#403: Pope Francis: My Kind of Traditionalist—Part 2

It is no mystery why Pope Francis’ interview sparked such rapid and widespread commentary.  For in one fell swoop, he took direct aim at all three flawed tendencies of the last generation of Catholic officialdom: Fetishism, Puritanism, and Proof-testing of Vatican II.  The result was a “triple play” against any distortion of Catholic tradition or the legacy of Vatican II.

Against Puritanism: Ecclesiastical fetishism not only reduced the faith to a small set of obsessions, it also justified attacks on Catholics who did not share those obsessions.

Francis openly disagrees with anyone who thinks that church reform means reducing the flock to a smaller, more faithful few.  Asked about his view of the Church, Francis begins with the image of the people:

The image of the church I like is that of the holy, faithful people of God. This is the definition I often use, and then there is that image from the Second Vatican Council’s ‘Dogmatic Constitution on the Church’ (No. 12). Belonging to a people has a strong theological value. In the history of salvation, God has saved a people. There is no full identity without belonging to a people. No one is saved alone, as an isolated individual, but God attracts us looking at the complex web of relationships that take place in the human community. God enters into this dynamic, this participation in the web of human relationships….The people itself constitutes a subject. And the church is the people of God on the journey through history, with joys and sorrows.

Expanding on that, he makes a clear that this people constitutes an expansive, open community:

This church with which we should be thinking is the home of all, not a small chapel that can hold only a small group of selected people. We must not reduce the bosom of the universal church to a nest protecting our mediocrity. And the church is Mother; the church is fruitful. It must be. You see, when I perceive negative behavior in ministers of the church or in consecrated men or women, the first thing that comes to mind is: ‘Here’s an unfruitful bachelor’ or ‘Here’s a spinster.’ They are neither fathers nor mothers, in the sense that they have not been able to give spiritual life.

And this means we need church leaders who draw others in with a patience that ensures that “no one is left behind”:

“How are we treating the people of God? I dream of a church that is a mother and shepherdess. The church’s ministers must be merciful, take responsibility for the people and accompany them like the Good Samaritan, who washes, cleans and raises up his neighbor. This is pure Gospel. God is greater than sin. The structural and organizational reforms are secondary—that is, they come afterward. The first reform must be the attitude.

It also means we need leaders ready and able to go after every “lost sheep”:

The people of God want pastors, not clergy acting like bureaucrats or government officials. The bishops, particularly, must be able to support the movements of God among their people with patience, so that no one is left behind. But they must also be able to accompany the flock that has a flair for finding new paths.

“Instead of being just a church that welcomes and receives by keeping the doors open, let us try also to be a church that finds new roads, that is able to step outside itself and go to those who do not attend Mass, to those who have quit or are indifferent.

This new pope seeks, not a purer, smaller, more dogmatically correct Church, but a bigger, more open, more merciful Church. 

Shades of John XXIII!

Against Proof-texting of Vatican II.  Asked about the legacy of Vatican II, Francis offers a “big picture” view of the Council as a historical event bigger than its texts:

Vatican II was a re-reading of the Gospel in light of contemporary culture. Vatican II produced a renewal movement that simply comes from the same Gospel. Its fruits are enormous. Just recall the liturgy. The work of liturgical reform has been a service to the people as a re-reading of the Gospel from a concrete historical situation.

He acknowledges that, even 50 years after the council, people still argue about “hermeneutics” (that is, how to interpret its decisions)--but he insists that its “irreversible” impact is above such disputes:

Yes, there are hermeneutics of continuity and discontinuity, but one thing is clear: the dynamic of reading the Gospel, actualizing its message for today—which was typical of Vatican II—is absolutely irreversible.

He even doubts that such disputes can be perfectly settled, since certainty is beyond us:

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.

