To Understand Pope Francis

A Franciscan Jesuit

A Pope Different from All Others

I was a friend and correspondent for several years with Father Giandomenico Mucci, a wise theologian, educator of young people, and great spiritual guide. He was an editor of La Civiltà Cattolica from 1984 until he died in 2020.

Father Mucci knew the Pope personally and had numerous personal encounters with him. One day, he wrote to me that the Pope had told him, "I am a bit cunning and a bit naive." I cannot find a better portrait of the Pope than this self-description.

Naturally, this assessment pertains not to his doctrinal mission but to his moral character. Cunning can be prudence, but it can also be duplicity. Naivety can be simplicity, but it can also be gullibility. A Pope is infallible in doctrine but not impeccable in moral conduct, pastoral work, and governance of the Church.

Francis acknowledges himself as a sinner and often asks us to pray for him. I have been following his acts daily since the beginning of his pontificate and have noticed that he has corrected certain flaws and shown improvement in his exercise as the universal Pastor of the Church. I have been discussing this in my publications for years, both in print and on websites or my blog.

The spirituality of this Pope is entirely unprecedented in the history of the Papacy: the first Jesuit Pope, not only that but a Pope who has managed to synthesize what seemed almost impossible between Ignatian and Franciscan spirituality, which are notoriously quite distant:

the former for the exaltation of human virtues, especially the ability to fight the good fight against satanic forces and the enemies of the Church. Indeed, no Pope has taught us to thwart the devil's snares as much as this one.

The latter for the humble awareness of one’s poverty, shared with the poor, in distrust of the arts of human doctrine, wisdom, and power, satisfied with the consciousness of one's sonship to the Father united with the Canticle of the Creatures.

What greater contrast exists between the disarming simplicity of the Franciscans and the meticulously calculated circumspection of the Jesuits? What greater distinction between an evangelizing activity aimed at winning over the ruling classes and one that seeks to give voice to the humble people of God? What greater disparity between a spirituality that seeks to subject all sciences and arts to Christ and one that keeps the thought fixed: «scientia inflat, caritas autem aedificat» (knowledge puffs up, but love builds up)? Yet, what does Christ say? "Be as innocent as doves and as shrewd as serpents." Franciscan doves and Jesuit serpents work together for the salvation of the world and the coming of the Kingdom of God.

Thus, Pope Francis brings together filial trust in the Father of Franciscan imprint, Franciscan brotherhood, Franciscan yearning for peace, Franciscan love for nature, and mercy, and sharing the poverty of the poor with the aptitude for spiritual direction, the fight against the devil, the ease with which he moves among the powerful of the earth, practical discernment, a sense of circumstances, affection for Christ, the cult of the Holy Spirit, the evangelizing zeal, decisiveness, dynamism, and progressivism typical of Ignatian spirituality.

Pope Francis has carried out this synthesis under the sign of voluntarism, a common characteristic of both Franciscans and Jesuits. Voluntarism is not the priority of charity over knowledge, a common evangelical principle for all disciples of Christ, but rather it is the tendency to conceive truth not under the sign of the intellect but the will as if the intellect needed the will to accomplish its office. [1]

Intellectualism and Voluntarism

In voluntarism, the movement of the spirit does not start from truth to fulfill the will but begins with the will to generate truth, ultimately aiming to produce existence. Truth is not what our intellect must conform to but what we decide with our free will. [2]

It is the tendency to see moral good not as the practice of truth and a prerequisite for good, not as an effect of intellectual activity, but as a value in itself, assuming it already contains the truth or produces truth. Freedom is not the effect and consequence of knowing the truth but the concrete realization of truth.

The will is not good or bad because it chooses the true or the false but because it disobeys God. God does not want something because it is good, but something is good because God wants it. True and false are not measured by being but by good: true is what is good, and false is what is bad.

Thus, there is no respect for the Lord's saying, "The truth will set you free," but the relationship is reversed: it is not freedom that depends on truth but truth that depends on freedom [3]. At this point, it should be noted that every religious institution in the Church possesses its unique charisms alongside human imperfections.

Of course, this is irrational voluntarism, not found in either Franciscans or Jesuits and therefore not in the Holy Father. It is instead the voluntarism of Ockham; but I wanted to mention this extreme form to say that even a mitigated, if not moderate, form can cause harm.

For this reason, religious institutes must complement each other but also correct each other's shortcomings. Franciscans and Jesuits tend toward a voluntarism that risks subjectivizing truth; however, the intellectualism characteristic of us Dominicans is a constant reminder to the Church and the Pope to be faithful to the truth. But we Dominicans, with our intellectualism, which in itself represents a value, are not always immune from tendencies towards abstraction.

