Just when the pundits had Pope Francis down as playing on Team Liberal during his US visit, he had to go and spoil it all on the return flight from Philadelphia, during his off-the-cuff conversation with the press.
He was asked about whether he thought women would ever become Catholic priests and he said no; John Paul II had thought about the matter and closedthe door.
He was asked about Communion for the divorced-and-remarried and he said: “It seems a bit simplistic to me to say that… the solution is the possibility to go to Communion.”
The Vatican’s electronic dispatch helpfully summed that up as ‘Communion is not the solution’, although it’s clear from its more detailed report that Francis stressed he was giving a personal opinion and that he’s interested in looking for effective solutions, not in shutting remarried divorcees out from the sacramental life of the Church.
Still, whatever happened to the man who, asked about gay priests, said: “Who am I to judge?” Or, the very man who had only just told the US Congress to remember the Golden Rule – to treat everyone as they would like to be treated themselves?
The short answer is: nothing’s changed. Francis is still the same man. He had ruled out women priests on another occasion (even adding that John Paul II’s judgement was definitive, despite having no ecclesial authority to say so). His “Who am I to judge?” was clearly addressed to gay priests who remain celibate.
As for his urging Congress to remember the Golden Rule, I shuddered when I heard that. If Congress really had to treatothers the way it treats itself, the number of self-destructive wars and institutional breakdowns in the world would skyrocket.
You get nowhere trying to understand Francis through the prism of US politics. At most, you get a man so self-contradictory you wonder how he can even manage to walk straight.
While the flight back home must have been depressing for liberals, the rage and fury was all on the conservative side before and during the US visit itself.
The Catholic billionaires who help fund the restoration of the major US churches and cathedrals had begun to threaten bishops that they were finding it difficult to support a Church whose leader seemed to care too much about the poor.
The encyclical on climate change was made out to be an attack on the way many of the same philanthropists made their money. The Pope’s statements about immigration were seen as a barely veiled criticism of today’s Republican Party.
The conservative darling on the US Supreme Court, Justice Antonin Scalia, a cradle Catholic, didn’t turn up for the Pope’s appointment with Congress.
In other words, the simple contrast between liberal and conservative cannot help you to begin to understand this Pope, or indeed any other. A contrast invented in the nineteenth century cannot account for the arguments within an institution that began 1,800 years before.
If you want to begin to make sense of Francis, and why he has the impact he does on so many people, then throw out much of what you’ve heard about him
If you want to begin to make sense of Francis, and why he has the impact he does on so many people, then throw out much of what you’ve heard about him – whether it’s the conservative pundit’s accusation that Francis is risking a schism, or, the liberal pundit’s praise that Francis reminds us that true religion is essentially the same and it’s based on loving one’s neighbour as oneself.
Remember, instead, just three things. First, what Francis understands by the Golden Rule is not a recipe for complacency.
It’s not a prescription to letothers enter our comfort zone.It’s not saying that, since we know how we’d like to be treated, therefore we know how we shouldtreat others.
Francis doesn’t just challenge how we should think of others. He challenges how we should think of ourselves. When hevisited a US prison, Francis told the convicts that he came to them as their brother. Decades earlier, on a prison visit, John XXIII had not only introduced himself to the prisoners as “John, your brother”; he matter-of-factly began his address by referring to one of Italy’s most notorious prisons as a “house of God”.
Such words urge us to change how we treat others by helping us to change how we think of ourselves. We all need purification, Francis told the prisoners, and I am the first.
None of this is doctrinal innovation. Its cultural impact is due to something peculiar. It makes long-known doctrine sound fresh, true and authoritative; it makes listeners feel they’re making a discovery for themselves rather than accepting a hand-me-down dogma.
It’s this quality that has made Francis the first Pope in years to be widely considered, in the secularised world, as spiritual as the Dalai Lama, with his “10 Rules of Happiness” circulating on the internet and plastered on office notice-boards around the globe.
It’s the same quality that explains how, in Francis, a traditional piety and old-fashioned attitude to gender roles can co-exist with startling freshness. It’s not his way with words. Rather, it’s how he translates doctrinal words back into flesh and blood.
Second, the thing about Francis, as it was with John XXIII, is that he doesn’t have a worked-out vision for the Church. Like his predecessor, he has an acute sense of the crisis within the Church, and that some things must change if the treasures of the Church are to be saved. John XXIII, let us remember, was also the pope who insisted that teaching in seminaries had to continue to be conducted in Latin; this in the late 1950s.
The fact that men so traditional and – by the standards of their own times – so old-fashioned can also be so prophetic and humane is a reminder of the inestimable value and vitality of the cultural heritage in which they were raised.
But both knew that what they were ushering was a journey of discovery, not something that they themselves had already mapped and planned. Francis himself has made this pointin more than one way, not least by appointing cardinals that represent the Church peripheries rather than some of the major centres.
Finally, replace the contrast between liberals and conservatives with the distinction (proposed by the Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor) between seekers and dwellers.
Dwellers are those Catholics who are so comfortable with the Church as it is, that they are ready to welcome new people only on their own terms.
Seekers might not even be Christian but they’re ready to travel – ready to embark on the journey of self-discovery, whether their starting point is left, right or centre.
There’s no doubt with whom Francis, who is at once modern and traditional, identifies. He has said that, within the Church, disagreement must not be understood as schism. It should be seen as the movement of the Spirit, as long as the participants remain committed to the journey.
ranierfsadni@europe.com