He then takes aim at those who insist that our task now is to restore a perfect, secure form of Catholicism:

If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist, if he wants everything clear and safe, then he will find nothing. Tradition and memory of the past must help us to have the courage to open up new areas to God. Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal ‘security,’ those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists­—they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way, faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies. I have a dogmatic certainty: God is in every person’s life. God is in everyone’s life. Even if the life of a person has been a disaster, even if it is destroyed by vices, drugs or anything else—God is in this person’s life. You can, you must try to seek God in every human life. Although the life of a person is a land full of thorns and weeds, there is always a space in which the good seed can grow. You have to trust God.

Finally, Francis rejects the view that we promote the Council’s legacy (or the mission of the Church) by lamenting the state of the world around us:

There is a temptation to seek God in the past or in a possible future. God is certainly in the past because we can see the footprints. And God is also in the future as a promise. But the ‘concrete’ God, so to speak, is today. For this reason, complaining never helps us find God. The complaints of today about how ‘barbaric’ the world is—these complaints sometimes end up giving birth within the church to desires to establish order in the sense of pure conservation, as a defense. No: God is to be encountered in the world of today…God manifests himself in historical revelation, in history. Time initiates processes, and space crystallizes them. God is in history, in the processes.

Clearly, the new pope prefers the hopeful tone that Vatican II gave to Catholicism’s dialogue with contemporary world:

Christian hope is not a ghost and it does not deceive. It is a theological virtue and therefore, ultimately, a gift from God that cannot be reduced to optimism, which is only human. God does not mislead hope; God cannot deny himself. God is all promise.

This new pope is proving once again that Catholicism can advance in history even when its teachings do not change.  He is showing us that a new attitude, a new style, a new emphasis on the real priorities can renew the core of our tradition and free us from the traps of a fetish-faith, a puritanical Catholicism, and a literalist and legalist reading of Vatican II’s renewal of the Church..

Is Pope Francis resetting the Church’s course? Yes—he is setting us back to the future of Vatican II’s true legacy. If he succeeds, the wisdom of Catholic tradition will be more available—and more accessible—to the people of our world and our time.

   © Bernard   F. Swain PhD 2013

#402: Pope Francis: My Kind of Traditionalist--Part 1

Pope Francis provoked headlines and commentaries by the hundreds last week by his lengthy interview with an Italian Jesuit, subsequently published in English by America magazine.  One result is obvious: a fresh gust of positive PR for the Catholic Church, which has suffered almost constant bad press for the last 10 years or more.  The second result is a question: Is the Catholic Church about to change course?

For the first time in many years, I am beginning to feel optimistic about the future of Catholic leadership.

Fifty years ago tomorrow (September 29, 1963) the newly-elected Pope Paul VI opened the second session of Vatican Council II by repeating Pope John XXIII’s call for “a second Pentecost” and giving it four priorities: A better understanding of the Catholic Church; Church reforms; Advancing the unity of Christianity; and Dialogue with the world.

This brought a sigh of relief to millions who had held their breath after John died in June 1963, fearing that his vision for the Church’s future might have died with him.

In the last six months, Pope Francis has brought a similar sigh of relief to millions who have been fearing (in this case for many long years, not just months) that John’s vision was dying a slow death, dating back 45 years.

For it was only five years after Paul VI re-opened Vatican II that he issued “Humanae Vitae,” his encyclical reaffirming the most recent official teaching on contraception while rejecting any further revisions.  And five years after that, in January 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its infamous “Roe v Wade” decision.

No matter how we view these actions, their combined effect since 1973 has been gravely damaging for American Catholicism.  Taken together, they have divided Catholics and caused a generation of American bishops to encourage the public impression that the American hierarchy is composed chiefly of sex-obsessed celibate men, bent on the self-righteous insistence that only they understand human goodness.

During the 40 years since Roe v Wade, in fact, two more things made matters worse.  First, Catholics who took issue with the official positions on sex-related questions were increasingly labeled “not good Catholics” or “not real Catholics” or even “not Catholic at all.” Second, the outbreak of the sex-abuse scandal beginning in Boston in 2002 sharpened the image of a hierarchy simultaneously obsessed with sex and incompetent to deal with sex.  This undermined their moral authority on virtually all other issues and left them impotent to seed public affairs and policymaking with the wisdom from Catholic tradition.

