The Good Pope and His Critics

I was not going to write about this article by Ross Douthat, published on the front page of Sunday’s New York Times “Currents” section.  But half the page is such a beautiful photo I cannot resist. Pope Francis is facing the Holy Door of St. Peter’s, his hands on two bronze panels with Latin inscriptions. The left one says “septuagies sept…”: “seventy times seven,” the translation. We remember what that refers to: Jesus telling Peter how often to forgive his brother if he wrongs him (Mt 18:21-22). Francis’s right hand is on the panel decorated with a rooster that says “conversus Dominus respexit Petrum,” alluding to Luke 22:61-62, “At that instant, while he was still speaking, the cock crew, and Jesus turned and looked straight at Peter, and Peter remembered what he had said to him, ‘Before the cock crows today, you will have disowned me three times.’ And Peter went outside and wept bitterly.”

This illustration could inspire a full Lenten meditation on mercy, or on faithfulness, or on the meaning of Peter in the synoptic Gospels, or on the posture of crucifixion. Look at it and see what it inspires in you.

Pope Francis opened the Holy Door to mark the opening of the Catholic Holy Year, or Jubilee, in St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican in 2015. Credit Max Rossi/Reuters

In the article that follows, Douthat is critical of Francis for an excess of mercy and a failure to insist on literal adherence to scripture. He sees the Pope as “a reformer without major reforms,” who has nonetheless created “vivid images of humility and Christian love” which might make the Catholic Church appeal to the modern world. OH, YES! Douthat finds that he himself and other critics of the Pope are criticized as the older brother in the story of the Prodigal Son, “self-righteous.” EXACTLY.

But Douthat’s position as columnist for the Times makes him an opinion-shaper, and this extremely prominent platform makes his new book more important than it might otherwise have been. I defer to those who have reviewed To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism, on which this front-page column must have been based. I admire their tenacity; I cannot commit to read a whole book when I found the article so distasteful. Instead, I’ll give you three options.

If you are the type who likes debate, I recommend Michael Sean Winters in NCR. Winters quotes liberally (pun intended) from the book about the politics around the synods on the family and then demolishes Douthat’s assertions about what happened. Winters then comments on Douthat’s takes on popes and cardinals; for example:

Douthat also commits a calumny against Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich, writing on Page 72 that, “You could read an awful lot of Blase Cupich sermons without finding anything that would make a Democratic Party functionary the least bit uncomfortable.” I have heard a fair number of the good cardinal’s sermons, and I know plenty of Democratic Party functionaries who do not like his repeated calls to respect life, nor his defense of Amoris Laetitia with its clear distinguishing between gay relationships and Christian marriage; nor, frankly, are many Democrats comfortable with Cupich’s articulation of the traditional teaching of the church that the right to private property is a consequence of the fall, and you can’t wiggle self-interest into a virtue, and that “this economy kills.” I wish more Democrats did sound like Cupich. To assert there is no difference between the two is asinine.

Do you get the flavor of the Winters review? Later he does make a useful distinction between moral and sacramental theology. Moral is what’s ethical; sacramental is what’s pastoral. Balancing the two is what Francis is trying to do and what Douthat deplores.

For those of you who are of a more literary and ruminative mindset, there is the review by Paul Baumann, the editor of Commonweal. He begins with a reflection on that mid-century Catholic classic by Graham Greene, Brideshead Revisited, to address the question of sin and whether or not remarriage after divorce is enough to deny Communion. He finds Douthat “thoughtful but nevertheless melodramatic,” and gently corrects various errors: “True, Jesus’ teachings are uncompromising, but he is unfailingly merciful to those who have fallen short. Francis’s pastoral proposals for the divorced and remarried, although clearly a departure from the church’s current teaching (if not its practice), hardly contradict Jesus’ actions.” Baumann brings journalists Matthew Boudway and Garry Wills, historian Eamon Duffy, legal scholar John Noonan, and theologians George Lindbeck and Joseph Komonchak into his discussion, and concludes “As an experienced pastor, Francis knows the church must come to grips with the fact that Catholic marriage and family life are in crisis. Arguably, there will be no renewal of the church without a renewal of the Catholic family.”

Finally, Thomas P. Rausch in America explains that a Brideshead reference is in Douthat’s introduction. Like Winters, he writes about Vatican politics, and like Baumann, about divorce and remarriage. Most cogent comment? “Perhaps where Douthat most falls short is in describing the church. He does not call it a communion of pastors and faithful but treats it as a political body of bishops.”

I am writing this on Wednesday, the day of the fourtheaster, the fourth nor’easter, that has now sheathed every branch of every tree in Rittenhouse Square in white – the Pope’s color. The beauty of these trees in the blue twilight, the wind starting to make them move — I think about Easter and Pentecost and Francis. I support our Pope, though I wish he were doing more. I read Douthat and I pray that his agenda is not the one that prevails.