The Future of the Catholic Church with Pope Francis
Description
Look out for a new book from Garry Wills, What The Qur'an Meant, coming fall 2017.
Pope Francis, the first Jesuit pope and the first from the Americas, offers a challenge to his church. Can he bring about significant change? Should he?
Garry Wills, the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, argues provocatively that, in fact, the history of the church throughout is a history of change. In this brilliant and incisive study, Wills describes the deep and serious changes that have taken place in the church or are in the process of occurring. These include the change from Latin, the growth and withering of the ecclesiastical monarchy, the abandonment of biblical literalism, the assertion and nonassertion of infallibility, and the erosion of church patriarchy. In such developments we see the living church adapting itself to new historical circumstances.
As Wills contends, it is only by examining the history of the church that we can understand Pope Francis’s and the church’s challenges today.
“A lively exercise in church history—history intended to orient us in the here and now. It is addressed not only to Catholics but to the entire church as ‘the People of God,’ . . . and to anyone else—practicing another religion or emphatically not—who is curious to learn how one of our foremost historians and public intellectuals understands his faith.” —The Chicago Tribune
**A USA Today “New and Noteworthy” Pick**
“A lively exercise in church history—history intended to orient us in the here and now. It is addressed not only to Catholics but to the entire church as `the People of God,’ . . . and to anyone else—practicing another religion or emphatically not—who is curious to learn how one of our foremost historians and public intellectuals understands his faith."
— The Chicago Tribune
“The church, Wills argues, may act like it never changes. But in the pages of this book, he shows us that it can. . . .Wills’s historical chops are on vivid display in his new title: he can zip from the church’s distortion of the stories of early martyrs to contemporary battles over the use of Latin in liturgy. . . . He writes for a wide audience of skeptics, doubters, and questioners.”
— The Guardian
“We are two years into a new papal era…[Francis] is unsettling the church—in order to set it aright. Garry Wills’s new book is a valuable compass for this new terrain.” — The Washington Post
“Wills thinks deeply, and then goes public with his thoughts. Not a mission for the faint of heart, especially when it comes to the Roman Catholic Church. Wills is both a lifelong member of the church, and one of its fiercest critics. His current preoccupation is with Pope Francis. . . . Wills has high hopes for the new pope’s ability to shine a light into the dark corners of the church, but he’s under no illusion that it will be easy. . . . This book is not so much about Pope Francis as an informed look at the Catholic Church and the challenges he faces. Whether you are religious or not, it’s a subject worth paying attention to.”
-- The Seattle Times
"Wills ranges widely through the Catholic past. . . [his book] provides a comprehensive. . . and eye-opening account of a pivotal period in recent American social history."
--The Los Angeles Review of Books
“Wills turns his sword on certain beliefs, some of which have been reformed, but whose influence lingers in the dark corners of chanceries. . . . Wills speaks not from left field, but from inside the church, a regular Massgoer with a devotion to the rosary.”
--National Catholic Reporter
“Wills discusses the reforms that Francis, the world’s first Jesuit pope and the first from the Americas, has implemented but also places them in a larger context of a church that has undergone far more change over the past 2,000 years than many might realize.”
— The Austin American Statesman
“Beautifully conceived and wrought essays that systematically address the wrongheadedness of the Catholic Church over centuries—and the space therein for Francis' long-needed reforms. A pope determined to admit change and renounce ‘infallibility’—is this possible? Pulitzer Prize-winning intellectual and leading Catholic scholar Wills is guided by his close scholarly readings of the Gospels, as well as by modern commentators, examining how the church can right itself—as it has repeatedly over the ages in the face of bad decisions . . . A welcome, thoughtful menu for the new pope on how to proceed with reform.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Is it possible, or even prudent, for an institution that has survived for 2,000 years to change? The Catholic Church, according to Wills, has changed substantially over the course of its existence and must continue to do so . . . [Wills] presents fascinating historical snapshots of the church throughout its history and illustrates the shifts it has navigated, from adopting and then dismissing universal Latin for its liturgical language to rejecting its embedded anti-Semitism at the Second Vatican Council . . . well researched, [Wills] offer[s] valuable insights into the contemporary political landscape.”