When progressive Catholics lamented the lost focus on the core of Catholic tradition and invoked the legacy of Vatican II, conservatives derided them for falsifying the Council by citing its “spirit” rather than its “texts,” and claimed Popes John-Paul II and Benedict XVI as champions of a “definitive” or “authoritative” interpretation of Vatican II that promoted “continuity” rather than “rupture.”

The net result of all this polarization has been an official leadership dominated, in the U.S. at least, by three flawed tendencies.

First: Fetishism.  Any fetish obsesses over one small part of something rather than the whole (e.g., desiring someone’s big toe rather than their whole body).  Too often in recent years, U.S. Catholicism’s official leadership has been obsessed with sex-related “culture war” issues like contraception, gay marriage, sex in the media, and abortion, as if they represent the core of Catholic tradition.  Whether intentionally or unwittingly, they have revived the distorted Catholic identity of the pre-Conciliar era, in which Catholics saw their tradition mainly as a moral system, saw morality mainly as a set of rules, and saw rules on sex as the most important ones.  In the extreme, this made Catholicism a fetish-religion for the sex-obsessed.

Second: Puritanism.  As Catholic numbers declined across America, many conservative Catholics seemed satisfied rather than alarmed.  To them, the loss of “cafeteria Catholics” or secularized Catholics simply meant that the Church was purging itself of its impurities.  Once everyone contaminated by contemporary values (rather than “traditional” values) drifted away, the Church would be a smaller, purer, more authentic vessel of God’s will.

Third: Proof-texting.  There is a long practice of Catholic teachers quoting whatever Bible passages can be located to “prove” their point.  This means using Gospel texts out of context and without any historical or literary analysis to gauge the writer’s true message.  This clashes directly with modern Biblical scholarship, which has shown that isolating Biblical texts to prove a point often distorts their real meaning and thus violates the Word of God.

Some Catholic leaders have taken the same approach to the documents of Vatican II.  They will find passages supporting their view and rip them out of their literary and historical context.  Anyone who objects is accused of promoting a mythical, even fictional “spirit” of the Council.

What is lost by such proof-texting is (1) the appreciation of Vatican II as an historical event guided by the Holy Spirit, (2) the recognition that John XXIII proclaimed it to be a rebirth of the Church, (3) the acknowledgement that the Council’s driving themes, named by both John and Paul VI, were mercy and hopeful dialogue with the outside world, and (4) the recognition that the Council texts are imperfect, political documents, often worded to appeal to as broad a base of bishops as possible, and thus often containing contradictory statements.

In short, proof-testing pretends that it is the documents alone, rather than the Council itself, which was divinely inspired. The documents become self-defining, rather than being defined by the actual history of the Council.

Thus proof-texting the Council allows conservative leaders to portray the Council as they wish it had been: as an event that restated rather than transformed Catholic tradition.  Often this also allows them to portray John-Paul II and Benedict XVI as historical giants whose groundbreaking work rightly overshadows (or at least defines) the Council.

With all this in mind, it is no mystery why Pope Francis’ interview sparked such rapid and widespread commentary.  For in one fell swoop, he took direct aim at all three of these flawed tendencies.  The result was a “triple play” against any distortion of Catholic tradition or the legacy of Vatican II.

Let’s see how.

Against Fetishism.  Pope Francis clearly rejects the idea that the Church’s mission can be advanced by focusing narrowly on a small piece of Catholic tradition.  But he knows that this has happened:

The church sometimes has locked itself up in small things, in small-minded rules. The most important thing is the first proclamation: Jesus Christ has saved you. And the ministers of the church must be ministers of mercy above all.

