This Easter brought us more than the news of the Resurrection: it also ushered us into an "interregnum." Easter Day itself marked the completion of Pope Francis' ministry, as he delivered one last blessing and rode through the crowds in St. Peter's Square. He fought the good fight, especially in the final weeks of his life, refusing to take it easy. You could say he died in the saddle. And now we're in between two Popes: the one we are preparing to bury, and the one who will appear in the loggia of St. Peter's in about two weeks, to bless us with his own unique ministry.
Of course, the pundits are falling all over themselves with retrospectives and prognostications, most of which tell us more about the speaker than about the Pope or the needs of the Church. (Thankfully, there are exceptions!) Sometimes I wish I could break into the broadcasts to share the insights I found last year when I was working on a talk for a Pauline meeting. My research led me to a book that had so many "aha!" moments in it I was determined to make the most of it. The Mind of Pope Francis: Jorge Mario Bergoglio's Intellectual Journey was not an easy read. In fact, I had to read it through twice to have read it once, it was so full of philosophy. But it shed immense light on the person and thought of Pope Francis, and showed me that what we saw in his papacy was consistent with what he had always done and taught throughout his priestly ministry. And, despite the claims of his detractors on the right and the naïveté of his left-leaning fans, the Pope's principles owed nothing to subversive left-wing movements, whether intellectual or political. Instead, Francis came to the Chair of Peter with a long, long experience of practice that we could call "active listening." He built this practice by applying the insights of especially two important thinkers:
- the Argentine philosopher Amelia Podetti, an expert on (and sharp critic of) Hegel. Pope Francis got the theme of "peripheries" from her.
- and the German-Italian theologian Romano Guardini (a favorite of Joseph Ratzinger, too), with his reflections on “polar opposites” and the vital importance of holding paradoxes in tension in the face of the temptation to demonize the other and not have to consider their position at all.
Their contributions were so important that I will try to offer a rapid summary of the most important points I was able to garner from the book. Fasten your seatbelts. (All quotes are from the book, unless otherwise noted.)
Let's start in this post with Podetti's contribution:
The “vocation” of Latin America is “[Latin] America [seems to have been] prepared, from its beginnings and by its history…to propose a path of universalization that is different from that of super-technical societies and capable of incorporating them. Its mission and its destiny is to conceive and to bring about unity.”
Podetti: “The appearance of America in history radically changes not only the view but also the meaning of humanity’s journey on earth. The discovery of the ‘New World’ represents, in reality, the discovery of the world in its totality. It is the discovery of the fact that the world was something completely different from what the people of either side had known until then. Universal history really begins with America.”
“The ‘centrality’ of Latin America means a displacement of coordinates, a correction of the envisioned ‘European’ model of the relationship between the center and the periphery. BOTH “poles” are now both center (to itself) and “periphery” (to the other).
“Europe ‘saw’ in a different way after Ferdinando Magellano’s circumnavigation of the earth. Looking at the world from Madrid was not like looking at it from Tierra del Fuego; the view was wider and you could see things that were hidden to those who looked at everything from the ‘center’ of the empire” (Gianni Valenti, Vatican Insider, May 28, 2016).
The US was founded on philosophical principles (“self-evident truths”): that all men are created equal; that all are endowed with unalienable rights (including but not limited to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”); that governments are instituted to secure these rights and receive their “just powers” from the consent of the governed; that it is the right of the people to alter or abolish a form of government and institute a new one “to effect their safety [life] and happiness."
That was in 1776. Meanwhile, Latin American societies had been functioning continuously for over 200 years in cities, territories, and dioceses that were (or had been) part of the Spanish or Portuguese Empires.
So our “American” viewpoint is highly influenced by the Enlightenment, and is more in line with a European mindset than is the case with Latin America, where the OLD WORLD had already established a society before the Enlightenment even took root; even before Protestantism had swept across Europe; before the Council of Trent (1545 and 1563), and where the various indigenous cultures also influenced the development of distinct Latin-American cultural expressions.
Our North American values owe much more to Protestant and enlightenment thought than to Catholicism. Many things we take for granted, and that social media memes tout as “traditional” are not traditional in any objective sense. The United States was a “great experiment,” to use the words of George Washington ("The establishment of our new Government seemed to be the last great experiment for promoting human happiness" George Washington, January 9, 1790.)
Latin American cultures developed more organically from a Baroque-era Catholic matrix, and received the Council of Trent, Vatical I and Vatican II from within that basically unbroken tradition (despite the betrayals of its own culture by socialists in the early 20th century). We are the ones whose culture and cultural values represent a break from tradition (“novus ordo seclorum”). In other words, we should not take our United States values as normative, even though they may seem so to us.
Back to Podetti:
“… [Latin] American culture may be the only Christian culture, that is to say, Christian from and in its very beginning. Rightly this vocation for synthesis, the unifying virtue, this attitude to change diverse cultural traditions, particularizes and at the same time universalizes [Latin] America. There is a vocation of universality within its own cultural particularity.
“…starting from the defeat of the Spanish Empire…an empire that had encompassed the whole world [into America and Asia, with the Philippines], European thought began to reduce itself again to the European world, and to the European world as already indicated by traditions…that thought, from Descartes to Hegel, and still today, moves in the dimensions of the Mediterranean world, in the dimensions of the Roman Empire and its borders, and goes no further. In this sense it is clear that for this body of thought [Latin] America does not exist as an integral and essential part of the world.”
“Hegelian universalism remains, despite intentions, a ‘Western’ universalism, different, that is, from the Latin American model that grew in the context of Catholic universalism," the Catholic mindset that formed the warp and woof of Pope Francis' thought.
Part 2: "Opposites," not opponents: Pope Francis' unwillingness to dismiss people he disagrees with.
Part 3: Pope Francis and taking the pulse of the ordinary people (the "pueblo fiel")
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