bus and I could hear her talking to the reporter who sat beside her. Speaking of the Pope, she asked in a voice full of incredulity, as if just having heard for the first time something so far beyond reason as to be insane, “Do you realize these people actually believe that in his hands bread and wine literally turn into the body and blood of Jesus?”

Leave aside that nobody believes they “literally” turn into anything. In her use of the word the TV producer showed her command of English to be as poor as her ignorance of basic Catholic belief was total. The point is we cannot expect such ignorance as that to distinguish between a pope exercising his teaching authority and a pope ventilating his personal and fallible views when he steps to the rear of an airplane to chat informally with reporters. However, it is to be expected of Catholics who purport to be solidly grounded in Church teaching. It is dismaying when they do not make the distinction.

That said, yes, it is disconcerting to learn that a pope can hold some of the views ventilated by Pope Francis, but so might it have been, we may suppose, to learn the views of many popes of the past if there had been reporters around to make them known. Further, liberals have also been disconcerted by the Pope as when he said that as far as he was concerned it’s okay to smack a misbehaving child and that he would punch anybody who insulted his mother.

For the record, and for what it’s worth, my personal and fallible view is that Pope Francis should stay in his cabin at the front of the plane when he travels, but I am reconciled to that being unlikely. He is a sociable, gregarious man. On the positive side of things, it is precisely those qualities that have got the world to speaking of something besides sexual scandal when talk turns to the Church and her affairs.

It needs also to be remarked that there is another Pope Francis, one we have only heard about but never see. He is a man who enjoys spending an evening alone, reading Dostoyevsky and listening to recorded music — real music, the kind disparaged nowadays as “high-brow”. This is a side of Pope Francis that the world saw all the time in Pope Emeritus Benedict, and the world didn’t like it. Because of it, Benedict, who got stuck with trying to pick up the pieces, in the aftermath of Vatican II, of a broken institution left behind by predecessors judged by competent authorities to be holy, was labeled “cold,” “aloof,” and (worst of all) “intellectual”.

Do reporters ever put into a pope’s mouth words he didn’t speak or misrepresent some he does? Yes, and they aren’t the only ones who do. In 1967 I heard the philosopher and theologian Dietrich von Hildebrand, who was visiting Washington after a recent trip to Rome, recount being told by Blessed Pope Paul VI in private audience that the Jesuits who translated his texts into English deliberately mistranslated him. That raises the question of why the head of the Church, or head of any enterprise, would put up with underlings guilty of such sabotage, but this isn’t the place to explore it. Let’s move on to more substantive matters.

Let me begin by speaking once more from experience — experience that you would think would also be familiar to an ethnic Italian from Argentina: Compassion can cloud the mind faster than the headiest wine. Has Pope Francis never had occasion to drink enough of his country’s excellent reds to know that?

Seeing as how compassion has been elevated in our day above other virtues, certainly above chastity and obedience, and even though the word is never heard from Our Lord (Does He tell us to love God first of all and then be “compassionate” to our neighbor?) I’d better explain my statement. It will take a few moments. Context is needed.

I came into the Church at the end of Vatican II and thus have been accustomed during my lifetime as a Catholic, as have been all Catholics born since 1965 and especially during the 70s, 80s and 90s, to a Church divided more or less along the lines of Judaism in this country.

Jews in the U.S. are divided into three camps: Reform; Conservative; Orthodox. In Catholicism we have had on the left, so to speak, those who would favor and have even agitated for female priestesses, married clergy, the popular election of bishops, and so on. Then we have mainstream Catholics. The main thing that marks them is that nothing marks them as different from most of American society today. They are fully integrated, even occupying some of the nation’s highest offices (Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, etc.). Finally, there are Catholics often called, and often calling themselves, traditional. Most of them are indistinguishable from the mainstream except that they prefer to worship at the Mass codified at the Council of Trent, some doing so at Masses not approbated by the local bishop.

In the last years of the long pontificate of Saint John Paul II it could be seen that the first Catholic camp, the left, was fading in significance as its loudest partisans lapsed into decrepitude. Besides, insofar as the loudest of all were female religious and laywomen, they had essentially won. There were no priestesses, but from the chanceries of major dioceses to “extraordinary ministers” to directors of parish religious education programs, women were running things. The face of the Church in the U.S. was female. Then, the third Catholic camp also shrank when Pope Benedict made access to the traditional Mass possible for most who really wanted it, outside some rural areas and often even there. Now an essay by the eminent Catholic historian Eamon Duffy (“Who Is the Pope?” New York Review of Books, February 19) has made me more sharply aware of what has happened: Where there used to be three camps of Catholics there are now two.

