Anyone who
speaks or writes in public knows that there’s a difference between saying
something and communicating it. Every utterance risks misunderstanding and
unless you have the courage and sheer impertinence to take a risk, you won’t
ever say anything at all.
That’s why,
as Richard Weaver brilliantly argued, there’s an ethics of rhetoric. You have
to be careful not only about what you say, but how you say it. The how is part
of the what. A carefully worded, but insipid, moral plea falls flat. The
careless presentation of a complex argument leaves people even more uncertain and
anxious.
Which
brings us to the recently released lengthy interview with Pope Francis. The media have
fastened on several phrases that the Church does not need to be always speaking
about abortion, contraception, and homosexuality, and that it needs “a better
balance,” with more focus on God’s saving love and less “insisting” on or
“obsessing” about narrow and sometimes trivial rules. Predictably, the media
have gone to town claiming that the pope is implying
that the controversial moral teachings of the Church are “secondary.”
Eloquent
defenses of the pope have appeared, notably this one by my onetime colleague George Weigel. George
rightly contextualizes Francis’s remarks – and in a way his whole papacy –
within an evangelical thrust. By bringing people back into touch with God’s
love, the pope argues, they will be able to hear the harder moral teachings
again.
Anyone who
wants sentire cum Ecclesia (“to think with the Church”) and who believes
that the Holy Spirit is active in papal elections must grapple with Francis’s
fresh spirit.
You must
already feel the “but” coming. So let me state it straight out. Granting all
the above, when this pope gives interviews (something he does not like), it has
almost always become disconcerting. And there may be good reasons for that. You
can’t stop people from misinterpreting you. But the pope is among other things
a teacher. And a good teacher has a moral responsibility to guard against
misinterpretation.
I’ll get to
specifics shortly. But I want to point out – hoping that I’m wrong – something
I fear has already begun.
After
Vatican II the Church went through decades of turmoil because of “the Spirit of
Vatican II,” a spirit that contradicted the Conciliar documents and much of Christian
history. But that didn’t matter. That wayward “spirit” carried all before it.
We are, I
believe, close to what may become a Spirit of Bergoglio, another period of
confusion based, once again, not on the pope’s actual words, but in the
unbalanced emotions to which certain, casual expressions of his have given
rise.
The words
themselves, though always orthodox, are not without problems. My colleague Brad
Miner points out that 1,300,000,000 babies have been aborted
worldwide since the 1980s. The Church just spoke out forcefully about avoiding
the deaths of innocents in Syria. Is it obsessing to shout from the housetops
about the massive modern slaughter of the innocents?
The pope is
right that it is pastorally wrong to obsess or insist all the time about
certain sins. It’s utterly counterproductive, just humanly speaking, to interact
with other people that way.
The
question here, however, is not about a more pastoral approach. I confess, I
don’t know who is he referring to as “obsessing,” other than a very few
zealots. In the United States – the same could be said about Europe and Latin
America – we’ve been talking about God’s saving love towards sinners for
decades. The papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI were not eras of
authoritarian moralism. They were sophisticated efforts to give us the real
Second Vatican Council – a proclamation of God’s saving power and clear moral
guidance, together. That’s what most of us have experienced as the Church in
recent decades.
Pope
Francis does add something:
The
dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s
pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed
multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently. Proclamation in a missionary
style focuses on the essentials, on the necessary things: this is also what
fascinates and attracts more, what makes the heart burn, as it did for the
disciples at Emmaus. We have to find a new balance; otherwise even the moral
edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the
freshness and fragrance of the Gospel. The proposal of the Gospel must be more
simple, profound, radiant. It is from this proposition that the moral
consequences then flow.
That
urgency and radiance and freshness is new – and welcome.
But if he
were to call me – he does such things, but I’m not holding my breath – I would
point to the misleading phrase that starts this passage. It’s true: not
everything in Catholicism is on the same plane. Benedict and the American
bishops, for example, tried for years to explain that life takes precedence
over secondary policy questions. Francis no doubt agrees, but before making his
strong evangelical point, he’s given an unnecessary opening to those who would
twist his words.
Those of us
who publicly fight these battles already know what we’re going to be hearing
from the other guys: “Will you Catholics stop yapping all the time about
abortion [or contraception or gay marriage]. Even the pope has told you to give
it a rest.” And they won’t be entirely wrong.
The world
is only too happy for the Church to leave the battlefield and allow the secular
world to kill babies in unimaginable numbers, destroy marriage, and along the
way reduce religious freedom – none of which will be good in the long run for
the evangelical efforts Francis favors.
Francis is
seeking to bring a new Catholic spirit to the world and that’s all to the good.
Let’s hope the spirit that arises is the one he seeks, not a wayward one that
others foist on him and the Church.
