In my previous two posts, I wrote about two core influences on the way Pope Francis, starting early in his ministry as a Jesuit leader, saw his role (and that of the Church in the world). They led him to appreciate the input of the often-overlooked. In other words, to listen to the "faithful people."
As rector of the Colegio Maximo in Buenos Aires, in 1976 Jorge Mario Bergoglio revised the academic program to “root students in Jesuit and Argentine traditions, rather than foreign models” (Ivereigh, 140). “Bergoglio wanted the Jesuits to value popular religious traditions alongside high culture” (The Mind of Pope Francis, p 44-45). He wanted nearness, listening to the life of the people and not, as the First Letter of John says, “not just talking about it.” Closeness to the people meant cultivating a genuine appreciation of the popular expressions of faith. As Francis says in Evangelii Gaudium, popular devotions are the inculturation of the Gospel on the part of a believing people; they are a sign of the Gospel’s having taken root and beginning to bear fruit; they are a new “incarnation” of the Word among us. (How fitting it is, then, that his last encyclical would be focused on a popular devotion, the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus!)
In other words, when he started his ministry, there was no “polar opposition” between the European philosophical and theological mindset and that of the local churches. There was only a European approach. It did not even have to attempt any form of inculturation, much less incorporate Argentine cultural and philosophical works into the program of studies. Nothing but the European achievements had a place in the Jesuit seminary. And in the 70’s, with some of the Jesuits embracing a Marxist approach to social problems, it may have seemed that allowing anything but the most stringently vetted, historically proven texts into the formation program was playing with fire.
But the 1968 Medellín Conference (2nd Episcopal Conference of Latin America) had affirmed “‘popular religious tradition’…teología del pueblo—immersion to the degree possible in the lives of the neighborhood and the families there, a ‘unity of theory and praxis’ in line with the ‘preferential option for the poor.” A later document from the Argentine bishops “saw the people as active agents of their own history” and said “the activity of the Church should primarily derive from the people” but not “people” understood in Marxist terms—it was “ordinary people,” not a class.
Borghesi writes: “Bergoglio…sought to restore a place of dignity to the country’s own historical and cultural background, which had become somewhat lost in…modernizing, Americanizing, and Marxist currents” as well as a “return to the sources” for the Jesuits, with special attention to the movement of the Spirit of God.
The “San Miguel” document from the Argentine bishops does not express “pueblo” in “sociological or Marxist terms”; “the declaration saw the people as active agents of their own history…it asserted that ‘the activity of the Church should not only primarily derive from the people’… the option for the poor understood as radical identification with ordinary people as subjects of their own history, rather than as a ‘class’ engaged in social structure with other classes” : not Marxist; a “liberation theology without Marxism.” (We can ask ourselves if “culture wars” from the right fall more in line with this “class struggle” than conservatives might like to admit.)
Gustavo Gutiérrez (OP; died Oct 2024), who introduced the term “liberation theology” revised his own seminal work to take on this “theology of the people.”: “being poor is a way of living, thinking, loving, praying, believing, and hoping”; “the economic dimension [“lack of food and housing, the inability to attend properly to health and educational needs, the exploitation of workers”] itself will take on a new character once we see things from the cultural view.”
“Gutiérrez now recognized the importance of popular belief, prayer and dialogue with Latin American culture in its concrete expressions, and he turned away from Marxism’s primacy of praxis and revolutionary (counter) violence. .. popular devotion, freed from ‘devotionalism’ and the prejudices of an Enlightenment point of view [one that the earlier Gutiérrez had fully embraced, considering “the religious dimension of the culture of the people…a sort of premodern residue” (The Mind of Pope Francis, 51, 50)] is a legitimage locus theologicus, proof of a distinctly Latin-American enculturation of faith”
Evangelii Gaudium 126 (within 122-126): underlying popular piety, as a fruit of the inculturated Gospel, is an active evangelizing power which we must not underestimate: to do so would be to fail to recognize the work of the Holy Spirit. … they are a locus theologicus which demands our attention.”
Bergoglio to the Jesuits in 1974: “By faithful people I means simply the people who make up the faithful, the ones with whom we have so much contact in our priestly ministry and religious witness. It is clear that now… ‘people’ has become an ambiguous term because of the ideological assumptions with which this reality is discussed and perceived. …I was very struck [in my studies] by a formula of the tradition [from Denziger]: the faithful people are infallible ‘in credendo,’ in belief. From this I have drawn my own personal formula… When you want to know what Mother Church believes, turn to the Magisterium, since it has the role of teaching in an infallible way; but when you want to know how the church believes, turn to the faithful people. The Magisterium will teach you who Mary is, but our faithful people will tach you how to love Mary. Our people have a soul, and when we speak of a people’s soul, we also speak of a hermeneutic, a way of seeing reality, a knowledge….”
“The concept of the believing people refers for him to the historical ways that faith animates life, reality, culture It points to the how of the incarnation. … the historically lived terrain that nourishes the faith of the Church” (The Mind of Pope Francis).