(Throughout this commentary I speak only of Catholics who accept that the Holy Spirit continued to operate in all recent conclaves, as in earlier ones, and that therefore the election of true popes was not thwarted by any human agency. If it is contended that an election was subverted by a supernatural agency, an obviously evil one, it has to be supposed that this agency was stronger than He Who is All Good and thus is subject to evil, and that therefore the latter is the controlling power in the universe. No one calling himself Catholic can believe that. But isn’t Satan “prince of this world”? Yes, he is, the world being as it is — full of human beings. However, unlike God, in whose very Being we “live and move and have our being,” he does not have power over any individual except one who welcomes it, which is what a person does when, deciding to sin, he refuses the protective grace of God.)

Back to the two camps. As Duffy sees things, and I concur, the first was exemplified by Pope Benedict. He saw that the Faith had become marginal in the life of the formerly Christian West, and saw it as due to the unbelief of too many who claimed to be Catholic or, if not unbelief, at least belief too thin for them to live the Faith they professed. Their real mindset and way of life was as materialist as that of everybody else in modern secular consumerist society. His corrective prescription was a Church that would be stronger in her repudiation of the dominant culture, though after the loss of much dead wood inevitably smaller than she had been — a leaner, tougher Church. In my view the support Benedict gave to the revival of the historical liturgy figured in this. The Church might become smaller but the grandeur of the ancient liturgical practices, especially in a pontifical setting (the throne, the richer vestments, the solemnity) would lend stature as well as glorify God. Whether or not I’m right about that, Benedict’s call was clear. It was to Catholics, some number of Catholics, to believe and live as they ought, which is to say at a higher level than most do.

As for the second camp, Duffy doesn’t give it a name. I’ll call it the camp of compassion. Why its primary concerns have become as they are should be comprehensible, even if some of its solutions are regarded as misguided, to anyone who has lived or traveled in what used to be called the Third World, where most of the world’s Catholics live. I have not spent a great deal of time in those parts but have seen, if only in passing, what lies on the outskirts of Manila, Mexico City, Lima and Pope Francis’ hometown of Buenos Aires. It may not be quite as deeply squalid as what faced Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta but it is a poverty more wretched than can be seen anywhere in Europe or North America outside, perhaps, some of our Native American reservations. A Catholic who sees it for himself and would be unmoved has to ignore what Our Lord had to say about the poor. They may always be with us, like war, but that doesn’t relieve us of the duty in charity to succor them when we can or, when it comes to war, to seek peace.

Pope Francis clearly is of the second camp. To him this means, first of all, dealing with people (not simply the poor, but them primarily) less as they should be, but more as they actually are, considering that when sheer physical survival can be a daily struggle there won’t be much energy left for lifting up the heart, as we talk about doing in Mass. They may also seek consolation or distraction in ways we might condemn, like the comfort and pleasure humans can offer one another, because that’s all that is available to them.

Let me tell a story to illustrate what I’m trying to get at, and what I think Pope Francis is about. I remember a conversation I had years ago with the late Fr. Enrique Rueda. Some readers may remember him. He came to the U.S. with his family from Cuba after Castro took over, was eventually ordained by Cardinal Cooke of New York for the Archbishop of Havana, and became well known as the author of a book, The Homosexual Network, an expose of how organized homosexuals were using the cover of religion to advance their social and political agenda. Father lived in Washington, D.C., in the 1980s but without ever being assigned by a local ordinary to any parish because of his “rigid orthodoxy”. That the ordinaries of the day put up with him at all was because he spoke Spanish and could therefore help minister to the region’s growing Hispanic population.

A young Hispanic couple asked Father to marry them. They were in the U.S. illegally and she was pregnant. Father couldn’t get permission to use a church for a wedding on the grounds the couple didn’t belong to any parish, hadn’t taken a requisite course of instruction for marriage, and couldn’t document that they were baptized. “My God!” Father cried to me. “We’re lucky they want to get married!”

I don’t know off-hand what they were, but doubtless the local chanceries had their reasons for denying permission. That is irrelevant here. The point is that at that moment a priest who was “rigidly orthodox” doctrinally was in practice in the camp of a pope who is quoted by Duffy as saying that the Church should not be afraid if “its shoes get soiled by the mud of the streets.” Francis is right about that. Life can be messy. Not everyone says morning and evening prayers. Some who do are self-righteous prigs. Christ scandalized them when He sat down to eat with “publicans and sinners” instead of at their table. “They that are well have no need of a physician, but they that are sick,” He said, ignoring for the moment that the Pharisaical, hypocrites though they be, also have souls to save.

