Out on a Limb

by Andrew Sullivan

  But, of course, there is. There is something quite stupendously new—as Catholics and especially non-Catholics have sensed. No pope emerges and immediately changes teachings that have been integral to decades and centuries of Christian practice and belief. To expect such is to misunderstand the very nature of the Church and its slow, internal means of reflection, renewal, and reform. But without such specific measures, what can we point to? What actually is this newness that cannot quite be summarized by specific, immediate injunctions?

  Perhaps the simplest way to understand what’s new is to address a first-order question: What is Francis’s own understanding of the office he now holds, and how is it different from his predecessors’? Many non-Catholics and some of the most fervent Catholics see the papacy as the defining institution of the Church—even imparting to it an infallibility it has rarely claimed to exercise. The papacy is both the final arbiter of truth or falsehood within the Catholic universe and also a pragmatic institution, designed to bring a vast and often-unruly flock into uniformity. Its power within the Church has waxed and waned over the centuries—vying with local bishops, national bishops’ conferences, and more, all the way down to divergent practices from parish to parish—but it became a rallying institution for traditionalists in their fight against the modern world in the nineteenth century—and has remained so ever since. Since it can be the only effective tool for order in the Church, it has long been central to the project of orthodoxy—and it got a new lease of extraordinary life under Pope John Paul II and his successor, Benedict XVI.

  Enter Francis. In his immediately famous interview published in English by the Jesuit magazine America, the new pope was asked how he would like to describe himself as a way of introduction:

  The pope stares at me in silence. I ask him if this is a question that I am allowed to ask.… He nods that it is, and he tells me: “I do not know what might be the most fitting description.… I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner.”

  Now this is not doctrinally new. Every pope is a sinner, just as every human being is. But not every pope has immediately and instinctively defined himself as such. Not every pope introduces himself by abandoning every trace of inherited, acquired authority that comes with the office itself and begins from scratch, as a human being, as a sinner. In fact, from the very beginning of his Pontificate, Francis has consciously abandoned the idea of papal authority as the moral force behind his words and actions. Some of this is in gestures—his refusal to live in the papal palace, for example, preferring to live in the hostel he stayed in while attending the conclave to elect a new pope; his preference for simple vestments in stark contrast to his predecessor’s ornate and bedazzled costumes; and his eschewal of the honorifics associated with papal authority in favor of the simple title “Bishop of Rome.”

  Some of it is in words. I was struck by the first he spoke as pope. On the balcony, before vast crowds, he said, “Brothers and sisters, good evening”—an almost informal, colloquial greeting. Then: “You all know that the duty of the conclave was to give a bishop to Rome. It seems that my brother cardinals have gone almost to the ends of the Earth to get him… but here we are. The diocesan community of Rome now has its bishop. Thank you!” Again: he almost goes out of his way to speak to equals, not subjects, and with a touch of humor. And notice again the downplaying of the role of pope: “a bishop to Rome.” He prayed for his predecessor, on traditional lines, but then broke the rules again:

  And now I would like to give the blessing, but first—first I ask a favor of you: before the bishop blesses his people, I ask you to pray to the Lord that he will bless me: the prayer of the people asking the blessing for their bishop. Let us make, in silence, this prayer: your prayer over me.

  In that simple gesture, he reversed roles with the crowd. He was not there to bless them until they had prayed for him—and that was a request, a favor, not an instruction. In a vast public spectacle, we stumbled immediately upon intimacy. And that intimacy has continued.

  How many popes, for example, have spoken of their internal spiritual experiences in the conclave and after? From the America interview:

  [Francis] tells me that when he began to realize that he might be elected, on Wednesday, March 13, during lunch, he felt a deep and inexplicable peace and interior consolation come over him, along with a great darkness, a deep obscurity about everything else. And those feelings accompanied him until his election later that day.

  Then an insight from when he first realized he had been elected, from a dialogue with Eugenio Scalfari, the atheist founder of La Repubblica, who paraphrased Francis’s remarks from memory. Francis:

  Before I accepted I asked if I could spend a few minutes in the room next to the one with the balcony overlooking the square. My head was completely empty and I was seized by a great anxiety. To make it go away and relax I closed my eyes and made every thought disappear, even the thought of refusing to accept the position, as the liturgical procedure allows.

  I closed my eyes and I no longer had any anxiety or emotion. At a certain point I was filled with a great light. It lasted a moment, but to me it seemed very long. Then the light faded, I got up suddenly and walked into the room where the cardinals were waiting and the table on which was the act of acceptance. I signed it.…

  Anyone blessed with a mystical experience will know what he’s speaking about. His prayer here is almost Buddhist—making “every thought disappear.” But what’s more striking than the simpleness of this meditation is how willing he is to open up in public about the deepest moments in his interior life, to divest the papacy of any veiled mystique or authority, and to relate this moment of mysticism not in an encyclical or a papal audience, but to an atheist in a newspaper.

