The Political Theology of Pope Francis: Understanding the Latin American Pope [1 ed.] 9781003349099, 9781032387277, 9781032392882

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction
2 The canonical ecology of Pope Francis – a comparison with Benedict XVI
3 Pope Francis and liberation theology – a conflict solved
4 Pope Francis and populism – resemblances and differences
5 The eternal feminine in the Catholic church – a gender perspective on Pope Francis
6 The non-historical Jesus of Pope Francis’ political theology
Conclusion
Index

Citation preview

The Political Theology of Pope Francis

This book explores the political dimension of Pope Francis’ theology from a variety of perspectives and makes a unique contribution to the ongoing historiography of his pontificate. It defines the concept of political theology when applied to Pope Francis’ discourse and reflects on the portrayal of him as the voice of Latin America, a great reformer and a revolutionary. The chapters offer a thorough investigation of core texts and key moments in Pope Francis’ papacy (2013–), focusing in particular on their relation to canon theory, liberation theology, the rise of populism, and gender issues. As well as documenting some of the continuities between the ideas of Pope Francis and his predecessor Benedict XVI, the author asks what the Argentinian pontiff has brought from Latin America and considers the Latin American dimension to what has become known as the ‘Francis effect’. Overall, the book demonstrates how the Pope’s words and actions constitute a powerful political theology disseminated from a unique religious and institutional position. It will be of interest to scholars of theology, religion, and politics, particularly those with a focus on world Catholicism, political theology, and church history. Ole Jakob Løland is an associate professor of religion, worldviews, and ethics at the University of South-Eastern Norway.

Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies

The Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies series brings high quality research monograph publishing back into focus for authors, international libraries, and student, academic and research readers. This open-ended monograph series presents cutting-edge research from both established and new authors in the field. With specialist focus yet clear contextual presentation of contemporary research, books in the series take research into important new directions and open the field to new critical debate within the discipline, in areas of related study, and in key areas for contemporary society. Religion and Intersex Perspectives from Science, Law, Culture, and Theology Stephanie A. Budwey Exploring Theological Paradoxes Cyril Orji African Churches Ministering ‘to and with’ Persons with Disabilities Perspectives from Zimbabwe Nomatter Sande The Fathers on the Bible Edited by Nicu Dumitraşcu The Theological Imperative to Authenticity Christy M. Capper The Political Theology of Pope Francis Understanding the Latin American Pope Ole Jakob Løland For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ religion/series/RCRITREL

The Political Theology of Pope Francis Understanding the Latin American Pope Ole Jakob Løland

First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Ole Jakob Løland The right of Ole Jakob Løland to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-38727-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-39288-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-34909-9 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003349099 Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Acknowledgementsvi 1 Introduction 2 The canonical ecology of Pope Francis – a comparison with Benedict XVI

1 22

3 Pope Francis and liberation theology – a conflict solved39 4 Pope Francis and populism – resemblances and differences

69

5 The eternal feminine in the Catholic church – a gender perspective on Pope Francis

92

6 The non-historical Jesus of Pope Francis’ political theology107 Conclusion

134

Index138

Acknowledgements

This book is a product of my research as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oslo, but it is also a result of decades of studies of Latin American Christianity – which I have undertaken both in Latin America and at a long distance. As a young theology student, I sought traces and concrete expressions of the Theology of Liberation movement in slums and poor neighbourhoods in countries such as Argentina, Paraguay, Mexico, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Bolivia, and Brazil. During these years, I learned a lot about the contextual nature of theology from my excellent Jesuit teachers in El Salvador and Brazil, as well as from outstanding lecturers in indigenous theology in the Andean context of La Paz, Bolivia. In my youth I had the privilege of getting to know the liberation theologian Lidio Dominguez (1936–2012), who had lived in my hometown as a refugee, escaping from the brutal human rights violations of the military regime in Argentina (1976–83). This friendship led me to write a biography in Norwegian about the spectacular life story of Dominguez, who served as secretary to Bishop Jerónimo Podestá at the Second Vatican Council, was a co-founder of the Christian Agrarian Leagues in Paraguay, committed himself to the Montoneros guerilla movement in Argentina, and thereafter worked as an advisor to Pope John Paul II. When Jorge Mario Bergoglio (1936–) was elected pope in 2013, I  knew that I  had studied the life of a Catholic theologian (Dominguez) of exactly the same age as the newly elected pope. Both had lived most of their lives in the same ecclesial and political context of Buenos Aires during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, before the military regime forced one of them into exile. And it is telling that one of them could safely remain in the Argentinean metropolis. What is more, when I  realized that Dominguez had collaborated with the two Jesuits whom the current Pope was accused of handing over to the military regime in Argentina, I understood that, by coincidence, I had studied Bergoglio’s social and religious context for several years. I thank the board of the Faculty of Theology for offering me the position as postdoctoral fellow to continue my studies of recent forms and expressions of Latin American Christianity and more specifically of Argentinean Catholicism.

Acknowledgements  vii Many colleagues deserve to be thanked for having shared their knowledge over the years, having discussed with me, for sometimes having posed challenges through disagreements and not least for having inspired me through their passionate interest in various forms of contemporary Christianity and its multiple forms of theology: Rafael Ruiz Andrés, Ragnar Misje Bergem, Maren Christensen Bjune, Einar Braathen, Benedicte Bull, Maria Soledad Catoggio, James Crossley, Enrique Dussel, Massimo Faggioli, Virginia Garrard, Vebjørn Horsfjord, Werner Jeanrond, Marianne Bjelland Kartzow, Yuri Kasahara, Sven Thore Kloster, Gina Lende, Fortunato Mallimaci, Enrique Santos Marinas, Marco Marzano, Geraldo di Mori, Halvor Moxnes, Afonso Murad, Brynjulv Norheim, Pablo Richard, Nilo Ribeiro Junior, Carlos Palacio, Gregory M. Reichberg, Pedro Rubens, Knut W. Ruyter, Riccardo Saccenti, Rafael de Sivatte, Jon Sobrino, Roberto di Stefano, Terje Stordalen, Sturla Stålsett, Juan Jacob Tancara, Jakob Egeris Thorsen, Javier Fernández Vallina, Jaldemir Vitorio, Georg Wink, Margit Ystanes, José Zanca, and Rodrigo Zaragaza. That said, I am, of course, responsible for this work in its entirety, with all its hypotheses and conclusions. In addition to stimulating conversations, it was also crucial for this research project to get help with reference tools, translations, proofreading, and library services. All the kind help from Patricia Battig, Irene Elordi, Pablo Etchebehere, Mario Iribarren, Lars E. Lørdahl, and Daniel Miño is very much appreciated. In particular, it has been a privilege to cooperate with translator Brian McNeil due to his expertise on Catholicism and his remarkable efficiency. I am also grateful to Tarjei Solvang Tjønn for setting up a little database with excellent search possibilities in the corpus of Pope Francis’ speeches and writings. An earlier version of chapter 3 appeared in the journal International Journal of Latin Americans Religions (Springer), and chapter 5 was published in its entirety in the Norwegian journal Kirke og kultur (Scandinavian University Press – Universitetsforlaget). This article, originally written in Norwegian, was translated by Brian McNeil and appears here for the first time in English. These materials appear here with the permission of the publishers of these journals. Ole Jakob Løland

1 Introduction

In 2013, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected as the first Latin American Pope in history. It was, in a certain sense, not before time. Latin America had for a long time been the heartland of Global Catholicism. Although the ­Catholic church during the last decades had lost a considerable percentage of its members to charismatic Protestant movements in every Latin ­American country, Latin America still remained the most Catholic region in the world. Due to demographic changes and high numbers of Europeans and North Americans being raised Catholic and then actively disaffiliated with the church, the centre of gravity in Catholicism had shifted even more to Latin America and to the rest of the so-called Third World. With an Argentinean pope, the world’s largest religious organization was for the first time to be governed by a representative of the Global South. What difference might this make? At the very least, the election of Bergoglio had an immediate impact in the public perception of the head of the Catholic church, and this was to influence the mediatized image and public credibility of global Catholicism in the years to come. As the newly elected Roman Pontiff, Bergoglio presented himself as a humble person from “the end of the world” and chose the name Francis while paying homage to and seeking support in the figure of Saint Francis of Assisi. As the first non-European pope in centuries and with the saintly name of Francis, Bergoglio could effectively build his charisma on his Latin American otherness.1 What was perceived by many as the Latin American foreignness in the figure of a new pope appeared to strengthen the radical sense of a new beginning for an old institution set in scene with the fresh style and the hitherto unprecedented acts of Bergoglio. With symbolic deeds such as refusing to live in the papal palace, insisting on carrying his own briefcase on papal journeys, or washing the feet of a Muslim woman among Rome’s prisoners, Bergoglio energized the mediatized image of an entirely different pope that the reports in the media confirmed repeatedly. Less attentive to theology and more inclined to expressions of the religiosity that could be visualized and thereafter commented upon in dramatic terms, the media cultivated this idea of a radically new pope with a coverage of the modern papacy that had not been observed for decades. According to the DOI: 10.4324/9781003349099-1

2  Introduction Pew Research Center, there was less talk in the media about Pope Benedict XVI in his eight years than about Pope Francis in his first year (Martín 2017, 175). What is more, the unprecedented act of Benedict XVI’s abdication, by many interpreted against the background of the various scandals surrounding the institutional centre of global Catholicism, enforced the sense inside and outside the church that with a new Roman pontiff something drastic had to happen. After all, the reports of sexual abuse in the church continued to shock the public.2 And the financial scandals had also erupted and left the Vatican under Benedict XVI in public disgrace. All this gave rise to huge expectations of what was to come in the governance of the Catholic church under Pope Francis. One of the first biographies published in English of the present Pope was entitled The Great Reformer (Ivereigh 2014). This picture of the Argentinian as a reformer also became an icon for Western popular culture, thanks to the front cover of the magazine Rolling Stone in 2014, which depicted Pope Francis with a headline taken from Bob Dylan’s song: “The times they are-a changin’ ”. The magazine described the pontificate of the Latin American as nothing less than a “revolution” (Rolling Stone 2014). Marco Politi’s (2015) book on Pope Francis bore the subtitle “The Inside Story of a Revolution”. “Revolution” was on many lips and in a lot of headlines. Was it all a well-orchestrated simulacrum of a true revolution, or did the headlines reflect a real turnaround of structures, hierarchies, and power? On a general level, some patterns under Bergoglio’s governance of the Catholic church can be discerned. After Pope Francis’ nearly decade-long pontificate, certain lasting tendencies and long-term developments can be distilled in spite of the tabloid headlines and turmoil surrounding the papacy that now carries a Latin American face. Evaluated in retrospect, it is clearer how Pope Francis’ decisions were implemented and his messages received in a global context marked by an unexpected wave of rightist populism with a forceful anti-immigration agenda and the neglect or outsight denial of the deteriorating effects of climate change. These new agendas of the radical right went hand in hand, however, with positions on issues such as abortion and gender in line with the Catholic church.3 What is more, they were partly results of a cultural war of which Christian identities and Catholic positions already formed an integral part. And within the prevailing logic of these culture wars, the Catholic vote in a country like the United States was, to a considerable extent, reduced to a single-issue vote centred on the question of abortion (Millies 2018). With a significant support from Catholics, Donald Trump was elected president in the United States, where the Catholic church continued to be the church with the highest number of members and the largest institutional presence. In the country on earth with the highest number of Catholics, Jair Bolsonaro, with a rhetoric and programme in many ways similar to Trump’s, was embraced by a majority of the Brazilian voters. Approximately half of the Catholic population in Brazil reported that they intended to vote for

Introduction  3 Bolsonaro (Datafolha 2018). Two of the three countries in the world with the biggest Catholic populations (Pew Research Center 2013) opted for authoritarian populists who promised restrictive policies on reproductive rights for women and openly denounced and disrespected the separation of powers that lay at the heart of modern democracies. As the flow of migrants to Europe’s border and Trump’s rhetoric on building a wall on the US-Mexican border occupied the global media’s attention, Pope Francis’ message of neighbourly love towards migrants stood out as a fresh contrast to powerful regimes and leaders within this new political conjuncture. Pope Francis’ accentuation of a broader spectre of an already-established Catholic social teaching effectively tempered some of the logic of the culture wars to which many Catholic authorities in several countries had committed themselves. When Pope Francis stated in an interview with his collaborator Antonio Spadaro in August 2013 that “[w]e cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods” (Spadaro 2013), the Argentinian signalled a significant shift in pastoral focus, but not in the content of theology or papal teaching. Although abortions, considered as murders, were taking place in modern hospitals throughout the world, Pope Francis chose the island of Lampedusa as the destination for his first official visit outside Rome after his election. In the years to come, the Pope would sometimes add places associated with social exclusion and human suffering to his list of destinations on his official visits, for instance when he chose to approach the wall on the West Bank in Palestine or Tijuana on the US-Mexican border. At Lampedusa in 2013, he set the tone for his preaching as Pope by concretely speaking about the boats on the sea outside the island as “vehicles of death”, by denouncing what he deemed “a globalization of indifference” towards the suffering and deaths of migrants. But Pope Francis not only accentuated the papal teaching established by his predecessors, he also moved this papal tradition in new directions theologically. In his first apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium from 2013, Francis placed the materially poor at the centre of his theology, and in his first encyclical Laudato Si from 2015 he made the care for our natural environment in light of a climate change caused by human technocracy into a Christian plight. This encyclical was historic for being the first such papal text to recognize the fact of global climate change. His 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti summed up and communicated the social teaching of the Pope’s previous messages in a more accessible way to a public that was not limited only to Catholics. And significantly, in this encyclical the pope reiterated his admiration for Saint Francis of Assisi by pointing to the medieval saint’s efforts of peace and dialogue with the non-Christian world when he travelled to meet the Egyptian Sultan Malik-el-Kamil. In the previous year, Pope Francis had travelled to the Arabian Peninsula as the first pope in history, where he made a controversial declaration about the divine origin of religious pluralism in a joint declaration with Ahmed el-Tayeb, Grand

4  Introduction Imam of al-Azhar. To proclaim that “[t]he pluralism and the diversity of religions, colour, sex, race and language are willed by God in His wisdom” (Francis and Al-Tayyeb 2019) goes beyond previous papal statements on interreligious relations or theology of religions. Moreover, it also takes a step further than the Vatican II document Nostra Aetate, the Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions. Through a new accentuation of established Catholic teaching and some new steps in the theology of the magisterium, the Pope broadened what the public could perceive as the papal agenda. The pontiff’s new emphasis could potentially halt, for instance, Catholics’ support for anti-immigration rhetoric based on Islamophobic attitudes or the Catholic embrace of policies with deteriorating ecological effects over the globe. The church historian Massimo Faggioli has succinctly formulated as follows the modern political role of the Catholic church: “The loss of temporal power due to the extinction of the Papal States and the secularization of the Western world, the historical cradle of Christianity, have given birth to an internationally and diplomatically more active papacy” (Faggioli 2020, 65). By accentuating social concerns of the church through such successful mediatizations, Pope Francis was capitalizing on this new profile of the papacy. This moral capital could then be turned into effective currency for the facilitation of new political initiatives, such as the establishing of diplomatic ties between the Obama administration in the United States and the Castro-led Communist regime in Cuba in 2015 or negotiations in late 2016 between the opposition and the authoritarian Maduro government in Venezuela. In this last case, the crucial role of the Catholic church became visible in the condition put forward by the opposition, that without the Vatican there would be no talks with Maduro’s representatives. This shows that the theology behind the political actions of the Vatican is a powerful one, although, after the loss of the papal states, it is built on a unique soft power or moral capital. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to discern the changes in this political theology under a new Pope. And this makes the discipline of theology very valuable in the work of critical academic analysis.

Political theology The social doctrine of the Catholic church is another name for political theology. Since the so-called “social question” was set on the Catholic agenda at the end of the nineteenth century, the social doctrine of the church has denoted the Catholic vision of how modern societies should be governed in accordance with Catholic tradition as heralded by the Roman pontiff, and therefore ultimately according to the Catholic discernment of the divine will. First, it seeks to guide the involvement of Catholic agents, movements, and parties in the social and political sphere. Second, the doctrine as articulated by the social teaching of the pope entails a vision of the entire society should be organized. From the time when Pope Leo XII initiated the

Introduction  5 tradition of social reform from a Catholic perspective, therefore, this social doctrine cannot be separated from a political theology that analyses and prescribes the governance of the polis on the basis of interpretations of the divine will for the world.4 The words and actions of a pope in the Catholic church constitute a powerful political theology disseminated from a unique religious and institutional position. The Catholic church is by far the largest religious organization in the world, and its social doctrine has political implications that depend on how it is understood and articulated, and not least on the interpretative position of a pope. For the sake of the argument, political theology is not defined here in the Schmittian sense of the category,5 but rather in the broader sense that includes a wide array of uses of theology in a kind of politics that cannot be reduced to partisan politics and democracies nor to the exercise of power in authoritarian states (Vries 2006). Religion is often used in everyday language to denote something that is sharply distinct from politics. The appearance in politics of what scholars conventionally classify as religious narratives, metaphors, and symbols may question our basic assumptions of what counts as religion in the first place.6 Given that definitions of religion are themselves products of historical processes and that there is little consensus among scholars of religion about how to define it, definitions of religion become working hypotheses that we employ for analytical purposes.7 Rather than conceiving of religion and politics as isolated spheres that at some points intersect, we should a priori expect the papacy and the Catholic church, with high levels of membership and institutional outreach and therefore importance for everyday socialization in many nations, to have political dimensions. This implies that we consider politics in a broader sense than the conventional view of it as the presence and impact of states and public institutions, but should also recognize the politics expressed in practices or institutions that are commonly seen as religious (Levine 2012, 8–11). At the heart of politics in a liberal democracy is, of course, winning elections and thereby reshaping non-material (cultural) or material structures in society, by the distribution of material resources to a population. Nevertheless, the decisions about how to distribute these resources are always products of cultural processes that privilege certain symbolic goods or moral norms over and at the cost of others. Notions such as the destiny of the people, the virtue of the nation, or the will of God cannot be empirically verified, but can nonetheless shape political attitudes. In the allocation of immaterial resources or supra-empirical goods, religion and politics overlap and compete. Accordingly, any utterance or action taken by the pope with political dimensions or implications in the broad sense can be considered an expression of his political theology. Pope Francis’ political theology is, of course, grounded in Catholic ideas and practices, but political theology is not a phenomenon that can be delimited to Catholicism or Christianity. It is, rather, the set of ideas that motivates religious actors from different confessions and

6  Introduction traditions in politics (Toft, Philpott and Shah 2011, 26–31). Political theology stands behind politicized and political religion. Of course, political theology is not unscathed or unaffected by political events and ideologies. Ideas do not operate in social and cultural vacuums. Hence, in this monograph, Pope Francis’ political theology will be politically situated and historically contextualized. Nevertheless, there are theological ideas and reasons that are cultivated more independently of shifting political circumstances. There are certain theological principles behind actions with political ramifications that are discernable over time, for instance in the case of the late-modern papacy of the Catholic church. This means that this book is primarily focused on the external orientation of Pope Francis’ deeds and actions, those that affect the political world outside the strictly religious and institutional sphere of the church. But as will be made clear regarding such a question as gender, the internal governance of the church and the vision of how societies should be governed from a papal point of view cannot be entirely kept apart from each other. Pope Francis’ opposition to the priestly ordination of women leads him to envision social roles for women more broadly, and vice versa. Given this interdependence, a study of Pope Francis’ political theology must also pay some attention to his key decisions in the running of the church. And if we are to believe an analyst of Pope Francis’ pontificate, the importance of the Pope’s decisions for matters of the church has not been reduced: “Francis has resignified and reinterpreted the power in and of papal Rome, but he has not renounced or diminished the role of Rome” (Faggioli 2020, 66).

