At first glance, Time magazine’s “Person of the Year,”
Pope Francis, is a mess of contradictions. On the one hand, he has
vehemently denounced the evils of global capitalism, calling it “a new
tyranny.” However, as pontiff, he heads the Catholic Church, which has
been characterized
as “probably the wealthiest institution in the entire world.” And,
although the pope has championed the importance of women in the Catholic
Church, saying in an interview,
“The woman is essential for the church. ... The feminine genius is
needed whenever we make important decisions,” he continues to oppose as
strongly as any pope before him the ordination of women, and considers
abortion to be evil. How do we make sense of Pope Francis’ views?
DonkeyHotey (CC BY 2.0)
It turns out that his critique of capitalism is actually nothing new.
According to human rights activist Blase Bonpane, a former Maryknoll
priest and adherent of “liberation theology,” “It’s been going on for a
long time. If we take the 19th century, we had Pope Leo XIII who gave us
the encyclical ‘Rerum Novarum,’ which followed directly from ‘The
Communist Manifesto.’ The pope agreed with practically everything in the
‘Manifesto’ by talking about how people go into the factories and are
ruined, whereas materials come out of the factory ennobled. And that was
followed by another encyclical by Pius XI called ‘Quadragesimo Anno’ in
the 1930s, 40 years after Leo XIII’s encyclical. These were
anti-capitalist documents.” In fact, according to Bonpane, “Pius XI
called for a living wage and defined it very well as ‘one worker in the
family, time for vacation, an ability to save money, to have a decent
life, to pay for all of your needs.’ So we have not always complied with
what the popes are talking about but they have had many anti-capitalist
statements going back to John the Baptist who said, ‘If someone has two
pairs of shoes, give one to someone who doesn’t have any.’ So [this
sentiment] has been in the history of the church despite its opulence.”
In that sense, Pope Francis represents a break not from the long-term
tradition of the church, but from his immediate predecessors. Bonpane
said, “I think it’s a dramatic change for him to focus on the liberation
theology elements [of Catholicism], which is to downplay dogma.” In
addition to his recent statements denouncing the ills of modern global
capitalism, there are reports
of the pope quietly stepping out of the halls of the Vatican at night
to help poor and homeless people. If that’s not enough to cement his
progressive economic policy credentials, Pope Francis has also provoked
the ire of right-wing shock jock Rush Limbaugh, who accused him of
“ripping capitalism” and being a Marxist.
Still, there remains the question of the Vatican’s vast and shady
financial empire, estimated to value in the billions of dollars and
plagued by allegations of money laundering.
If the pope is so interested in redistribution of wealth, why doesn’t
he just give it all away? Bonpane chuckled, “That would be a great idea!
I think it would help the church immensely if [the Vatican] became a
huge museum complex. Jesus didn’t call for a Vatican. He didn’t even
call for a building! He was on the street. He didn’t talk about rigid
dogmatic compliance. He talked about serving the poor and realizing that
whatever we do for those in need is our connection to the Almighty.” So
even though, according to Pope Francis, we “have to say ‘thou shalt
not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality,” and that “Such an
economy kills,” it does not appear as though he will redistribute
Vatican wealth anytime soon.
The pope also has a complex relationship with social issues such as
women’s rights and the role of the LGBT community in the Catholic
Church. In an interview
earlier this year, he said, “Women are asking deep questions that must
be addressed. The church cannot be herself without the woman and her
role.” Jon O’Brien, president of Catholics for Choice, is cautiously
heartened. He told me in an interview, “As someone who really cares
about issues that are central to women, I have to say that I welcomed
what Pope Francis [has] said. Because he basically called for the
Catholic Church to be home for all and not just a small chapel focused
on very narrow interpretations of what the moral issues really are of
the day. And that message resonates with so many Catholics because it
reflects our personal experience that Catholics are gay and lesbian,
Catholics use birth control, Catholics have abortions.”
The pope has also said that the church has expended too much effort
being fixated on contraception and abortion. O’Brien said he believes it
is a good thing for the church to pull back its focus on those issues,
“because if you look at what the Conference of Catholic Bishops here in
the United States has been saying and the amount of time they spent
telling us we shouldn’t be using contraception, 98 percent of women in
the United States use a method of contraception the bishops don’t like.
It does get a bit laborious when we see them up on Capitol Hill lobbying
against President Obama’s coverage of contraception as part of the
Affordable Care Act. So the idea that we’d hear church hierarchy speak
less about it, is a good thing.”
