The Ark of the Church

I don’t think that the liberal–conservative dichotomy does much to illuminate the Catholic faith. But it’s a helpful set of categories for understanding American Catholics. What lessons did Francis leave for American conservatives and liberals?

One thing that bothered conservatives about Francis was a perceived lack of theological precision. They saw him as playing fast and loose with words and ideas. This was especially annoying to those formed by Thomistic philosophy, which relies on neatly defined concepts knitted together in a series of necessary logical relationships. Instead of practicing such intellectual discipline, Francis would announce, for example, that the death penalty was now “inadmissible.” That word, “inadmissible,” is in this context ambiguous. Did Francis mean “immoral”? If so, why did the Church previously teach that the death penalty was justifiable in some circumstances? Why did the Papal States keep an executioner on the payroll for years? If “war can easily be chosen by invoking all sorts of allegedly humanitarian, defensive or precautionary excuses,” as Francis once wrote in a footnote, does that mean, then, that war can never be justified? Should we abandon the doctrine of just war? Why did popes call for military intervention during the Siege of Vienna and the Battle of Lepanto? And I’m not even mentioning his most controversial statements.

Most Catholics were unaffected by and probably unaware of these controversies. But the faith of some buckled under the weight of the anguish they caused. If the pope makes “quasi-heretical statements” (to use a term I heard the other day from a traditionalist friend), then how could the Church really be indefectible in matters of faith and morals? If the deposit of faith is a repository of truths, then why is one pope tampering with its contents? Beyond the controversies about specific theological questions, there was a deeper worry that the logical edifice of the Church itself was in question.

In response to these moments of frustrating ambiguity, many conservatives have decided to re-examine the role of papal authority in one’s faith. Others hope, as Bishop Robert Barron put it on the eve of the conclave, for a “quiet papacy” after Francis. Behind these desires is the idea that perhaps we can ignore the pope from now on, that perhaps we can figure out how to iron out the intellectual difficulties of the Faith without him.

I think this is the wrong lesson to take from Pope Francis. To think in this way is to take upon one’s own back the weight of doctrinal interpretation. There’s a reason why we pay bishops to do this for us. What I learned from Pope Francis is to trust the Church the way Noah trusted the ark, as the seas are rising. “Orthodoxy: the most necessary and the least adequate thing in the world,” wrote Henri de Lubac in Paradoxes of Faith. Which is another way of saying that orthodoxy without a robust sense of the Church as a dwelling place is inadequate. Francis lives in our memory because his public gestures communicated a robust sense of Church. His flair for the dramatic—who could forget his global prayer during the pandemic?—pointed toward the real presence of God in the world, toward refuge during a plague.

Those who treat the Church as a watertight system of truth claims will always have to worry about a glitch in the system, a leak in the bow. There is no rest for the Christian heart that has burdened itself with the task of eternal ecclesial vigilance. Peace comes not from trying to fit everything into a system but instead from knowing that intellectual coherence is there, beyond our mind, and is only a part of a greater thing that we call the Church.

On the other hand, many liberals are wont to claim that Pope Francis believed in “liberation theology.” This is an incomplete, and possibly misleading, statement. Francis’s papacy could be seen as the culmination of the experience of faith of an entire continent, and of its political struggle and martyrdom. Liberation theology was an important part of this experience and struggle. The Church in Latin America has been in tension with the region’s political rulers ever since Bartolomé de las Casas blew the whistle on the abuses of the conquistadores. Liberation theology was first and foremost the attempt—formulated by Hispanic scholars schooled in Europe—to once again bring Christian judgement to bear upon political and economic injustice. That many of these theologians did so by applying the philosophy of Karl Marx to Latin American reality is an important but secondary part of the story. Liberation theology’s excessive reliance on Marx was, according to Ratzinger and others, where this movement went wrong. But even Ratzinger himself acknowledged that liberation theology made Christianity politically relevant on a level not seen since the Reformation. While some liberation theologians became guerrilla fighters or joined revolutionary governments, others re-examined their thinking and reconciled with the Church. To give one important example, Gustavo Gutiérrez, who wrote the book titled A Theology of Liberation, reconciled with the institutional church and towards the end of his career co-authored a book with the Ratzingerian Cardinal Gerhard Müller, who called him “one of the great theologians of our time.” Moreover, Pope Francis’s own version of liberation theology he learned from the Argentine Jesuit Juan Carlos Scannone: a less Marxist school of thought called teología del pueblo, which focused on a “people,” rather than the working class, as the revolutionary subject, and on cultural, not only material, conditions. These academic distinctions might seem irrelevant. But they informed Francis’s thinking about Catholic social doctrine, especially how he expresses this doctrine in Laudato si’.

Francis’s social teaching goes against the main materialist thrust of theology of liberation. Gutiérrez et al. wanted, rightly, for the Church to not ignore the unjust material conditions in self-proclaimed Christian republics in Latin America. It wanted the Church to focus on the concrete, earthly necessities of the poor. This school of thought came to encompass ecological concerns, as Laudato si’ shows. But consider the following words from Camilo Torres, a priest who left his parish to lead a guerrilla group in Colombia in the late Sixties. (That guerrilla force—the Ejército de Liberación Nacional—still exists, primarily as a kidnapping and racketeering outfit.) “We discuss whether the soul is mortal or immortal,” wrote Father Torres, “and neglect another point about which we are all in agreement, and that is that extreme poverty is fatal.” This was the type of liberation theology that Christians should reject: one that embraces violence and relegates spiritual questions to secondary status. No one can say that Pope Francis supported this type of liberation theology. In fact, a cursory reading of Laudato si’ reveals a deeply spiritual document, one that roots its hopes for political and ecological renewal in prayer and awareness of God’s love. Today, the utopian dreams of the Sixties and Seventies are dust, and liberals and leftists are less tempted to violence as they are to despair. Francis, whose faith survived utopian disappointment, suggests a way beyond political despair.

Francis surely made many mistakes. Reporters have caught many of them, and others will become easier to see with time. But he also left a positive legacy, which hopefully will outlast any negatives. To conservatives, Francis says: Rest in the ark of the Church. To liberals: Trust in God’s love for the world. These two lessons are related: They contribute to an integrated Christian life.

This essay is part of a symposium on Pope Francis’s life and legacy. Read the rest here.