—Publishers Weekly
Praise for Garry Wills:
—The New York Times Book Review
“Wills brings to bear the skills that have justly brought him renown as America’s greatest public intellectual: encyclopedic erudition, concise prose and a polyglot’s gift for languages.”
—The Chicago Tribune
“Garry Wills is simultaneously one of this country’s leading public intellectuals and American Catholicism’s most formidable lay scholar.”
—Los Angeles Times
Praise for Why Priests?: A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
“Wills draws on his expertise in classical languages and his wide reading in ecclesiastical history to argue that the Catholic/Orthodox priesthood has been one long mistake.”
—The Washington Post
“How. . .did priests become dominant and then essential in Catholic Christianity? And why, Wills asks, in this provocative [and] historically rich . . . book, does the Vatican continue to sustain such falsehoods? . . . [C]rucially informative and enlightening.”
—The New Republic
“Pulitzer Prize winner Wills, a venerable voice on church history, thought and practice, provides a stunning critique of the Roman Catholic priesthood.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“Using his linguistic skills and his impressive command of both secondary literature and patristic sources, Wills raises doubts aplenty about ‘the Melchizedek myth,’ and the priestly claims for Jesus in the ‘idiosyncratic’ Epistle to the Hebrews … His final chapter is a model of elegant simplicity, a contrast (intended or not) to the flummery often associated with his own church … ‘There is one God, and Jesus is one of his prophets,’ Wills concludes, ‘and I am one of his millions of followers.’ For those millions, scattered across time and space, that’s an affirmation worthy of celebration.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Do we really need Catholic Priests? Wills, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Why I Am a Catholic, dares to pose this controversial question[.] . . . One cannot help but be impressed with this brilliant work written by a scholar whose love for the Church compels him to make it better.”
—Publishers WeeklyGarry Wills is a historian and the author of the New York Times bestsellers What Jesus Meant, Papal Sin, Why I Am a Catholic, and Why Priests?, among others. A frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and other publications, Wills is a Pulitzer Prize winner and a professor emeritus at Northwestern University. He lives in Evanston, Illinois.
Pope Francis heartens some Catholics, but frightens others—both of them for the same reason, the prospect of change. The Catholic Church is the oldest institution in Western civilization. Surely the secret to its longevity is its ability to defy and outlast all the many breaks and discontinuities over the last twenty centuries. From that vantage point, a changing church is simply not the Catholic Church. Immutability must be built into its DNA.
It helps, in holding such a view, not to know much history. There was no need to know much. Since one begins from a certitude that the church was always what it has become, one simply has to extrapolate backward from what we have. We have priests, so we must always have had them—though they never show up in the Gospels. We have popes, so they must have been there too—they were just hiding for several centuries. We have transubstantiation, so we did not have to wait for the thirteenth century to tell us what that is. The beauty of the church is its marble permanence. Change would be its death warrant.
Early on, I was given a different view of the church from reading G. K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man. It was published nine years before I was born, and it took me sixteen years after that to catch up with it—but I was intrigued, then, by a chapter called “The Five Deaths of the Faith.” This offered a different story of the church’s long life. For Chesterton, it was not a tale of certainty formed early and never altered. It was a story of hairbreadth escapes, as the church kept dying, of old age, or of inanition, or from external causes. There were many times when it could have died—when, by the laws of historical probability, it should have died—yet it was constantly reanimated from some supernatural deathlessness. Corruption should have killed it, or the Roman Empire should have, or the Renaissance, or Galileo, or Darwin, or Freud. “Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.”3
This was not because it simply defied change. In fact, it often changed with the age—became Roman with the Roman Empire, shedding its Middle Eastern roots and adopting a Latin structure; became a super-monarchy in the age of monarchs; became super-ascetic in the age of Stoic contempt for the body; became misogynistic in the various patriarchies; became anti-Semitic when the world despised Jews. But when the age died of old age, the church somehow didn’t. As Chesterton put it:
It has not only died often but degenerated often and decayed often; it has survived its own weakness and even its own surrender . . . It was said truly enough that human Christianity in its recurrent weakness was sometimes too much wedded to the powers of the world; but if it was wedded it has very often been widowed. It is a strangely immortal sort of widow.4
Sometimes, of course, it clung too long to what it had worn as a new set of up-to-date garments. The recovery of Aristotle was a fresh and challenging thing when Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas led it, but it became an unnecessary encumbrance when Rome thought it something too good to let go of. The Latin tongue looked, for a long time, like a universal language, spreading opportunities for communication, till it became an outmoded thing trammeled in its own particularities. The Irish practice of private confession introduced a deeper kind of spirituality for monastic specialists, till its broader use for everyone, including children, made it commonplace and subject to abuse.