But the pope draws the line at abortion. O’Brien cited how the
pontiff made it clear to a group of gynecologists gathered at the
Vatican that “he would expect them, in his opinion, to continue to not
provide abortions and that they should refuse to provide women with the
right to choose.”
On the issue of LGBT Catholics, O’Brien
said, “While he embraced and said we should not pass judgments on gay,
lesbian and transgender folks, I think the reality is that he’s not
talking about changing the certain judgment that the Catholic hierarchy
has, that when a gay man or a lesbian woman expresses sexual love, that
that sexual love is not accepted by the church.” Indeed, in his Evangelii Gaudium, the pope stands by American bishops in their condemnation of “moral relativism” with regard to choice and gay marriage.
So while women may be more welcome in
Francis’ church, they cannot expect a role within the Catholic Church’s
power structure. And, while gays and lesbians may be less stigmatized,
they are unlikely to be fully accepted.
In addition to the pope representing
incremental social progress, his own identity as an Argentine was an
important consideration for the church, Bonpane pointed out, “because of
Latin America and the huge amount of Catholics not feeling
represented.”
But the pope’s integrity during the “dirty
war” in Argentina has been seriously compromised. Bonpane, who spent
many years doing solidarity work in Latin America, reflected, “It
certainly is questionable. He was using his authority at that time to
question priests who had continued working in the slums and were really
followers of ‘liberation theology,’ which ultimately began to have an
impact on him. But we certainly cannot defend his treatment, especially
of two priests and maybe various others that really lost their status
and could have lost their lives as a result. I saw this in Guatemala
that once the cardinal declared that we were communists and anti-Christ,
we didn’t have a chance to live through it, really. So it can really
finish off not only your career in the church but your life as well.”
Even though, Bonpane said, “I wouldn’t make any excuses for his
behavior,” he added, “I would say that there has been an evolution,” and
that once Pope Francis “saw how terrible the junta was, and how
terrible the dirty war was, ultimately he had something of a conversion
somewhat analogous to that of Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador.”
Ultimately, what makes the pope an
important figure in progressive politics is the very real
ultraconservative power structure in the Catholic Church that he
represents a sharp break from. O’Brien said, the church’s right-wing
lobby wants to “use a conservative understanding within the church—which
is a minority view—to beat up on our elected leaders like Nancy Pelosi
and other Catholic leaders here in the U.S. What Pope Francis has done
in one fell stroke is taken away some of the weapons that they try to
use to go after our elected representatives who want to legislate for
all of the people as opposed to legislating some conservative minority
view into our laws.”
In fact, Pope Francis has also made it clear that he disapproves of right-wing Christian fundamentalism, calling it “a serious illness.”
While he is tilting toward progressive
ideals, it should be noted that this pope understands that the real
crisis of credibility facing the Catholic Church is one of image.
O’Brien pointed out that Pope Francis is savvy about public relations,
saying “the head of communications at the Vatican is a former employee
of Fox News. In other words, the image that Pope Francis is projecting
is different. We’re talking about a pope who is a communicator ... who
is painfully aware what’s been going on at the church: scandals at the
Vatican Bank, an ongoing sexual abuse scandal that’s global and is
monumental in its mismanagement, and problems in the actual government
of the church.”
Bonpane concluded that, weighing all
considerations, Pope Francis does appear to be “a reformer,” and that
“he has an enormous amount of work to do.” However, he hinted that we
shouldn’t take the Catholic Church and its head so seriously in the
first place, condemning the Vatican’s attempts through the years to “try
to make the church the exclusive voice of God on earth.” Bonpane was
adamant that the church “is not [the exclusive voice] and it has never
been and never will be.” He went further, suggesting that what would be
truly radical is to say, “We don’t need the Vatican. We don’t need
churches. We don’t need a lot of dogma. We don’t need institutional
legalization of various issues. We have to liberate ourselves from that.
And we can go even further: We can liberate God from the Bible, and
from the Quran, and from the so-called holy books and see that there’s
something far more transcendent than that.”
© 2013 TruthDig.com
Sonali Kolhatkar is Co-Director of the
Afghan Women's Mission, a US-based non-profit that supports women's rights activists in Afghanistan. Sonali is also co-author of "
Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence." She is the host and producer of
Uprising, a nationally syndicated radio program with the Pacifica Network.
No comments:
Post a Comment