  The importance of this only truly hits home when you consider the project of his two predecessors in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church’s first profound attempt to grapple with the challenges of modernity in a way that was not entirely defensive and afraid. This was the council that gave us the Mass in the vernacular, that recognized the importance of religious freedom, that opened up the avenues of ecumenical dialogue, that attempted to recover the wisdom of the early Church, that brought Scripture back more powerfully into the Catholic conversation, and that finally came to terms with the original sin of the Church: anti-Semitism.

  Both John Paul II and Benedict XVI were creatures of this council—with Benedict, then Joseph Ratzinger, known at the time as being sympathetic to reform, even serving as a theological consultant to the council. But in the wake of confusion over the council’s implementation, liturgical excesses, theological heresies, and declining church attendance, and as the sexual revolution took ever-firmer root in the West, retrenchment arrived. Pope Paul VI unilaterally doubled down against the pill in 1968 and the young Polish pope who followed in the Reagan-Thatcher era went further still. While never denying the centrality of the moment when Pope John XXIII opened the doors and windows of the Church to the modern world in 1962, both John Paul II and Benedict XVI were intent on correcting what they both viewed as its dangers to orthodoxy. In response to new dialogues about modernity, women, sexuality, and liberation theology, John Paul II and his chief theological enforcer, Ratzinger, rebuilt Catholic doctrine around a newly powerful and authoritative papacy and a rigid, unchangeable set of rules regarding faith and morals. The newly potent papacy, its once-again unquestionable doctrines emanating from Ratzinger’s own Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, was intent on suppressing heresies of various kinds, monitoring the universities, seminaries, and religious groups for signs of dissent, and reasserting traditional Catholicism against what both men saw as the unraveling of uniformity in the 1960s and 1970s.

  They buttressed this increasingly top-down, centralized, thoroughly orthodox governance with the elevation of ultra-conservative trends in the Church, from Opus Dei, with its practices of physical mortification, to th
e Legionaries of Christ, headed by the notorious child molester Marcial Maciel, and the reactionary Society of Saint Pius X, which included a Holocaust denier among its luminaries. The key to restoring the Church’s moral authority and doctrinal orthodoxy was, for both John Paul II and Benedict XVI, a centralized church, where all roads led to the Vatican, and where every bishop was elevated according to his unquestioned dedication to the restorationist project.

  And this is the most striking and immediate change since Francis’s election. The new pope has not just repudiated that legacy of a supreme pontiff in gestures; he has emphatically reversed it in words and acts, both formal and informal. In his recent Apostolic Exhortation, “The Joy of the Gospel,” Francis writes explicitly of the limits of his own influence on the Church:

  Nor do I believe that the papal magisterium should be expected to offer a definitive or complete word on every question which affects the Church and the world. It is not advisable for the Pope to take the place of local Bishops in the discernment of every issue which arises in their territory. In this sense, I am conscious of the need to promote a sound “decentralization.”

  To repeat: what is said by the papal magisterium is neither definitive nor complete for the whole Church. The voice of the Bishop of Rome is one voice among many. This is a clear and blunt unwinding of a core project for his predecessors, an emphatic return to the themes of the Second Vatican Council. Francis acknowledges that this may mean all sorts of unpredictable ideas, arguments, and practices emerging in the Church again, as the firm papal grip on orthodoxy is relaxed:

  God’s word is unpredictable in its power. The Gospel speaks of a seed which, once sown, grows by itself, even as the farmer sleeps. The Church has to accept this unruly freedom of the word, which accomplishes what it wills in ways that surpass our calculations and ways of thinking.

  It’s worth noting the parable from which the metaphor of the seed comes:

  This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain—first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head.

  The papacy cannot control the word or the work of God. It has an “unruly freedom.” Few ideas were more anathema to the Church as understood by Joseph Ratzinger. For Ratzinger, “unruly freedom” was the problem, not the solution. But notice also the premise of this parable—in my emphasis. The farmer does not know how the seed grows. It is a mystery. And the second great correction of Benedict, after the abrupt removal of the papacy from its authoritarian pedestal, is an epistemology of doubt as the central truth of faith.

  Benedict XVI and John Paul II focused on restoring dogmatic certainty as the counterpart to papal authority. Francis is arguing that both, if taken too far, can be sirens leading us away from God, not ensuring our orthodoxy but sealing us off in calcified positions and rituals that can come to mean nothing outside themselves. He is not shy about saying this, even though the contrast with his immediate—and still-living—predecessor is close to shocking:

  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. The great leaders of the people of God, like Moses, have always left room for doubt. You must leave room for the Lord, not for our certainties; we must be humble.

