The Medieval Pope went away

Francis, the best Pope in the last 500 years, went to his reward

Thanks, Holiness.

When Pope Francis was elected, I didn’t like it. An Argentinian Cardinal? A Jesuit?? Even the name he chose was weird, and I feared he would be the typical Latin-American Jesuit, all about politics. Down here, the Marxist infiltration of the Church, usually called “Liberation Theology” (which is neither theology nor liberating in any way), went very far, led by the three orders that in other turbulent times had championed Orthodoxy: the Franciscans, the Dominicans, and the Jesuits. They talked a great deal about a “preferential option for the poor”, but were much more interested in fomenting a class war than in saving souls or even helping feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and all that good stuff. A Latin-American Jesuit picking “Francis” as his name seemed to point in that direction, at least from a naturalistic point of view.

Soon after, however, when he went to Rio de Janeiro (instead of Benedict XVI, who had been expected there for the World Youth Day), he surprised me so much I quickly turned into a fan. I was there, in Rio, teaching in one of the many WYD events, but I didn’t have the privilege of witnessing first-hand when Pope Francis single-handedly ended with two words a very sad orientation that had done the Church grievous harm for many generations. But it was only the beginning; later, he showed by his acts, not (only) his words, that another trap that had kept the Church manacled to the world for half a millennium was also over.

First, the couple of words that made the Church turn 180 degrees: “¡Hagan lío!” There are many possible translations for the original Spanish meaning of these words, but none of them are sufficiently faithful to the original sense. “hagan” is the plural imperative form of “hacer”: “to do”, “to make”. So it could be “y’all, go and do/make [this or that].” “Lío” can be “trouble”, “fuss”, “confusion”, “fight”.

With these words, the Holy Father told the youth to go out and make lots of noise. Fight. Kick up a fuss. Make trouble. Be impolite. Mess out the works of the Devil. With these words, the Church remembered that her Founder did not say that her gates would resist the hosts of Hell. Instead, He said: “That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church; and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.” (Mt 16:18) Now, in the biblical verse, it is assumed that the Church is on the offensive, laying siege to Hell, and we will breach the gates of Hell and win the war.

For too long, though, the Church had been on the defensive, allowing her gates to be besieged instead of besieging those of the enemy. The enemy started his most successful advance a little more than 500 years ago, when Luther’s new religion stole from the Church the whole of Northern Europe.

Before Luther, everybody agreed that secular administration was each king’s business, but it was the Church’s mission to preach and make clear what was universally held as ethical standards. Most of the time, it made no difference, but once in a while, when this or that king acted immorally, the Church would chastise him, sometimes even placing his whole kingdom under interdict — that is, forbidding all acts of worship and ministration of sacraments within its borders. It was usually enough to make the ruler repent.

One of the reasons why Luther’s new religion grew so fast was that he would allow the kings who took his side to do things that would have been unthinkable a few years before, like massacring rioting agricultural workers (“Kill them like dogs!”, he famously told one of his princely followers), stealing land that had been of common use from immemorial times, and so on. Consensual morality, until then guaranteed by the Church, was purposefully broken down so that Luther’s princely allies could cement their power at the expense of the poor, and the Lutheran “church” itself could come to control the whole of Northern Europe, usually hand-in-hand with the State if not under its orders.

While before him Europe was a patchwork of small kings whose rule was held in check by consensual morality guaranteed by the Church, Luther’s new religion created all-powerful kings who directly or indirectly ruled over their local Lutheran “independent churches”. Morality was placed below the wishes of kings for the first time since the Christianization of Europe.

The wars that ensued made Europe Hell for a long time, and the peace that eventually ended them did so at the expense of Truth Himself. When the Treaty of Westphalia enshrined the principle of cuius regio eius religio (the religion of the King determines that of his subjects), it made it a Europe-wide rule that the personal opinion of each king the final arbiter of what would be true, good (or bad), right (or wrong), morals, ethics, etc. In other words, even in the parts of Europe that had not fallen prey to the new religion, adherence to what had been the consensus until Luther came became the king’s choice, not the default anymore.

That, of course, opened the path for something that had never been seen in human History: a society — that soon expanded from Europe to many other parts of the world, mostly North America — in which there was no general consensus of what is right and what is wrong, what is moral and what is immoral. An amoral society, which substitutes the wishes of rulers or, later, the vagaries of democratic processes for morality.

The Church took a very long time to recover from the loss of its previously important (in both a moral and a sociological sense) place in society. Just as a start, the Council of Trent, convened in the 16th Century to answer to the Lutheran and Calvinist errors, did so in such a way that the then-realistic hopes of reunion with Oriental Schismatic Churches were so seriously jeopardized that we are now — 500 years later! — farther away from that goal than we were at the time, soon after the Council of Florence.