Evangelii Gaudium 125: “it is only when we start from the affective co-naturality that loves supplies that we can appreciate the theological life present in the piety of the Christian people, especially in that of the poor."
Puebla Document (Latin American bishops): The Catholic wisdom of the common people is capable of fashioning a vital synthesis. It creatively combines the divine and the human, Christ and Mary spirit and body, communion and institution, person and community, faith and homeland, intelligence and emotion. This wisdom is a Christian humanism that radically affirms the dignity of every person as a child of God, establishes a basic fraternity, teaches people who to encounter nature and understand work, and provides reasons for joy and humor even in the midst of a very hard life.”
The then-Archbishop of Buenos Aires comments: “The tensions mentioned by Puebla…are universal. The vital synthesis, the creative union of these tensions, inexpressible in words because it would require all of them…translates into ‘proper names” like Guadalupe and Luján, into pilgrim faith, into gestures of blessing and solidarity, into offerings and into songs and dances…. This heart with which and thanks to which our people love and believe is a theological place with which the preacher must be vitally connected.”
In 1974 (most likely to SJs), the future Pope taught: "This faithful people does not separate its Christian faith from its historical expressions, nor mix them up in a revolutionary messianism. This people believes in resurrection and life; it baptizes it children and buries its dead. 
Our people pray…for health, work, bread, family harmony; for the nation, they ask for peace. … a people that asks for peace knows perfectly well that peach is the fruit of justice.”
JMB in 1974: “In fruitless clashes with the hierarchy, destructive conflicts between ‘wings’ [left-wing, right-wing], we …. ‘absolutize’ what is secondary…giving, in the end, more importance to the parts than to the whole.”
Over the course of time, the future Pope articulated the principles that he consistently used in entering into discussions, seeking resolution of serious issues, and even evangelizing. Knowing these four principles can help us interpret the things Pope Francis write (they are all over the place in Evangelii Gaudium) and what he did, that “style of relating” to the “other” that drove some people crazy because it seemed to stand in between two sides, as if relativizing one’s own perspective. Instead, it was not so much relativizing a perspective as attempting to keep two “antinomies” united in tension. He would tell us, I am sure, that this is the only way we can enter into a fruitful conversation. It is his way of establishing open communication, of listening to and for the other.
In these “theoretical principles,” he is articulating a hierarchy of values that bear on dialogue:
Unity is superior to conflict.
The whole is superior to the parts.
Time (process) is superior to space.
Reality is superior to ideas.
All three of the original principles/criteria aim at “unity of action”
These are “criteria of synthesis and are intended to foster social and political peace”
“The method for arriving at synthesis… “ 
processes rather than “the desire for domination that calls for occupation of spaces.” (I remember a physicist in my theology class who said, “I have learned to be at peace with process.”)
In 1980, another principle: JMB, 1976: “We are divided because our commitment to people has been replaced by a commitment to systems and ideologies. We have forgotten the meaning of people, concrete people…with all their historical experiences and clear aspirations.”
To his fellow Jesuits he said, in 1976: “Unity through reduction is relatively easy but not lasting. More difficult is to forge a unity that does not annul differences or reduce conflict.”
In 1978, to the Jesuits united for a congregational meeting, he summed up: “Neither one nor the other: neither traditionalists nor utopianists”; rather, “resort to the ‘classic’ … [and not what is merely] ‘traditional,” to the empty traditionalism that is concerned only with maintaining peace…. By ‘classics,’ we refer to those powerful moments of experience and religious and cultural reflection that make history because, in some way, they touch the irreversible events of the journey of a people, of the Church, of a Christian…”
“The ‘classics’ have provided the strength of synthesis in moments of conflict. These are not easy ‘compromises’ or cheap ‘irenicsm.’ these are the syntheses that, without denying the contrary elements that cannot be simply combined in such crises, find resolution at a higher level, through a mysterious journey of understanding and of fidelity to what is perennial in history. For this reason, the ‘classic’ possesses thisdouble virtue of being faithful to history and of inspiring new paths to be undertaken.”
Then, in 1999: “The true, the beautiful, and the good exist. The absolute exists.”
And again, in 2002 [on “information”]: “good, truth, and beauty are inseparable at the moment of communication between us, inseparable in their presence and also in their absence. And when they are absent, good will not be good, truth will not be truth, and beauty will not be beauty.”
“…truth cannot be found by herself. Next to her is goodness and beauty. Or, to put it better, the truth is good and beautiful. ‘A truth that is not entirely good always hides a good that is not true,’ said an Argentine thinker" (Jorge Mario Bergoglio in 2008).
This is as much as I am able to write on the fly, drawing from a talk I prepared for a congregational meeting that took place this past January. I highly recommend the book The Mind of Pope Francis, and consider it essential for a proper understanding of the ministry of Pope Francis, and an important tool for interpreting his documents, talks, and practical choices.
And now, may the Holy Spirit strengthen us for the next stage of our journey as the Body of Christ!