Pope Francis – from Buenos Aires to Rome Jorge Mario Bergoglio was born in Buenos Aires in Argentina on 17 December 1936. He was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest on 13 December 1969 and lived for most of his life in the Argentinean metropolis. Bergoglio was named Provincial Superior of the Society of Jesus in Argentina on 31 July 1973. He assumed this influential ecclesial position at a dramatic and turbulent time in the modern history of Argentina and of the Argentinean Catholic church (Løland 2018). Argentinean Catholicism seems to be a theological and political battleground that partly reflects the national political conflict that to a high degree revolves around the future of Peronism. The Movement of Priests for the Third World  is one of the uniquely Argentinean expressions of a regional radicalization of Catholicism that also makes visible the division of the clergy and the generational tensions that reach the church and threaten the traditional authorities in this institution. These new movements, conflicts, and confrontations are also symptoms of social processes in which the Catholic church in Argentina is losing its religious monopoly and the authority of its formal leadership is in decline, as Catholicism is diversifying; this too is a signal of various secularization processes.8

Introduction  7 When Bergoglio is named the Provincial Superior of the Jesuits in the order on a national level in the South American country at the relatively young age of 36, the conclusions of the Second Vatican Council are to be implemented. But the battle over their implementation only seems to accelerate the changes and deepen the division within the church. In this battle, the young Bergoglio stands out as a traditionalist who is eager to call young novices and the rest of the Company to resist many of the new ideas, habits, and changes (Klaiber 2009, 299), for instance the Decree Four about the “promotion of justice” from the General Congregation of the Jesuits 1974–75.9 And it is important to note that the Catholic church in Latin America sets out to implement the Second Vatican Council and its adoption of human rights and freedom of religion in midst of the rise of political authoritarianism and evangelical Protestantism. On a national level, political polarizations become reflected in a deeply divided Church until the socalled Dirty War in Argentina. This national tragedy cast shadows over the national church in South America, which, more than any other national Catholic church in the region, symbolizes the failure of speaking out against human rights violations during the Cold War. Bergoglio acts as a typical herald of the ecclesial institution during the military regime (1976–83) and represents the strategy taken by most Catholic leaders in Argentina during these brutal years marked by state terror and political violence. Bergoglio is wary of speaking out publicly against the regime. He neither explicitly embraces the military regime as antisecular protector of Christian civilization nor joins forces with the minority of church leaders and bishops who commit themselves to the human rights struggle as an inherent dimension of the praxis of their Catholic faith.10 While Bishop Desmond Tutu became the great symbol of the truth commission after apartheid in South Africa, the leader of the work for a comparable truth commission in Argentina after the rule of the military regime in Argentina was Ernesto Sabato – not a bishop, but a writer and an atheist (Morello 2017, 246). And unlike Catholic churches in other Latin American countries, neither any major dioceses nor the episcopal conference in the Argentinean church created mechanisms for documenting human rights violations or for protecting victims of torture and political persecution (Morello 2014, 24). Bishop Antonio Quarracino comes to symbolize the unwillingness of the Catholic church to bring those responsible for the state terror and the political violence to justice in the sense of holding them legally accountable (Marina Franco 2018, 207–8). In 1983, Quarracino declared that there should instead be a “law of oblivion” (ley del olvido) (Robben 2018, 204). Given that the church plays an influential public role in the era of the return of democracy and freedom of expression to Argentina from 1983 onwards, there is a striking absence of any explicit concern about these matters in the few writings that Jorge Mario Bergoglio has left us from the 1980s and in his homilies of the 2000s as archbishop.11 Quarracino plays a key role in the nomination process of Bergoglio in 1992 as auxiliary bishop of Buenos

8  Introduction Aires (an appointment that surprised many), and then in 1997 as his coadjutor with the right to succeed him as Archbishop of Buenos Aires. Bergoglio takes over in the following year (Esquivel 2004, 229). But when, as archbishop, he is confronted by these realities in 2010, he does not replicate Quarracino’s position. When pressured to take a stand, he calls for a reconciliation that also involves juridical prosecution (Rubín and Ambrogetti 2013, 135–46). Bergoglio’s politics of memory differed from Quarracino’s, but that was long after the decisive debates of the 1980s and 1990s had taken place. The Argentinean sociologist Fortunato Mallmaci has pointed out that Bergoglio as a bishop was careful to avoid controversies in the public square (Mallimaci 2015, 235). Even as Archbishop in a country heading for recognition of same-sex marriage Bergoglio held a low public profile (Larraquy 2013, 219–28).12 When the conclave in 2013 elected Bergoglio as the new Pope, they selected a representative from a national Catholic church that between 1976 and 2012 never accompanied in public human rights organizations in their demand for truth and justice for the victims and the crimes committed under the rule of the military junta from 1976 to 1983 (Mallimaci 2015, 204). But the fact that the Pope was Latin American may have been a more important factor in the election than his national identity. The election may have reflected a strategy to regain religious territory in a region where Catholicism lost ground to Evangelical Protestantism, particularly in its Pentecostal forms, but was also weakened by secularization processes in some South American countries. Perhaps a Latin American pope would mean a Catholic renaissance in this part of the world? In constitutional terms, the Pope’s home country has remained one of the least secularized countries in Latin America. Arguably, only Costa Rica has a constitutional regulation of religion that provides greater privileges to the Catholic church than Argentina.13 Article 2 in the Argentinean constitution about state-church relations has remained unchanged since 1853. It says: “The Federal Government supports the Roman Catholic Apostolic religion”.14 Sociologically, in terms of reported beliefs, attitudes, and religious practice, Argentina is one of the most secularized countries in the region. First, some research concludes that in no other country in the region are the people so sceptical towards religious leaders’ influence on national politics as in Argentina.15 In this sense, the Argentinian people can be said to be marked by a modern mentality that calls for a clearer differentiation between the religious and the political spheres; this is an essential aspect of secularization. Second, if Catholic leaders in Argentina had hoped for something comparable to the Catholic renaissance that was witnessed in Poland after the election of Karol Wojtyla in 1978, they were indeed disappointed after the ascent of their fellow countryman to papal power in 2013. In Argentina, Catholicism has been in decline during the years that the Catholic church worldwide has been governed by an Argentinian. From 2009 to 2018, the proportion of Catholics in the Argentinean population

Introduction  9 sank from 76.5 to 62.9%. As an interesting indication of secularization processes in the country, the proportion who said that they had no religion rose to nearly 20% (Mallimaci et al. 2019). Third, the elevation of Jorge Mario Bergoglio to the highest rank in the Catholic church does not seem to have made people in Argentina more confident and respectful of his religious authority when the question of abortion is considered. Five years into Pope Francis’ pontificate, the public support for a proposal to legalize abortion took the church by surprise. And in 2019, Alfredo Fernández won the presidential election with clear promises of advancing the issue of softening the law and its penal legislation against women who had abortions. The legislation had been in place from 1921. Although Pope Francis made harsh statements on the matter from 2018 onwards and his local bishops in Argentina employed their full moral weight to stop the legalization, the government’s proposal of legal abortion up to the twelfth week in pregnancy passed the two chambers of Congress in December 2020. It was a major theopolitical defeat of Pope Francis and his national church since this made Argentina the first large country in Latin America to legalize abortion. What is more, the success of the Argentinean mobilization against the will of Catholic authorities could also have a regional ripple effect. This was an indication of the weakened position of the moral authority of the Catholic church, particularly among the younger generations. This change was another sign that the conclave’s choice would not result in a renewal and flourishing of Catholic religious life in a country like Argentina. When we add to the picture the protests in Chile during Pope Francis’ visit in 2018 in light of the sexual abuse scandals, together with the active disaffiliation of so many Catholics in the country,16 we get a sense of the accelerating secularization on the Southern Cone that Pope Francis has not been able to reverse.17 That said, the rest of Pope Francis’ region has over the last decades been more characterized by vibrant religiosities than by the secularization perceived on the Southern Cone. And it is interesting to note that the competition in this religious market, where the Catholic church no longer enjoys a monopoly, seems to have mobilized Catholics in areas where the rise of Charismatic Protestantism has been most clearly felt (Stark and Smith 2012). The vitality of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal and the high levels of church attendance in Catholic churches in Latin America is a strong manifestation of this. The missionary language and pastoral programme formulated under Bergoglio’s leadership at the CELAM meeting in Aparecida in 2007 and further articulated in Pope Francis’ first apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, seem to be influenced by this rise of Protestant Pentecostalism and the Charismatic turn within Catholicism in Latin America (Thorsen 2015). As I  have already pointed out, Pope Francis has gained an extraordinary amount of publicity in secular media in the West. If the conclave in 2013 intended to promote to the highest rank of the church a cardinal who was familiar with the vibrant religious life that marks many

10  Introduction Latin American countries and the secularization that leads people either to distance themselves from the church or to lose interest in it, the Metropolitan Archbishop from Buenos Aires from 1998 onwards was a wise choice. As an Argentinian, Bergoglio appears to communicate well both in the European sphere and in the Latin American sphere. The Argentinian social anthropologist Eloísa Martín has pointed out that the smiling Pope who has been interpreted as a sign that big changes are on their way in the Catholic church has little to do with the man whom the Argentinians knew as Jorge Mario Bergoglio until he was elected Pope in 2013. Ernst Kantorowicz described the two bodies of medieval kings, one natural and one political; today, the mass-medialization of Pope Francis has, in Martín’s opinion, created a third body: the virtual body. This third body mixes the natural body (Bergoglio) with the political body in ways that strengthen the power of this pontificate. The Pope of mass-medialization keeps on breaking the Vatican’s protocols and displays his popular warmth in drawing near to the laity (E. Martín 2017). But there is more to this discontinuity between Bergoglio and Pope Francis than the mass-medialization. For an analysis that primarily focuses on papal messages as texts, it is also important to bear in mind the collective nature of their authorship. A pope has a much larger bureaucracy to serve his interests and major resources to engage intellectual experts to inform and co-write texts. Pope Francis is to some extent open about this. He makes it clear in an interview that he did not write the whole encyclical Laudato Si, but that he merely gave his style to the content provided by scientists, theologians, and philosophers (Reyes Alcaide 2017, 93). Since there is no full transparency of this editorial processes, we cannot know what comes from co-authors and what can be traced back to the Pope himself. We do not know where the work of collaborators begins and the revisions of Jorge Mario Bergoglio end. As Pope, however, Bergoglio will always have the final word. But Pope Francis cannot be reduced to Bergoglio. Pope Francis is a wider and more complex phenomenon than Archbishop Bergoglio.18 The Second Vatican Council affirmed: “For the Roman Pontiff, by reason of his office as Vicar of Christ and as pastor of the entire church, has full, supreme and universal power over the whole Church, a power he can always exercise freely” (Lumen Gentium, no. 22). Pope Francis is sovereign. Although there are checks and balances in the form of collaborators and consultants in the Vatican, in the end, he and only he decides the content of the papal texts. This is not new, but the conditions in which the Pope decides are now considerably different than under his predecessors. After having taken the initiative to gather bishops at one extraordinary synod in 2014 and one ordinary in 2015 with the family as the theme, Pope Francis published in 2016 the post-synodal apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia. Through the synodal process he had met considerable resistance to his pastoral view on the need to open the reception of communion to divorced and remarried Catholics (see AL, no. 242). This made the internal opposition

Introduction  11 in the church to Pope Francis’ pontificate more visible than before. And when a prominent Vatican diplomat, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, called in a public letter in 2018 for Pope Francis’ resignation, Viganò met support among some high-ranking officials in the church, including cardinals (O’Connell 2018). This was unprecedented in the recent history of the papacy. What was new was arguably not so much the existence of an internal opposition to a pope, but the public visibility of this opposition and the explicit demand for the pope’s resignation. It was as if after Pope Benedict XVI’s abdication it made sense to call for a pope’s renunciation of his sovereign position and for a new vote by the college of cardinals. If this was not enough, Pope Francis also had to cope with the existence of a pope emeritus. Pope Benedict XVI had generally withdrawn from public and did not challenge Pope Francis’ public role as the supreme voice of the institution of the papacy. But at a time that the Catholic church globally was under an unprecedented amount of public pressure on the topic of sexual abuse in the church, Pope Benedict XVI wrote an essay giving his explanation of the abuse crisis, primarily blaming secular societies after the sexual revolution of the 1960s (Benedict XVI 2019). This 2019 essay, published only a month after Pope Francis’ global summit in February the same year on the sexual abuse, was a unique moment in the history of Pope Francis’ pontificate. In a rare moment, the world could hear the pope emeritus’ opinion on a matter high up on the agenda of the church and the media that potentially diverged or conflicted with the voice of the governing Pope voice. The tension laid bare some aspects of what it meant for the church to have two popes living at the same time.

State of research One of the presuppositions that guide this work is that much of current research has not sufficiently considered Pope Francis’ Latin American background. One obvious example is the Pope’s relation to liberation theology, which is not straightforward, but deserves more attention than it has received up to now in scholarship on the current pontificate. Another sign of this limitation in certain strands of scholarship is the notable absence of engagement with Latin American and particularly Argentinean scholars. There has also been a tendency in some scholarship to approach the figure of Pope Francis in a rather acritical manner. Marco Marzano has rightly pointed out that superficial journalism has exaggerated the changes under Pope Francis (Marzano 2018, 5). One challenge in this field is that there is not always a clear delineation between findings of journalists and conclusions of scholars, since popular works can be referred to and cited in scholarship without the necessary scrutiny of their sources or because of the lack of better sources. Jorge Mario Bergoglio is, after all, a person who kept a low public profile in Argentina before he became archbishop in 1998, and he has left little written material for us as researchers to work with.

12  Introduction Another difficulty arises from the imprecise generalizations and somewhat idealized descriptions of the Pope that not only permeate some of the popular literature but that sometimes also leave their traces on works of scholars too.19 “Humble”, “compassionate”, and “merciful” are categories for hagiographies, not for critical research.20 It appears necessary to move beyond the heroic portrayals and treat Jorge Mario Bergoglio like any other historical agent embedded in social, cultural, and political complexities. When a scholar reduces the complexity of the matter and writes that “[m]ercy is the defining characteristic of Pope Francis’ leadership” (Mescher 2019, 102), Bergoglio is uncritically turned into a religious hero. What is more, “mercy” can hardly be said to count as a critical category for academic research that intends to grasp the historical significance of a pope. Some of the seemingly premature conclusions of certain earlier academic works appear to be guided by a clear normative interest in the success of Pope Francis’ pontificate. One can, as a scholar, appreciate Pope Francis’ voice and function as a global religious leader in a world plagued by xenophobia, the climate crisis, and the hegemony of capitalism. Nevertheless, this appreciation can also be articulated as acritical appraisals that affect the accuracy of our descriptions as scholars. We therefore need a more critical distance and awareness, particularly in the academic field of theology. The level of precision of portrayals and descriptions in some cases appears to be reduced by a strong sympathy for Pope Francis’ causes or by fear of the effects of the various forms of opposition to his pontificate, both inside and outside the Catholic church.21 For these reasons, some of the ambition in this book is to contribute with sober reasoning to identifying the historical significance of the first Latin American pontificate in history, with a focus on theology and its contexts. Another indication of this lack of critical approaches to Pope Francis is the impatience or urgency to exonerate him for the misdeeds he is accused of in Argentina in the case of the arrest and torture of the Jesuits Yorlando Orio and Francisco Jalics in May  1976.22 While some scholars carefully avoid drawing swift conclusions, given the lack of clear evidence (­Catoggio 2016, 137–42; Massaro 2018, 8; Zanatta 2015, 238–40), some authors use the good deeds of Bergoglio during the military regime (1976–1983) as proofs of his innocence,23 while others again run quickly to the conclusion that Jalics’ declaration, that he had reconciled himself with the events, constitutes a proof of Bergoglio’s innocence.24 Furthermore, there is a striking neglect or unwillingness to engage with a first-hand source like the letter Orlando Yorio wrote about his relation to Bergoglio after he was released from captivity (Yorio 1977).25 The purpose of this book is not to provide an exhaustive answer to the question about the Francis effect in relation to all the issues related to political theology. This field of research is vast and complex. The ambition is thus rather to modestly contribute to some new insights about the historical significance of Pope Francis’ political theology through some case studies

Introduction  13 with a set of theories that has yet to be applied to Pope Francis’ theological thinking. This contribution aims not only at showing the clarity and coherence of Pope Francis’ political theology but also at bringing to light some of the major tensions and possible incoherencies of his pontificate. This entails that the study explores not only the content of the pope’s teaching but also the ways by which he builds and legitimates his unique religious authority. The longer period of time that has passed since the election of Pope Francis in 2013 means that a larger corpus of the Pope’s writings can now be taken into consideration. Several key decisions that some earlier works awaited with uncertainty have now been taken by the Pope, with a lasting impact that probably will remain in effect until the end of this pontificate. This means that nearly a decade after Bergoglio’s ascension to the position of a Roman pontiff, a more mature historical understanding of the current pontificate is possible.

Structure of the book This book consists of several case studies of aspects of Pope Francis’ theology that have political implications in a broad sense. By using perspectives from theories on canonicity, liberation theology, populism, biblical reception, and gender, new knowledge is gained about the historical and theological significance of Pope Francis’ papacy.26 As a whole, these different perspectives contribute to a deeper understanding of what has been “the Francis effect” since Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s ascension to papal power in 2013. When the Jesuit Patrick Howell, in an otherwise illuminating memoir, affirms that Pope Francis has redirected the mission of the church because the Argentinian “has not caught up in the American cultural wars, but has returned to the gospel as his primary text” (Howell 2019, 210), this description of the Francis effect remains too vague. Accordingly, we still need to ask more thoroughly in what ways Pope Francis interprets the gospels of the New Testament. Hence, biblical reception becomes one of several useful tools for describing the Francis effect more accurately. Pope Francis is the first in several senses of the word. He is the first Jesuit Pope, the first Pope from the Americas, and the first non-European Pope in 12 centuries. No wonder that many have emphasized the election of Bergoglio as a major rupture in the recent history of the modern papacy. These acritical assumptions of a new beginning and a radical break with the past can, however, be put to the test by critical scholarship. While paying close attention to possible discontinuities, important historical continuities between the ideas of Pope Francis and his predecessor Benedict XVI may be discerned when their words and actions are studied. Chapter  2 will document some of these continuities between the two Popes through a comparison of the two socially oriented encyclicals Caritas in Veritate (2009) and Laudato Si (2015). Recent studies of canonicity have illuminated the ways the biblical canon has been interpreted and received in

14  Introduction history. The theory of canonical ecologies serves to analyse how Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis have construed their papal authority with references to the biblical canon and to non-biblical authorities that exemplify some of the flexibility of the actual canon for their Catholicism. This comparison not only emphasizes historical continuity but also indicates some of the novelties of Pope Francis as the first Latin American Pope. In tune with the Latin American tradition of the General Bishops’ conferences since Medellín in 1968, Pope Francis uses Scripture for a more inductive way of theological reasoning than Pope Benedict XVI. Pope Francis’ canonical ecology reflects a broader theological horizon than can be detected in the case of Benedict XVI. Finally, Pope Francis’ invoking of the canonical commentaries of regional and national bishops’ conferences around the world effectively recognizes episcopal collegiality in a stronger manner than we find in his predecessor’s writing. Chapter 3 focuses on Pope Francis’ relation to Latin American liberation theology. With the election of the Argentinean Jorge Mario Bergoglio as head of the global church in 2013, the question about the legacy of liberation theology was actualized in new forms. The canonization of Archbishop Óscar Romero and the pope’s rapprochement with the public figure of Gustavo Gutiérrez signalled a new approach in the Vatican to the liberation theology movement. This chapter argues that Pope Francis as pontiff shares some of the main theological concerns of liberation theology. Although the Pope remains an outsider to liberation theology, he has, in a sense, solved the conflict between the Vatican and the Latin American social movement. Through an analysis of ecclesial documents and theological literature, this can be discerned on three levels. First, Pope Francis’ use of certain theological ideas from liberation theology has been made possible and less controversial by post-Cold War contexts. Second, Pope Francis has contributed to the solution of this conflict through significant symbolic gestures rather than through a shift of official positions. Third, as Pope Francis, the Argentinian Jorge Mario Bergoglio has appropriated certain elements that are specific to liberation theology without acknowledging his intellectual debt to it. The starting point in chapter 4 is the rise of populism as a worldwide phenomenon with a long history in Latin America and Argentina. The chapter then discusses the claim that Pope Francis is some sort of a populist. As a religious leader from a unique position, Pope Francis has criticized populism in strong terms, at the same time as he has been defined by commentators as himself a populist. This chapter argues that the definition of populism as embedded in Pope Francis’ discourse is not a scholarly one and that the Pope’s criticism does not imply that he cannot be considered a populist. Of the three core concepts of populism (people, elite, and the general will), the Pope invests most in the concept of the people. Pope Francis constructs the notion of a morally virtuous people in ways that resemble the typical populist construction of the people. Although the typical populist demonization of the political enemy of the people is less present in Pope Francis, his

Introduction  15 criticism of Donald Trump might constitute an exception. As a whole, Pope Francis’ political theology can be said to have some affinities with populism. Chapter  5 explores Pope Francis’ and gender issues. A  pattern in Pope Francis’ pontificate with regard to gender has become discernable. First, Pope Francis disseminates gender-stereotypical prejudices through an essentialist categorization of women as a group. Second, the Argentinian refuses to give women access both to priestly ordination and to ordination as deacons. Third, Pope Francis confirms the Catholic church’s construction of the so-called “gender ideology” – a rhetorical figure that has proved to be a politically effective concept, especially over the past decade. Chapter 6 maps the reception of the gospels in Pope Francis’ most authoritative writings, alongside his historic homily in March 2020 that was part of his response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The reception of the Jesus figure in Pope Francis’ theology is contextualized through the perspective of the turn to history within Latin American theology and Catholic biblical interpretation after the Second Vatican Council. Although Latin American theologians claimed after the Council that an emphasis on the historical Jesus safeguarded their interpretations against apolitical readings that served the interests of the rich, Pope Francis reads Jesus as a non-historical figure who sides with the poor. When English translations of biblical passages are quoted, the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) is used in this book. Citations of English translations of documents from the Second Vatican Council are taken from Austin Flannery’s 1996 translation (New York/Dublin: Costello Publishing Company Dominican Publications).

Notes 1 Some of the origins of this charisma are encapsulated by Massimo Faggioli’s words: “Francis is the first pope in modern church history born in a multicultural capital, located in the southern hemisphere, and one of the most important destinations on the map of global migrations in the first half of the twentieth century. Francis has introduced the world to a particularly Catholic imagination of space, and he has introduced Western Catholics to a new global imagination of the space of the church” (Faggioli 2020, 65). 2 However, the crisis the Catholic church found itself in was caused by more factors than the sexual abuse scandals alone (Helmick 2014). 3 The radical right can be distinguished from the extreme right. Whereas the extreme right forcefully rejects democracy, the radical right accepts the basics of democracy, while nevertheless working against central elements of liberal democracy (Mudde 2019, 7). 4 On the emergence in the nineteenth century of the tradition of social reform in the Catholic church, see Camp (1969). 5 By following the Schmittian direction, political theology becomes a matter of asking whether the supposedly secular secularism has freed itself from religious categories of thought. It includes a critical inquiry into Schimtt’s dictum that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.” Schmitt quoted in Newman (2019, 6). Since the object of this study

16  Introduction is not the presumably secular state that sustains democracy, but a papacy and its openly theological arguments, Schmitt’s theopolitical problem is less relevant to this study. 6 Religion is not an antecedently existing entity that can be observed independently of the scholars’ interpretations. In the words of Jonathan Z. Smith, “ ‘Religion’ is not a native term; it is a term created by scholars for their intellectual purposes and therefore is theirs to define” (Smith 2004, 194). 7 As Brent Nongbri writes: “Religion could be deployed in nonessentialist ways to treat something as a religion for the purposes of analysis” (Nongbri 2013, 155). Talal Asad’s argument about the difficulty of a universal consensus on the meaning of the term “religion” is also strong: “My argument is that there cannot be a universal definition of religion, not only because its constituent elements and relationships are historically specific, but because that definition is itself the historical product of discursive processes” (Asad 1993, 29). 8 For a deeper understanding of these intensified ecclesial divisions in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, see Di Stefano and Zanatta (2000, 487– 545). See also Martín (2013). 9 In written form, Bergoglio is wary in his criticism of the Decree Four, restricting himself to the affirmation that the Decree gave rise to interpretations that were not always orthodox (Bergoglio 1988). 10 The labelling of Bergoglio as herald of the institution is based on the three ideal types of these various strategies formulated by the Argentinean sociologist Gustavo Morello: The committed, the antisecular, and the institutional (Morello 2016). This minority of church leaders committed to human rights struggles included Catholic church leaders such as the bishops Enrique Angelelli, Jaime de Nevares, Miguel Hesayne, and Carlos Ponce de León (Franco 2018, 115). 11 See for instance Bergoglio (1984). To consult Bergoglio’s homilies from the 2000s, see the three volumes published by Fordham University Press, In Your Eyes I See My Words. 12 The most critical statement from Bergoglio came not in a homily or official declaration, but via a letter to Carmelite nuns, which thereafter was widely quoted in the media. Bergoglio affirmed that the proposed bill on same-sex marriage was part of a demonic intent to destroy God’s plan for the world (Spanish: “Aquí también está la envidia del Demonio, por la que entró el pecado en el mundo . . . no se trata de una simple lucha política; es la pretension destructive al plan de Dios”) (Pecheny, Jones and Ariza 2016, 212). Juan Cruz Esquivel has also noted Bergoglio’s low public profile over the years (Esquivel 2004, 229). Spanish original of the letter quoted from Larraquy (2013, 226). 13 For the historical roots of the Argentinean exception, see Stefano (2014). 14 www.biblioteca.jus.gov.ar/Argentina-Constitution.pdf. Accessed 10.12.21. 15 When Argentinians were asked in a poll around the year 2000 about what they thought about religious influence in politics, 76% of the respondents held that religious leaders ought not to influence the political choice of voters. The percentage for Argentina was considerably higher than in Venezuela, Mexico, and Chile (Hagopian 2008, 27). 16 During Pope Francis’ pontificate, the percentage of Chileans who consider themselves Catholic has continued to drop, from 61% in 2010 to 51% in 2020 (Latinobarometro 2020, 39). 17 To underline the point about the relatively secularized Southern Cone in Latin America, one could add the case of Uruguay, where levels of church attendance and percentages of religiously disaffiliated have more in common with trends in Europe than with the rest of Latin America.