The main mistake Church authorities made, and kept making, for the last 500 years was allowing Modern Europe to dictate the terms in which the Church would deal with it. It led, after a very fertile period usually called Counter-Reformation, to a sense of being besieged by Modernity, or by Hell itself, instead of being the besieging force. It took many forms, from a paradoxical “triumphalism” that condemned everything around, including many good things that in other times would have found their place within the Church, to the abject groveling to the world that followed the Second Vatican Council, a mere 60 years ago.

All that was reversed by two words: “¡Hagan lío!”

These were the first real marching orders uttered by a Pope in 500 years: go out to the world, and conquer it. Besiege Hell, for its gates shall not prevail. Make the voice of the Church heard, and make it hurt.

Pope Benedict had the opposite mentality. He would talk about how the Church would perhaps go back to being composed of just a dozen people. He paid attention to intra-ecclesial disputes, while allowing the world outside to fester and its pus to seep into the Church. He acted as if the Church herself was not only besieged, but already lost.

Pope John Paul II was not so bad, in this sense, but he had a very hard task at hand, having to deal with the results of what could only be called a process of self-destruction the Church underwent in his predecessor Pope Paul VI’s time. He also laid aim to a few immoral structures in the world, mainly Communism, whose horrors he had witnessed in his native Poland. However, he did so by allowing himself to become a party in an intra-Modernity battle instead of placing the Church above Modernity as the moral paragon she is called to be. By allowing puny History-book-footnote-worthy characters such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan to depict him as their “ally”, he belittled the Church’s mission, even in the most generic, more restricted to morals, of all possible views of it.

Pope Francis, however, who started by giving us the order to attack, to go and besiege Hell, went much further on the same path. He simply ignored the petty disputes between Modern factions, even when those disputes happened inside the Church. Instead of allowing the world to define the terms of the dialogue, he did what any Medieval Pope would have done and went back to the basics. In most of his homilies, he would talk about how the Devil seeks to ensnare us and how we can avoid his traps. He would preach, over and over and over, about what really matters: the Beatitudes. Sanctification. Respect for human dignity. How ideological thinking tears us away from God.

When he was the Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires, he would wear a simple black cassock, like that of any regular priest, and ride public transit. Thus, he said, he had the opportunity of helping people who never went to Church, people who didn’t recognize him and approached him because he was a priest, there, with them. He was, in a way, “haciendo lío” that way: going to the world and bringing it the Gospel instead of allowing the world to define the Church.

Ironically, for some, but making perfect sense according to his non-Modern view, he saved the schismatic Lefebvrian seminary of Buenos Aires when he was the Cardinal Archbishop. In Argentina, it is forbidden to wear a cassock when one is not a Catholic clergyman, and the government intended to arrest the schismatics, who regularly wore cassocks, for the crime of falsely impersonating a Catholic clergyman.

So the Cardinal formally recognized the schismatic seminary as his own insofar as it concerned secular authorities, thus preventing the government from meddling in what he rightly saw as an intra-ecclesial matter. He did not grant them canonical recognition, of course, for after all, they were proud schismatics; he only recognized them in the terms of secular law so that no petty secular king-wannabe could meddle in what was above his station.

Later, he went much further than his predecessor when he gave the same schismatic group extraordinary jurisdiction so that they could hear confessions and act as representatives of local Parish priests in marriage ceremonies. The powers of granting absolution and blessing marriages come from the local authority of each Bishop, who is the Successor of the Apostles in charge of a particular territory, his diocese. Priests can receive those powers from a Bishop, and nowadays usually do, but if they don’t receive them, or if their Bishop takes them away, they can only grant absolution to a person who is about to die. Up to the end of the 19th Century, there was a category of priests who did not receive those powers and could not preach. As their studies were radically simplified, the only priestly activity they were allowed to perform was to offer the sacrifice of Mass.

The schismatics, however, don’t care about it at all. Their whole schism is based on an extremely stretched notion of “emergency”. For them, the whole world has been in such a situation (a stable emergency, to say) for the last fifty-something years, and this fictitious emergency would allow them to act as if they were the only real priests in the world. After all, in a real emergency, as a nuclear war that disrupted the regular hierarchy of the Church, any priest would be able to grant absolution, even without specific authorization of the local Bishop if one existed. That’s why the schismatics hold to the fantasy of a Churchwide “emergency” that would allow them to act as if there were no longer a hierarchy in place. They were granting invalid absolutions (in other words, pretending to grant absolution without effecting it) as if there was no tomorrow.

When the Pope gave them extraordinary jurisdiction so that their absolutions worked, he did it not because they wanted it, but because they didn’t. By doing so, he at the same time worked for the salvation of the souls of the faithful who believed the schismatics’ lies and went to them asking for an absolution they only pretended to grant, and reinforced Chuch doctrine and papal authority.