Specifically, he rejects a strategy that plunges the Church into the “culture wars” by ripping some “traditional values” out of their real traditional context:

We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. This is not possible. I have not spoken much about these things, and I was reprimanded for that. But when we speak about these issues, we have to talk about them in a context. The teaching of the church, for that matter, is clear and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time.

 Francis makes it clear that a focus must remain on the core of Catholic tradition, which means keeping our priorities straight:

The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently. Proclamation in a missionary style focuses on the essentials, on the necessary things: this is also what fascinates and attracts more, what makes the heart burn, as it did for the disciples at Emmaus. We have to find a new balance; otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel. The proposal of the Gospel must be more simple, profound, radiant. It is from this proposition that the moral consequences then flow.

The point here is that too much official leadership has conveyed an unbalanced view of Catholicism by stressing moral principles over the whole message of the gospel:

The proclamation of the saving love of God comes before moral and religious imperatives. Today sometimes it seems that the opposite order is prevailing…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.

The new pope could not be clearer: the fetishism that reduces Catholicism must give way to a focus on “the heart” of our faith.

NEXT: Francis takes aim at Catholic Puritanism and Proof-texting of the Council.

  © Bernard   F. Swain PhD 2013

#401: Is the Just War Theory Winning?

The recent crisis over chemical weapons in Syria illustrates the growing relevance of Catholic Social Teaching on war.

 I first learned about the “Just War Theory” during my sophomore year in college.  As an 18 year old male with a draft card in my wallet and a war raging in Vietnam, I had a personal stake in knowing what the Church taught about war, military service, and conscientious objection.

In the 45 years since, I have written and lectured about the Just War Theory (JWT) countless times.  Often I have found that my Catholic audience was not well enough informed about JWT to make it a practical tool for citizens to form their moral judgments about any specific war policy.

Moreover I have had to point out that, while JWT’s purpose is to impose moral limits on war, it has never actually prevented one.  But we may be getting closer to the day when it will—and the Syria crisis illustrates how.

First, some preliminary remarks about the theory itself:

Developed over 15 centuries beginning with Saint Augustine, JWT evolved as an alternative moral framework to both Christian pacifism (espoused by Jesus and the earliest Christians, and still embraced by millions of Christians today) and the anything-goes “Holy War/Crusades” approach (which the Church now rejects). JWT represents a kind of middle ground between a prohibition of all wars and a “carte blanche” for any war.

This theory presumes that peace is always our moral imperative, and that going to war must always be justified as an exception to the rule. The burden of proof is on those who argue for war, since the moral presumption is ALWAYS in favor of peace.

The theory aims not simply to determine whether a war is “justified,” but whether it is morally lawful—after all, the Latin word “JUS,” from which we get “justice,” means “LAW.”

To justify a war as morally lawful, any military action must meet two different sets of conditions: jus ad bellum  (conditions to justify going to war), and jus in bello  (conditions to justify the conduct of that war). To claim that one is engaged in a “just war” one must argue that all of the conditions in both sets are being met at every stage of the war.

Some scholars argue that the conditions set by JWT should not be applied as a simple “checklist,” but increasingly public figures are doing just that, and to good effect.  In the Syria crisis, leaders from Barack Obama to the U.S. Congress to the UN to Vladimir Putin have all cited elements of JWT to support their positions.  The overall result has been to force a sharper debate with clearer objectives and finally a more restrained approach that has made war less likely.

A brief check of some major portions of JWT illustrates this.

Just Cause?  Self-defense is the only just cause for war that is formally recognized in modern international law.  This does not apply to a U.S. intervention in Syria.

But recent conflicts have also raised the possibility of a new just cause—“humanitarian intervention”­­—where events harming innocent people within a sovereign state justify foreign intervention. 

In his 2008 address to the U.N. General Assembly, Pope Benedict XVI endorsed the notion of a “responsibility to protect” innocent populations from harm.  This is not yet an established norm in the Church’s JWT, nor in international law, but we may be witnessing the JWT’s evolution to include this as a just cause.  If that happens, the Syria crisis will have contributed to that evolution.

