Pope Benedict XV was voted into office on 3rd August 1914, less than a week after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The focus of his papacy was therefore the Great War that ravaged the continent for most of his seven year term. He called it “the suicide of civilised Europe”, declared the Holy See to be neutral in the conflict, and sought to mediate between the two sides to broker peace.
Just under a hundred years later Pope Francis was voted into office on 13th March 2013. His eleven year papacy did not feature conflict on anything like the scale or severity of the First World War. It did however feature that strange form of mostly nonviolent conflict we call the culture wars.
Indeed, he was fully cognisant of this fact. He spoke of how social crises were leading some to retreat into private worlds of likeminded factions. As early as 2013 he mentioned that people were embracing conflict “in such a way that they become its prisoners; they lose their bearings” and “project onto institutions their own confusion and dissatisfaction”. In his last encyclical he wrote of those who “bombarded by technology … often find themselves confused and torn apart”
Something which those unfamiliar with Catholicism often misunderstand, and of which those all too familiar with Catholicism often need reminding, is that the Catholic Church is not understood by Catholics to be a merely human institution. This means the Church is not like merely political or cultural organisations, and so cannot be as vulnerable to the back-and-forth between opposing sides that currently dominates society at large. This means the Church should be able to stand above the deep oppositional divisions currently dominating the world at large, and indeed adjudicate between them, on occasion. The spirit of Benedict XV should be reimagined in our era of social media, widespread division, populism, and social fragmentation.
The papacy has immense potential to do what popes are meant to do: be a “bridge builder” (pontifex). To be Catholic is to submit to the wisdom of the Church over against one’s own private judgement. The theological assumption that papal teachings should be taken very seriously, at least in theory, promises to cut through a world in which different issues are mired in identitarian allegiances. Pope Francis never invoked Papal Infallibility — but the fact remains that, for Catholics, if a Pope says something in his formal capacity it should still have the power to provoke soul-searching and change people’s hearts.
In 2013, this potential seemed realised in Pope Francis. Not being European, it was said he wasn’t mired in our oppositional factions and could stand apart from the standard identity-markers and clustering of associated issues with which we are all too familiar. He could ferociously criticise unrestrained capitalism while also holding the line on sexuality and gender. He could pull no punches on abortion while demanding a powerful response to climate change. He could speak of ministering in the barrios of Buenos Aires while maintaining the Church’s dogmas and doctrines without reserve.
The Pope’s 2013 Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium promised to fulfil this vision. Some of his most memorable comments are found therein. He spoke of the value of popular piety, the devotional piety of the poor, which seemed to combine the sentiments of conservatives and liberals alike. He warned how a fixation on particular issues risks forsaking the authentic core of the message of the gospel for “doctrinal or moral points based on specific ideological options”. He railed against those adopting “a spirit of exclusivity” by belonging to “this or that group which thinks itself different or special”.
There was much in that document that many of my generation and background found challenging. Our theological vintage was that of Francis’ predecessor Pope Benedict — of the rediscovery of the Church’s liturgical traditions which had been mutilated by baby boomers playing guitars, of the rarefied theology of European high-culture which blossomed on the continent in the twentieth-century, of the uncompromising defence of life against the increasingly promethean tendencies of biotechnology and medical consumerism, and of the commitment to re-evangelise those Western European countries that had forsaken the very Catholic soil from whence they those countries had sprung had at all.
But it was OK to have a Pope with a different agenda — because, again, to be Catholic is to submit to the wisdom of the Church over against one’s private judgement.
Before long, however, the immense challenges facing any Benedict XV-type response to the phenomenon of the culture wars seemed increasingly to dominate Pope Francis’ tenure. The flashpoints are too well-known to need explaining here. There was confusion over the precise meaning and significance of the infamous footnote in Amoris Laetitia, and the uncertainty over who the female figurine at the Amazon Synod was meant to signify. There was the fact that many of Pope Francis’ comments on immigration seemed to neglect the even-handed treatment of all the prior ecclesial documents which balance the Christian duty of compassion with realistic concerns about social cohesion and public services.
After the 2021 suppression of the Old Rite of the Mass reversed Pope Benedict XVI’s 2007 motu proprio Summorum Pontificum, it was difficult for many of my theological generation to know which way to turn. Were we following private judgment in 2007 or 2021? Whichever year we chose meant the wisdom of the Church itself had erred on the other date. Then the explanation of the 2023 document Fiducia supplicans’ outlining of blessings for same-sex couples prevaricated and obfuscated over what exactly was being permitted and why.
For many the challenge was no longer about struggling to harmonise private judgement and the wisdom of the Church, but about facing the grim possibility that the Church herself had fallen under the sway of private judgements, so her wisdom was now actually preserved authentically by one of the rival factions.
To submit to this would be a grave error, however. The Catholic Church has longevity on its side. As history shows, things will settle down over time and the gift of hindsight will offer clarity where needed, even if some corrective work is required to sort a few things out along the way. Proclaiming schism or Babylonish captivity is for Protestants. Catholics can trust in the Church.
Yet many good and faithful people I know disagree with me on this last point. Whoever is right or wrong on all the issues at stake — the fact is that the last few years have seen many Catholics reacting by doing exactly what Pope Francis wanted to avoid, and exactly what Traditiones custodes was meant to confront: retreating into private worlds of likeminded factions, becoming prisoners of ideological conflict, projecting onto the Church their own confusion and dissatisfaction.
Maybe we can all agree that Pope Francis was nothing if not unpredictable
Those heady days of Evangelii Gaudium thus seemed a long time past in recent years. But then the encyclical Dilexit Nos appeared last Autumn, which seemed to rediscover and rearticulate some of that original, compelling vision. Maybe we can all agree that Pope Francis was nothing if not unpredictable.
Perhaps some of the current confusion is due to his character as much as anything. He seemed not to want to explain his decisions, to deliberately give forth ambiguous comments on thorny theological issues, and to delight in causing mischief among those he felt made their religiosity so solemn and foreboding that they’d forgotten that God always brings goodness out of anything we throw at him.
Yet the challenge for many faithful Catholics is not knowing how they can discern between private judgement and the wisdom of the Church, insofar as many of the key theological judgements of the pontificate itself have not been laid bare for contemplation and reflection. People are then thrown into thinkpieces by the many online polemicists who have gained successful careers from the Francis years.
There’ll be much speculation about the Pope’s successor in the coming days and weeks. Some members of the Church will lay bare their own entanglement in the sins of the age by marking certain cardinals out as party men for this or that side. Maybe the really interesting thing about having a new pope will be discovering how it’s possible for that pontifex-role to function in the contemporary world at all — now technology means we know everything a Pope has said within minutes of his saying it, now ecclesial politics are treated like a spectator sport, and now the sole authority which can disambiguate issues from identities has itself seemed in danger of becoming just another identity among the fray. But let us recall that Benedict XV didn’t stop the First World War. He reminded people to do better.
