By Daniel Rigney
Like many other non-Catholics (Acatholics?), I’ve been following the ascent of the church’s new pope, Francis, with interest – and probably with more personal fascination than most. For nearly 30 years I taught at a Catholic university in the southwestern United States, where I absorbed by osmosis a wealth of legend and lore about Catholicism’s complex history and culture. I learned these things mainly from Catholic faculty colleagues, many of whom were also priests, brothers, nuns, lay theologians and philosophers.
The university wasn’t my first exposure to Catholicism. Though I grew up in the Protestant South, I remember hearing distant news in 1962 that Pope John XXIII had convened an ecumenical council in Rome, known as Vatican II, and that new winds were blowing through the church.
Closer to home, I noticed that St. Anne’s Catholic Church was among the first institutions in my small city to become racially integrated, while local Southern Baptist congregations were still practicing something they called “closed communion.” (Guess who wasn’t invited to dinner.)
Catholics were a rather mysterious lot to me then. Some called them “mackerel snappers” for their odd custom of eating fish on Fridays. And what was the deal with those little white statues on their dashboards?
Yet as far from Rome as I was, geographically and culturally, I remember being intrigued and inspired by this new pope as he began to bring his church into fuller conversation with the modern world. I would later learn that his church was undergoing an aggiornamento, or as we might now say, an “updating” of its institutional software, upgrading to Vatican 2.0.
In a host of ways, the Catholic church began to seem less medieval and more contemporary to many of us, though its updating disappointed traditionalists. Even today, some seem nostalgic for romanticized images of the Middle Ages.
The ecumenical spirit of Vatican II was a gust of fresh air compared to the more authoritarian and dankly anti-modernist spirit of the First Vatican Council (Vatican I, 1868-1870). Vatican II reaffirmed and extended the church’s professed commitment to principles of economic and social justice already enunciated in Leo XIII’s foundational social encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891). The documents of Vatican II challenged the church to rise to meet the emerging challenges of the modern world on behalf of peace and social justice, with a “preferential option for the poor.”
Beginning in the 1980s, however, under Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger (later to become Benedict XVI), I sensed that the church was lurching sharply to the right. At the time I privately described this era as “Vatican 1.5,” a regression from the relatively more progressive reforms of the Second Vatican Council.
It was during Vatican 1.5 that the church sustained a firestorm of criticism for its obsessive concerns with matters of sexuality, gender and reproduction (women’s place in the church and world, birth control, fornication, abortion, homosexuality, priestly celibacy, sexual abuse, et al.), covering up its own institutional sins and crimes even as it scolded congregants for their transgressions of church sexual teachings.
“Let’s not talk about it,” said the hierarchs. “But we have to,” said the people.
When Benedict, at the age of 86, finally stepped down from the papacy earlier this year, a relatively unknown Argentine Cardinal, now Pope Francis, assumed the chair and began to use it less as a throne than as a stool – less a symbol of spiritual grandeur than of a shared humanity.
Cynics may say that Francis is playing the humility card for theatrical effect, but I’m waiting to see just how he plays it, and to what real and enduring effect. As a concerned Acatholic, I wish him well.
Today I read that Pope Francis has issued a new encyclical, Evangelii Gaudium, attacking unfettered capitalism as a “new tyranny,” condemning the “idolatry of money,” calling the rich to a more profound ethic of sharing with the poor, and describing an economy of exclusion and inequality as an “economy [that] kills.” Whether this new encyclical will have any real influence in or outside of the church is in doubt, considering the erosion of respect for the church’s moral authority in recent decades.
To some, Francis’s strong words may recall the polemics of Karl Marx. To others, their expression of concern for “the least of these” echoes the voice of Jesus of Nazareth.
Not everyone shares Pope Francis's understanding of the Christian message. Sarah Palin, for instance, has weighed in with her own philosophic concerns about the “liberal” direction this new pope may be taking the church, to which one wag on Twitter responds with this mock headline: “Christianist baffled by an encounter with Christianity.” Pope Francis, though reaffirming the church’s traditional restrictions on abortion and priestly women, is now urging the church to turn away from its obsessive preoccupation with matters of sexuality and reproduction, and to give renewed emphasis to the monumental moral issues of war and peace, interfaith reconciliation, and the persistence of poverty amidst plenty. His early pronouncements augur well for a reawakening of the progressive spirit of Vatican II after several seamy decades of regression.
Now if the church will only speak out more forcefully on environmental issues like carbon pollution and climate change, we may yet see a Vatican 2.5 on Pope Francis’s watch. Why the church, with its professed respect for life, has had so little to say thus far regarding life-or-death ecological issues is a puzzling and disturbing question.
Dare we imagine what a Vatican 3.0 might look like?
A Pope Maria Magdalena perhaps?