Introduction  17 18 A critical reading of these papal documents also needs to consider the possible censorship of some of Francis’ utterances, such as his press conferences and the revision of them before their publication on the website of the Vatican. Several Vatican observers have noted this aspect of Francis’ papacy (Allen 2021). 19 To adopt the concept of a “Francis miracle” and to conclude that “the profoundly persuasive and percussive impact” that Pope Francis’ words had on all the 115 cardinals was “clearly felt” are examples of how some research contributes to this laudatory tone (Oldenburg 2018, 119, xiv). It is hardly reassuring when a scholar claims to know the intention behind Bergoglio’s “simple” language and attempts to assure the reader that this simplicity “is rooted in long reflection and in evangelical simplicity, not in any limitation of expression” (Borghesi 2018, xix). Nor is it comforting for critical research when an author declares his “love of things Argentine, including Cardinal Bergoglio, now Pope Francis” (Rourke 2016, vii). 20 Austen Ivereigh is sometimes referred to in scholarship as an authority, but he is also an author who subscribes to the hagiographic notion of Pope Francis as someone who has “an ability to read hearts” (Ivereigh 2019, 185). Generalizations in laudatory terms such as this are hardly enlightening for current research: “He is a pope of the people, for the people; but most of all, he is a pope with the people” (Ivereigh 2019, 5). 21 See for instance Boff (2014). One can, of course, fully understand the need among formerly marginalized ecclesial groups to support Pope Francis in the struggle for the direction of the future church. It is illustrative that the base communities in Brazil have recourse to the figure of Pope Francis in order to legitimate their place in the Brazilian Catholic Church. But understanding of these strategies need not lead to an uncritical attitude towards them. 22 This accusation was made public in Mignone (1987, 158). Some of Yorio’s accusations are articulated in Wornat (2002). Bergoglio’s version of the story, when he was asked as Archbishop about this issue, is to be found in Rubín and Ambrogetti (2013, 150–53). 23 “Given the testimonies in his favor from persons like Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, Nobel Peace Prize winner, it can be verified, four decades after the fact, that the then-provincial of the Jesuits in Argentina, Jorge Bergoglio, helped those who needed shelter and protection during these terrible years in his country” (Bingemer 2017, 95). See also Scavi (2014, 77; Tornielli 2013). 24 Politi (2015). As Roberto Blancarte affirms, Jalic’s declaration is not necessarily an expression of an exoneration of Bergoglio. To forgive is not to declare someone’s innocence (Blancarte 2013, 296). 25 Important exceptions to this unwillingness are the admirable effort to take this testimony of one of the victims of state terror seriously in Mallimaci (2013a, 2013b). 26 In this study, reception functions as a critical academic category, not as a theological category in the traditional Catholic sense of the word as the pious reception of the message of the church in accordance with God’s will and as the manifestation of the Spirit’s work among God’s people.

Bibliography Allen, John L. 2021. “In Vatican’s Clumsy Stab at Censorship, the Massage Becomes the Message.” https://cruxnow.com/news-analysis/2021/12/in-vaticans-clumsystab-at-censorship-the-massage-becomes-the-message.

18  Introduction Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Benedict XVI. 2019. “The Church and the Scandal of Sexual Abuse.” Catholic News Agency. www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/41013/full-text-of-benedictxvi-essay-the-church-and-the-scandal-of-sexual-abuse. Bergoglio, Jorge Mario. 1984. “Sobre pluralismo teológico y eclesiología latinoamericana.” Stromata 40 (3/4): 321–31. ———. 1988. “Servicio de la fe y promoción de la justicia: algunas reflexiones acerca del Decreto IV de la Congregación General XXXII de la Compaña de Jesús.” Stromata (1/2): 7–22. http://revistas.bibdigital.uccor.edu.ar/index.php/STRO/article/ view/3001. Bingemer, Maria Clara. 2017. “The Hope of a Future for the Catholic Church.” In New World Pope: Pope Francis and the Future of the Church, edited by Michael L. Budde, 86–97. Eugene: Cascade Books. Blancarte, Roberto. 2013. “La incógnita de Francisco.” Sociedad y religión 23 (40): 292–308. Boff, Leonardo. 2014. Francis of Rome & Francis of Assisi: a New Springtime for the Church. Translated by Dinah Livingstone. Maryknoll: Orbis Books. Borghesi, Massimo. 2018. The Mind of Pope Francis: Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s Intellectual Journey. Translated by Barry Hudock. Collegeville: Liturgical Press. Camp, Richard L. 1969. The Papal Ideology of Social Reform: A Study in Historical Development 1878–1967. Leiden: Brill. Catoggio, María Soledad. 2016. Los desaparecidos de la iglesia. Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno. Datafolha. 2018. “Intenção de voto para presidente da República – 25/10/18.” http://media.folha.uol.com.br/datafolha/2018/10/26/3416374d208f7def05d1476 d05ede73e.pdf. Di Stefano, Roberto, and Loris Zanatta. 2000. Historia de la iglesia argentina: Desde la conquista hasta fines del Siglo XX. 2009 ed. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana. Esquivel, Juan Cruz. 2004. Detrás de los muros: la iglesia catolica en tiempos de Alfonsin y Menem (1983–1999). Bernal: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes. Faggioli, Massimo. 2020. The Liminal Papacy of Pope Francis: Moving Toward Global Catholicity. Maryknoll: Orbis. Francis, and Ahmad Al-Tayyeb. 2019. “Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together.” www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/travels/2019/outside/documents/papa-francesco_20190204_documento-fratellanzaumana.html. Franco, Marina. 2018. El final del silencio: dictadura, sociedad y derechos humanos en la transición (Argentina, 1979–1983). Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Ecónomica. Hagopian, Frances. 2008. “Introduction: The New Landscape.” In Religious Pluralism, Democracy, and the Catholic Church in Latin America, edited by Frances Hagopian, 1–66. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Helmick, Raymond G. 2014. The Crisis of Confidence in the Catholic Church. London: Bloomsbury. Howell, Patrick J. 2019. Great Risks Had to Be Taken: The Jesuit Response to the Second Vatican Council, 1958–2018. Eugene: Cascade Books. Ivereigh, Austen. 2014. The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope. New York: Holt.

Introduction  19 ———. 2019. Wounded Shepherd: Pope Francis and the Struggle to Convert the Catholic Church. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Klaiber, Jeffrey L. 2009. The Jesuits in Latin America, 1549–2000: 450  Years of Inculturation, Defense of Human Rights, and Prophetic Witness. St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources. Larraquy, Marcelo. 2013. Recen por él: La historia jamás contada del hombre que desafíua los secretos del vaticano. La puja interna de la Curia romana ante el fenómeno llamado Francisco. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana. Latinobarometro, Corporación. 2020. Informe Latinobarometro Chile 1995–2020. Corporación Latinobarometro (Santiago de Chile). www.latinobarometro.org/lat. jsp. Levine, Daniel H. 2012. Politics, Religion  & Society in Latin America. London: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Løland, Ole Jakob. 2018. “Francis, Pope.” In Encyclopedia of Latin American Religions, edited by Henri Gooren, 1–5. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Mallimaci, Fortunato. 2013a. “Crisis del catolicismo y un nuevo papado: Bergoglio antes de ser Francisco y el sueño del papa propio en Argentina.” Estudos de Religião 27 (2): 270–96. ———. 2013b. “El catolicismo argentino de Bergoglio y el papado de Francisco: Una primera aproximación desde la Argentina.” Sociedad y religión 23 (40): 211–44. ———. 2015. El mito de la Argentina laica: Catolicismo, política y Estado. Buenos Aires: Capital Intelectual. Mallimaci, Fortunato, Verónica Giméez Béliveau, Juan Cruz Esquivel, and Gabriela Irrazábal. 2019. Sociedad y religión en movimiento. Segunda encuesta nacional sobre creencias y actitudes religiósas en la Argentina. Informe de investigación, n° 25. Buenos Aires: Ceil-Conicet. Martín, Eloísa. 2017. “God Is Argentine and so Is the Pope! Catholicism, Popular Culture and the National Imagination.” In Religions, Nations, and Transnationalism in Multiple Modernities, edited by Patrick Michel, Adam Possamai, and Bryan S Turner, 175–95. NewYork: Palgrave Macmillan. Martín, José Pablo. 2013. Ruptura ideológica del catolicismo argentino: 36 entrevistas entre 1988 y 1992. Los Polvorines: Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento. Marzano, Marco. 2018. La chiesa immobile: Francesco e la rivoluzione mancata. Roma: Laterza & Figli. Massaro, Thomas. 2018. Mercy in Action: The Social Teachings of Pope Francis. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Mescher, Marcus. 2019. “Mercy.” In Pope Francis: A  Voice for Mercy, Justice, Love, and Care for the Earth, edited by Barbara Eileen Wall and Massimo Faggioli, 102–27. Maryknoll: Orbis Books. Mignone, Emilio F. 1987. Iglesia y dictadura: el papel de la Iglesia a la luz de sus relaciones con el régimen militar. 2013 ed. Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Pensamiento nacional. Millies, Steven P. 2018. Good Intentions: A History of Catholic Voters’ Road from Roe to Trump. Collegeville: Liturgical Press. Morello, Gustavo. 2014. Dónde estaba Dios católicos y terrorismo de estado en la Argentina de los setentas. Buenos Aires: Ediciones B. ———. 2016. “Transformations in Catholicism Under Political Violence: Córdoba, Argentina, 1960–1980.” In Religious Responses to Violence: Human Rights

20  Introduction in Latin America Past and Present, edited by Alexander Wilde, 219–42. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. ———. 2017. “Transformations in Argentinean Catholicism, From the Second Half of the Twentieth Century to Pope Francis.” In Secularisms in a Postsecular Age? Religiosities and Subjectivities in Comparative Perspective, edited by José Mapril, Ruy Llera Blanes, Emerson Giumbelli, and Erin K. Wilson, 231–51. Cham: Switzerland. Mudde, Cas. 2019. The Far Right Today. Cambridge: Polity. Newman, Saul. 2019. Political Theology: A  Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity. Nongbri, Brent. 2013. Before Religion: A  History of a Modern Concept. New Haven: Yale University Press. O’Connell, Gerard. 2018. “Cardinal Burke: It Is ‘Licit’ to Call for the Resignation of Pope Francis.” America. The Jesuit Review. www.americamagazine.org/ faith/2018/08/29/cardinal-burke-it-licit-call-resignation-pope-francis. Oldenburg, Christopher J. 2018. The Rhetoric of Pope Francis: Critical Mercy and Conversion for the Twenty-First Century. Lanham: Lexington Books. Pecheny, Mario, Daniel Jones, and Lucía Ariza. 2016. “Sexual Politics and Religious Actors in Argentina.” Religion & Gender 2016 (2): 205–25. Pew Research Center. 2013. “The Global Catholic Population.” www.pewforum. org/2013/02/13/the-global-catholic-population/. Politi, Marco. 2015. Pope Francis Among the Wolves: The Inside Story of a Revolution. New York: Columbia University Press. Reyes Alcaide, Hernán. 2017. Papa Francisco. Latinoamérica: conversaciones con Hernán Reyes Alcaide. Buenos Aires: Planeta. Robben, Antonius C. G. M. 2018. Argentina Betrayed: Memory, Mourning, and Accountability. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Rourke, Thomas R. 2016. The Roots of Pope Francis’s Social and Political Thought: from Argentina to the Vatican. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Rubín, Sergio, and Francesca Ambrogetti. 2013. El Papa Francisco: conversaciones con Jorge Bergoglio. Barcelona and Miami: Ediciones B. Scavi, Nello. 2014. Bergoglio’s List. Charlotte: Saint Benedict Press. Smith, Jonathan Z. 2004. Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Spadaro SJ, Antonio. 2013. “A Big Heart Open to God: An interview With Pope Francis.” America. The Jesuit Review. www.americamagazine.org/faith/2013/09/30/ big-heart-open-god-interview-pope-francis. Stark, Rodney, and Buster G. Smith. 2012. “Pluralism and the Churching of Latin America.” Latin American Politics and Society 54 (2): 35–50. Stefano, Roberto Di. 2014. “La excepción argentina. Construcción del Estado y de la Iglesia en el siglo XIX.” Procesos (40): 91–114. Stone, Rolling. 2014. “Pope Francis’ Gentle Revolution: Inside Rolling Stone’s New Issue.” www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/pope-francis-gentlerevolution-inside-rolling-stones-new-issue-49840/. Thorsen, Jakob Egeris. 2015. Charismatic Practice and Catholic Parish Life: The Incipient Pentecostalization of the Church in Guatemala and Latin America. Boston: Brill. Toft, Monica Duffy, Daniel Philpott, and Timothy Samuel Shah. 2011. God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics. New York: Norton.

Introduction  21 Tornielli, Andrea. 2013. Francis: Pope of a New World. London: Catholic Truth Society. Vries, Hent de. 2006. “Introduction. Before, Around, and Beyond the TheologicoPolitical.” In Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World, edited by Hent de Vries and Lawrence Eugene Sullivan. New York: Fordham University Press. Wornat, Olga. 2002. Nuestra santa madre: historia pública y privada de la Iglesia Católica Argentina. Barcelona: Ediciones B. Yorio, Orlando. 1977. “Carta del Padre Yorio al Padre Maura de la Compañía de Jesús sobre sus conflictos con el superior Jorge Bergoglio de 1977.” www. academia.edu/7891150/Carta_del_Padre_Yorio_al_Padre_Maura_de_la_ Compa%C3%B1%C3%ADa_de_Jes%C3%BAs_sobre_sus_conflictos_con_el_ superior_Jorge_Bergoglio_de_1977. Zanatta, Loris. 2015. La larga agonía de la nación católica. Iglesia y dictadura en la Argentina. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana.

2 The canonical ecology of Pope Francis – a comparison with Benedict XVI

Any pope construes his authority with reference to Scripture and tradition. He justifies ideas with recourse to general ideas about the Bible and the Catholic tradition as well as with reference to concrete texts. Papal texts are comprised of complex webs of quotations of and links to selected biblical and non-biblical sources. These knots of texts that produce the conditions for the potential meanings of papal texts reach far back into the past as well as into the present. They constitute diachronic axes and exemplify how tradition is, in Aleida Assmann’s words, “a special case of communication in which information is not exchanged reciprocally and horizontally, but is transmitted vertically through the generations”.1 As the first Latin American pope in history, Bergoglio was soon turned into an icon of novelty, rupture, and reform among influential voices in Western media and academia. But he soon also became an object of intense opposition within the ranks of the Catholic church. The liberal embrace and the conservative opposition were often inspired and fuelled by the imagined contrast between the newly elected Pope Francis and his processor, Pope Benedict XVI.2 Meanwhile there have hardly been any in-depth comparisons between the two popes’ theologies in current scholarship,3 and the difference between them has more often been traced in their public appearances than in their theologies. As the anthropologist Valentina Napolitano has pointed out, unlike in the case of Pope Benedict XVI, “it is not so much the veracity or doctrinal consistency of beliefs and moral positions but rather a transmission of affects that drives Francis’s Catholicism as an ethical, pastoral, and political project” (Napolitano 2019, 65). Whereas the intellectually oriented Pope Benedict XVI unintentionally caused public controversies through pronouncements that he complained were misunderstood (Thavis 2013, 289), the pastorally oriented Jesuit Pope Francis communicates human warmth and closeness to common people, and in particular to the poor. Hence the impression that the dogmatic German university professor had been replaced by the undogmatic and flexible priest from the end of the world, who became known for his simplicity rather than for his intellectuality. In other words, the difference in the way these theologians expose their theologies might be more significant than DOI: 10.4324/9781003349099-2

The canonical ecology of Pope Francis  23 the content of it. Is this something that can be traced in their authoritative writings as popes? What difference could there actually be said to exist between the two Popes’ written contributions to the Catholic tradition as information that is to be transmitted through the coming generations? What does Pope Francis’ novelty in the discursive space between Scripture and tradition consist of? This chapter suggests that one way of exploring this difference, and therefore of the novelty of the first Latin American pope, is through an analysis of what the biblical scholar Terje Stordalen has coined “canonical ecology” (Stordalen 2012, 27). The metaphor of an “ecology” evokes associations to the various environments that readers and texts are dependent upon in the evolvement of canonicity. These environments may be material, natural, social, or cultural (Stordalen 2021, 325). While Stordalen is one of those scholars of religion who have compared the logics of canonization in different traditions (Stordalen 2007), the presupposition here is that his theory of canonicity can be fruitfully applied to two instances of canonical ecology within one tradition: The written corpuses of the pontificates of Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis that contribute to the Catholic tradition in a non-reciprocally way. A comparison of some of their most authoritative texts with these theoretical lens can provide a partial and preliminary answer to what constitutes the novelty of Pope Francis.

The biblical canon and the Catholic church In his Theological-Political Treatise from 1670, the philosopher Spinoza formulated the task for what was to become modern biblical criticism. While Spinoza’s rationalism is commonly considered a key moment in the evolvement of historical-critical methods and perspectives on the Bible (Grant and Tracy 1984, 105–8; Barton 2019, 409–35), it is less well known that Spinoza’s programme for writing “a history of the Bible” also contained a mandate for a reception history of the Bible as well as a study of biblical canonicity.4 Spinoza argued that a truly rational and historical inquiry about the Bible had to describe “how all the books which are now accepted as sacred came to form a single corpus” (Spinoza 2007, 101). Although the Bible often functions as the proto-model, the study of canonicity has expanded well beyond the list and collection of texts that came to be recognized as the closed canon of Christianity by the fourth century. Human cultures produce canons through both formal and informal decisionmakings or negotiations that are to a lesser or greater degree open or closed. The formation of literary canons is one case in point, and canons of popular culture another (Guillory 1993; Von Appen and Doehring 2006). The existence of these non-religious canon formations, canonical cultures that evolve without recourse to the divine, challenges the common modern assumption of progressive secular cultures that can easily be pit against conservative

24  The canonical ecology of Pope Francis religious ones. Canonicity has proved to be a fruitful analytical perspective on the inherent tendency towards exclusion and the closure of the canon in secular and religious cultures alike. Moreover, there are great varieties between religious canonical cultures. On a general level, the Catholic canon is more flexible than the strong canon of a Protestantism (or of Islamic traditions) that proclaims that it bases its beliefs and practices on “Scripture alone”. Interestingly, with regard to its canonical dynamics, in Stordalen’s discussion, canonicity in Catholicism (and the Orthodox traditions) has more in common with Judaism than with Protestantism in the ways that voices from the tradition attain canonical status on the level of the formal biblical canon (Stordalen 2015, 135). In his book on Catholicism, written before the Second Vatican Council, Jaroslav Pelikan pointed to an apparent paradox in the Catholic attitude towards the biblical canon: “In very few other churches does the minister kiss the Bible as part of the worship service, and yet this is the church that bypassed the Bible to proclaim the assumption of the Virgin Mary simply on the authority of an infallible pope” (Pelikan 1959, 16). In order to understand what might appear as a contradiction in Catholicism, Stordalen’s distinction between a holy text and a canonical text is helpful. While the Bible is formally held as canon and hailed as a holy book through religious practices (kissed during Mass, printed in special editions for liturgical use, kept at the altar as a sacred object), this does not automatically lead to an increased emphasis on the written content of the biblical canon. In principle, Catholic praxis can generate a higher regard for the Bible as a physical artefact than in Protestantism, while effectively bestowing a higher esteem on other authoritative texts than the biblical texts in the actual interpretation of human realities. To give one example, when the liberation theology movement in Latin America began to encourage the poor to open the Bible and read it outside the setting of the Catholic Mass with the non-liturgical purpose of interpreting the daily realities of misery and oppression, liberation theology appropriated what had been a Protestant practice in the region, and caused a major rupture with common Catholic piety (Løland 2015, 109). The Bible can maintain its formal canonical status and function even more forcefully as an icon when it is not opened, read, and interpreted. After all, for centuries, Catholic authorities did not recommend Bible reading for the lay people in the various parts of the world. That said, the Bible can indeed be given a status as an icon in expressions of Protestantism too. The iconic function of a Bible that is sworn upon, but not opened to be read from, during a presidential inauguration in the United States is an illustrative example of a Protestant cultivation of the Bible as holy text. A pontificate produces a massive corpus of texts with each pope’s sermons, messages during audiences, press conferences on papal travels, and revisions of canonical law. Nonetheless, the papal discourse to which particular attention is paid within the worldwide Catholic community is, not

The canonical ecology of Pope Francis  25 least, that which comes to expression in papal encyclicals and exhortations, the latter often written as response to the consultative organ of the synod, an institution founded by Pope Paul VI in 1965.5 At a formal level, these texts are marked by a consistent separation between the formal biblical canon and voices from the Catholic tradition that are worth quoting or referring to. References to biblical texts are put in parenthesis in the main text, while references to tradition are located at the end of the authoritative texts as endnotes. This apparent primacy of the formal biblical canon does not necessarily mean that voices from the tradition have not taken the centre stage or main role in the arguments. Important decisions of the pontiff that are made public in these texts can be made without being anchored in a biblical model or text. For instance, when Pope Francis in the post-synodal exhortation Querida Amazonia announced that he would not allow women to enter the diaconate as a permanent ministry in the Catholic church, he anchored the decision in a non-biblical argument about “clericalization”. Pope Francis affirmed that allowing women the same formal position as men would “reduce” the value of what “strong and generous women” had already achieved for the mission of the church and “clericalize” them (Querida Amazonia, no. 99–100). Hence, a study of canonicity in the two pontificates of Benedict XVI and Francis must look into how arguments are made rather than at what is their content.6

The canonical ecology of a pope Canonicity refers to the authority given to a body of texts. This does not happen in a social vacuum, but is something achieved by a community, encapsulated by Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s expression: “Scripture is a human activity”.7 The canonical status cannot be traced by the scholar in the quality or content of the texts themselves, but should rather be interpreted as an effect of the cultural practices of a community. In the words of Stordalen, the canon can be conceived as “a product of a large ecology of institutions, social formations, technological conditions, and social and political processes” (Stordalen 2012, 18). In the case of Catholicism, the community that effectively gives the canonical status to the texts is the largest religious community on a global level. Officially, the normative tradition in the Catholic church is contained in the religious life of all the members of the church as the people of God, as affirmed by the Second Vatican Council’s dogmatic constitution on revelation Dei Verbum: Now what was handed on by the apostles comprises everything that serves to make the people of God live their lives in holiness and increase their faith. In this way, the church, in its doctrine, life and worship, perpetuates and transmits to every generation all that it itself is, all that it believes . . . This comes about through the contemplation and study of believers who ponder these things in their hearts (see Lk 2:19