Discrimination?  JWT requires that non-combatants must remain immune from attack.  Thus killing soldiers may be justified, but not killing babies.  Hence the prohibition against weapons of mass destruction in general, and chemical weapons in particular: they kill everyone without discrimination.

But while JWT prohibits our use of such weapons, it does not authorize attack on those who do.  This raises again the question of humanitarian intervention.  Do we have the right to use violence to prevent the use of prohibited weapons in order to protect civilians? 

Thus, in targeting chemical weapons while refusing to back the rebels in Syria’s civil war, Obama was pushing the boundaries of JWT (which may now accept humanitarian intervention) without going beyond them (JWT does not accept intervening in civil war).

Lawful Authority?  Since Pearl Harbor, Congress’ constitutional authority to declare war has been ignored - - a breach of JWT.  By going to Congress, Obama made a gesture toward the rule of law.  But those who insisted on the support of the U.N. also had JWT on their side, since it requires any use of arms to be authorized by the relevant authorities, and international law makes intervening in a sovereign state a U.N. matter.

Reasonable Hope of Success?  U.N. inspector David Kay has admitted that, despite his skepticism, past attempts to deter a nation’s use of chemical weapons by force of arms have been effective; he now regrets we did not stop Saddam Hussein’s chemical attacks and believes we could use force of arms to stop Syria.

Last Resort? All peaceful means of addressing conflict must be tried until exhausted, before one may justify recourse to war.

When people cry “America is not the world’s cop,” they are correct.  But JWT argues that violence against another state may be justifiable precisely because the world does not have an international police system that can enforce international law.  (Technically, resolutions of the U.N. Security council are legally binding, but have often proven unenforceable.)

Still, stepping into that vacuum to play “temporary cop” cannot be justified until all other means are exhausted.  Thus Russia’s insistence on U.N. action and a diplomatic compromise were, ironically, truer to JWT than the U.S. proclamation that the UN was useless.

Don’t forget: if the U.S. had waited in 2003 for U.N. inspectors to finish looking for WMDs in Iraq, the entire Iraq war could have been avoided.

Proportionality?  Would intervention do more harm than good?  Here strong arguments surfaced on both sides.  Former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta thinks a strike against Syria would accomplish the goal of preventing more chemical weapons attacks, but former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said a strike would be like ‘‘throwing gasoline on an extremely complex fire in the Middle East.”

In case we have forgotten the lesson of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan should have reminded us that predicting war outcomes is notoriously difficult.  This makes the last resort rule that much more binding. 

So letting the U.N. inspectors finish their work (recording on September 16 the evidence against the Syrian government) and waiting for a U.N. resolution both reflect compliance with JWT.

All in all, it seems that many participants evoked pieces of JWT to back their positions.   
Ironically, the overall effect was to promote JWT itself and reduce the threat of further U.S. War--despite the political fallout: lower polls for Obama, disgruntled Congress members in both parties, mixed results for U.S. diplomats like UN Ambassador Samantha Power and Secretary of State John Kerry, a political coup for Putin, a reprieve for Syria’s Assad, and a setback for the rebels.

It is impossible to imagine the diplomatic solution that emerged last weekend if the principles of JWT had not been invoked by so many parties.

It is too soon to know how all this will play out in Syria, but for the longer run at least three things seem clear: (1) none of this promises to end the civil war raging in Syria; that crisis remains untouched; (2) the case against chemical weapons is now stronger than ever (Syria now admits having them and agrees to give them up and sign the international convention prohibiting them); (3) the basic terms of the Catholic Just War Theory are becoming the common currency of public discourse on war.

The just war theory is no longer the Church’s intellectual property, of course.  No one ever copyrighted it.  But on the day JWT actually prevents a war (and Syria might provide that day), the Catholic Church will have made a profound historical contribution to the cause of world peace—whether anyone notices and not!

  © Bernard   F. Swain PhD 2013