Danagram
Acatholic by birth, Unitarian (UU) by choice
Like many other non-Catholics (Acatholics?), I’ve been following the ascent of the church’s new pope, Francis, with interest – and probably with more personal fascination than most. For nearly 30 years I taught at a Catholic university in the southwestern United States, where I absorbed by osmosis a wealth of legend and lore about Catholicism’s complex history and culture. I learned these things mainly from Catholic faculty colleagues, many of whom were also priests, brothers, nuns, lay theologians and philosophers.
The university wasn’t my first exposure to Catholicism. Though I grew up in the Protestant South, I remember hearing distant news in 1962 that Pope John XXIII had convened an ecumenical council in Rome, known as Vatican II, and that new winds were blowing through the church.
Closer to home, I noticed that St. Anne’s Catholic Church was among the first institutions in my small city to become racially integrated, while local Southern Baptist congregations were still practicing something they called “closed communion.” (Guess who wasn’t invited to dinner.)
Catholics were a rather mysterious lot to me then. Some called them “mackerel snappers” for their odd custom of eating fish on Fridays. And what was the deal with those little white statues on their dashboards?
Yet as far from Rome as I was, geographically and culturally, I remember being intrigued and inspired by this new pope as he began to bring his church into fuller conversation with the modern world. I would later learn that his church was undergoing an aggiornamento, or as we might now say, an “updating” of its institutional software, upgrading to Vatican 2.0.
In a host of ways, the Catholic church began to seem less medieval and more contemporary to many of us, though its updating disappointed traditionalists. Even today, some seem nostalgic for romanticized images of the Middle Ages.
The ecumenical spirit of Vatican II was a gust of fresh air compared to the more authoritarian and dankly anti-modernist spirit of the First Vatican Council (Vatican I, 1868-1870). Vatican II reaffirmed and extended the church’s professed commitment to principles of economic and social justice already enunciated in Leo XIII’s foundational social encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891). The documents of Vatican II challenged the church to rise to meet the emerging challenges of the modern world on behalf of peace and social justice, with a “preferential option for the poor.”
Beginning in the 1980s, however, under Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger (later to become Benedict XVI), I sensed that the church was lurching sharply to the right. At the time I privately described this era as “Vatican 1.5,” a regression from the relatively more progressive reforms of the Second Vatican Council.
It was during Vatican 1.5 that the church sustained a firestorm of criticism for its obsessive concerns with matters of sexuality, gender and reproduction (women’s place in the church and world, birth control, fornication, abortion, homosexuality, priestly celibacy, sexual abuse, et al.), covering up its own institutional sins and crimes even as it scolded congregants for their transgressions of church sexual teachings.
“Let’s not talk about it,” said the hierarchs. “But we have to,” said the people.
When Benedict, at the age of 86, finally stepped down from the papacy earlier this year, a relatively unknown Argentine Cardinal, now Pope Francis, assumed the chair and began to use it less as a throne than as a stool – less a symbol of spiritual grandeur than of a shared humanity.
Cynics may say that Francis is playing the humility card for theatrical effect, but I’m waiting to see just how he plays it, and to what real and enduring effect. As a concerned Acatholic, I wish him well.
Today I read that Pope Francis has issued a new encyclical, Evangelii Gaudium, attacking unfettered capitalism as a “new tyranny,” condemning the “idolatry of money,” calling the rich to a more profound ethic of sharing with the poor, and describing an economy of exclusion and inequality as an “economy [that] kills.” Whether this new encyclical will have any real influence in or outside of the church is in doubt, considering the erosion of respect for the church’s moral authority in recent decades.
To some, Francis’s strong words may recall the polemics of Karl Marx. To others, their expression of concern for “the least of these” echoes the voice of Jesus of Nazareth.
Not everyone shares Pope Francis's understanding of the Christian message. Sarah Palin, for instance, has weighed in with her own philosophic concerns about the “liberal” direction this new pope may be taking the church, to which one wag on Twitter responds with this mock headline: “Christianist baffled by an encounter with Christianity.” Pope Francis, though reaffirming the church’s traditional restrictions on abortion and priestly women, is now urging the church to turn away from its obsessive preoccupation with matters of sexuality and reproduction, and to give renewed emphasis to the monumental moral issues of war and peace, interfaith reconciliation, and the persistence of poverty amidst plenty. His early pronouncements augur well for a reawakening of the progressive spirit of Vatican II after several seamy decades of regression.
Now if the church will only speak out more forcefully on environmental issues like carbon pollution and climate change, we may yet see a Vatican 2.5 on Pope Francis’s watch. Why the church, with its professed respect for life, has had so little to say thus far regarding life-or-death ecological issues is a puzzling and disturbing question.
Dare we imagine what a Vatican 3.0 might look like?
A Pope Maria Magdalena perhaps?
Danagram
Acatholic by birth, Unitarian (UU) by choice
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