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By Massimo Faggioli | United States
Great historical leaders rise to the challenge because they create change by aptly reading the "signs of the times" – to use that famous phrase from the Second Vatican Council's pastoral constitution on the Church, Gaudium et Spes.
Sometimes it takes an external perspective, even from quite a distance, to understand that change.
This is the impression a Catholic reader develops of Pope Francis while reading the latest volume of collected essays by Marilynne Robinson, one of the most important novelists and authors in America and in the English-speaking world today.
The title of the collection - The givenness of things - comes from Robinson's take on Jonathan Edwards, one of the fathers of Christianity in North America, and his pragmatism about the life of the soul.
The essay on "Awakening" especially speaks to any Catholic who has been closely following the current pope. Robinson looks at the role of the great religious awakenings in American history between the origins of Protestant America and the 20th century, and she underlines the differences between those moments and the political-religious reactionary hysteria in some quarters of American Christianity today.
"I was in high school and college when the civil rights movement emerged [in the 1960s]. That was a very troubled time, and it was for me a deeply important education," she writes.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident. Nothing has ever persuaded me to think less of these movements or otherwise about them," she continues.
"[But] the word 'liberal' has been effectively stigmatized, as the word 'abolitionist' was and is, as if generosity were culpable. As if there were some more reasonable response to slavery than to abolish it", she declares.
In another passage Robinson notes how "the word 'Christian' now is seen less as identifying an ethic, and more as identifying a demographic"
She writes: "History has shown us a thousand variations on the temptation that come with tribalism, the excitements that stir when certain lines are seen as important because they can be drawn. This is old humankind going about its mad business as if it simply cannot remember the harm it did itself yesterday."
In a third passage Robinson analyzes the narrowness of the theological vision of a muscular cultural Christianity today in this way:
"The whole focus is on 'personal salvation,' on 'accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior.' Theologically speaking, the cosmos has contracted severely. The simple, central, urgent pressure to step over the line that separates the saved from the unsaved, and after this the right, even the obligation, to turn and judge that great sinful world the redeemed have left behind – this is what I see as the essential nature of the emerging Christianity.
Those who have crossed this line can be outrageously forgiving of one another and themselves, and very cruel in their denunciation of anyone else. Somehow in their eyes this does not make them hypocrites, a word that for Jesus clearly had a particular sting."
Robinson does not talk about Catholicism specifically, but these three passages describe essential elements of the "Francis effect" on the Catholic Church.
First, Francis has brought back into the Church a liberationist perspective that has something in common, although does not identify with, the social and political awareness of Christians in the 1960s and 1970s. The Argentine pope addresses new forms of slavery – economical, social, and political – and this has made of him almost automatically a "liberal" pope, even if the word liberal is not radical enough to describe his social gospel.
Second, Francis' Latin American background is clearly part of the panic he has triggered in some conservative quarters of white and European Catholicism. In the last century these quarters had become accustomed to a racial and geopolitical dominance of the northern hemisphere – even in global Catholicism, a tradition cannot quite identify itself with its "European" roots because of a internal contradiction between the idea of "catholic" and the term "European" or "North American".
Third, Francis' message has been particularly clear in its rejection of any exclusivism within the Catholic Church and in its pointing out the hypocrisy that props up such ecclesial exclusivism. This is what the Church of the open doors is about, as Francis put forth in his great, final speech to the Bishops' Synod on Oct. 24, 2015.
Robinson has a paragraph where she seems to translate for her cultural landscape what Francis was trying to say in that speech.
"So, we have an element newly prominent in American religious and political life, a new form of entitlement, a self-declared elect. What some have seen as a resurgence of Christianity, or at least a bold defense of American cultural tradition - even as another great awakening! – has brought a harshness, a bitterness, a crudeness, and a high-handedness into the public sphere that are only to be compared to the politics, or the collapse of politics, in the period before the Civil War," she writes.
Now, these convergences between Francis' and Marilynne Robinson's interpretation of the present moment in the life of Christianity are all the more striking because they come from two very different interpreters. This is not only because one is the Bishop of Rome and the other is a Pulitzer prize-winning author and a professor at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.
The differences are in terms of theological culture. Robinson is an avid reader of John Calvin and of the authors of the theological renaissance in English- and French-speaking Europe of the 15th and 16th centuries (Hus, Wycliffe, Tyndale, up to Martin Luther).
Francis is a Jesuit from Argentina with very little familiarity with those theological sources that shaped the Europe of the Reformation and the religious wars and controversies that followed.
Robinson is a Calvinist loved by Catholic readers, but that seems to keep Catholicism at some distance. Francis is a deeply Catholic teacher that a few years ago, as an archbishop, spoke of Calvin and Luther in less than flattering terms (as it was noted by Paolo Ricca, the most important Italian Protestant theologian, in an essay in the journal Riforma).
The givenness of Francis is the realism of the theology and ecclesiology he expresses. As he said in Evangelii Gaudium, "realities are more important than ideas" (EG 231-233).
There is no denying that immediately before his Francis' election as pope, Catholicism was going through a false sense of "awakening" that was fueled by a sense of identity marked more by cultural exclusivism (such as the use of Latin, lacey vestments and so forth) than by any genuine rediscovery of the Gospel.
And so it should not be surprising that an American Calvinist like Robinson is so helpful in making many of the connections between the ambiguities of the recent American religious awakening and the last few decades of a much more American type of global Catholicism.
Follow me on Twitter @MassimoFaggioli
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