The church outlasted things that seemed to undermine it—not because it was unaffected by these transitory things, but because it joined them, drew on other sources, and lived to adopt different new things. Instead of reading history backward, from its current form to a fictive immutability in the past, Chesterton led me to read history forward, from the early evidences and from the different guises the church had to adopt in order to survive. That is not only a more interesting story, but an exciting one—of narrow escapes and improbable swerves. It calls to mind Buster Keaton’s Seven Chances (1925), in which Buster runs full speed down a sloping mountainside, pursued by a giant landslide of boulders, dodging some, leaping over others, maneuvering through repeated impasses, caught by a smaller rock that knocks him out of the path of a bigger one, ducking into cover that itself gives way. And then, toward the bottom of the mountain, an even greater menace forces him to run back up through the continuing rain of rocks.
Going back to read the church’s story as it happened was called ressourcement (re-sourcing) in the 1940s and 1950s, when Pius XI and Pius XII silenced its practitioners. The only way to look back, for those popes, was to reaffirm what “always was” in the church, not to find anything new there. There can be no history at all for those who just retroject the present into the past. But Pope Francis champions ressourcement, as he told his fellow Jesuits at America magazine. Newman’s concept of doctrinal development breathes through that interview:
The joint effort of reflection [with the Orthodox Church], looking at how the church was governed in the early centuries, before the breakup between East and West, will bear fruit . . . St. Vincent of Lerins makes a comparison between the biological development of man and the transmission from one era to another of the deposit of faith, which grows and is strengthened with time. Here, human self-understanding changes with time and so also human consciousness deepens.5
The suppression of the “re-sourcers” is an old story with the church. Yesterday’s heretic becomes today’s authority—and vice versa. I want to trace, in this book, how change—far from being the enemy of Catholicism—is its means of respiration, its way of breathing in and breathing out. Even before Pope Francis, the Second Vatican Council had found in the church’s sources that “the church” did not always mean what some of its defenders insist that it must mean. Their meaning is implicit in usages like “the church teaches,” or “you must obey the church.” For some, “the church” is the Vatican, the papacy, the magisterium, the church’s teaching authority. But that apparatus was not there at the beginning. Another usage of “church” was older, broader, and better attested in the sources. Vatican II returned to that meaning when it proclaimed that the church is “the People of God.”6 This people includes all those who believe in, follow, and love Jesus.
This people first organized itself under the guidance of the Spirit imparted to it at Pentecost. It chose its own leaders, it tested authority, it rejected attempts to dictate to it from above. It had various leaders, playing them off against each other—James in Jerusalem, Peter in Antioch, Paul in Corinth. Its councils voted on doctrine through representatives (bishops) who were themselves elected by the people. In John Henry Newman’s time, the magisterium was so far from this understanding of the church that he was silenced for claiming that the laity had some role in forming doctrine, and that the church could undergo some change (under the rubric of “development”). It was impossible for Newman to carry his thought further, developing its own implications. The very concept was quashed in its initial formulations. The need to hang on to set ways stifles creativity. Pope Francis describes the condition:
Whenever we Christians are enclosed in our groups, our movements, our parishes, in our little worlds, we remain closed, and the same thing happens to us that happens to anything closed: when a room is closed, it begins to get dank. If a person is closed up in that room, he or she becomes ill!7
We are now able to read history forward again, to test evidence and trace changes—changes that came, were changed themselves, and then fell away. We can see the People of God weathering all kinds of vicissitudes, while not losing belief, while still following Jesus, while still expressing love of him in the care for each other and for the needy. We can see the coming and going of the papacy as a worldly empire, the rise and final rejection of a “universal language,” the rejection of the Jewish covenant and its renewed recognition, the fad for biblical fundamentalism returning to figurative readings, the condemnation of the body circling back to its recognition. I mean in this book to watch the phases of this process, the reaction of the church as a living body in real situations.