Therefore, at the same time, a certain exclusive attention of us Dominicans to immutable and abstract truths can isolate us from the historical context in which we live, making us forget that we live in history and that human action is indeed the application of universal law but in itself concreteness and singularity.

Our anthropology, inspired by Saint Thomas and confirmed by the anthropological dogmas of the Middle Ages, is undoubtedly valid for the entire Church. However, this theoretical knowledge of man is not sufficient to achieve the understanding of individual souls and specific human and social environments necessary for pastoral care, the guidance and governance of the Church, and the service of souls in different historical, cultural, and environmental contexts, as well as within the multifarious array of situations that continually arise across space and time.

Starting from the 13th century, due to the influence of Dominican and Thomistic intellectualism, the Petrine office began to take on a magisterial role. As a result, the Pope started to perceive his doctrinal responsibility as his primary duty, above the pastoral duty of being a minister of salvific sacramental grace and the duty of being a witness to the charity of Christ. The dogmatic affirmation and the defense of truth against error began to take precedence over the promotion of holiness and the exercise of mercy.

From Intellectual Popes to Pastoral Popes

The great triumph of Thomistic, Dominican, and Scholastic intellectualism occurred at the Council of Trent and the First Vatican Council. The drafting of the Catechism of Trent was entrusted to four Dominican theologians. The Holy Office, presided over by a Dominican, became the most important of the Roman Congregations. The Pope consistently relied on the close collaboration of the so-called "theologian of the sacred palaces," a Dominican.

However, it happened that, due to a scholastic extrapolation of Thomism and Dominican preaching, the teaching of the eternal, dogma, the absolute, the immutable, and the universal became separated from the attention to the evolving times and historical events, the efforts and sufferings of men, cultures, and religions in their pursuit of truth and good.

Ignatius did not become a Dominican because he interpreted Luther's endeavor through the lens of disobedience to the Pope. Ignatius realized that it was necessary to establish an institute that would make immediate and effective operational decisions under the orders of the Pope, against whom Luther had rebelled, dragging entire peoples previously subject to the Pope.

But, for Luther, it was more a matter of truth than obedience to the Pope, although he started from a voluntaristic, Ockhamist, and subjectivistic notion of truth: what is the true Gospel? The Pope's or his own? Luther believed he had rediscovered the true, original Gospel, which had been covered and adulterated by Dominican scholasticism favored by the Popes to dominate the Church.

The Dominicans, for their part, had fully understood this fundamental aspect of the Lutheran rebellion, but being inclined to speculation, they could not effectively counter the spread of heresy and the dissolution of the Church. Ignatius understood that men of action were needed. This is the value of Ignatian voluntarism.

Thus, the rise of the Society of Jesus in the 16th century marks the beginning of a pastoral shift that culminated with Pope Francis, the first Jesuit Pope, while we Dominicans have had four Dominican Popes: Blessed Innocent V, Benedict XI, Saint Pius V, and Benedict XIII.

The 17th to 19th centuries marked a progressive separation of the Papacy and its influence from the progressive maturation of the modern world, which brought new values to the scene of history in the fields of knowledge and moral customs. These values, however, were born outside the visible boundaries of the Catholic Church and were used by its enemies against it. A critical adoption of these values was necessary, discarding the errors. Unfortunately, this critical and significant task of modernization remained undone until the end of the 19th century.

The Epochal Turn

This led to the modernist crisis during the time of Saint Pius X. On one side, many philosophers, theologians, and exegetes felt an urgent need to engage with the modern world. On the other side, the Dominican Thomists, influential with the Pope, imparted their intellectualism to the Papacy and the Petrine ministry until the arrival of Saint John XXIII, who initiated a pastoral shift in Peter's ministry through the Council, prioritizing pastoral care over doctrinal ministry.

At Vatican II, the Jesuits took center stage, unlike the Dominicans who had played a prominent role in earlier Councils. Instead of following the excellent inspiration of Maritain (bold mine, Ed.), the Dominicans were swayed by Schillebeeckx's trend, which proposed an indiscriminate modernistic adoption of modernity.

The Crisis of the Society of Jesus

What is difficult to understand is how, during the Council's proceedings and immediately post-Council, the Rahnerian faction within the Society triumphed, overturning the essential and original style of the Society by replacing the principle of obedience with that of freedom, the Cartesian principle of conscience instead of the biblical doctrine of truth, principles derived from Lutheran and Hegelian theology.

Certainly, we remain within the realm of voluntarism. But the replacement of freedom for obedience and conscience for truth signifies a conception of morality and thus of man that is no longer subject to God but, as Marx following Hegel said, man who is God unto himself. Here, voluntarism reaches the extreme of Nietzschean "will to power." (bold mine, Ed.) Is the Jesuit still a Jesuit?