26  The canonical ecology of Pope Francis and 51). It comes from the intimate sense of spiritual realities which they experience. (DV, no. 8) In tune with the council’s emphasis on the church as the People of God and the work of the Holy Spirit outside the sacraments and ministries of the church (in Lumen Gentium, no. 12), Dei Verbum expressed here a reaction against the idea of the magisterium as the exclusive channel and voice of the sacred tradition. There is a direct line from the Apostles to the peoples of God. Moreover, the tradition first progresses through the common believers and only thereafter is the special and necessary role of the bishops mentioned. Although the primacy of the pope was indeed confirmed at the council (LG, no. 22),8 there was an overall consensus, expressed by the formulations of the council fathers, to acknowledge the ability or gift of the individual members and the local communities to interpret the Word of God and transmit the tradition. While many expected the church to implement the decentralization envisioned by the council, what they witnessed in the following decades was the opposite: Vatican II’s sense of the Church as “People of God” has been supplanted by a normative emphasis upon communion with Rome, i.e. the relation to the centre is primary, with all the centralized control and uniformity in doctrine, practice and viewpoint that this entails. (Mannion 2013, 60) This centralization, which was probably at its most intense after Vatican II under the leaderships of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI (Faggioli 2015b, 37–38), justifies a scholarly focus on the popes as privileged interpreters and producers of Scripture in Cantwell Smith’s sense. In a manner otherwise unparalleled within Catholicism, the pope represents the Catholic community. He is uniquely positioned to define it. The canonical ecology that is manifested through a pontificate involves a centralized institution with increased power and the possession of a whole apparatus, literally a state apparatus in the middle of Europe, with a territory governed by the region’s last sovereign monarch. The outreach of the pope’s interpretations of and production of the canon is unique through the mediatization facilitated by the economic resources, the political legitimacy, and the technological tools that the church state possesses. The pope combines formal religious authority with a virtual presence through the mass media in a way that gives him a unique symbolic capital. This capital is attained through a concrete canonical ecology that involves three elements, in Stordalen’s theory: The canonical body, the canonical community, and the canonical commentary (Stordalen 2015, 145). While some of the characteristics of the canonical body and the canonical community in Catholicism have been presented, the third element of canonical

The canonical ecology of Pope Francis  27 commentary needs to be introduced. The success of the canon is dependent on commentaries on it. Canonical commentaries are those that are given an authoritative status within a tradition by the community. In Stordalen’s view, the borders between the canon and the canonical commentary can be porous, and the commentary can at times even migrate into the canonized text (Stordalen 2015, 144). Stordalen illustrates this dynamic with the Medieval Bible with Gloss (Biblia cum glossa), where the few biblical verses from the Latin Vulgate translation at the centre of the page are surrounded by comments and explanations from authoritative voices from the Christian tradition. According to Stordalen, similar processes of canonization of commentaries can be detected in the centrality of Thomas Aquinas’ works for Catholicism and of Martin Luther’s works for Lutheranism (Stordalen 2015, 144). The most frequently quoted papal texts can serve as ideal examples of a canonical commentary: They continuously refer to the canon, their relation to it is very close, and they seek to actualize the meaning of the canon in new circumstances without admitting or leaving the impression of a radical break. Through their fixation on tradition, the papal texts can be regarded as utterly conservative. They are manifestations of a continuous effort to conserve tradition and, through selection of sources, to determine what is the true tradition. Papal encyclicals comment selectively, and in that way preserve what they consider to be worth remembering as a true expression of tradition. These canonical commentaries seldom explicitly refute unwanted elements of tradition. On the contrary, they effectively exclude these elements by forgetting and ignoring them.9 The reception in the wider church also indicates which of the papal texts are the most authoritative in the sense of being worth commenting upon and discussing thoroughly. In the case of Pope Francis, the apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium from 2013 and the encyclical Laudato Si stand out, the first due to the time of its publication and the second due to the widespread assumption that it represented theological novelty as a papal text. Evangelii Gaudium became effectively a programmatic text for Pope Francis’ pontificate, giving rise to expectations and hope of “reform”, a loaded term in Catholic tradition frequently used in the exhortation. Laudato Si was enshrined in the revered form of an encyclical, indicating the level of importance and global significance one should expect of it. Furthermore, it was the first encyclical to be entirely the product of the Argentinian’s ascendency to papal power in 2013, given that Pope Francis’ first official encyclical, Lumen Fidei from 2013, was partly written under Pope Benedict XVI. For the purpose of comparison, Laudato Si is selected from Pope Francis’ official writings to be read together with Caritas in Veritate from Pope Benedict XVI’s pontificate. First, they both are encyclicals and carry therefore a comparable authoritative weight for Catholic tradition when their papal authority is considered. Second, they both respond to geopolitical events that arguably affect all Catholics and non-Catholics alike. Caritas in Veritate

28  The canonical ecology of Pope Francis was announced in 2007 and written to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of Pope Paul VI’s Populorum progressio. The shattering event of the most severe financial crisis since the 1930s meant, however, that the social encyclical was written in the midst of this crisis. Laudato Si was published just months before the Paris summit on global climate change was to take place, and with its focus on ecology from a social perspective it recognized the challenge of climate change that no other papal text had done so far.10 Third, as the two encyclicals focusing on a social issue, both are understood to contribute to and renew the social doctrine of the Catholic church. In this regard, Caritas in Veritate was significant for being the first social encyclical in nearly 20 years (Clark 2018, 484). Fourth, both encyclicals adopt the formulation of Pope John XXIII and address their messages to “all people of good will”.11 Given this shared focus, the two documents can be expected to signal some important aspects of the canonical ecology in Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis.

The biblical canon in Caritas in Veritate and Laudato Si Caritas in Veritate was signed by Pope Benedict XVI on 29 June  2009 as his most socially oriented encyclical. Laudato Si was published on 18 June 2015 as the first encyclical ever to be promulgated on social media platforms like Twitter (Peppard 2018, 515), which the Vatican has used as a channel for papal pronouncements since February 2012. Caritas in Veritate is a considerably shorter text than Laudato Si. Whereas Pope Benedict XVI’s writing contains roughly 30,000 words divided into six chapters and 79 paragraphs, Pope Francis’ text consists of slightly over 40,000 words spread over six chapters and 246 paragraphs. This, of course, is significant when the two texts are compared, particularly when the amount of references to certain sources and authorities is taken into account. Furthermore, while Caritas in Veritate is explicitly intended to commemorate a particular text, the encyclical Populorum progressio from 1967, no such focus on one single text is announced in Laudato Si. Caritas in Veritate can therefore be regarded as an attempt to canonize Populorum progressio, to sharpen its authority for new social and political circumstances more than 40 years later and insist on its continuing relevance. Naturally, this purpose of Caritas in Veritate as a commentary on the 1967 encyclical results in extensive references to it and its author Pope Paul VI. In this regard, it is not surpassed by Laudato Si. Moreover, Caritas in Veritate can also be seen as an effort to defend the legacy of the controversial encyclical Humane Vitae from 1968, which Pope Benedict XVI finds no reason to overlook on the occasion of commemorating the 1967 encyclical. The German Pope explicitly mentions Humane Vitae four times and praises it for teaching the church about the “strong links between life ethics and social ethics” and “ushering in a new area of magisterial teaching” (CV no. 15).

The canonical ecology of Pope Francis  29 Even when taking the longer text of Laudato Si into account, Pope Francis has a considerably higher number of references to biblical texts than Pope Benedict XVI. Laudato Si is a text that, with its focus on creation and criticism of anthropocentrism, engages with texts from both the “Old” and “New” collections or “Testaments” of the Bible, but in particular with the “Old” Hebrew part of it. In total, Caritas in Veritate refers to only two books from the Hebrew Bible, while Laudato Si refers to no less than ten. Two of these ten are deuterocanonical books (Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach), which confirms the canonical status of these books for the Catholic tradition. In particular, the Book of Genesis and the Psalms are invoked to ground the value of nature in its divine origin and to anchor the human responsibility for the preservation of the natural environment in God’s creation act. A major inspiration for Pope Francis’ use of the Book of Genesis and his focus on it in the first three chapters is probably a text not referred to: Lynn White’s 1967 article “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis”. Since Western Christianity in White’s view was “the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen” (White Jr 1967, 1205), the most influential religious roots of the ecological crisis were to be found in it, particularly in its creation myth in which human being were made in God’s image. In Pope Francis’ view, there has been an interpretation of the first chapters of Genesis that “has encouraged the unbridled exploitation of nature” and that the Argentinian bluntly labels “not a correct interpretation”, without tracing this incorrect one in any concrete text or expression (LS, no. 67). The two popes also weave the biblical texts and references into different parts of their long arguments. In contrast to Pope Francis’ argument, in Pope Benedict XVI’s Caritas in Veritate the biblically sustained argumentation is to be found early in the encyclical. This reflects the deductive way of arguing that is typical of Pope Benedict XVI. He moves from universal Christian claims about “Eternal Love” and “Absolute Truth” in the introduction and applies them to more specific cases of development and underdevelopment later in the text. He constructs a notion of Christian truth which is constantly under threat from a contemporary “social and cultural context which relativizes truth” (CV, no. 2) with recourse to New Testament texts that in the Pope’s view say of the Christian that “through adherence to this truth he becomes free (cf. Jn 8:32)” or speak of a Christian charity that “rejoices in the truth” (1 Cor 13:6)” (CV, no. 1). Having established these biblically grounded truths, he is equipped to distil their validity for particular social challenges in light of Pope Paul VI’s 1967 encyclical, generally without anchoring this validity in Scripture. The introductory part, with a certain biblical density, is followed by an argument that leans most heavily on a line of thought imagined by the pope to be uninterrupted and embedded in papal pronouncements since Pope Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum (1891). Laudato Si, by contrast, holds back the biblical reservoir of meanings, mainly the chapter two. This is not least due to the inductive form of theological reasoning that Pope Francis here allows to drive the motor of the

30  The canonical ecology of Pope Francis argument. As a whole, the encyclical appears to be attuned to the see-judge-act scheme from the tradition that has found expression in the General meetings of Latin American bishops from Medellín (Colombia) in 1968 onwards, until the meeting in Aparecida (Brazil) in 2007.12 This last meeting was partly shaped by the present Pope, who was then archbishop of Buenos Aires (1998–2013), after he was elected to lead the committee that edited the final conclusions from the meeting (Larraquy 2016, 323). Although the preparatory document had eschewed the see-judge-act methodology of Medellín (1968) and Puebla (1979), the current Pope led the bishops’ efforts to restate this dimension of the Latin American tradition (Brighenti 2010, 309). This Latin American mark is evident in the structure of Laudato Si, where chapter 1 describes the realities (see), chapters 2–4 discern the judgement of God on these realities (judge), and chapters  5 and 6 outline the praxis that is needed (act). In keeping with this inductive scheme, it is in chapter 2 that biblical texts are mostly used to inform arguments. In chapters 3 and 4, these arguments, which are sustained with explicit reference to the biblical canon, are deepened and developed with the choir of the Catholic tradition, in which Francis’ predecessors take a prominent position.

The appearance of historical continuity Theological judgements about pressing ecological realities are made with the weight of their unique authority. This strong emphasis on the insights granted by tradition is prepared by the introduction in Laudato Si with the presence of the voice of the saint from whom the Argentinian has taken his name, in order to build his own authority as pope. The very title of the encyclical is explained there with a translation of an excerpt of the hymn of Saint Francis of Assisi: “LAUDATO SI’, mi’ Signore”, which in English is translated as “Praise be to you, my Lord”. The Pope then proceeds with the idea that “the earth herself . . . is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor” since she “groans in travail”, as Paul writes in Rom 8:22. The Pope puts another of his biblical arguments up front in the introduction by claiming that “[w]e have forgotten that we ourselves are dust of the earth”, with reference to Gen 2:7 (LS, no. 2). Saint Francis, Romans, and Genesis are lined up as sources of legitimacy for Pope Francis’ speech before he invokes the authority of the four last Popes in the next four paragraphs (3-6). The canonicity of certain writings of these four Popes can be detected in the way that Pope Francis uses them to “avoid the impression of a radical break”, in the words of Terje Stordalen (Stordalen 2015, 134). It is precisely because of what commentators have called the “groundbreaking” nature of Laudato Si that it is pertinent to mask the newness of the content within this particular canonical ecology. Attuned to the novelty of the encyclical, one commentator typically describes Laudato Si as “a groundbreaking contribution” when he considers it “against the background of Catholic social teaching on the environment over the past half century” (Massaro 2018, 72).

The canonical ecology of Pope Francis  31 Accordingly, Laudato Si does indeed highlight Paul VI’s lament of the exploitation of nature in the early 1970s without acknowledging how little attention his pontificate gave to environmental issues, when compared to many other groups in civil society during that decade. Laudato Si is careful to remember John Paul II’s relatively few sayings that might give the impression that the newly declared saint (by Pope Francis) was a pioneer on the topic. Moreover, Laudato Si quotes from some of the paragraphs of Caritas in Veritate that speak of environmental issues but avoids reminding the reader that Pope Benedict XVI’s moral evaluation of the ecological crisis was mainly limited to four paragraphs only (CV, nos. 48–51). Within its canonical ecology, Laudato Si could be said to work so successfully because it construes a historical continuity on the topic of ecology between these Popes who were utterly preoccupied by the damaging of natural environments and the encyclical that won headlines in international media for being the first “green” or “ecological” encyclical. Laudato Si entirely bypasses the fact that there was no acknowledgement in the encyclicals of the eight-yearlong pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI of the global challenge of climate change. Instead, Laudato Si maintains that the isolated statements of the earlier Popes about the natural environment do nothing less than “echo the reflections of numerous scientists, philosophers, theologians and civic groups, all of which have enriched the Church’s thinking on these questions” (LS, no. 7). In this way, Laudato Si establishes an almost perfect harmony between the voices of Pope Francis’ predecessors on the one hand and the voices of scholars from various disciplines and environmental activists from the civil society on the other. Pope Francis can move on in the encyclical since theological novelties or innovations appear to stand in continuity with a firm and stable tradition prefigured by the patron saint of ecology (Saint Francis of Assisi) and foreshadowed by Scripture. His encyclical has the capacity to “conjure the old texts into making new sense”, as Stordalen formulates it (Stordalen 2015, 134). Given that the Popes echo scholarly reflections on ecology, Pope Francis can bring new voices into this encyclical without leaving the impression of great changes in his tradition. The attentive reader, however, will encounter sources for this new theology of the Catholic church that were not used during Benedict XVI’s pontificate. When Caritas in Veritate and Laudato Si are laid side by side, the dominant intertexts for both encyclicals, in addition to biblical texts, are papal texts produced by Paul VI, John Paul II, or Benedict XVI. Common to both are also some references to the Second Vatican Council (Gaudium et Spes), to the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, and to the arguably primary Doctor of the Catholic church, Thomas Aquinas (formally given the title “Doctor Ecclesiae Universalis”). Besides these common sources, Laudato Si has included a more diverse and extended list of figures with insights worth remembering than what Caritas in Veritate has. If one were to solely rely on the explicit sources of Caritas in Veritate, one could conclude that a pope’s social teaching could do away with modern theology

32  The canonical ecology of Pope Francis altogether, since it apparently does not deliver any ideas valuable enough to quote in official papal discourse. By contrast, Laudato Si presents a wider theological horizon for the reader, informed by a greater number of church fathers as well as medieval and modern theologians. Instead of Augustine (as in Caritas in Veritate), church fathers such as Justin Martyr (100–165), Basil the Great (330–379), and Vincent of Lérins (died 445) serve as points of reference for Laudato Si. In addition to Thomas Aquinas, Laudato Si also engages with texts by medieval theologians as Bonaventure (1221–1274) and Saint John of the Cross (1542–1591). Furthermore, there are modern theologians who are deemed so relevant that Pope Francis expresses his debt to them, such as Theilard de Chardin (1881–1955), Romano Guardini (1885–1968), and Juan Carlos Scannone (1931–2019). What is more, the italicized expression “the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor” in no. 49 is identical to the title of a book by the Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff and is commonly recognized as an allusion to his 1995 publication on theology and ecology (Boff 1995). Formerly marginal voices (some of whom were actually marginalized through formal sanctions from the Vatican) are brought closer to the canonical centre for Catholic theology. It should be pointed out that these are male voices. Unlike Benedict XVI, Pope Francis refers to one female voice, though only one, namely Saint Therese of Lisieux, who was designated a doctor of the church in 1997 (“Doctor Ecclesiae Universalis”). Nevertheless, the absence of more female voices and particularly of ecofeminists in a theological text on ecology is noticeable.

Papal individuality versus episcopal collegiality The canon in Catholicism is less fixed and closed than in Protestantism, partly thanks to the ongoing production of authoritative texts signed by a figure who remains a sovereign monarch. If the biblical canon is an attempt to control meaning (Aichele 2001), then this control is strongly limited by an institution centred on the person of the pope but also conditioned by the decisions taken by an ecumenical council. Alongside the papacy, the possibility of convening an ecumenical council with all bishops in the world represented is an inherent aspect of Catholicism as a canonical culture. In an identical manner to historical Protestant churches (but not to Pentecostalism), the Catholic church effectively upholds dogmatic formulations and the creeds from the ecumenical councils in late Antiquity as part of the canonized body of literature. Like the Bible, they are to guide the beliefs and practices of the church in their unaltered verbatim form. Catholicism differs, however, from Protestantism in its maintenance of the conciliar tradition. In principle, this Catholic institution can add elements to the actual canon; this is no longer an option in Protestant churches. Of course, this is wholly dependent on the decision of the ruling pope at any time. But at the very least, council texts such as those promulgated at the Second Vatican Council constitute canonical commentaries of high importance in the

The canonical ecology of Pope Francis  33 Catholic tradition. Moreover, these canonical commentaries can defy papal interpretations of the canon in an unparalleled manner. When convened at a council, the bishops enact what is properly labelled “collegiality” in matters that concern the worldwide church. The tension between the pope as head of a centralized institution and the bishops as leaders of local churches remain a fundamental tension in the Catholic community. The high authority of the council makes its declarations canonical as commentaries to such a degree that the pope feels compelled to quote them in the encyclicals, although citations of papal texts take up more space in encyclicals such as Caritas in Veritate and Laudato Si. That said, the author of Caritas in Veritate expressed anxieties about the loss of papal control of the meaning of the council texts of Vatican II. In a speech in December 2005 Pope Benedict XVI lamented that it had been so difficult to implement Vatican II in the Catholic church: “the fact that two contrary hermeneutics came face to face and quarrelled with each other. One caused confusion, the other, silently but more and more visibly, bore and is bearing fruit” (Benedict XVI 2005). Unlike Benedict XVI, Francis has not presented the reception of the council texts in such a bold manner. He does not speak of a correct and an incorrect interpretation of the council. The reason might be that the Pope is aware that Vatican II texts are “still captive to polarizing narratives” (Faggioli 2015a, 334) in the church.13 Another reason may be a major difference between the two Popes that finds expression through one difference in the way they write their authoritative texts. A significant aspect of the centralization of power and enhancement of papal authority under Pope Francis’ predecessors was the silencing of national and regional episcopal conferences and the weakening of their capacity to function as influential commentators on the canon when they gathered as colleagues (Faggioli 2015a, 227). While the status of the episcopal conferences was not sufficiently clarified at Vatican II, there are good reasons to consider the regulations imposed on these conferences by the Popes in the decades thereafter as a blocking of the enactment of a major concern at Vatican II. This tendency towards centralization can be illustrated by the fact that the Latin American bishops’ conclusions at Medellín were recognized immediately and without any intervention by Paul VI, whereas the conclusions from bishops’ regional meetings thereafter were authorized by John Paul II and Benedict XVI only after they had been sent to Rome for authorization and some correction.14 Perhaps the most striking difference between the canonical ecology of Benedict XVI and Francis, when Caritas in Veritate and Laudato Si are compared, is the role of the interpretations of Scripture and tradition by episcopal conferences, in particular non-European ones. Statements on environmental issues from episcopal meetings in countries such as Bolivia, the Philippines, and Australia are effectively given an upgraded status through being cited in Laudato Si, whereas they are entirely absent from Caritas in Veritate. No fewer than 21 occurrences of this type of reference can be

34  The canonical ecology of Pope Francis found in Laudato Si, and only three of them are of European origin. Pope Francis extends the interpretative community reflected in the encyclical by letting local bishops in collegiality assume the role of an authoritative commentator. Their authority is bolstered as their interpretations of “the signs of the times” are considered relevant to the new articulation of the teaching of the church. In this way, what Richard R. Gaillardetz has named the “papo-centrism” of the Catholic church is tempered (Gaillardetz 2015, 7).

Conclusion Canonicity is an ongoing activity through the negotiation of various interests in the production of papal texts in which a special status is granted to certain texts that in reality attain a canonical authority in the popes’ theological arguments. It is an activity in the Catholic community that is regulated to a high degree by the institutional centre and its sovereign leader, the pope. Having compared the canonical ecologies of Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis, as they find expression in one encyclical of each Pope, one can note various continuities between their pontificates. First, both follow the wellestablished pattern of reserving references in the main text for the formal biblical canon and references to non-biblical sources in the endnotes – as if to symbolize a biblical primacy. As I have said, we cannot take for granted that this formal priority of the biblical canon means an actual priority for their arguments. Second, both popes appear centred on the discourse of their predecessors in their encyclicals. The two Popes lend their voice to their predecessors to such a degree that their encyclicals can be understood as efforts to canonizing these writings of their predecessors. After all, Benedict XVI dedicates his entire encyclical to Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio. Third, the two Popes refer to the same extent to Vatican II texts. Both focus on social issues in their encyclicals, and Gaudium et spes from Vatican II appears to have attained a canonical status in this field of Catholic teaching as a text that a pope naturally evokes for his reformulations of the social doctrine of the church. The status of Gaudium et Spes in these two canonical ecologies is perhaps comparable only to Lumen Gentium among the texts from Vatican II. In sum, there are historical continuities between the two Popes in their ways of building papal power through authoritative texts; these continuities should be noted in academic discussion of the historical novelty of Pope Francis. There are, however, also significant discontinuities to be observed between the German and the Argentinean Pope. First, as I  have pointed out, in Laudato Si there is a wider theological horizon than in Caritas in Veritate, with a more extensive engagement with ideas from theologians from late Antiquity, medieval times, and the modern period. However, Pope Francis limits his gallery of modern theologians worth citing to male theologians only. Second, there is a break with Pope Benedict XVI’s

The canonical ecology of Pope Francis  35 deductive reasoning that alters the way biblical ideas are woven into the theological argument of Pope Francis about a social ecology with concern for the poor. Scripture is considered in Pope Francis’ Laudato Si less as a deposit of truths to be derived deductively, and more as the Word of God that can reveal the true ecological vocation of humankind in light of scientific observations of the world. Third, there is an interesting break with the theological reasoning of all his post-Vatican II predecessors in the way Pope Francis introduces bishops’ conferences as major sources for his canonical commentary. By integrating episcopal voices from non-Western contexts and peripheral countries in terms of political capital and economic resources, Pope Francis effectively constructs a new and less “papocentrist” discourse as the head of a global church. And last, Laudato Si exemplifies and assumes a more ecumenical canonical ecology than Caritas in Veritate when Pope Francis invokes a number of non-Catholic authorities who substantially inform his thinking. The only non-Catholic referred to in Benedict XVI’s encyclical is a Presocratic Hellenist philosopher. In contrast, Laudato Si builds on insights from the United Nations’ summit, the Orthodox patriarch Bartholomew, and a non-Christian Sufi. Pope Francis thereby gives the impression of a more ecumenical vision of the church and of its role in the world.