To say that change has often shaken the church does not mean that change is always an easy process. And we should not expect it to come from any one man, even though he is the pope. We sometimes think John XXIII changed much in the church. But he was not so much the initiator as the welcomer of changes long in preparation and not to be imposed, “top down,” by fiat. Three of the changes I treat in this book—from the Latin liturgy, from rejection to acceptance of the Jewish covenant, and from the ideal of a state church to one of religious freedom—were made not by Pope John but by the Vatican Council he called together. He was in many ways a conservative in his tastes. He personally loved the Latin liturgy, and his own scholarship was pretty much restricted to editing writings of the quite autocratic Charles Borromeo.8 But he did not try to mold the church in his own image. He knew that would be going against the true meaning of the church. He called in others to consider change. And the council fathers summoned or listened to prophetic scholars who had been silenced by autocratic popes—men named Daniélou, Congar, Chenu, Rahner, Murray.
The papacy is not a prophetic office. People may be lodging too much hope in the name Cardinal Bergoglio took for himself. No other pope has taken that name, probably for good reasons. Francis of Assisi was, notoriously, not a good administrator—prophets never are. The religious order he founded rushed off in all directions, splintered, and quarreled, while—in broader and lasting ways—the whole church was aerated and exalted by his example. It would have been more expectable for Bergoglio, a Jesuit, to have taken one of the Saint Francises from his own order—Saint Francis Xavier, for instance, or even Saint Francis Borgia. He made a riskier choice, but we would make the long shot even longer by expecting a prophet instead of a pope. Leonardo Boff, the leader of liberation theology, once avoided by Bergoglio, now embraced by Francis, thinks that, in this case, nomen truly is an omen. He says, “Francis is more than a name—it’s a plan.”9 But Francis of Assisi was not good at plans, and the name can promise too much.
Though the pope has changed much in the style and presentation of the papacy, conservatives keep telling themselves that he has not changed dogma, and liberals say that even his stylistic changes have kept much they disapproved of in place. He has, for instance, canonized the authoritarian John Paul II, and retained Benedict XVI’s favored disciplinary instrument, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. He has not only retained Benedict’s choice as prefect of the CDF, Gerhard Müller, but promoted him to cardinal. And under Müller the harsh investigation of American nuns was allowed to continue.
The pope has said that to be truly Christian one must be a revolutionary, as Jesus was. “In this day and age, unless Christians are revolutionaries, they are not Christians.”10 But the man at the center cannot rebel against himself. The pope must, by his office, care for continuity and minimize disruption. It is true that some popes care more for continuity than for the life of the church—Paul VI and John Paul II were so urgent to keep continuity with the 1930 encyclical Casti Connubii that they wrote Humanae Vitae (1968) and Familiaris Consortio (1981), ignoring the voices of theologians, bishops, and the people. But that does not mean that a pope can just disregard any need for continuity. Though Francis can renounce the more ostentatious flourishes of his office, he cannot knock the props out from under the throne he sits on. Prophets levitate; popes rarely do. Francis cannot simply draw up the ladder by which he climbed. That was as true of John XXIII as it is of Francis.
