Dispatches from the present
How does one teach a church of 1.4 billion people? That is, after all, part of the office of the Pope: the “ordinary universal magisterium,” that ponderous slab of Catholic theological Kunstsprache, is simply the Pope’s duty to teach the entire Catholic Church and the entire world. How to carry out that office in a Church divided in so many ways—by nationality, by politics, by thousands of languages—and how to do so when doctrine can seem so abstracted from people’s immediate needs are questions that makes one understand why, perhaps, the person entrusted with this job might need God’s help.
Pope Francis, it seems, had some sense of this problem, because some of his first acts after being installed as pope were to dramatically scale down the customary lifestyle of the office. The Apostolic Palace became an office and diplomatic meeting spot, with Francis himself residing in a small apartment in the nearby Domus Sanctae Marthae, a guesthouse built to house the cardinals during a conclave. The famous red papal shoes, restored to use by Benedict XVI, were abandoned for plain black ones. A few months into his papacy, reports emerged of his sneaking out into Rome to talk with the city’s homeless and give them money. What were we supposed to make of this man?
Francis’s media interviews became notorious for their informality; he spoke off the cuff and without the definition and qualification that characterized the public interviews of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the two previous popes of the modern media era, both of whom had been academics. “Who am I to judge?” he replied when asked about a purportedly gay priest. The word pastoral became a favorite of Francis’s defenders: he was speaking, they would say, not as a lecturer but as a pastor, and perhaps he wasn’t always right on the doctrinal specifics, but he said what people needed to hear. This contrast between a “pastoral” and a “doctrinal” approach came to a head when Francis published “Amoris Laetitia,” his second apostolic exhortation, whose infamous footnote 351 seemed to suggest that people who were divorced and remarried—a state that normally bars a person from the sacraments except in extreme need—might, under certain circumstances, after consultation with their pastor, be admitted to receive Holy Communion.
That contrast between teaching doctrine and pastoring the faithful became inescapable in virtually all subsequent media coverage, which is unfortunate because it’s worthless as a hermeneutic approach. It worked well in a media environment that longed to portray Francis as a modernizing liberal in contrast with the supposedly reactionary Benedict, but even this contrast was founded mostly on the fact that Benedict was a career academic, a German theology professor far more at ease with his old students than with the media; he would far rather teach through his writings. Francis, knowing both the panoptic scrutiny under which the modern papacy operates and his own comparative deficiencies as a theological thinker, opted to teach by how he lived.
This is where the pastoral/doctrinal distinction completely collapses. Francis understood that doctrine must always be expressed in concrete pastoral decisions and that, for better or for worse, the Pope’s own decisions would be taken as particularly expressive. In this he was in full agreement with Benedict—but where Benedict’s teaching by example took place in the liturgical celebration of the Mass, Francis chose to make his day-to-day life a reference point for the Church. In this he followed his namesake, Francis of Assisi, whose life was marked by evangelical poverty: that is, by a poverty chosen not for the sake of personal discipline but for the sake of teaching the world something about who God is. It imitates both the poverty of Christ, who had “no place to rest his head” (Matthew 8:20), and the literal poverty of God the Father, who has no possessions but only gives. It is a way of living in which even private life is directed outward, not as an act to please an audience but as one possible concrete realization of something that exceeds the capacity of speech.
This dedication to embodying what he taught ought to strip away the too-popular delusion that Francis’s teaching was vague or indefinite. If anything, it was scandalously concrete: evangelical living forces us to confront the fact that what is preached about on Sundays or argued about at theological conferences must, at some point, be lived. We may read the story of the Good Samaritan, but to show mercy to others in our lives is to make a deliberate choice about how to do it; it demands a decision about the right way to love someone. The Pope going out into the city of Rome to give alms at night or inviting sex workers to have lunch with him in the Vatican were not major contributions to alleviating poverty or the plight of sex workers, but they showed the world a person who had decided to love other people in such a way that they did not merely hope or suspect but knew that they were, personally and directly, loved.
“The business of the priest,” writes the theologian Herbert McCabe, “is to be one jump ahead of the Christian life of his age; it is his job to be constantly representing to the Christian people and to the world the evangelical, revolutionary significance of their Christian, secular lives.” As befits a bishop who exercises the fullness of the priesthood, the pedagogic and evangelical life that Francis led as Pope offered such a representation. In an age of omnipresent media scrutiny, the actions of a pope will have meaning piled on them whether he wishes or not: his choice is only to teach well or to teach badly. The pedagogic life is not and should not be perfect: it does not offer a complete set of rules for every occasion. What it does offer, what Francis offered, is the assurance that a complete set of rules is not necessary. What is necessary is to show love and mercy to those in front of us, here and now.
Photo credit: Catholic Church England and Wales (Flickr, CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0)