Notes 1 Aleida Assmann quoted in Assmann (2006, 8). 2 Note the incessant tendency among representatives of the opposition to Pope Francis’ pontificate to claim that they have Pope Benedict XVI as Pope Emeritus on their side. One significant example was the controversy that surrounded the publication of the book From the Depths of Our Hearts (Ignatius Press 2020) on the topic of priestly celibacy, which the publisher and Cardinal Robert Sarah claimed was co-written with the Pope Emeritus. The book came out just weeks before Pope Francis made his decision on the possible permission for the ordination of married men to the priesthood in the Amazon region. 3 Although it is not limited to their theologies, one exception to the absence of such comparisons in current scholarship is (Fernández Vega 2016). 4 It is seldom noted that Spinoza emphasized reception history as a major task for the modern and critical scholarship on the history of the Bible that the philosopher envisaged. Spinoza stated that a truly historical enquiry into the Bible should document how each biblical book “was first received and whose hands it came into” and “how many variant readings there have been of its text” (Spinoza 2007, 101). 5 Here, discourse should be understood along the lines defined in Stordalen’s reading of Bourdieu, and connected to canonicity: “A socially negotiated phenomenon like a mass or a scriptural canon is embedded in what Bourdieu would call a discourse: a socially produced and transmitted conglomerate of ideas, attitudes, beliefs, and practices that produce subjects who reinforce embedded world views through their speech and acts” (Stordalen 2012, 18). 6 “in studying a collection of texts as canonical, one is not primarily studying the contents of the texts” (Stordalen 2021, 325). 7 Wilfred Cantwell Smith quoted in Stordalen and Naguib (2015, 28).

36  The canonical ecology of Pope Francis 8 “the college or body of bishops has no authority, however, other than the authority which it is acknowledged to have in union with the Roman Pontiff, Peter’s successor, as its head, his primatial authority over everyone, pastors or faithful, remaining intact” (LG, no. 22). 9 It is noteworthy how Pope Benedict XVI in Caritas in Veritate avoids citing some of the most quoted words in Latin American Catholicism from the encyclical it says it is commemorating. Pope Paul VI emphasized how “revolutionary uprisings – except where there is manifest, longstanding tyranny which would do great damage to fundamental personal rights and dangerous harm to the common good of the country – engender new injustices, introduce new inequities and bring new disasters” (Paul VI 1981, no. 31). These words were referred to extensively by Catholic activists in Argentina who founded the Montoneros guerilla in the early 1970s (Løland 2009, 88; Martín 2010, 107; Wornat 2002, 141). 10 It is also interesting to note that Caritas in Veritate anticipates the strong emphasis on ecology of Laudato Si, as Caritas in Veritate was the first encyclical to dedicate a considerable section to environmental concerns, with four long paragraphs on the matter (no. 48–51) (Massaro 2018, 76). 11 It should be noticed, however, that in Laudato Si, Pope Francis insists that Pope John XXIII addressed his encyclical Pacem in terris (1963) to all the genderinclusive entity “all men and women of good will”, while in Pope John XXIII’s encyclical the expression is the gender-biased “men of good will” (John XXIII 1981, 107). 12 With the exception of the 1992 Santo Domingo meeting, where the Latin American bishops were under more pressure from Rome and the representatives of the Roman curia who were present at the meeting to develop a more deductive form of theological reasoning (Hennelly 1993, 28–29). Pope Francis acknowledged on his visit to Medellín in Colombia on 09.09.17 the validity of the method and the indebtedness to the 1968 Medellín conference with these words: “Disciples who know how to see, judge and act, as stated in that Latin-American document born precisely here” (Francis 2017). 13 Another factor may be the fact that Pope Francis is the first Pope after the council who was not present at the gathering in Rome from 1962 to 1965, and therefore was not so strongly involved in its disagreements. 14 Scholars therefore speak of “the censors” of these documents, and a critical study of them demands an awareness of how this censorship of the Vatican operates (Brighenti 2010).

Bibliography Aichele, George. 2001. The Control of Biblical Meaning: Canon as Semiotic Mechanism. Harrisburg: Trinity Press International. Assmann, Jan. 2006. Religion and Cultural Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Barton, John. 2019. A History of the Bible: the Book and Its Faiths. London: Allen Lane. Benedict XVI. 2005. “Address of His Holiness Benedict XVI to the Roman Curia offering them his Christmas Greetings.” www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/ speeches/2005/december/documents/hf_ben_xvi_spe_20051222_roman-curia.html. Benedict, Robert Sarah, and Michael J. Miller. 2020.  From the Depths of Our Hearts: Priesthood Celibacy and the Crisis of the Catholic Church. San Francisco: Ignatius Press.

The canonical ecology of Pope Francis  37 Boff, Leonardo. 1995. Ecologia: grito da terra, grito do pobres. 2004 ed. Rio de Janeiro: Sextante and São Paulo: Editora Atica. Brighenti, Agenor. 2010. “Aparecida: As supresas, sua proposta e novidades.” Perspectiva teológica 39 (109): 307–30. Clark, Megan J. 2018. “Commentary on Caritas in Veritate (On Integral Human Development in Charity and Truth).” In Modern Catholic Social Teaching: Commentaries and Interpretations, edited by Kenneth R. Himes, Lisa Sowle Cahill, Charles E. Curran, David Hollenbach, and Thomas A. Shannon, 482–514. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Faggioli, Massimo. 2015a. A Council for the Global Church: Receiving Vatican II in History. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. ———. 2015b. Pope Francis: Tradition in Transition. New York: Paulist Press. Fernández Vega, José. 2016. Francisco y Benedicto el Vaticano ante la crisis global. Buenos Aires: Fondo de cultura económica. Francis. 2017. “Homily of His Holiness Pope Francis. Enrique Olaya Herrera airport (Medellín). Saturday, 9 September 2017.” www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/ homilies/2017/documents/papa-francesco_20170909_omelia-viaggioapostolicocolombiamedellin.html. Gaillardetz, Richard R. 2015. An Unfinished Council: Vatican II, Pope Francis, and the Renewal of Catholicism. Collegeville: Liturgical Press. Grant, Robert, and David Tracy. 1984. A Short History of the Interpretation of the Bible. 2nd ed. London: SCM Press. Guillory, John. 1993. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hennelly, Alfred T. 1993. Santo Domingo and Beyond: Documents and Commentaries From the Fourth General Conference of Latin American Bishops. Maryknoll: Orbis Books. John XXIII. 1981. “Pacem in Terris.” In The Papal Encyclicals 1958–1981, edited by Claudia Carlen. Raleigh: McGrath. Larraquy, Marcelo. 2016. Código Francisco: cómo el Papa se transformó en el principal líder político global y cuál es su estrategia para cambiar el mundo. Barcelona: Debate. Løland, Ole Jakob. 2009. Lidio: en uvanlig historie. Oslo: Spartacus. ———. 2015. “The Position of the Biblical Canon in Brazil: From Catholic Rediscovery to Neo-Pentecostal Marginalisation.” Studies in world Christianity 21 (2): 98–118. Mannion, Gerard. 2013. “Cognitive Dissonance?” Concilium (5): 51–62. Martín, José Pablo. 2010. El Movimiento de Sacerdotes para el Tercer Mundo: un debate argentino. Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento. Massaro, Thomas. 2018. Mercy in Action: The Social Teachings of Pope Francis. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Napolitano, Valentina. 2019. “Francis, a Criollo Pope.” Religion and Society 10 (1): 63–80. Paul VI. 1981. “Populorum Progressio.” In The Papal Encyclicals 1958–1981, edited by Claudia Carlen. Raleigh: McGrath. Pelikan, Jaroslav. 1959. The Riddle of Roman Catholicism. New York: Abingdon Press. Peppard, Christina Zenner. 2018. “Commentary on Laudato Si’ (On Care For Our Common Home).” In Modern Catholic Social Teaching: Commentaries

38  The canonical ecology of Pope Francis and Interpretations, edited by Kenneth R. Himes, Lisa Sowle Cahill, Charles E. Curran, David Hollenbach, and Thomas A. Shannon, 515–50. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Spinoza, Benedictus de. 2007. Theological-Political Treatise. Translated by Jonathan I. Israel and Michael Silverthorne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stordalen, Terje. 2007. “The Canonization of Ancient Hebrew and Confucian Literature.” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 32 (1): 3–22. ———. 2012. “What Is a Canon of Scriptures?” In Mótun menningar. Shaping Culture, edited by Gunnlaugur A. Jónsson and Kristinn Ólason, 15–33. Reykjavík: Hið Íslenska bókmenntafélag. ———. 2015. “Canon and Canonical Commentary. Comparative Perspectives on Canonical Ecologies.” In The Formative Past and the Formation of the Future: Collective Remembering and Identity Formation, edited by Terje Stordalen and Saphinaz-Amal Naguib, 133–60. Oslo: Novus Press. ———. 2021. “The Production of Authority in Levantine Scriptural Ecologies: An Example of Accumulative Cultural Production.” In Levantine Entanglements, edited by Terje Stordalen and Øystein S. LaBianca, 272–322. Sheffield: Equinox. Stordalen, Terje, and Saphinaz-Amal Naguib. 2015. “Time, Media, Space.” In The Formative Past and the Formation of the Future: Collective Remembering and Identity Formation, edited by Terje Stordalen and Saphinaz-Amal Naguib, 17–37. Oslo: Novus Press. Thavis, John. 2013. The Vatican Diaries: a Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Power, Personalities, and Politics at the Heart of the Catholic Church. New York: Viking. Von Appen, Ralf, and André Doehring. 2006. “Nevermind the Beatles, Here’s Exile 61 and Nico: ‘The Top 100 Records of All Time’ – a Canon of Pop and Rock Albums from a Sociological and an Aesthetic Perspective.” Popular Music 25 (1): 21–39. White Jr, Lynn. 1967. “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” Science 155 (3767): 1203–207. Wornat, Olga. 2002. Nuestra santa madre: historia pública y privada de la Iglesia Católica Argentina. Barcelona: Ediciones B.

3 Pope Francis and liberation theology – a conflict solved

The disagreements and battles over theological issues between Latin American liberation theologians and the Vatican constitute one of the major intraecclesial conflicts of the twentieth century. The Vatican attempted to combat the dissemination of controversial strands and ideas of Latin American liberation theology through measures such as public “notifications” by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), censorship of books in the seminaries, and passing over liberation theologians in the promotion of priests to entrusted positions such as the episcopate. Because of their supposed deviation from Catholic orthodoxy, the Vatican sought through the CDF to correct the theological errors of liberation theologians such as Gustavo Gutiérrez, Leonardo Boff, and Jon Sobrino, and to sanction what it regarded as their lack of obedience to the official teaching of the Catholic church.1 After the election of the Argentinean Jorge Mario Bergoglio in 2013, questions were raised about his relation to the world-famous ecclesial movement that had caused so many controversies in the church, particularly during the Cold War when many in the movement allied themselves with the political left in Latin America (Gómez Hinojosa 2018). In Argentina, Bergoglio had been known as a powerful opponent of liberation theology when he was the Jesuit Provincial during the 1970s. Just a month into his pontificate, however, Vatican officials said that Pope Francis had decided to unblock the beatification process of the Archbishop of El Salvador, Óscar Romero, hailed as a saint for liberation theology ever since he was assassinated in 1980. Furthermore, in September 2013 news surged that the Pope had met in private (not on his official schedule) with the so-called “father of liberation theology”, the Peruvian Gustavo Gutiérrez. Gutiérrez was in Italy to launch the Italian edition of the book he had cowritten with none other than the head of the CDF from 2012 (until 2017), Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller (Gutiérrez and Müller 2015). This event appeared dramatic and led to headlines in the international media. As the biographer Paul Valley concluded: “After three decades of hostility from the conservative pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI this was an extraordinary turnaround” (Vallely 2015, 142). The former opponent DOI: 10.4324/9781003349099-3

40  Pope Francis and liberation theology – a conflict solved of the movement had embraced its primary figures and made the Vatican itself into an ally of it. And when Leonardo Boff, previously silenced by the CDF, enthusiastically proclaimed that Pope Francis had called him to ask for materials in order to write his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si, the impression was strengthened that the Argentinean pontiff had reconciled himself with liberation theology. No wonder that some of the fierce conservative opposition to Pope Francis accused the Argentinian of betraying the antiCommunism of his predecessors by rehabilitating the “Marxist” liberation theology (Neumayr 2017, 1–11). In Boff’s words, “Francis is one of us. He has made liberation theology the common property of the church and he has, moreover, extended it” (Pongratz-Lippitt 2016). Had the once so controversial Latin American liberation theology become “common property” for the Catholic church and its pope? Or was the Argentinean liberation theologian Ruben Dri (1929–) closer to the truth when he affirmed that “[h]e never took the reins of liberation theology because it’s radical” (Yardley and Romero 2015)? This article argues that Pope Francis is still at odds with liberation theology, although, as pontiff, he shares some of its main theological concerns. The pope is not “one of them” (Boff) in this sense, but he has nonetheless in a certain way solved the conflict between the Vatican and the ecclesial movement. First, Pope Francis’ negotiations of themes from liberation theology were prepared by post-Cold War contexts that displaced some of the most controversial topics of liberation theology and brought others to the fore. Second, Pope Francis solves this conflict through symbolic gestures rather than open intellectual engagement with specific expressions of the innovative ideas of the movement. Third, Pope Francis rejects some aspects of liberation theology and appropriates others without explicitly acknowledging his intellectual debt to it. These strategies reflect one of the few opinions the Argentinean has shared about liberation theology: It has positive as well as negative aspects, the negative being due to what Bergoglio in 2010 described as its “recourse to Marxist hermeneutics” (Rubín and Ambrogetti 2013, 83).2 To ask in what sense the legacy of liberation theology has been renegotiated in the case of the present Pope is also to inquire about the significance of the first Latin American Pope in history. We may ask: What is the Latin American dimension to what has come to be known as “the Francis Effect”, when the impact of liberation theology is considered?

Liberation theology as social movement and historical legacy Liberation theology is here defined, in agreement with previous scholarship, as a body of literature, but also as a social movement (Chaves 2015; Corten 1996; Lehmann 1996; Löwy 2000; C. Smith 1991). As an ecclesial movement, it is a social movement that has attempted to shape church and society

Pope Francis and liberation theology – a conflict solved  41 through distinctive ideas and practices carried out by agents with personal connections and institutional links. Here the emphasis is on the ideas and theology that have been articulated by the most influential intellectuals of the movement, primarily highly educated Catholic theologians with connections to the priestly hierarchy and with an explicit commitment to the liberation of the poor in tune with political leftism.3 To conceive of liberation theology as a movement also means to take into account the dynamic nature of this historical phenomenon that emerged in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65). While the term “liberation theology” was not in use at the time of the Second General Conference of the Latin American episcopate in Medellin in 1968, this effort of the Latin American bishops to translate the Council to their regional context is commonly considered as the founding event of the movement. New research has nevertheless questioned the view of the Medellín conference as the univocal expression of Christian progressivism, without denying its immense effect on Catholics who were mobilized to take action on the political left (Bonnin 2013). It is not the case that there was a progressive consensus and theological cohesion at the outset, and that reactionary conservatives then dismantled it. Disagreement and negotiation played a formative role that can be detected in the inherent tensions of the Medellín text as a productive reception of the Council.4 After the movement’s expansion in Latin America in the 1970s, its influence was reduced in the decades thereafter. While some journalists have given the impression that Pope John Paul II crushed liberation theology (Steigenga and Cleary 2004, 9), and certain scholars have concluded that the movement has had rather “meagre results” (Beyer 1994, 157), I have elsewhere defended the position that the political influence of the movement has persisted well into the 2000s. As manifestations of the electoral success of political leftism in Latin America, the president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, legitimated his populism with liberationist ideas (Løland 2016). Furthermore, the Workers’ Party that governed Brazil from 2003 until 2016 was partly the result of political mobilization within Catholic base communities,5 which has been the exemplary model for organizing Christian community life in liberation theology. Although it can be said to be marginal as a social force within the Latin American churches, it has left a historical legacy primarily tied to the memory of the martyrdom of key figures and to the body of literature produced by the intellectual elite of the movement. This legacy can be categorized as a cultural memory that is most persistently remembered on the margins of the Catholic church. With the election of an Argentinean pontiff of the same age as the first generation of liberation theologians, the handed-down memory of liberation theology was to some extent moving closer to the centre of attention and remembrance. It was no longer only relegated to the margins or the archives, but was implicitly interpreted and renegotiated by the head of the largest religious organization on earth.

42  Pope Francis and liberation theology – a conflict solved

Liberation theology and the theology of the people As an Argentinean theologian, Pope Francis is naturally influenced by Latin American theology. Two of the specifically Latin American expressions of Catholic theology after the Second Vatican Council are liberation theology and the theology of the people.6 While much has been written about the roots of Pope Francis’ thinking in the theology of the people (Carriquiry Lecour 2019; Luciani 2017; Rourke 2016; Scannone 2016), less has been studied in current research about the possible links between Pope Francis and liberation theology.7 The theology of the people is commonly seen as a strand of postconciliar theology developed in Argentina by theologians such as Lucio Gera, Rafael Tello, and Juan Carlos Scannone. Of these three, Scannone is the only one to be explicitly cited by Pope Francis (LS, no. 117). The three were among the theologians who undoubtedly contributed to the renewal of Catholic theology in Argentina after the Second Vatican Council that eventually also inspired the form of liberation theology in this national context.8 Lucio Gera is a figure who cannot easily be relegated exclusively to the group of thinkers associated with the theology of the people, particularly in view of his role as advisor to the Latin American bishops’ conference in Medellín (CELAM) in 1968 and his close cooperation with the Movement of Priests for the Third World (Movimiento de Sacerdotes para el Tercer Mundo) (J.P. Martín 2010, 272). This movement channelled much of the social radicalism and revolutionary spirit of Catholic priests in Argentina until its disagreements over the meaning of revolution and the armed struggle led to its gradual fracture. It was one of the creative laboratories for the formulation of liberation theology in Latin America until the coup d’état in 1976 put a violent end to its activities, which from then on were considered “subversive” by the military regime. Lucio Gera and Rafael Tello helped to furnish renewal and radicalization among their students and future priests in 1960.9 The two served together as consultants in the Episcopal Commission for Pastoral Practice (COEPAL) that the Argentinean bishops established after the Second Vatican Council. In this theological milieu, Tello’s contribution to an Argentinean theology of the people was further articulated (Rivero 2015). At the same time, a wide range of social issues were discussed here that overlapped with themes and concerns of liberation theology. In other words, there is no sharp delineation between the Argentinean theology of the people and Latin American liberation theology, and this has been the object of some debate. In the introduction to a recent edition of some of Lucio Gera’s main theological writings, the Argentinean theologian Virginia Raquel Azcuy summarizes the tension between liberation theology and theology of the people as crystallized in the option between liberation and evangelization (Azcuy 2015, 30). Although an influential Argentinean bishop like Eduardo Pironio (cardinal from 1976) and others prepared a synthesis of the two that

Pope Francis and liberation theology – a conflict solved  43 came to expression through Pope Paul VI’s Evanglii Nuntiandi in 1975 and the conclusions at the Latin American bishops’ conference in Puebla in 1979, the tension between the two schools remained. As Juan Carlos Scannone has maintained, the theology of the people has privileged a historicalcultural analysis over the structural social analysis of liberation theology. Furthermore, the theology of the people is distinguished from liberation in its refusal to be informed by the thought and categories of Marxist philosophy (Scannone 2016, 124). This means that the moment of seeing within the theological reflection process has a different perspective in the theology of the people, where the history and religiosity of the faithful people become decisive for the sort of pastoral action that is needed. Theologians such as Scannone and Juan Luis Segundo (Segundo 1976, 234–36) located the theology of the people as one of several strands under the wider umbrella of Latin American theology.10 But as Azcuy remarks, this is still a question open to debate and there is no consensus on Scannone’s position (Azcuy 2015, 27). That said, the two Latin American schools of postconciliar theology can still be distinguished. Accordingly, theologians such as Gera, Tello, and Scannone will not be treated here as typical representatives of liberation theology. While Pope Francis has expressed a certain distance towards liberation theology, he has spoken in more favourable terms of the theology of the people. What is more, he has affirmed that his first apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium expresses a “theology of the people” (Francis and Wolton 2018, 187), without connecting it to specific Argentinean theologians. Besides this, he has affirmed that he is not fond of the term “theology of the people”, without clarifying why (Francis and Wolton 2018, 188). The aim here is not to say that liberation theology has had a deeper impact on Pope Francis’ pontificate than the theology of the people, but merely to explore the possible links between Pope Francis’ pontificate and this Latin American ecclesial movement. There are certain manoeuvres, decisions, and ideas expressed by the pontificate of Pope Francis that have more to do with liberation theology than with the theology of the people. Hence, there is need to analyse this relationship.

