Pope Francis in Context

By Ross Douthat
The New York Times
July 30, 2013

http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/30/pope-francis-in-context/?_r=1&

The cycle is familiar: A pope says something about a controversial issue that doesn’t fit the media’s semi-informed preconceptions about Roman Catholic teaching, a firestorm of coverage follows, and then better-informed observers are left to pick up the pieces and explain that no, actually, the pope is just reasserting an idea — an openness to Darwinian evolution, the possibility that nonbelievers might go to heaven, pick your controversy — that the church already accepted or believed or allowed to be considered.

In the case of Pope Francis’s comments on homosexuality on the plane back from a wildly successful World Youth Day in Brazil, though, I have a little more sympathy than usual for the media reaction. Here’s what the pontiff said, per the Catholic News Service, in response to a question about sex scandals and a so-called “gay lobby” within the Vatican and the Roman Curia:

    … Pope Francis said it was important to “distinguish between a person who is gay and someone who makes a gay lobby,” he said. “A gay lobby isn’t good.”

    “A gay person who is seeking God, who is of good will — well, who am I to judge him?” the pope said. “The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains this very well. It says one must not marginalize these persons, they must be integrated into society. The problem isn’t this (homosexual) orientation — we must be like brothers and sisters. The problem is something else, the problem is lobbying either for this orientation or a political lobby or a Masonic lobby.”

Now it’s certainly true, as a host of Catholic writers quickly pointed out, that this doesn’t depart from official church teaching on human sexuality, and indeed invokes the language of the Catechism (commissioned by John Paul II and overseen by Joseph Ratzinger, the future Benedict XVI) to make its point. Which, means, in turn, that a lot of the more breathless coverage has exaggerated the significance of the pope’s words, and overhyped the gap between what he’s saying and what his predecessors might have said.

But at the same time, the context of the remarks — the specific subject being addressed, and the larger pattern of Francis’s words and deeds — do magnify their significance beyond the “newsflash: pope still Catholic” norm that defines a lot of these soundbite controversies. First, the pope does seem to have been talking specifically about gay Catholics in the priesthood. Indeed, according to this translation, the words quoted above followed a question about the case of Monsignor Battista Ricca, a recent papal appointee with an alleged gay relationship in his past, which inspired Francis to a long riff about the importance of forgiving past sins. And given that Benedict XVI’s Vatican specifically reasserted the rule that men with a “deep-seated” attraction to the same sex should not enter holy orders, the tone of Francis’s remarks alone — the forgive-and-forget response to a particular case, and the broader “who am I to judge” — does seem striking and newsworthy. Consider, by way of contrast, what Benedict said to Peter Seewald, his longtime interviewer, when asked about the subject of gay priests:

    It is no secret that there are homosexuals even among priests and monks. Just recently there was a major scandal on account of the homosexual passions of priests in Rome.

    Homosexuality is incompatible with the priestly vocation. Otherwise, celibacy itself would lose its meaning as a renunciation. It would be extremely dangerous if celibacy became a sort of pretext for bringing people into the priesthood who don’t want to get married anyway …

    But there is no doubt that homosexuality exists in monasteries and among the clergy, if not acted out, then at least in a non-practiced form.

    Well, that is just one of the miseries of the Church. And the persons who are affected must at least try not to express this inclination actively, in order to remain true to the intrinsic mission of their office.

The settings are different and the questions are different, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Vatican issued a clarification shortly explaining that the official rules for seminary formation are still very much in effect. But still, such a tonal difference, from ”the miseries of the Church” to “who am I to judge,” on a fraught, high-profile topic is surely newsworthy, even if the news media inevitably offered misinterpretations of its significance as well.

And it’s especially newsworthy since a latitudinarian statement on this topic is of a piece with the tone of Francis’s pontificate as a whole. Popes do not change doctrine, but they do choose what to emphasize and what to downplay, which issues to elevate and which to set aside, where to pass judgment and where to talk about forgiveness, and so forth. And we’ve seen enough of this pontificate to sense where Francis’s focus lies: He wants to be seen primarily as a pope of social justice and spiritual renewal, and he doesn’t have much patience for issues that might get in the way of that approach to Christian witness. Thus the headline-grabbing rhetoric and symbolic gestures emphasizing poverty and simplicity above all else, thus the frequent invocations of “clericalism” as the worst problem facing the church, thus his fairly casual attitude (in his off-the-cuff remarks, at least) toward doctrinal discipline, his frequent calls for experimentation and his apparent hostility to liturgical traditionalism — and thus, too, his apparent determination to distance himself and his message from the culture-war issues of the post-sexual revolution West.