All popes show a proper deference to their predecessors; but no other pope had a predecessor still living, and living right next door. Some earlier popes had resigned or been forced from office, but they did not hang around to keep an eye on what their successor was doing. Francis is in the ticklish position of having to look over his shoulder, much of the time, at Benedict. The canonization of John Paul II, for instance, was an uncompleted project of Benedict. Francis completed it. The prefect of the CDF is another example of Francis’s limited room for maneuver. Müller was not only a friend of Pope Benedict, he is the man he commissioned as the editor of his writings. Benedict also appointed him to the signature office he had held himself in a stormily contested tenure. No one could be more trusted to guard Benedict’s legacy and reputation at the CDF. For Francis to reject him would be a direct insult to Benedict.
On the other hand, as the expert Jesuit Vaticanologist Thomas Reese has pointed out, Francis has done much to whittle down the centrality of the CDF, creating different centers of power in gradual shifts of emphasis and organization.11 This is the kind of balancing act by which popes make change digestible, if not palatable. Francis, like John XXIII, calls on others to take steps moving the whole church, not just its ceremonial head. Liberals, for instance, have called for him to repeal the informal excommunication of sincere Catholics who have lapsed from some doctrinal demands. Francis has called on bishops to consider this question. But he has encouraged those who want to speak out to do so. He considers a hypothetical case in the confessional:
I also consider the situation of a woman with a failed marriage in her past and who also had an abortion. Then this woman remarries, and she is now happy and has five children. That abortion in her past weighs heavily on her conscience and she sincerely regrets it. She would like to move forward in her Christian life. What is the confessor to do?
He offers this simply as a matter for confessors to ponder, but he gives a hint where his own instincts lie when he says, “The confessional is not a torture chamber.”12
Though church reform is a matter Francis cannot avoid, he says that the Gospel energy for that must look outward, at the other tasks the church has neglected, draining its power to carry out its commission from Jesus—to care for the sufferings of the poor, of immigrants, of sexual victims of all kinds. Reforms that seem hard can become almost incidental when energy is generated and expended on these missions. A constant emphasis of his talks as pope has been on going out to the periphery, the margins, the frontiers, to take God’s love to them. And he wants Catholics to join with other Christian churches, East and West, in carrying Christ’s message to those in need. It seems at first as if he is just taking on more tasks, more external missions along with internal reforms. But he says that getting priorities straight will help with all these efforts. That is why he criticized the endless and repetitive harping on things like abortion and contraception.13
It is a huge undertaking. If the pope is not a prophet, he does need to be something of an acrobat, like Buster Keaton dodging and scrambling down the mountain under the steady pursuit of boulders large and small. He has multiple tasks no one can perform alone, which is why he calls on others to pray for and support him. These are tasks the whole church must take up—tasks for us, for the People of God. He has made the church as the People of God a leitmotiv in his pronouncements, as in his major document, Evangelii Gaudium:
[The church] exists concretely in history as a people of pilgrims and evangelizers, transcending any institutional expression, however necessary . . . The People of God is incarnate in the peoples of the earth . . . God furnishes the totality of the faithful with an instinct of faith—sensus fidei—which helps them to discern what is truly of God.
A pope who believes in that church will not try to change it all by himself—which is the best way to change it.
NOTES
1. J. H. Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (Penguin, 1994), 100
2. Pope Francis, The Church of Mercy (Loyola Press, 2014), 18
3. G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (Ignatius Press, 1987), 250
4. Ibid., 259–60
5. Interview with Pope Francis, America, September 30, 2013 The interview was drawn from six hours of conversation over three days.
6. Lumen Gentium 13, Gaudium et Spes 11, in Vatican Council II, edited by Austin Flannery, sixth printing (Costello Publishing Company, 2007), 17, 174
7. Pope Francis, The Church of Mercy (Loyola Press, 2014), 19
8. As Peter Hebblethwaite wrote, “[Roncalli] had discovered his scholarly vocation, editing the 39 volumes of Saint Charles Borromeo . . . But it took a lifetime. The five volumes appeared in 1936, 1937, 1938, 1946 and 1957” But the books were so expensive few could buy them. John XXIII: Pope of the Council (Geoffrey Chapman, 1988), 54, 240
9. Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots (Bloomsbury, 2013), 198
10. Pope Francis, The Church of Mercy, 13
11. Thomas Reese, S.J., “Vatican’s Doctrinal Congregation Isn’t So Supreme Anymore,” National Catholic Reporter, February 14, 2014
12. Pope Francis, America interview.
13. Ibid.: “We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods . . . We have to find a new balance; otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards.”