The conflict between liberation theology and Rome In my biography of the liberation theologian Lidio Dominguez (1936–2012) from Paraguay, I  tell the story of how Dominguez influenced Pope John Paul II on the Polish pontiff’s first journey to Latin America in 1979. The liberation theologian had been recommended by the Argentinean cardinal Eduardo Pironio to John Paul II as a speech-writer who would help the pontiff to connect with the poor peasants and indigenous people of Mexico, where the Latin American bishops’ conference (CELAM) was to gather. Aware of the Polish Pope’s anti-Communism, one of Dominguez’ motives for accepting the task was to avoid a confrontation between the Pope and

44  Pope Francis and liberation theology – a conflict solved Marxism. In his liberationist perspective, Dominguez was convinced that Marxism was an ally in the cause of the liberation of the poor in Latin America. Although John Paul II accepted large parts of Dominguez’ drafts, the Polish Pope or other consultants edited them in ways that sharpened the tone with regard to some tendencies in liberation theology (Løland 2009, 244–53). This illustrates how conflicting views were negotiated in papal statements that, on the one hand, officially acknowledged concerns of the liberation theology movement and, on the other, delegitimized some of them. It was in particular the opening address to CELAM that prefigured the conflictive issues raised by the CDF statement “Instruction on Certain Aspects of the ‘Theology of Liberation’ ” in 1984. Although the term “liberation theology” did not appear in the Pope’s 1979 address, it was commonly assumed that he was referring to the movement. The Pope celebrated “the positive elements” from the conclusions at the CELAM in Medellín 11 years earlier, but warned against what he called “the incorrect interpretations” of them. He felt the necessity to proclaim that “the principal duty” of Latin American Catholics was to “be the teachers of the truth”. This was “not a human and rational truth, but the Truth that comes from God” and was to lay the foundation for what the Pope qualified as “an adequate ‘praxis’ ” (John Paul II, 58). “Praxis” in quotation marks referred to the preferred term of the liberation theologians that insisted on the primacy of the Aristotelian or even Marxist praxis over an isolated spirituality. Liberation theology had insisted on ecclesial praxis in the form of concrete struggle for the oppressed as the starting point for true theology. Without naming specific works or theologians, the pope actually insisted on the primacy of the opposite: “Besides oneness in charity, oneness in truth ever remains an urgent demand upon us” (John Paul II, 58). In other words, before community in praxis there is a community in truth. Concerned about “the purity of doctrine” in light of the tendencies to interpret Medellín incorrectly, the Pope directed his attention to the topic of Christology. Now today we find in many places a phenomenon that is not new. We find “re-readings” of the Gospel that are the product of theoretical speculations rather than of authentic meditation on the word of God and a genuine evangelical commitment. . . . In some cases people are silent over Christ’s divinity. . . . In other cases people purport to depict Jesus as a political activist, as a fighter against Roman domination and the authorities, and even as someone involved in the class struggle. This conception of Christ as a political figure, a revolutionary, as the subversive man from Nazareth, does not tally with the Church’s catechesis. (John Paul II, 59–60) The Pope’s rhetoric about “theoretical speculations” that in his view are not authentically Catholic or Christian targets the tendency to emphasize the

Pope Francis and liberation theology – a conflict solved  45 humanity of Jesus at the cost of his divinity. This accusation of the tendency in liberation theology to reduce Christian faith to the mundane, earthly, and political persisted as a pattern well into the 1984 Instruction. More severe in the 1979 address, perhaps, was the Pope’s criticism of the idea of Jesus in the liberation theology movement as politically committed and as involved in a reality described with the Marxist category of “class struggle”. The view of Jesus as revolutionary in this political sense was simply not reconcilable with true Christian faith. Besides this, the Pope affirms that Christians do not need to have recourse to ideologies in order to collaborate in the liberation of the human being man (John Paul II, 66). And unlike the papal encyclical Populorum Progressio (1967), Pope John Paul II did not leave any legitimate room for armed struggle against dictatorships in a region where the majority was governed by military regimes.11 In the address, all violence was denounced as immoral. This admonition to refrain from images of Jesus as revolutionary or subversive might strike one as insensitive and harsh in a Cold War context where adherents of liberation theology were being imprisoned, tortured, and even assassinated while the very same labels were employed in the accusations made against them. This group was heterogeneous. Some had committed themselves to armed struggle, while many others were engaged in non-violent activities like organizing cooperatives or alphabetization programmes. In Argentina, more than 10,000 persons disappeared in the name of the military regime’s combat against “subversivos” (Spanish). Nevertheless, Peter Hebblewaithe interestingly points out the “mildness” of the Pope’s formulation at this instance (Hebblethwaite 2007, 183). By Catholic standards it can be described as mild, given that there is no talk of “errors” and still less of heresy (Hebblethwaite 2007, 187), although any theological innovation within a Catholic church concerned with doctrinal purity or orthodoxy is, of course, in principle potentially heretical. The issue of class was taken up again in the 1984 instruction. In the view of the Instruction, class struggle is a perspective on history which poses a severe danger to the Christian faith, since it implicitly denies “the transcendent character of the distinction between good and evil” and therefore leads to a “political amorality” that merely follows the deterministic laws of Marxism (Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith 1990, 404). Moreover, it goes hand in hand with the affirmation of the necessity of violence. And by employing a Marxist analysis of history and society, some strands of liberation theology had embraced visions of reality that were “incompatible with the Christian vision of humanity” (Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith 1990, 404), according to the Instruction. What is more, there is a “tendency to identify the kingdom of God and its growth with the human liberation movement” (Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith 1990, 405) that is contrary to the conclusions of Vatican II. In other words, the soteriology that discerns signs of the Kingdom, and therefore of salvific importance, in political realities is not tolerated. Moreover, the innovative ideas in liberation

46  Pope Francis and liberation theology – a conflict solved theology about social sin and sinful structures were deemed a dangerous immanentism, since evil cannot be located “principally or uniquely in bad social, political, or economic ‘structures’ ” (Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith 1990, 398). Nevertheless, the notion of class was also to some degree validated when the CDF text acknowledged that the aspiration for liberation was most forcefully expressed in “the heart of the disinherited classes” (Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith 1990, 394). Even more, when the Instruction spoke of “the scandal of the shocking inequality between rich and poor” or “between social classes in a nation” (Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith 1990, 395), the parasitic relation between liberation theology and the CDF became evident. It was as if, in its eagerness to warn Catholics against the Marxist deviations of liberation theology, the CDF had radicalized official Catholic discourse on the topic of social and economic inequality.12 One level is the discursive and another is the political, of course. While doctrinally attuned to some of the main concerns of adherents of the liberation theology movement, together with other factors, the 1984 Instruction led to the marginalization of base communities and the bypassing of liberation theologians for major positions in the hierarchy for the years to come.13 It caricatured the liberation theology movement in ways that effectively delegitimized it. Many concerns of liberation theology were officially reaffirmed by the bishops at Puebla in 1979, including the legitimacy of base communities, the option for the poor, and the perception of liberation as salvation from poverty in history. Nevertheless, the battle about the meaning of the documents began as soon as its conclusions were approved by the Vatican.14 The Colombian Alfonso López Trujillo was a major opponent of liberation theology after he became the president of CELAM (from 1972 until 1984). When the present Pope, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, in one of his few publications from this period, privileges the voice of López Trujillo in his interpretation of the Puebla conclusions, this illustrates Bergoglio’s position in this ecclesial battle (Bergoglio 1983). In the article, Bergoglio argues that Puebla warns against the dangers of the ideologies for the church (Bergoglio 1983, 149), but it is interesting that he nowhere mentions the document’s statement about the necessity of ideologies as mediating factors for social action (no. 535 in CELAM III, 198). And the article shows that, like López Trujillo, Bergoglio too is concerned about the lack of discipline in the church. Liberation theology in a country like Argentina was to a large degree formulated by a generation of seminarians and priests who were perceived by certain ecclesial authorities as disobedient, and even rebellious. Some of this rebellion would lead to a rupture with the traditional parochial structures and to the creation of new base communities among the poor. In even more radical cases, it led to some priests’ active collaboration with left-wing guerillas, the Montoneros in particular. As the Jesuits’ provincial in Argentina, Bergoglio sought to marginalize liberation theology, reinstall pre-Vatican

Pope Francis and liberation theology – a conflict solved  47 II traditions, and dismantle the new community that the Jesuits Francisco Jalics and Orlando Yorio had set up among the poor. He left them with no other choice than to dissolve the community or leave the order. These are the roots of a conflict with Bergoglio that is inseparably tied to the sequestration, torture, and imprisonment of these men just two months after the military coup in March 1976. They were considered “subversives” (Diana 2013, 377–83; Klaiber 2009, 299; Mallimaci 2013; Vallely 2015, 38–44). In addition, Bergoglio was one of the few provincials in Latin America who refused to implement “Decree Four” that had been agreed upon at the 32nd General Congregation of the Jesuit order, which took place from 2 December 1974 to 7 March 1975 (Hinsdale 2008, 300). The decree spoke of “the service of faith, of which the promotion of justice is an absolute requirement”, but Bergoglio downplayed the decree and preferred not to mention it to novices (Larraquy 2016, 156–60). Its call for social and political action was suppressed. But that was decades before he was elected Pope. Peter Hebblewaithe concludes that there is no unequivocal condemnation of liberation theology on the part of Rome in the 1979 opening address in Mexico, nor in the “Instruction” of 1984, in the sense of the condemnations of a variety of modern movements and ideologies of what John O’Malley has termed “the long nineteenth century” (O’Malley 2008). Still, there are ideas peculiar to the postconciliar liberationist movement in Latin America that have caused disagreements and conflicts between the Vatican and ­Catholic liberationists. As a whole, therefore, the liberation theology movement is not condemned in these major official reactions from the Vatican,15 which expresses a warning in generalized and vague terms that, in the long run, limited the impact of the social movement within the Catholic church.

1990s: innovations in liberation theology in a post-cold war context How did the once so conservative Jesuit provincial in Argentina come to reconcile himself with liberation theology? And importantly, which of the various liberation theologies that emerged from the 1960s onward in Latin American Christianity did he come to accept or reconcile himself with? One of the main explanations is to be found in the historical context of the Latin American church after the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. The political resonance and possible reception of ideas and motifs from liberation theology, such as the liberation of the poor, was considerably different in a post-Cold War context in which Latin American democracies ensured freedom of expression and joining leftist guerillas was no longer an option. The demands of Latin American liberation theology were no longer as politically explosive, or a cause for scandal within and outside the C ­ atholic church, as before.16 When the geopolitical world was no longer bipolar, the ideological opposition between capitalism and communism was to a large degree replaced by the overarching challenge of the dominant

48  Pope Francis and liberation theology – a conflict solved neoliberal capitalism. Hence, neoliberal globalization could more easily be denounced as a cause of cultural fragmentation or economic injustices without affirming some sort of socialism as its alternative when this option seemed less viable.17 In the national context where Jorge Mario Bergoglio was appointed auxiliary bishop in the capital in 1992, and six years later assumed the position of Metropolitan Archbishop, protests against neoliberal policies were widespread. Interestingly, in the Catholic church, resistance to neoliberalism was not limited to groups connected to liberation theology. This agenda united a broad range of Catholic groups (Donatello 2005, 93). In this situation, liberation theology evolved with new ideas and new emphases. The post-Cold War context had displaced some of the most controversial topics of liberation theology and brought others to the fore. During the 1990s, liberation theology developed in two innovative ways that influenced Catholic theology in Latin America in a broader sense: Creative theological reflection was produced in dialogue with the field of economy and ecology.18 Liberation theologians such as Franz Hinkelammert, Hugo Assmann, Jung Mo Sung, and Julio de Santa Ana analysed neoliberal economic theory within a theological framework that led to criticism of the idolatry of the market.19 The social sciences had been of great importance for liberation theology since the days when the theory of dependence emerged. This meant that the engagement with ecology and insights from the natural sciences seen in Leonado Boff’s Grito da terra, grito dos pobres from 1995 was something new in liberation theology. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Boff had been one of the most optimistic voices among the liberation theologians about the value of Communism,20 but praise of aspects of “really existing socialism” (“real existierender Sozialismus”) was nowhere to be seen in his book on ecology. The call for a socialist transformation or revolution of society was replaced by a criticism of the common exploitative logic of the whole of modernity, both in its liberal-capitalist and in its socialist-Marxist form (Boff 1995, 97–98). The theology of the Peruvian priest who is conventionally called the “father” of liberation theology also exemplifies some of this evolution. His A Theology of Liberation, published in 1971, marks the beginning in customary historical accounts of the movement.

Gustavo Gutiérrez: the evolvement of liberation theology One year before the Puebla conference Gustavo Gutiérrez (1928–) published the essay “La fuerza historica de los pobres”.21 Here he takes stock of the period after the “new popular awareness could burst as a social force in the popular liberation struggles of the 1960s” (Gutiérrez 1983, 78). The Peruvian theologian is describing a historical process where the class of poor and exploited people, who have been absent in Latin American societies, make themselves present through popular struggles for liberation from misery and

Pope Francis and liberation theology – a conflict solved  49 domination. He then dedicates considerable space to the reactions to these struggles from “the oppressors” while displaying sympathy with the political left, exemplified by “the socialist program” of Allende in Chile (Gutiérrez 1983, 79). Gutiérrez also fills the term “subversive” with a positive, Christian meaning (Gutiérrez 1983, 80). He further writes: We affirm a utopia on the way to becoming a historical reality. . . . This “utopianism” clashes with the “realism” of the oppressor, who is incapable of appreciating the kind of historical rationality that springs from the power of the poor. . . . Such misconceptions only hinder the development of the revolutionary energies of the popular classes. In particular, they constitute an obstacle to the exercise of a liberating faith on the part of the Christian communities based in those popular classes. (Gutiérrez 1983, 81–82) Gutiérrez’ theological discourse is structured by a fundamental opposition between “poor”, “popular classes”, and “exploited”, on the one hand, and “dominators” and “oppressors”, on the other. True, liberating faith is to be found in churches and communities that in some sense “base themselves on the life and conscience of these “popular classes”. The true Christian faith is in a sense class-based. Moreover, “revolutionary energies” are in tune with the divine will for liberation. The revolutionary forces, connected to resistance to capitalism and an option for political leftism, are a sign of God’s salvific will in the world. An essay published in 1973 further clarifies the meaning of “poor” and therefore also his interpretation of the widespread slogan of the Catholic church in Latin America after the Medellín conference: “the option for the poor”. While this slogan and the term “liberation” were interpreted differently in these years, along a spectrum from “socialist revolution” to “spiritual liberation” or simply works of charity for the poor (Bonnin 2013, 61), Gutiérrez interpreted them with terms commonly used on the Latin American left: The poor, the oppressed, are members of one social class that is being subtly (or not so subtly) exploited by another class. This exploited class, especially in its most clear-sighted segment, the proletariat, is an active agent. Hence, an option for the poor is an option for one social class against another. (Gutiérrez 1983, 45) It is hard to escape the impression that Gutiérrez categorizes the poor and interprets the meaning of Christian faith within the framework of some sort of class struggle in a sense that overlaps with Marxism. Hence, Gutiérrez is a possible target for the Polish anticommunist and newly elected Pope in the address at Puebla in 1979. Moreover, what was controversial in the liberation theology in Gutiérrez’ version of the 1970s was not only the Marxist

50  Pope Francis and liberation theology – a conflict solved influence but also the argumentative weight given to the insights of social sciences in general, which would lead to criticism of liberation theology.22 In 2004 Gustavo Gutiérrez published his recent reflections on liberation theology in a work that contained texts by the Peruvian liberation theologian and the German theologian (later Cardinal) Gerhard Ludwig Müller.23 Müller was known as a very conservative theologian, and he was appointed Prefect of the CDF in 2012 by Pope Benedict XVI. In his time as cardinal, of course, Benedict had been the very symbol of the Vatican’s opposition to liberation theology since the Instruction of 1984.24 One could easily conclude that Gutiérrez had made an intelligent move, if recognition as an orthodox theologian was what he needed, having co-authored a book with Müller.25 That said, there is no reason to suppose that Müller was ready to embrace what the 1984 Instruction had criticized as a theology with “concepts uncritically borrowed from Marxist ideology” (Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith 1990, 401). When we compare Gutiérrez’ work from 2004 with his writings from the years up to the bishops’ conference in Puebla in 1979, major differences become evident. First, “socialism” or “revolution” is no longer a task to be pursued or a cause to be sympathized within Gutiérrez’ text from 2004. There is no mention of the 1959 revolution on Cuba or the 1979 revolution in Nicaragua, nor does Gutiérrez find it worth remembering the moral examples of Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Camilo Torres, who took up arms against the oppression.26 To the extent that the term “revolution” occurs, it is used to describe aspects of modern capitalism or individualism. Second, while the emphasis on the marginalized and poor is maintained, it is expressed in terms without the former Marxist connotations, such as “the proletariat”. Third, terms such as “oppressor” and “dominator” are absent. The former descriptions and denunciations of these oppressors’ strategies have disappeared from Gutiérrez’ theology of 2004. In other words, the class struggle that Gutiérrez’ texts from the 1970s seemed to presuppose, and to be associated with, is replaced by a call for solidarity and love for the poor. The former emphasis on the conflictive causes of poverty and the urgency of taking sides with a specific social class is replaced by a warning not to exaggerate the conflictive dimension of societies at the expense of the universal Christian love: “Conflictive social realities cannot make us forget the requirements of a universal love that does not recognize the boundaries of social class, race, or gender” (Gutiérrez and Müller 2015, 5). Moreover, the earlier emphasis on the necessarily political dimension of Christian love in oppressive societies is now moderated with an awareness of the limits of political action: “the demands of the gospel go beyond the political project of building a different society” (Gutiérrez and Müller 2015, 5). This is an author who seems to have heard the warning of the 1984 Instruction against identifying the Kingdom of God with the growth of human development. Gutiérrez also finds it necessary to underline that “to speak of a scientific understanding of the social universe cannot be considered something definite”. And the

Pope Francis and liberation theology – a conflict solved  51 father of liberation theology tells the story of a fundamental revision of the movement’s theology: It is possible to go astray in these matters, and in fact this has happened. Nor have misunderstandings been lacking in the face of new themes and new languages. In this way a debate over the theology of liberation arose which even flowed beyond the world of the church and into the wide and stormy world of the media. Nevertheless, beyond appearances and arduous discussions, a profound process was taking place in those years, characterized by a serious and respectful confrontation, well-founded objections, requests for necessary refinements from those who have the authority in the church to do so. (Gutiérrez and Müller 2015, 6) No longer pitting the popular classes against the dominating ones, nor the church of the people against the institution, Gutiérrez is here attuned to listening humbly to the established authorities in the church. He embodies the shift from an innovative, self-confident, and potentially heretical theology infused by Marxism to a more moderate and orthodox theology. It is against this background that principal concerns of liberation theology are incorporated into the conclusions of the general meeting of CELAM in Aparecida in 2007, where Jorge Mario Bergoglio as archbishop of Buenos Aires headed the editorial committee of the final conclusions. In striking contrast to the last general meeting of CELAM at Santo Domingo in 1992 (Serbin 1992), the autonomy of the Latin American church was expressed at the 2007 meeting in Aparecida without the same effort by the Vatican to control the bishops and the outcome of the meeting.27 Under Bergoglio’s leadership, the Latin American bishops had the courage to correct or modify Pope Benedict XVI’s controversial remarks in his opening address.28 The Pope had affirmed that “the announcing of Jesus and his Gospel did not presuppose in any moment an alienation of the pre-Columbian cultures, nor was it an imposition of a foreign culture”. This caused controversy and reactions from state leaders such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez (Løland 2016). At the same time, however, it was significant that Pope Benedict XVI clearly confirmed the option for the poor, anchoring this theme in the very same scriptural passage as the fathers of Medellín had done: “the preferential option for the poor is implicit in the Christological faith in that God who became poor for us, so that he would enrich us with his poverty (cf. 2 Cor. 8:9)” (Benedict XVI 2008, 6). Contrary to what many had expected or feared, in Aparecida the Latin American bishops reasserted central concerns of liberation theology: They reintroduced the see-judge-act scheme from Medellín and Puebla, reaffirmed the preferential option for the poor, restated the importance of the base communities (CEBs) and confirmed the core issue from liberation theology of an integral liberation (conversion of persons and transformation of structures

52  Pope Francis and liberation theology – a conflict solved in the society) (Brighenti 2010, 310). What is more, Aparecida broke the eloquent silence in the 1992 documents from Santo Domingo about the martyrs who had not yet been canonized, but who nevertheless were considered saints in the Latin American church.29 The primary example of such a martyr was, of course, a figure who for many personalized the radicalism of liberation theology: Archbishop Óscar Romero (1917–1980).30 The fathers of Aparecida had, under Bergoglio’s leadership as chair of the editorial committee of the final document, paved the way for an official recognition in the future of the sainthood of Romero and other Latin American martyrs. In these efforts for consensus among the various interests and theologies of the region’s bishops, preparations of the Latin American dimension to what has come to be known as “the Francis Effect” were being made – without any of the bishops being able to foresee that the archbishop who stood out as their leader in Aparecida was to be elected as the first Latin American pontiff in history six years later.