Again, it’s not that Benedict or John Paul actually prioritized issues like abortion and gay marriage over the church’s social teaching (Benedict, too, visited prisoners and wrote encyclicals critiquing global capitalism and so on … ), and it’s not that Francis is somehow doing the impossible and repudiating church teaching on those hot-button topics. It’s just that he’s going out of his way to place his emphasis on other issues and areas and concerns, and taking clear steps to avoid the kind of “pope versus sex” headlines that so often dominate coverage of the church. (It’s noteworthy, for instance, that in the same post-Brazil interview, he was asked why he didn’t address that country’s abortion and marriage controversies during his visit, and he answered that “the church already has spoken on these issues,” and “young people understand perfectly what the church’s point of view is.”)

It seems a bit early and a bit presumptuous to offer any kind of judgment on what all this might mean for the church as a whole. To admirers of the previous pope’s labors, necessary and often thankless, to preserve the core of Catholic faith, it can be a little painful to watch journalists overhype the contrast between Francis and Benedict (much as they overhyped — and often misjudged — the contrast between Benedict and John Paul), and use Francis’s different style to write a “progressive pope, reactionary pope” morality play that doesn’t really fit the facts. At the same time, the issues Francis wants to emphasize lie at the very heart of Christianity, and it is no bad thing for conservative Catholics — especially American conservative Catholics — to think and walk with a pope so focused on the poor. Nor is it a bad thing, in the wake of the sex abuse scandals, to have a pope who persuades reporters to tell a story about Catholicism that doesn’t begin and end with the sins of priests and the cover-ups of bishops.

I recommend reading Elizabeth Scalia and Damian Thompson, both Benedict fans, for more on these and related issues. Let me conclude, though, by striking a cautionary note about Pope Francis’s rhetoric and what it might mean for the governance of the church. I mentioned above the remarks about forgiveness that followed a question about a scandal involving one of his appointees; here they are in full:

    I’d like to add that many times we seem to seek out the sins of somebody’s youth and publish them. We’re not talking about crimes, which are something else. The abuse of minors, for instance, is a crime. But one can sin and then convert, and the Lord both forgives and forgets. We don’t have the right to refuse to forget … it’s dangerous. The theology of sin is important. St. Peter committed one of the greatest sins, denying Christ, and yet they made him pope. Think about that.”

This is a striking and deeply Christian passage, and the fact that it inspired a Wonkblog meditation (!) on the theology of forgiveness is a testament to Francis’s ability to reach unexpected audiences with his rhetoric. But for anyone who followed the deep history of the sex abuse scandal, it has some troubling implications — because much of what went wrong in the church, in the 1960s and 1970s especially, represented a disastrous misapplication of precisely this message. Christianity and Catholicism insist that no sin is is beyond forgiveness, and that true repentance washes away even the worst stain. But for people in positions of ecclesiastical authority, the obligation to forgive and forget is complicated by the obligation to protect the faithful and satisfy the demands of justice … and too often, far too often, the theology of forgiveness was invoked by authority figures in Catholicism as a justification for returning priests to ministry, for hoping that pathologies could be cured in the confessional, and then for refusing to do the appropriate thing when confronted with the consequences of these decisions and resign. The sex abuse disaster was a disaster in part for very worldly reasons, involving clerical privilege and the institutional tendency to cover-up. But it was also a disaster because of misapplied Christian theology, which persuaded many churchmen that the confessional was a sufficient response to both others’ evil and their own misgovernment. It was indeed a scandal of clericalism, as the current pope has suggested — but it was clericalism compounded by cheap grace.

Now Francis did specifically exempt crimes against children from his call for a forgiveness that also forgets. But the danger facing the church in the future is not an exact replay of the sex abuse scandal. Rather, it’s a perpetuation of a model of church governance in which any scandal — sexual, financial, you name it — is met with forgiveness but not with penance, with apologies but not accountability.

And I raise this point only because for all that Francis has done, as Thompson puts it, to “decontaminate the Catholic brand,” where reform is concerned his (yes, brief) papacy has thus far been longer on rhetoric and symbolism than action. There has been no noticeable housecleaning in the hierarchy, and the badly-needed reform of the Curia — the agenda that Francis was elected to implemented — is in the hands of a commission, which in Rome as in Washington can bury an issue as often as it actually resolves it. As much as the church needs a pope capable of transcending the church’s recent disasters, it also still needs real accountability and real reform — and it does not need another charismatic leader, a la John Paul II, who rallies throngs around the world but neglects the administration of the Vatican. Nor does it need a pope whose media-friendly persona persuades journalists to lay off the church on the one front where a hostile press has often been correct to hold Catholicism to account.

“I believe this is a time of mercy,” Pope Francis said, during the same plane conversation. To which I would say yes, but please God, of discipline as well.