I
The Coming and Going of Latin
ONE
When I was growing up I often heard that a strength of the Catholic Church was its universality. Go anywhere in the world, and you would find the same words and rites being used at Mass. This made people as different as Joseph de Maistre and Arnold Lunn say that a Catholic was at home anywhere. Latin knew no spatial or temporal limits. It was the perfect vehicle for conveying eternal truths, absolute everywhere. No wonder people fought so hard at the Second Vatican Council to keep this symbol and pledge of supra-temporal consistency. Latin was the eternal language for an eternal church.
The idea of a common language, one that can span cultural differences and bring people together, is perennially attractive. The most persistent effort at this is Esperanto, invented in 1878 by Ludwig Zamenhof. He came from the town of Bialystok, where people spoke Russian, German, Yiddish, and lesser-known tongues. After mastering these, Zamenhof dreamed of breaking down divisions in the community by creating a shared language all could own and be proud of. His broader hopes for creating peace through a unity of language were fostered by thousands of people around the world. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Other artificial languages have been contrived, along with attempts to unify the spelling, phonetics, and morphology of single languages—for instance, George Bernard Shaw’s promotion of a new alphabet for English. At a less ambitious and therefore more common level, there have been attempts by national academies or prescriptive dictionaries to impose standard usage for any and all words. These have all been strangled in the thickets of particularity they were trying to erase.
Esperanto, precisely because it seeks a neutral common ground, loses the color, nuance, and historical resonance of native words spoken over time in specific cultural contexts. These words all have echoes of their former uses, in many layers. Different people are aware of different levels of that usage, but every native speaker recognizes some of them, and they lend richness to the words. The words when joined have rhythms and accents that vary according to the linkages, recognizing old partner-words, or perking up at striking collisions with surrounding words, accompanied with the arc of their phrasing, the tune of the language as sounded. Esperanto and its congeners will always seem sterile and empty next to words that buzz with such possibilities, as suggestive as they are elusive. That is why it is impossible to write real poetry in Esperanto. As a language with the lowest common denominator of meaning, it is all a wide, thin surface over nonexistent depths.
Latin, however, seemed for a long time to escape these common dangers of a common language. It did have a history, with historical resonance. For centuries it served as a lingua franca for those with differing first languages. It facilitated diplomatic and scholarly exchanges. It was the language not only of the Christian churches, but of the learned in many secular circles. Treaties were better drawn up in a language that extended to all parties. The civilization of a culture was judged by its degree of connection with the Latin language. That is why T. S. Eliot claimed that Dante is a more universal poet than Shakespeare, more accessible to those with the common heritage of Latin-derived Romance languages. (He hastened to say that this did not make Dante greater than Shakespeare, just a denizen of a wider culture.) As de Maistre wrote, “the European sign is Latin.”1 That was a problem. Latin was “universal” only for Europe. It was parochial so far as the rest of the world was concerned. Those who championed Latin as the best expression of the faith also thought, in Hilaire Belloc’s familiar maxim, that “Europe is the faith.” We no longer think that “universal” means European.
Even in the New World colonies of America, which were only partly non-European, there was a sense that one should find one’s own ways of thinking and speaking, outside the matrix of Latinity. Dr. Benjamin Rush, the Revolutionary leader in Pennsylvania, said that people in a young country should develop their own new ways of learning. Though classically trained himself, he said that starting out
PUBLISHER:
Penguin Publishing Group
ISBN-10:
0143107895
ISBN-13:
9780143107897
BINDING:
Paperback / softback
BISAC:
Religion
NUMBER OF PAGES:
288
BOOK DIMENSIONS:
5.4000(W) x 8.0000(H) x 0.7000(D)
AUDIENCE TYPE:
General/Adult
LANGUAGE:
English