Symbolic gestures rather than open intellectual engagement Pope Francis has been aptly characterized as a man who “communicates as effectively by gestures as by words” (O’Malley 2015, 69). It is also because of the gestures that the liberation theologian Leonardo Boff has praised Pope Francis as someone who embodies liberation theology in the sense that the pontiff acts in a liberating way for the poor. While Boff’s book on Pope Francis is devoid of analyses of the pope’s discourse, Boff is all the more impressed by the Pope’s appearance and deeds: The new pope, Francis, comes from outside the framework of old European Christendom, so bogged down with traditions, palaces, princely spectacles, and internal power disputes. He is distinguished by simple, down-to-earth, obvious gestures that value life’s common sense. Francis is breaking all the protocols and showing that power is always a mask, even when this power is supposed to be of divine origin. (Boff 2014, 47) Icons of liberation theology like Ernesto Cardenal and Pedro Trigo also praised Pope Francis. Trigo was one of those who would praise the Argentinian pope in hagiographic terms, for example, by claiming that “Pope Francis is the incarnation of the council par excellence, since . . . he is so charismatic that he creates a Pentecost” (Trigo 2016, 7).31 Nonetheless, breaking protocols or incarnating the Second Vatican Council can hardly be said to be fruits of liberation theology or examples of the movement’s peculiarities. A popular or charismatic pope is not the same as a liberationist pope. Jorge Bergoglio chose “Francis” as his name as Pope. This would serve as a signal that, as pope, he was to serve the poor. Shortly into his pontificate,

Pope Francis and liberation theology – a conflict solved  53 he retrospectively construed a narrative about the origin of his election as the new Pope that proved to be influential. The Argentinian gave the impression that his election by the college of cardinals was not the result of a successful campaign for promotion or a career move, but rather the consequence of a divine call – made in the name of the poor: During the election, I was sitting next to the Archbishop Emeritus of São Paulo and Prefect Emeritus of the Congregation for the Clergy, Cardinal Claudio Hummes, a good friend. When things started to move in a dangerous direction, he comforted me. When the votes reached the two thirds, there was the usual applause, because I  had been elected. Then, he hugged, kissed, and told me: “Do not forget the poor!” That word made an impact on me: the poor, the poor. Immediately, I thought of Francis of Assisi in relation to the poor. (Cavassa 2013) Pope Francis would interpret this option of the poor through symbolic acts such as refusing to live in the papal palace, washing the feet of prisoners on Maundy Thursday during Holy Week, or planning papal visits to places associated with social exclusion (the island of Lampedusa in Italy or Ciudad Juárez in Mexico). Nevertheless, Pope Francis’ particular concern for the poor or his successful mediatizations of this church of the poor could hardly be explained by the influence of liberation theology. It rather illustrated how “the preferential option for the poor” could be shared by adherents and opponents to liberation theology alike, since its meaning could be interpreted in multiple ways, ranging from traditional Christian charity work to modern political leftism. Moreover, Pope Francis’ vision and staging of the church for the poor could be considered as an expression of a broad Catholic tradition of concern for the poor, expressed in official papal teaching such as Mater et magistra (1961) or Evangelii Nuntiandi (1975).32 Pope Francis’ admiration for the latter text has been expressed in sayings such as “Evangelii Nuntiandi is the greatest pastoral postconciliar document” (Reyes Alcaide 2017, 108).33 Evangelii Nuntiandi (1975) is also a document that expresses Pope Paul VI’s warnings against politicized or ideological misuses of the Christian and salvation motif of “liberation” without the hostility or the polemical tone of Pope John Paul II at the 1979 Puebla meeting. Jorge Mario Bergoglio has never been very explicit or elaborated much on his view on liberation theology. As archbishop, he subscribed to the Uruguayan professor Guzmán Carriquiry Lecour’s (1944–) criticism of liberation theology as at times too ideological and too violent for the Catholic church to tolerate. In his preface to Carriquiry Lecour’s 2005 book Una apuesta por América Latina, the archbishop of Buenos Aires expresses his sympathies for the vision in the book of an authentic culture in Latin America marked by Christian evangelization that is threatened by ideologies that are foreign to this culture (Bergoglio 2005). Carriquiry Lecour

54  Pope Francis and liberation theology – a conflict solved elaborates further on this opposition in the book and criticizes the theology of liberation as a secularizing theology that imposes unwanted ideologies on the church. This rather general view of liberation theology coheres well with the statements made by the same Bergoglio in the 2010 interview with Francesca Ambrogetti and Sergio Rubin. Here, Bergoglio affirms that there were theologians of liberation who went down the wrong path. The major preoccupation for the poor that was seen in the 1960s provided a fertile ground for any ideology to enter. Nevertheless, this danger of ideological infiltration that was evident in these mistakes by liberation theologians disappeared gradually as the awareness of the richness of popular religiosity in Latin America grew. Moreover, Bergoglio emphasizes in the interview that there were thousands of pastoral agents, priests, as well as lay people, who committed themselves to the option for the poor in the way that the Catholic church desired that they do. The archbishop is also careful to emphasize that the church should engage, not in partisan or party-based politics, but in the wide-ranging politics that arises from the commandments and the gospel (Rubín and Ambrogetti 2013, 83–85). As Pope, however, Bergoglio has expressed few opinions about liberation theology. Unlike his predecessor, he has not acted as an intellectual who engages openly with theoretical ideas or academic interlocutors. As a Catholic world leader, Bergoglio acts more as a priest than as a professor. Therefore, his approach is pastoral rather than doctrinal. And when asked for his opinion about liberation theology, as Pope, Bergoglio answered in a way that indicates that he wants to evade controversies on the matter: Dominique Wolton: Do you think that the reinforcement of inequalities within the context of globalization gives a boost to liberation theology? Pope Francis: I’d rather not talk about the liberation theology of the 1970s, because that’s something specific to Latin America. (Francis and Wolton 2018, 51) The reason for refusing to reflect further on the topic raised by the interviewer is somewhat elusive. At the outset, the fact that liberation theology is specific to a region and belongs to the past is not a convincing reason for not wanting to reflect on it. And when Pope Francis is yet again asked about liberation theology in the same interview book, the pope limits himself to stating that “[l]iberation theology has a partial aspect, in the good sense, but also in the bad sense” (Francis and Wolton 2018, 187).34 Then the pope once again evaluates the Marxist interpretation of liberation theology as bad. Interestingly, he points out that there were various understandings of liberation theology “after the French movement of May 1968”, which leaves the impression of impulses or inclinations to interpret liberation theology in Marxist terms as something coming from outside of Latin America. As in the impression left by his foreword to Guzmán Carriquiry Lecour’s 2005 book, the pope answers as if this Marxist interpretation is the result of an

Pope Francis and liberation theology – a conflict solved  55 infiltration by an ideology that is foreign to the Latin American church. And so, implicit here is a contrast between an authentic Latin American faith and an inauthentic ideology from Europe. Although the Pope does not say it explicitly, the logic embedded in his reflection seems to be that there is room for an authentic liberation theology cleansed of Marxist contaminations. In the case of Gustavo Gutiérrez, we saw how purified his liberation theology of 2004 had become in comparison to his 1978 essay. It had become a sort of sanitized version of it, worthy of recognition from Gerhard Ludwig Müller, who was appointed by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012 to be the cornerstone of Catholic orthodoxy, as the head of the CDF, and who became a conservative pillar of the college of cardinals from 2014 onwards. Pope Francis’ relation to Gutiérrez exemplifies, alongside other gestures, the Argentinian Pope’s ecclesial politics towards the movement of liberation theology. First, through the gesture of inviting the “father” of liberation theology to a public audience in the Vatican a few months into his pontificate, Pope Francis signalled willingness to dialogue with the once so controversial theologian. On his papal visit to Peru in 2018, the pope had scheduled another meeting with Gutiérrez, and in 2019 the Pontifical Commission for Latin America invited the Peruvian theologian to the symbolically important conference on the fortieth anniversary of the Puebla conference. Gutiérrez was the keynote speaker at the conference, together with some of the Pope’s closest collaborators, such as the aforementioned Guzmán Carriquiry Lecour, Juan Carlos Scannone, and Carlos María Galli.35 None of these is regarded as a liberation theologian, and Scannone has profiled himself as a representative of the “theology of the people”. Given that he was entrusted the task of interpreting the theological significance of the Puebla meeting at a conference arranged by the Vatican, Gutiérrez had surely not been called to Rome for interrogation. He had obtained official recognition by the Vatican, and the impression was left that Pope Francis had reconciled himself with Gutiérrez’ revised version of liberation theology. Although there is no official record of it, the story Leonardo Boff tells about being contacted by Pope Francis and encouraged to send material for the elaboration of the Laudato Si encyclical is another gesture that signals reconciliation.36 In one sense, the impression given by the official involvement of Boff in drafting a papal encyclical indicates an even stronger willingness to solve the long conflict between the Vatican and the liberation theologians. After all, Boff, unlike Gutiérrez, was silenced for one year and decided to leave the priesthood. The publicity surrounding Boff’s conflict with the Vatican was much higher than in the case of Gutiérrez. The gesture of citing the liberationist Bishop Pedro Casaldáliga in the apostolic exhortation Querida Amazona from 2020 (no. 73) and Dom Helder Câmara (labelled “the saintly Brazilian bishop”) in a Christmas message from the same year is also a significant part of this picture.37 Second, the power to lift sanctions against a suspended Catholic priest is another instrument a pope possesses to signal closeness or distance vis-à-vis

56  Pope Francis and liberation theology – a conflict solved a person who has become a priest, like the liberation theologians. The lifting of such sanctions is an authorization that can signal interest in dialogue, community, and even reconciliation. Instead of upholding sanctions or denouncing the controversial actions once made in the past by the liberation theologian Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann (1933–2017), pope Francis decided in August 2014 to end the suspension of the Nicaraguan priest. Pope John Paul II had suspended d’Escoto Brockmann more than 30  years earlier. D’Escoto Brockmann had been suspended for his disloyalty to the canon law from 1983 that forbids clerics in the Catholic church from assuming public offices. He served as a foreign minister in the Sandinista government of Nicaragua from 1979 until 1990, but asked the Vatican for permission to say Mass a few years before he died. In February 2019 the Vatican also allowed the liberation theologian and poet Ernesto Cardenal (1925–2020) to celebrate Mass. Cardenal had been suspended for the same reason as d’Escoto Brockmann, namely, for serving as a Minister in the Sandinista government after the revolution in Nicaragua in 1979. Given the international prominence of Cardenal as one of the icons of liberation theology, it was yet another decision that signalled Pope Francis’ reconciliation with his former opponents in the church. Third, through his politics of canonization Pope Francis has signalled a rapprochement with liberation theology and a recognition of some of its key figures never seen before on the part of the Vatican in this area of ecclesial politics since the rise of liberation theology in the 1960s. It took just one month before Vatican officials, most likely with the permission of the Pope, announced that Pope Francis had decided to “unblock” the canonization process of Archbishop Óscar Romero. Ever since the assassination of the Archbishop of San Salvador in March 1980, liberation theologians had called for an official recognition of Romero’s martyrdom. What is more, many of them considered it a scandal that an Archbishop who died for the sacred cause of the liberation of the poor was denied a regular canonization process in the church. The liberation theologian Jon Sobrino, for instance, expressed incomprehensibility on the matter and did not accept the explanations that were sometimes given from official authorities in the Catholic church, that a recognition of Romero’s sainthood would cause conflicts in the church or that canon law required more caution in this case (Sobrino 1993, 179). Pope Francis has certainly not limited the canonization processes during his pontificate to figures linked to liberationist Christianity. Moreover, there was another dimension to the sainthood of Archbishop Óscar Romero that could not be reduced to the interpretations of his life and death given by liberation theologians. The cult around Archbishop Romero was also an expression of a less theologically articulated and more popular form of Catholicism practiced among wider parts of the Catholic population in Central America than those who identified themselves with liberation theology (Hughes 2016). That said, the Pope could hardly have

Pope Francis and liberation theology – a conflict solved  57 been unaware of the recognition of some of the legacy of Latin American liberation theology caused by his papal authorization of the initial opening of the canonization process in 2013, the beatification decision in 2015, and the final canonization in 2018. It is hard to imagine a symbolic gesture on the Pope’s part that would have greater potential at improving the relations between the Vatican and liberation theologians than the canonization of Óscar Romero as an official saint in the Catholic church. The unblocking of the canonization process of the Brazilian bishop Dom Helder Câmara (1909–1999) made public in 2015 and the beatification of the Argentinian bishop Enrique Angelelli (1923–76) in 2018 are decisions taken by Pope Francis that contain a similar symbolic meaning, but the symbolic weight of the case of Romero is undoubtedly unique in postconciliar Catholicism in Latin America and for global Catholicism of the twenty-first century.

Pope Francis: rejects aspects of liberation theology and appropriates others Liberation theology can be understood as a series of attempts to radicalize the Social Doctrine of the Catholic church for the cause of the poor. Pope Francis tends to emphasize the role of the theology of the people when confronted with the question of the Latin American sources of his theology (Francis and Wolton 2018, 187–88). Although there is obviously some truth to this (also because the borders between the theology of the people and liberation theology are blurred), what we encounter in Pope Francis’ discourse appears to be a negotiation of the legacy of liberation theology. Through this negotiation, some elements characteristic of Latin American liberation theology are rejected by the pontiff, while others are appropriated and integrated into the papal discourse without an explicitly reference to the liberation theologians.38 What seems to be clearly rejected by Pope Francis is the reliance on Marxist philosophy in theology and the embrace of a vaguely defined “socialism”. On his first journey as Pope to Latin America, to Brazil in 2013, Pope Francis warned the CELAM leadership in ways reminiscent of Ratzinger’s 1984 Instruction. The Argentinian reiterated the warning from his predecessors against reducing the gospel to an ideology and made it clear that this was a particular danger when applying the see-judge-act methodology, without mentioning that this has been a cornerstone of liberation theology. By describing one of the ways of making an ideology of the gospel as “sociological reductionism”, the pope could also reaffirm the decades-long resistance in the Vatican to any form of Marxism: This is the most readily available means of making the message an ideology. At certain times it has proved extremely influential. It involves an interpretative claim based on a hermeneutics drawn from the social

58  Pope Francis and liberation theology – a conflict solved sciences. It extends to the most varied fields, from market liberalism to Marxist categorization. (Francis 2013) Pope Francis is eager to distance himself from any ideology and to criticize different models of politics, whether economic liberalism or Marxism.39 His theology serves primarily to delegitimize political powers and ideologies, not to legitimize concrete new policies. Like the 2004 version of Gustavo Gutiérrez, Pope Francis consistently avoids the use of “proletariat” or “class”, and he seldom speaks of “oppressors”.40 Like Gutiérrez, he prefers “the poor”, “the excluded”, or “the marginalized”, used in ways that are free from connotations of class struggle. The view that Pope Francis is a leftist (Neumayr 2017), or the impression of the Pope as more critical of the political right than of the left, is misguided. This impression is partly due to the post-Cold War context in which the Pope addresses social concerns for the poor, where capitalism is the dominant economic reality. In this sense, Pope Francis stands firmly in the tradition of the Social Doctrine of the church, building on Pope John Paul II’s fierce criticism of capitalism before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall.41 Moreover, this papal criticism of capitalism gained actuality in Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical Caritas in veritate from 2009, written in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. So what is the Latin American effect on the papacy after 2013 with regard to this particular topic? Evangelii Gaudium remains the most programmatic document for Pope Francis’ papacy. In this apostolic exhortation from 2013, the traditional Catholic anticapitalism, expressed through the Argentinian’s predecessors, receives notably Latin American marks. Here, the Pope draws connections between the realities of economic inequalities and deaths of the poor, on the one hand and the idolatry of money and the literally deadly logic of the market economy, on the other: Just as the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say “thou shalt not” to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills. . . . The worship of the ancient golden calf (cf. Ex 32:1–35) has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose. The worldwide crisis affecting finance and the economy lays bare their imbalances and, above all, their lack of real concern for human beings. (EG, no. 53 and 55) The Brazilian scholar of religion, Allan da Silva Coelho, has pointed out that while Pope Francis’ predecessors spoke of an idolatry of money, they

Pope Francis and liberation theology – a conflict solved  59 never connected this grave sin directly to the function or logic of the market economy (Coelho 2019, 216–19).42 Here, the traditional criticism of capitalism by the social doctrine of the Catholic church is articulated as a denunciation of a practice of idolatry attested in the Bible. Never before has the criticism been accentuated in this way by a pope, who also speaks of a “deified market” that “become[s] the only rule” (EG, no. 56). In this way, the modern market economy becomes absolutized in a way that effectively kills in the form of social exclusion. As liberation theologians would say, it kills the poor who die before their time. When the Pope states that “our challenge is not so much atheism as the need to respond adequately to many people’s thirst for God”, the resemblance to liberation theology becomes clearer. A liberation theologian like Jon Sobrino has called for a focus on idolatry rather than on atheism as the real threat to the poor and therefore to the church. The denunciation of idolatry is more biblical and more relevant to the sinful state of the world, according to Sobrino (Sobrino 1991, 235–50). In a notable contrast to Benedict XVI, and in reminiscence of liberation theology, Pope Francis focuses on idolatry at the expense of atheism. In 1998, a group of Argentinians Jesuits close to the present Pope published an anthology with theological and ethical perspectives on market economy and neoliberalism. Among the editors was the theologian of the people, Juan Carlos Scannone. It is noteworthy that the concept of the idolatry of the market operative in Pope Francis’ discourse does not figure in the book (Scannone and Remolina Vargas 1998). But it does indeed figure in the DEI school of liberation theology of the 1990s, as Allan da Silva Coelho has also pointed out (Coelho 2019, 206–7). In works of the aforementioned liberation theologians of this school, an innovative theological analysis of the inherent logic of a laissez-faire market economy is formulated. It is not absorbed by the theology of the Aparecida document of 2007, but it seems to have left its mark on Pope Francis’ accentuation of Catholic social teaching. Pope Francis’ view of an absolutization and divinization of the market that literally kills resembles the sacrificial logic of the idolatry of the market detected by the DEI school in the 1990s.43 Hence, the denunciative aspect of liberation theology proves to be attractive to a Pope who is ready to denounce economic injustice without embracing a concrete model as an alternative to it.44 Pope Francis takes a step further in his interpretation of the church’s social teaching with his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si. In this text, the denunciation of negative effects of the market economy is extended to the theme of ecology. This document is structured with the methodology of the seejudge-act-scheme typical to liberation theology. Furthermore, the intimate link between the cause of the poor and the protection of the environment of the 1990s ecologically oriented liberation theology is fundamental. And it is no coincidence that many hear an allusion to title of Leonardo Boff’s book

60  Pope Francis and liberation theology – a conflict solved Ecology. Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor from 1995 in paragraph 49 of the document: Today, however, we have to realize that a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor. (LS, no. 49) In Pope Francis’ official genealogy, the turn to ecology in Catholic theology that led to the production of Laudato Si took place at the Aparecida meeting in 2007 (Reyes Alcaide 2017, 95). Nonetheless, the shift in Latin American Catholic theology with regard to ecology occurred already in the 1990s liberation theology. It is highly likely that there were influential bishops present at the 2007 CELAM meeting in Aparecida familiar with the ecological theology of the Brazilian liberation theologians Leonardo Boff and Ivone Gebara (Gebara 1997). While environmental concerns seem to have had a lasting impact on official Catholic teaching in Latin America, Gebara’s liberationist feminism has been neglected and even actively resisted by Latin American bishops such as the present Pope.

Conclusion The conflict between liberation theology and Rome seems to have been solved through the charismatic enactment of the church of the poor in the person of Pope Francis, but also through the adjustments of the theology of various actors. In the post-Cold War era, Jorge Mario Bergoglio is confronted by the overwhelming reality of poverty and dominance of capitalism in a world where Communism is no longer a threat and Marxism no longer attractive to intellectuals in the church. But interestingly, Pope Francis absorbs elements from new directions taken within liberation theology in the 1990s, such as the theological criticism of neoliberal market ideology and ecotheology. This new rapprochement to the figures and the thought of liberation theology takes place after substantial self-criticism has been made on part of liberation theologians such as Gustavo Gutiérrez, attuned to the 1984 Instruction and other forms of criticisms of liberation theology in the church, in particular in relation to Marxism. Jon Sobrino is one of the few prominent liberation theologians who have not only praised Pope Francis but also made some of his criticism public. Sobrino admits having been positively surprised by a person that within the Jesuit Society was known for his controversial role as provincial in Argentina during the 1970s. Sobrino credits Pope Francis for his compassion for the victims and for the canonization of Óscar Romero. Nonetheless, he criticizes the martyrology of the Aparecida document, which Bergoglio had a key role in the final editing of. The Aparecida document does not emphasize

Pope Francis and liberation theology – a conflict solved  61 the historical conflicts that led to the execution of the Latin American martyrs of the twentieth century (such as Archbishop Romero). It alludes to the martyrdom as if it had a value per se, according to Sobrino (Sobrino and Mármol 2018, 304–6). While Sobrino does not mention it explicitly, this criticism could apply to the way that Pope Francis decided to canonize a martyr like Óscar Romero. Pope Francis’ sermon on that day was free of any of the historical contexts that gave rise to the conflicts that led to the assassination of Romero.45 The official hagiography of a victim of such a dense moment in the history of Latin American Christianity was limited in scope and content. Some would even claim that Pope Francis’ remembrance of Saint Romero was poor, despite the rich memory of Romero’s martyrdom in Latin America. The claim that Pope Francis is a political leftist seems greatly exaggerated.46 In light of the critical appraisal of some elements of liberation theology, Pope Francis appears more as a figure of a selective integration of symbols and groups connected to the liberation theology movement. He is not so much one of them, as a figure of reconciliation between formerly oppositional groups within Latin American Catholicism. The post-Cold War context makes his approximation to liberation theology less controversial and his liberationist accentuation of traditional Catholic anticapitalism more understandable, particularly when he connects it to the deterioration of the environment.

Notes 1 Unlike in the case of Boff and Sobrino, no “Notification” on Gutiérrez’ work was made public by the CDF. In 1983 the Peruvian bishops’ conference was informed by the CDF that a case on Gutiérrez had been opened. Twenty-four years later, the CDF stated that it was closed (Torres 2008, 155). 2 “la apelación a la hermenéutica marxista a la realidad” (Rubín and Ambrogetti 2013, 83). 3 The movement is ecumenical and has not consisted exclusively of Catholics. The Brazilian Protestant Rubem Alves may even be said to have been the first to employ this term for the movement in his 1968 dissertation “Toward a Theology of Liberation” (PhD defended at Princeton University). 4 In the words of Jon Sobrino, “Medellín was more than the mere application or extrapolation of the Council” (Sobrino 2012, 83). 5 Activists from unions and church groups such as base communities were the primary social base for the party in 1990. In view of the power of the Workers’ Party in Brazil in the 2000s, the conclusion that liberation theology in Latin America has had “meagre results” appears questionable (Follmann 2000). 6 Feminist theology and indigenous theology also deserve to be mentioned in this context of Latin American schools of theology. 7 The relation is seldom explored and is mentioned only in passing by (Faggioli 2017, 86). Nor is the relation sufficiently explicated in (Figueroa Deck 2017, 43–45). The Argentinian theologian Emilce Cuda poses the question whether Pope Francis’ theology is a theology of liberation, but her only conclusion is that if one is to consider the Pope a theologian of liberation, one must carefully distinguish between the various strands of Latin American liberation theology and

62  Pope Francis and liberation theology – a conflict solved what she considers to be the Argentinian strand of it, the theology of the people (Cuda 2016, 235–36). 8 It is therefore inaccurate to depict the theology of the people as “an Argentine alternative to liberation theology”, as the political scientist Thomas R. Rourke has written (Rourke 2016, 9). Rourke’s description of the dissociation of Gera and Tello from the Movement of Priests for the Third World is also too sharp. See Rourke (2016, 73–74). 9 In my biography of the liberation theologian Lidio Dominguez, I relate an episode that exemplifies Gera’s and Tello’s support of this young and radical generation of Catholic theologians who encountered resistance from conservative bishops. A significant part of them, like Dominguez, were to opt for an armed struggle as the path to authentic liberation, and for the Montoneros guerilla as a means to achieve this (Løland 2009, 64–72). Published in Norwegian. 10 This is also Emilce Cuda’s position on the matter. See (Cuda 2016, 40). 11 Populorum Progressio (1967) warns against revolutionary violence but acknowledges its legitimacy in cases “where there is manifest, longstanding tyranny which would do great damage to fundamental personal rights and dangerous harm to the common good” (Populorum Progressio, no. 31). 12 The 1984 Instruction is “one of the most radical documents ever to emanate from the Vatican” (Hebblethwaite 2007, 187). 13 A significant example of the ecclesiopolitical impact is the splitting of Cardinal Paul Evaristo Arns’ archdiocese into five parts (Hewitt 1993). 14 After the 1968 meeting in Medellín, all CELAM conclusions have had to wait for authorization, and partly correction, from the Vatican before publication. According to Agenor Brighenti, about 250 modifications of the text approved by the Latin American bishops were made by the Vatican before final publication (Brighenti 2016). 15 The rhetoric in the CDF Notifications on Leonardo Boff from 1985 and Jon Sobrino from 2006 is notably different. For instance, the language carries a more strongly condemnatory meaning when it claims to have revealed the “errors” in Boff and Sobrino’s books. 16 “Liberation theology . . . has abandoned most of the revolutionary rhetoric of the earlier period . . . appealing to what is now a mainstream element in official social teaching of the church – the preferential option for the poor” (Sigmund 1990, 175). 17 Ever since the personal conflict between Orlando Yorio (1932–2000) and his superior Jorge Mario Bergoglio arose in the 1970s over the responsibility for the torture and imprisonment of Yorio and another Jesuit, Francisco Jalics, Yorio upheld his accusation against the present Pope. The conflict, however, was not limited to the personal sphere and to discipline. The theology of liberation taught by Yorio in the 1970s defended a vaguely defined “socialism“. See (Yorio 1973, 144). 18 Gender and sexuality is another field with which liberation theologians engaged and which led to innovative contributions in the 1990s. These significant contributions encountered a stronger resistance in official Catholic teaching, however. 19 In particular, the environment at Depto Ecuménico de Invesigaciones in Costa Rica proved to be innovative and productive in this field. See for instance Assmann (1991). 20 For instance, after a trip to the Soviet Union in 1987 Leonardo Boff proclaimed that the “social organization of the Soviet Union when compared with our dependent and exclusive capitalism avoids the eroticization and commercialization of everything and maintains a basic healthiness of human and social