The Church has been infiltrated too deeply by ideological thinking; the Lefebvrist schism is only another instance of this sad phenomenon, the right-wing equivalent of the left-wing infiltration of “Liberation Theology” in Latin America. In many countries, in North America as in Europe, the very hierarchy of the Church is divided between right-wing and left-wing ideologues, with precious little room left for real Church doctrine.

Pope Francis witnessed personally the evils of ideological thinking during the Argentinian military dictatorship, as well as in the inner workings of his own Jesuit order. He had been the Superior of the Jesuits in his country, but when the left-wing ideologues took over his order, he was demoted to doorman of a countryside Jesuit residence. At the same time, the crazy Fascist generals in charge of the Argentinian government arrested and murdered not only the Communist guerrillas they were supposed to be fighting, but anyone who vocally manifested displeasure with their abuses. As always, they found people within the Church hierarchy to support their abuses. As he rose in the ranks, the late Pope had to deal with both kinds of ideologues in those extreme circumstances, which made it clear to him how any ideological thinking can only detract from the gospel.

That is why, when he became “the Pope from the end of the world”, he brought back to Rome, the city that had once been the center of the world, everything that had once been taught from there.

What he did was similar in many aspects to what the Irish have done a long time ago. Present-day Ireland has never been part of the Roman Empire, and when it fell, the chaos that engulfed Western Europe did not reach the Emerald Isles. The books preserved in Continental monasteries were mostly destroyed, but those in Irish ones were preserved and copied. In time, when the situation of Continental Europe became peaceful again, Irish monks were sent to the places from which sprang those who had brought their ancestors the Gospel. The children went back to the house of their forefathers to give them back the gift of life.

In a way, the work of Pope Francis was akin to that of the first Irish monks invited to teach in continental Europe. While Europe fell to Modernity, the part that took the longest to fall was the Iberian Peninsula. Among other reasons, because they had just managed to drive the Muslims away, when all Hell broke loose in Northern Europe. While the cushy life of their Northern co-religionists made novelty seem worth pursuing, the Iberians knew the hard price of keeping the Faith, and managed to keep Modernity away from the core of their culture for centuries more. It was only by the late 19th century that it started to make strong inroads there, more or less at the same time that their Latin-American colonies became independent.

That is why Modernity in Latin America has seldom been more than a thin veneer over a strong cultural backdrop of pre-Modern and Personalist culture. Statistically speaking, even if the societal effects of ideological thinking were devastating enough (as in the confrontation of military dictatorships and Communist guerrilla movements in the 1970s), it has never been more than skin-deep. The Communists believed the Communist pablum, and the military believed in a version of Fascism, but the man on the street believed neither, and usually could not even understand what that was all about. Unlike what has been the rule in Europe and North America for at least a couple of centuries, ideologies in Latin America attract followers by emphasizing whatever they have in common with a consensual moral system not much different from that of pre-Modern Europe.

The Church is a great prize for ideologues because of its societal role as steward of consensual mores, and it made her the target of serious and often successful infiltration campaigns, such as that which led to the fall of Jesuits, Dominicans, and Franciscans in the Marxist error. Having suffered the effects of this infiltration, which he could compare with the wholesome Faith life of non-ideological Catholics (which he usually personalizes as the abuelita, the loving grandmother), Pope Francis wouldn’t give European or North American ideology-driven prelates the time of day. Unlike Pope John Paul II, he did not see left-wing ideologues as evil and right-wing ideologues as potential allies. Or the opposite, for all it matters. For him, all ideology is bad, and whenever it finagled its way inside the Church, it must be denounced and rooted out.

That is why both ideologue churchmen and, even worse, the secular press could never understand him. For them, ideology comes first, and reality comes later. An ideology-free man is unthinkable. They spent all their time trying to make him fit within the narrow confines of either the left or the right wings of a Modernity he had never belonged to and which he could only see as the greatest enemy of the Church in our days. Most of his teaching carefully presented reasons why both sides of the ideological divide were wrong, and reiterated how dangerous it is to fall into ideological thinking. However, if we read the media, we would believe him to be a strong partisan of one side. Usually the left side, mostly because they depicted Pope Benedict as a strong partisan of the right side (which he wasn’t), and the illusion of a dispute would sell more newspaper copy.

For the same reason, his daily warnings against the traps the Devil places on our path, which could only be read in the context of right-wing and left-wing politics as unhinged rightism, were simply never mentioned. They couldn’t understand him because he came from another world, a world in which ideologies are neither fact nor opinion, but sheer madness: civilization-destroying madness.

And he was right, our beloved Medieval Pope, who came from the end of the world to bring back to Europe some of the light it once brought the world before it became blind to the light of Truth. God only knows who the next Pope will be, but I hope it will be someone who can clearly see the dangers of ideologies, the child of one of the many places on the peripheries, one of the many “ends of the world”, in which pre-Modern Christian sanity still thrives. Africa, perhaps?