Will the two existing camps be reconciled? Faith tells me they will, though it will be difficult, not least of all because Pope Francis’ position puts him at loggerheads with the liberals who call themselves, in the U.S. political context, conservative — those who seek, even by force of arms if necessary, to make the world safe for the Fortune 500. They pretend their tide will lift all boats, but not merely will the rich become so much richer that already ninety-five individuals control as much wealth as fifty percent of the rest of the world’s population, they risk reducing everybody including themselves to a moral squalor more deadly to the soul than the conditions of a Third-World slum, or the situation of a couple living together but wishing to marry.

How will the two existing camps reconcile? It wasn’t an accident that I earlier mentioned Indian reservations. Here I am thinking in historical terms, of what actually exists today contrasted to what was begun when there was no Christian presence in North America except the Catholic one. The Catholic Spanish and French who would found St. Augustine, Nouvelle Orleans, St. Louis, San Antonio, Santa Fe, San Diego and San Francisco before the U.S. existed could do so because predecessors did not simply baptize Native Americans, the first thing that had to be done, and then catechize them. They also taught them animal husbandry, the cultivation of crops, the manufacture of goods, construction of buildings and also the arts (especially architecture, music and painting). In a word, there was material and spiritual uplift. They are not incompatible. In truth they are two sides of the same Catholic religious-social-political coin as long as the one side doesn’t forget that failure to nurture the inner man will produce a half-man and the other doesn’t try to turn the world outside the monastery into a monastery.

The latter aren’t good for society because they are too apt to turn into Savonarola with his bonfires of the vanities burning canvases by Botticelli. The former, those driven blindly by compassion, aren’t good for it either precisely because, their minds clouded, they are too apt to neglect the inner man, the one who will pray not for things but in order simply to spend time with God. With the misguidedly compassionate the result in the political order is a Ted Kennedy, the “liberal lion” obsessed with passage of a universal health-care measure but whom no one would accuse of being a faithfully practicing Catholic any more than his brother Jack who began the U.S. involvement in Vietnam and approved the overthrow of President Diem for dreaming to make his Asian country Catholic.

That’s the political order. In religion the compassionate are exemplified by the missionaries we’ve had for decades, ones dedicated to nothing but material uplift and the poor’s “empowerment” and the last remnants of whom now stand around wringing their hands as they watch millions head into Evangelical sects because that’s where they can hear Christ preached.

Is Pope Francis overcome by compassion, wanting nothing except to make things easier not simply for the poor but also the divorced, those who parade a sexually immoral lifestyle, and other troubled folk? He is compassionate, but I’d say no, not overcome, not on the basis of what can be read in official texts instead of news fed to the world by its electronic screens. His devotion to Our Lady is especially striking, as when he talked a couple of months ago in remarks that received no publicity (there being about them no conflict or sensation and thus no news) that his first act upon awakening is to touch a statuette of her with a little prayer that she help him get through the day ahead. How many of his critics, or any of the rest of us, start the day like that?

The question touches on my main point, at last. The work begun by missionaries in pre-U.S. America can one day be completed, and even on a worldwide scale, but only with sufficient faith. That is, only with the confidence that we may not understand, but God knows what He is doing by allowing in the life of His Church the doctrinal and then liturgical disarray that have marked it for more than a century and especially in the fifty years since Vatican II, that seemed to abate in recent time but now, in the eyes of some, threatens again.

If this faith needs fortifying, it should be enough to observe that there do exist, perhaps not where you happen to live and worship but elsewhere, in parishes and other communities, Catholic men and women led by stalwart priests who quietly, calmly, with saints as their model and no sense of being beleaguered, carry on as those who would be saints have always done: trying to draw closer to God in this life in order to be with Him for eternity.

In any event, without this faith, can it truly be said we are of the Faith?

People, the sky is not falling. In the time of the bad priest Arius, one bishop, Saint Athanasius, stood alone against the world and was excommunicated by a pope for doing so. Yet the Church survived. In the time of the bad monk Luther, scores of bad bishops and thousands of bad priests led millions out of the Church into Protestantism. Yet the Church survived. You don’t think she can survive Cardinal Kasper? We may not know exactly how the Church will look thirty, fifty or one hundred years from now or in five hundred, but know she has a mandate for eternity and therefore will be.