  Uncertainty is in every true discernment that is open to finding confirmation in spiritual consolation.

  Or in blunter fashion:

  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.

  Perhaps another way to describe this would be a profound critique of the desiccated promise of fundamentalism. Fundamentalism requires an absolute, unchanging revelation of truth in every particular. It is Truth beyond history, outside of time, revealed definitively and unquestionable in every detail. In its Protestant forms, it can mean a biblical literalism in which every single word in the Bible is to be understood as empirically true. In more recent Catholic formulations, it means that the Truth (and it is always with a capital T) is only securely located in an infallible, authoritative vicar of Christ on Earth. Without that total certainty and absolute authority, we are lost in a miasma of our own relativism, mistaking feelings for facts, sins for wishes. Benedict XVI was intimately familiar with this kind of fundamentalism. The apex of his career before the papacy was being the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Holy Office which was once the Inquisition. In his 1986 disciplining of the theologian Charles Curran, then-prefect Joseph Ratzinger put the rules of his view of the Church this way:

  The faithful must accept not only the infallible magisterium. They are to give the religious submission of intellect and will to the teaching which the supreme pontiff or the college of bishops enunciate on faith and morals when they exercise the authentic magisterium, even if they do not intend to proclaim it with a definitive act.

  That’s an almost totalitarian demand: the religious submission of intellect and will to the “supreme pontiff.” The totality of that submission rests on Ratzinger’s Augustinian notion of divine revelation: it is always a radical gift, it must always be accepted without question, it comes from above to those utterly unworthy below, and we are too flawed, too sinful, too human to question it in even the slightest respect. And if we ever compromise an iota on that absolute, authentic, top-down truth, then we can know nothing as true. We are, in fact, lost forever.

  And yet here are the words of the new Bishop of Rome, speaking of relative truths with Rabbi Abraham Skorka of Argentina in 2010:

  Rabbi, you said one thing, which in part, is certain: we can say what God is not, we can speak of his attributes, but we cannot say what He is. That apophatic dimension, which reveals how I speak about God, is critical to our theology. The English mystics speak a lot about this theme. There is a book by one of them, from the 13th century, The Cloud of Unknowing, that attempts again and again to describe God and always finishes pointing to what He is not.…

  I would also classify as arrogant those theologies that not only attempted to define with certainty and exactness God’s attributes, but also had the pretense of saying who He was.

  The Book of Job is a continuous discussion about the definition of God. There are four wise men that elaborate this theological search and everything ends with Job’s expression: “By hearsay I had heard of you, but now my eye has seen you.” Job’s final image of God is different from his vision of God in the beginning. The intention of this story is that the notion that the four theologians have is not true, because God always is being sought and found. We are presented with this paradox: we seek Him to find Him and because we find Him, we seek Him. It is a very Augustinian game.

  It is only in living that we achieve hints and guesses—and only hints and guesses—of what the divine truly is. And because the divine is found and lost by humans in time and history, there is no reachable truth for humans outside that time and history. We are part of an unfolding drama in which the Christian, far from clinging to some distant, pristine Truth he cannot fully understand, will seek to understand and discern the “signs of the times” as one clue as to how to live now, in the footsteps of Jesus. Or in the words of T. S. Eliot:

  There is only the fight to recover what has been lost

  And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions

  That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.

  For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

  II

  How did this deep shift sud
denly happen? More to the point, how could it have come from a church hierarchy relentlessly selected and promoted for more than thirty years according to fealty to the Ratzinger project? Where, in other words, did Jorge Bergoglio come from?

  The answer is that he was always there. The indispensable English-language biography of the pope, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots by Paul Vallely, provides solid evidence that Bergoglio was the runner-up to Ratzinger in the 2005 conclave. Far from being on the margins of the global Church, Bergoglio was at its very center. He was a wunderkind in the Church in the Western Hemisphere, a Jesuit who swiftly soared through the ranks to become the Provincial Superior for the Society of Jesus throughout Argentina at the tender age of thirty-six, just three months after he had taken his final vows as a Jesuit. He remained in that post for the following six years—years in which the Argentine junta initiated its infamous “dirty war” against perceived enemies of the state, a war that would continue with incalculable human cost from 1976 to 1983.

  The Argentine context is essential in grappling with who Francis is and how he became the leader he now presents to the world. It helps explain why the American political scene has difficulty placing him on its usual right-left spectrum. And it also gives us an insight into a crisis in his spiritual and moral life, a crucible from which he emerged a changed man.