This phenomenon exploded at the 32nd General Congregation of the Society in 1974 [4], when under the generalship of Father Pedro Arrupe, it was a matter of adapting the Society's legislation to the decisions of the Council. At that time, Saint Paul VI, who had long been aware that the Society was deviating, gave a speech of warm exhortation and paternal reproach but did not feel capable of giving orders.

Thus, the Rahnerians, under the pretext that they had not received formal orders to correct their heresies, felt exempt from obeying the Pope, and indeed, they were able to further strengthen their positions until the pontificate of Saint John Paul II.

After the very brief pontificate of John Paul I, who probably intended to suppress the Order [5], the new Pope took up this intention of his predecessor. Upon assuming the papal throne, he intended to dismantle the Society of Jesus, a plan that was halted by Cardinal Casaroli, the Secretary of State, who dissuaded him from doing so [6]. In any case, in 1983, the Pope faced the task of deposing Father Arrupe, replacing him at the helm of the Order with Father Paolo Dezza.

However, unfortunately, to this day, the Society is still under the influence of the Rahnerians, and although the Pope issued a strong call for fidelity to Saint Thomas last year, only a faint glimmer of hope is seen.

The Council of Trent

Severe Discipline but Also an Example of Pastoral Wisdom

Conversely, as soon as the Council of Trent ended, the Fathers of the Council realized the pastoral urgency of immediately providing parish priests with a sound exposition of the doctrine that Luther had corrupted. Therefore, they wanted the immediate publication of the Catechism, enabling the people of God . to comprehensively understand the truths of faith as altered by Luther.

The Popes of the Tridentine reform were able to send the highly obedient Jesuits to reclaim the peoples led astray by Luther and to curb the spread of heresies. Unfortunately, at the end of the Second Vatican Council, Paul VI lacked the pastoral insight and timeliness that the Fathers of Trent had. Consequently, inspired by Schillebeeckx, the Dutch Modernists published the disastrous Dutch Catechism, which Paul VI had to purge of numerous heresies.

So, if the Catechism of Trent was written by four Dominican champions of faith, at the Second Vatican Council, except for Congar and a few others, we Dominicans were not up to our mission ( bold mine, Ed.) and contributed to spreading modernism in the Church, suggesting that it was the interpretation of the Council's doctrines.

The Catechism truly reflecting the Council was published 30 years after the Council when the modernist Dutch Catechism had already spread. Some have bitterly noted that the stable door was closed after the horses had bolted. Now, it is not easy to bring these schismatic or heretical brothers back into communion with the Church because they consider themselves the advanced wing.

Until Vatican II, we Dominicans helped the Popes in the doctrinal aspect of their apostolic office, but we promoted excessive severity and a too-polemical pastoral approach towards modernity. The Vatican Council, thanks to the contribution of Jesuits and Franciscans, helped the Papacy acquire a more evangelical pastoral approach, more embedded in the historical context in which we live.

However, currently, the dissolving effects of a pastoral pragmatism or praxis, not sufficiently illuminated by a theological vision, are felt, risking to resolve into a secular activity that, instead of stimulating holiness and opening the ways to the Kingdom of God, settles, gets lost, and struggles in the meanders and labyrinths of this world.

We Dominicans need to return to offering light, certainties, clarity, reasons, intellectual honesty, motivations, openness of mind, nobility of thought, aptitude for speculation, broadness of vision, and transcendent perspectives, without diminishing the essential contribution of active voluntarism of the Franciscans and Jesuits. This way, we can once again offer the Popes the doctrinal support they need to fulfill their office as teachers of the faith.

Father Giovanni Cavalcoli OP

Fontanellato, June 30, 2024

source: https://padrecavalcoli.blogspot.com/p/per-capire-papa-francesco-un-gesuita.html

Notes:

[1] This is the epistemology of Blondel.

[2] This is the deep and ultimate meaning of the Cartesian cogito.

[3] This is the Cartesian, Schopenhauerian, Hegelian, Marxist, Heideggerian, and Nietzschean conception of truth.

[4] The facts are narrated by Jesuit Father Antonio Caruso, my dear friend, and colleague at the Secretariat of State in the 1980s, in his book "Tra grandezze e squallori," Edizioni VivereIn, Monopoli (BA), 2008.

[5] A few years ago, a priest friend of Patriarch Luciani confided in me that Luciani had told him, before going to the Conclave from which he would emerge as Pope, that if he were elected, he would suppress the Society. The sudden death prevented the revered Pontiff from implementing his project a few weeks before the XXXIII Congregation was to meet, for which he had prepared a very severe admonitory speech.

[6] See Jesuit Malachi Martin's "I Gesuiti. Il potere e la segreta missione della Compagnia di Gesù nel mondo in cui fede e politica si scontrano," SugarCo, Milan 1988. This book was given to me by Father Caruso.