Pope Francis and liberation theology – a conflict solved  63 relations, offering the objective possibility of living more easily in the spirit of the Gospels and of observing the Ten Commandments” (Sigmund 1990, 173). 21 Translated in (Gutiérrez 1983, 75–107). 22 “Sociologismo” (Spanish), denoting an exaggerated use of sociology, was an accusation that liberation theologians such as Hugo Assmann were familiar with (Assmann 1991, 92). 23 Translated into English in 2015 as Gutiérrez and Müller (2015). 24 Ratzinger’s opposition to liberation theology was in fact made public in March 1984 through an unexpected criticism in the form of an article. 25 Some years later, Müller would constitute one of the principal opponents of Pope Francis in the College of Cardinals. This is perhaps expressed most fully in the book Remaining in the Truth of Christ: Marriage and Communion in the Catholic Church (2014). The book, co-authored with four other cardinals, consisted of a criticism of the idea that divorced and remarried persons could receive communion. 26 As Gutiérrez did in the 1970s. See for instance Gutiérrez (1983, 41). 27 Even a figure like Pope Francis is critical of the Santo Domingo Meeting (Reyes Alcaide 2017, 106). 28 “The Gospel reached our lands as part of a dramatic and unequal encounter of peoples and cultures.” No. 4 in the introduction to the Concluding Document of Aparecida. 29 No. 98 in the Concluding Document of Aparecida: “We wish to recall the courageous testimony of our men and women saints, and of those who, even though not canonized, have lived out the gospel radically.” 30 On the silence of the martyrs in Santo Domingo in 1992, see Sobrino (1993, 178–80). 31 The author’s translation. 32 In Mater et magistra (1961) Pope John XXIII had stated that he felt a “profound sadness” since he had himself witnessed “a wretched spectacle indeed – great masses of workers who, in not a few nations, even in whole continents, receive too small a return for their labor” (John XXIII 2018). Moreover, shortly before presiding over the of opening of the Second Vatican Council in 1962 the Pope spoke of “a church of the poor,” to signal the direction for the Catholic church (Massaro 2018, 32). 33 The author’s translation (Reyes Alcaide 2017, 108). 34 Pope Francis was also pressed on the issue in the press conference on the return to Italy after the official visit to Bolivia, where President Evo Morales had given the Pope a Christ figure with the hammer and sickle, made by the Jesuit Luis Espinal. The pope mentions the two CDF instructions on liberation theology without going into the content of them. 35 www.americalatina.va/content/americalatina/es/articulos/congreso-internac ional-a-los-cuarenta-anos-de-la-conferencia-de-.html. 36 For Boff’s story, see https://leonardoboff.org/2020/01/27/dos-papas-two-typesof-man-two-models-of-the-church/. 37 “I think of what that saintly Brazilian bishop used to say: ‘When I am concerned for the poor, they call me a saint; but when I keep asking why such great poverty exists, they call me a communist’ ” (Francis 2020). 38 The argument for a selective integration of liberation theology is directed against Thomas R. Rourke’s claim that Bergoglio’s “always remained independent” of liberation theology (Rourke 2016, 5). 39 “Ideology” never receives the positive content that the Puebla document sometimes gives it. In Pope Francis’ discourse, “ideology” is always something the believer should avoid. See Pope Francis’ warnings in Francis (2015). The pope calls for “a non-ideological ethics” (EG, no. 57).

64  Pope Francis and liberation theology – a conflict solved 40 There is one exception to this, on a very general level, in Francis and Wolton (2018, 187). 41 For instance, in his encyclical Centesimus annus (no. 42), where the Polish anticommunist Pope denounces “a radical capitalist ideology” reflected in a government that “blindly entrusts their solution to the free development of the market forces”. 42 In his Centesimus Annus (no. 40) John Paul II spoke of an “idolatry” of the market with quotation marks, as if this was not a real form of idolatry. Furthermore, the idea was elaborated only to a small extent in the 1991 encyclical. 43 The school’s focus on free market ideologies in the 1990s is prepared by a more general focus on idolatry in the early 1980s. See Richard (1983). 44 “Socialism” or “welfare state” are not common terms in Pope Francis’ discourse, which overall gives little indication of what kind of society the Catholic church is calling for. Nevertheless, there are some indications that the Pope calls for more state regulations of the economy. “The liberal market economy is madness. The state needs to regulate a little bit” (Francis and Wolton 2018, 68). 45 “Even in the midst of tiredness and misunderstanding, Paul VI bore witness in a passionate way to the beauty and the joy of following Christ totally. . . . It is wonderful that together with him and the other new saints today, there is Archbishop Romero, who left the security of the world, even his own safety, in order to give his life according to the Gospel, close to the poor and to his people, with a heart drawn to Jesus and his brothers and sisters” (Francis 2018). 46 In agreement with Cuda (2016, 45).

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4 Pope Francis and populism – resemblances and differences

One of the controversies surrounding the political role of Pope Francis in the global and mediatized public square of our time has been the question of the Argentinian’s alleged populism. Just months into the first Latin American papacy in history, R. R. Reno, editor of the journal First Things, concluded: “This will be a populist papacy” (Reno 2013). Reno emphasized the ad intra dimension to what he called an “ecclesiastical populism” of Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, and claimed that this was due to the neglect of the specialized expertise of priests in the document. Since the beginning of his papacy, Pope Francis has given preference to the category of “the People of God” in his ecclesiology, at the same time as he has repeatedly criticized “clericalism”, which he considers to be one of the obstacles to the mission of the church (Spadaro SJ 2013). Massimo Faggioli has affirmed that “Francis entails a mistrust of the elites – social, ecclesiastical, theological, or otherwise” (Faggioli 2017, 41). The pope’s Argentinean nationality and apparent sympathy for Peronism seem to have contributed to the impression of some sort of papal populism ad extra and outside the church, for instance when a renowned newspaper like the Financial Times reported a decisive influence of Pope Francis on the unification of the Peronist coalition before their electoral victory in October 2019 (Mander 2019). In Argentina, there is a widespread assumption among commentators that the pope is a Peronist; this has led to publications such as “El Papa peronista” (Zuleta 2019) (English: “The Peronist Pope”). Peronism in contemporary Argentina is a complex and heterogeneous political phenomenon. Nonetheless, in its classic form Peronism is commonly considered a paradigmatic example of Latin American populism (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2013b, 496). It can therefore make perfect sense to deem Pope Francis a populist,1 as the Italian political scientist Loris Zanatta has done (Zanatta 2016). Is there a populist dimension to what has come to be known as “the Francis Effect”? Which populist elements could it possibly consist of? Zanatta’s assertion has met considerable resistance, however. One of the Argentinean theologians close to Pope Francis, the dean of the Faculty of Theology in Buenos Aires, Carlos María Galli, has dismissed the claim as unfounded, saying that “Pope Francis is popular, but he is not a populist”.2 DOI: 10.4324/9781003349099-4

70  Pope Francis and populism – resemblances and differences Another apologist for Pope Francis has characterized Zanatta’s analysis as a “simplification” of the categories of “populism” and “Peronism” and as an expression of the unwillingness to “tolerate any criticism of the dominant model of globalization” (Carriquiry Lecour 2018, xix). What is more, the image of Pope Francis as a populist obviously clashes with some commonly held views of the pontiff. In a political conjuncture in which the world witnessed the rise of reactionary populist rightists such as Donald Trump and Jair Messias Bolsonaro in countries with some of the world’s largest Catholic populations, Pope Francis’ call to welcome immigrants and preserve the environment led to common views of the present pope as a progressive global leader and a cornerstone in the opposition to rightist populism. From his historical trip to the island of Lampedusa in July 2013 onwards, Pope Francis has effectively stood in opposition to the kind of populism in Europe that took its starting point in a criticism of immigration or even in a demonization of immigrants based on ideas about ethnicity or religion. In other words, Pope Francis’ papacy could be perceived as a bulwark against populism, particularly in its xenophobic variants. Moreover, populism is also turned into an accusation from reactionary groups that seek to delegitimize Pope Francis and construe his papacy as a deviation from the true Catholic faith, for instance when the activist writer George Neumayr accuses Pope Francis of being a liberal Pope who supports “left-wing Latin American populism” (Neumayr 2017, 141). The pejorative uses of this term by both Pope Francis and Neumayr exemplify the need for a more objective and scholarly understanding of the phenomenon labelled “populism”. Pope Francis has attained high levels of popularity among members and non-members of the Catholic church within many different national contexts, not least in Latin America. According to a 2020 survey, the Argentinian enjoyed approval percentages above 60% in the region (Bohigues and Rivas 2020, 13). In terms of communication, Pope Francis seems to have had great success with his symbolic gestures as well as his vocal opinions on a wide range of issues. The contrast between the intellectual Pope Benedict XVI fixated on preserving the theological integrity of the church and the Argentinean charismatic Pope oriented towards pastoral care seems to be a recurring pattern of thought among scholars (Napolitano 2019, 65; Fernández Vega 2016). With the vocabulary of populist theory (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2013b, 498), the contrast could be redrawn as the difference between the thick ideology of Benedict XVI and the thin ideology of Pope Francis. Hence, we could ask whether there are populist elements to Pope Francis’ charismatic style that could help to explain his popularity? The aim of this chapter is to clarify the relation between Pope Francis and populism. Through the use of various scholarly theories on populism and an analysis of relevant parts of Pope Francis’ political theology, we can determine to what degree Pope Francis as a theological thinker is a populist. Links between religion and populism will be drawn and the conditions for labelling the Pope a populist will be discussed. Thereafter the

Pope Francis and populism – resemblances and differences  71 pope’s Argentinean context marked by the populist form of Peronism will be taken into consideration. Nevertheless, the hypothesis of a populist pope primarily hinges on the theological discourse of Jorge Mario Bergoglio as Pope Francis. Therefore, Pope Francis’ explicit criticism of populism will be considered to determine whether it is a relevant factor for the question of Pope Francis’ populism. Moreover, with an emphasis on the people as a core concept of populism, we shall discuss whether Pope Francis has affinities with ideal types of populism within current scholarship.

Populism and religion In common non-scholarly use of the word, “populism” often denotes an irresponsible form of politics that pleases the instant demands of the masses, as if seeking to buy their support in the next elections. Quite often, it is also employed to categorize a simplistic approach or emotional approximation to politics that is devoid of rational planning or decisions that derive logically from sophisticated deliberations based on solid knowledge. Although scholarly definitions do not in principle exclude the potential relevance of these characteristics to actual populist leaders, parties, or movements, the term is usually defined by a deeper political logic. This logic can be discerned from an “ideational” perspective that considers populism as discourse, ideology, or worldview (Mudde and Kaltwasser2013b, 498). But it can also be approached with a stronger emphasis on material conditions, as a political strategy with specific instruments of winning as well as exercising power. According to this approach, mobilization through mass rallies coupled with communication and a strong presence in media are typical instruments employed by populist agents in order to construe the impression of direct contact between the populist and the people, alongside anti-elite rhetoric (Weyland 2017, 58). Although the political-strategic approach does not emphasize the ideas as the primary core elements of populism, it shares the basic view from the ideational approach of the rhetoric that constructs a dichotomy between the people and the elite as fundamental to populism. The people is typically construed in populist discourse as one homogenous entity possessing wholly good moral virtues and a unified political will that can be discerned by the populist and even incarnated in his (or sometimes her) leadership. This morally virtuous people is envisioned as threatened by the immoral and corrupt elite, a vision that leads the populist to construe a narrative about the existential struggle of this people against the enemy, which is reinforced and intensified by being dramatized in stark and polarizing terms. This polarization also allows for demonization of political opponents on a rhetorical level. This normative distinction between “us” and “them”, “the people” and “the elite” fuels populism in a manner that makes it moralistic rather than programmatic (Mudde 2004, 544). As a vision of reality, this antagonism can be nourished by real or imagined social conflicts, but it is embedded in discourse and can be understood to be

72  Pope Francis and populism – resemblances and differences an ideology in spite of its vagueness. In the words of Cas Mudde, populism can be defined as an ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogenous and antagonistic groups, “the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite”, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the general will of the people. (Mudde 2004, 543) Defining the populism along these lines implies that populism (to borrow Mudde’s expression) is a “thin ideology” that is not tied to a specific side of the political spectrum. It seeks to dominate the political field through its constructed dichotomy between the people and its enemies, and this logic can work for leftist as well as rightist political purposes. While there is a broad scholarly consensus that populism is anti-elitist in its essence and can serve the interests of entirely opposite political sides,3 there is less agreement on whether populism is authoritarian and anti-democratic. Populism and the popular demands that arise from it are only conceivable within a democratic horizon (Zanatta 2008, 31). The inception of populism takes place within democracy, although it is not so clear where it leads. There is clearly empirical evidence of populist governance that has led countries in an authoritarian direction, such as the chavismo movement of Venezuela (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018). But the problem of whether the populist logic necessarily pushes a country in that direction remains unresolved in current scholarship. While some theorists of populism argue for the corrective function of populism to democracy in its potential for giving a voice to groups that have been hitherto excluded from the decision-process within liberal democracy (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2013b, 506), others maintain that populists claim exclusivity for the representation of (or in their own eyes merely the voice of) the people (Müller 2017, 40). According to this understanding of populism, populists claim that only they can speak for the true people, and this logic undermines democracy from within. Since populists, on this view, conceive of all political competitors as essentially illegitimate, their leaders and movements constitute a constant danger to the pluralization on which liberal democracy relies (Müller 2017). In spite of some scholarly disagreements about a contested concept, scholars who theorize about the political phenomenon of populism appear to share a common trait: They tend to neglect religion. As some scholars have claimed, there is a “general neglect of religion in academic work on populism” (DeHanas and Shterin 2018, 177). Populism is typically defined in relation to democracy, nationalism, and gender but more seldom with regard to religion. Few seem to share Loris Zanatta’s view that “the relationship between populism and religion hits you in the eye”.4 Nevertheless, the very terminology of populist theorists who conceptualize the distinctive populist construction of the people-elite dichotomy in terms of a

Pope Francis and populism – resemblances and differences  73 “Manichean dualism” that expresses a stark contrast between “good” and “evil” indicates a potentially strong resemblance between religion and populism. Populism can be religious. In the words of Jose Pedro Zúquete, “religious populism is a form of populism that shares its conceptual center but reproduces it in a specific religious key or fashion” (Zúquete 2017, 445). Research on religion and populism has documented the appropriation of religious identities and motifs, illustrated by the title of the 2016 anthology Saving the People. How Populists Hijack Religion (Marzouki, McDonnell and Roy 2016). Fewer scholarly works have focused on the possible populist dimensions of religious actors, such as a religious leader like Pope Francis. Moreover, the very idea of populists who “hijack” religion seem to imply that religion is not the populists’ property at the outset. But the assumption that populists are not, in principle, equally legitimate heirs of religious traditions, on the same level as the formal leaders of these traditions, is problematic, and at the very least is not fruitful for critical studies of religious leaders. The words and actions of these leaders should be scrutinized without the assumption that they have a better access to religious truth or that they are the legitimate owners of a religion that populists merely “hijack” when they use it. Religion is used for political purposes, in a broad sense of the term “political”, by politicians and religious leaders alike. The task of a critical study of religion is to demonstrate how religion is being used by concrete agents in specific contexts. Furthermore, the very distinction between the use and abuse of religion is a normative one and should be tempered. Elsewhere, I have demonstrated how Venezuela’s president Hugo Chávez (1954–2013) constructed a religiously grounded leftist populism by integrating common Christian symbols and appropriating elements from Latin American Christianity in general, and liberation theology in particular, into his populist rhetoric (Løland 2016). This does not entail that liberation theology is inherently populist, but that its ideas can be incorporated into the populist imaginary in ways that make it into one of the “host ideologies” of the ideologically thin populism (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017, 21). Religion can be mobilized in the typical Latin American populism that is predominantly inclusionary in its depictions of the people,5 but it has in the last decades also been used as a source for the typical exclusionary European populism that aims at protecting the existing living conditions against the “other” (as immigrants or non-Europeans). In the name of vague notions such as the “Christian cultural heritage” or “Christian values”, these others are excluded from the allegedly true people on the basis of culture, ethnicity, or religion (in particular, Islam).

Conditions for an inquiry about a populist pope On what grounds could it be legitimate to ask whether a pope could possibly be a populist? There are three aspects of the late-modern papacy of

74  Pope Francis and populism – resemblances and differences Pope Francis that in principle appear to challenge the very notion of a populist pope. First, while we may work with the core hypothesis of populist theory that populists possess a thin ideology, the words and actions of a pope are embedded in a Catholic tradition with a long intellectual trajectory, which is sustained by a large corpus of texts that are normative and function as conditions for the pope’s interpretations of the social and political. In contrast to the populist, a pope can be said to possess, or at least have at his disposal, a thick system of thought: Catholic theology, systematized in detail, including the canon law of the Catholic church with all its regulations sanctioned and enforced by the hierarchical authorities of this institution. Nevertheless, this complex system of thought is to be applied within the Church. Therefore, one should still ask whether the pope disseminates a thin ideology with populist traits outside the Church, as soon as its discourse moves into politics or gains relevance within the political. Second, if populism is a phenomenon that can be perceived only within a democratic horizon, particularly in populist politicians who employ populist strategies with the purpose of electoral success, a pope could be said to be an inappropriate object for the study of religious populism. A pope does not aim at winning democratic elections in the name of a people and in a battle against a corrupt elite. A figure like Pope Francis does not stand as a candidate in elections. He has won one already: One election in which ordinary people are not allowed to vote, which is reserved to the members of the college of cardinals only; an exclusive group of male bishops who elect a leader of a monarchy that can be said to have more in common with an ancient theocracy than with a modern democracy. A late-modern pope could, however, be incited to act in ways that foster popularity: The influence, legitimacy, and power of the Catholic church, and in particular of its sovereign leader, hinges on its moral capital in increasingly multireligious societies. To maintain the unique position of the moral authority of the leader of the world’s largest religious denomination in a contested public square, with political ramifications, is undoubtedly in the interest of a pope. On the one hand, the church wants governments to uphold legislations in tune with Catholic moral theology, in policy areas such as abortion or reproductive health. On the other hand, the Catholic church receives legal support and economic subsidies from various states, sometimes as a privileged entity when compared to other religious traditions. It is therefore in its interest to maintain its status in society in order to defend its religious territory and possibly gain more ground in society. The popularity of a pope might, in other words, be a good investment – in the symbolic as well as the economic meanings of the word. Hence the relevance of a possible populist dimension to this popularity. Third, the question about the populism of a pope could be deemed misplaced at the outset if the pope has refuted populism in its essence or proven to be an effective opposition to the phenomenon of populism. To determine

Pope Francis and populism – resemblances and differences  75 whether this is the case in the example of Pope Frances, one needs therefore to take his utterances on populism into account. Is the Argentinian pontiff effectively refuting populism in the ways in which this term has been defined and understood in scholarly literature?

Pope Francis on populism Evangelii Gaudium from 2013 is the first official document from the Holy See with the signature of Pope Francis where the term “populism” appears. It is brought to the fore in the context of the Pope’s theological and moral criticism of laissez-faire market economy in the document. The Pope argues that the lack of justice and concern for the poor inherent in the forces of “the invisible hand of the market” makes redistribution of wealth an urgent political task (EG, no. 204). In this context, the pope assures the readers of the document that he is “far from proposing an irresponsible populism”, without defining what he means by “populism” (EG, no. 204). In an interview from 2017, Pope Francis is asked what he means with this assurance and answers that he not saying that people should comfortably receive without working (for the production of goods) or live permanently on subsidies.6 In other words, by “populism” the pope means some sort of irresponsible economic policies that favour the poor but ultimately make them dependent on the benefactor. This is one of the two common notions of populism that Cas Mudde regards as dominant in public debate (Mudde 2004, 542–43). Although the notion of populism as opportunistic and irresponsible economic policies is widespread, it does not go to the heart of the scholarly definitions of populism, either in their ideational or in their political-strategic versions.7 Furthermore, this view of populism as giving quick and opportunistic solutions to the economic demands of the population is highly charged and lacks objectivity.8 Another meaning of the Pope’s definition of populism finds expression in a speech to state leaders and diplomats on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the Treaty of Rome in 2017. The topic was European integration, and the Pope lamented the “split” between Europeans and the regional institutions. Then he contrasted European solidarity with populism: Forms of populism are instead fruit of an egotism that hems people in and prevents them from overcoming and “looking beyond” their own narrow vision. There is a need to start thinking once again as Europeans, so as to avert the opposite dangers of a dreary uniformity or the triumph of particularisms. (Francis and Wolton 2018, 112)9 The Pope affirmed that populism was the result of a human selfishness that hinders a broader vision that allows for solidarity. A true or authentic European should avoid the danger of the “triumph of particularisms”,

76  Pope Francis and populism – resemblances and differences which appeared to stem from a “narrow vision” rooted in egoism. 2017 was a year that saw the theme of populism more frequently in utterances by Pope Francis. Interestingly, the pontiff used the term when he was interviewed by the Spanish newspaper El País on the very same day that Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 45th president of the United States on 13 January 2017. In line with a speech the Pope had given six days earlier, he referred to populism as the nationalism from the interwar period in Europa and a phenomenon that had reappeared today as a threat to multilateral cooperation.10 In the interview with El País, the Pope added a regional differentiation to his concept of populism, claiming that in Latin America populism had another meaning than in Europe. In Latin America, populism meant that people became protagonists, for instance in popular movements, whereas in Europe, the most typical of all sorts of populism was the Nazism in Germany of 1933.11 In that way, the Pope had portrayed Latin American populism in a favourable light, contrasted with a political regime commonly considered by Europeans to be the most inhuman and evil government of the twentieth century. European populism was, in other words, a product of human selfishness and an expression of pure, political evil that could result in totalitarianism. In late 2020, Pope Francis made public statements that repeated his fierce criticism of populism and elaborated further on his parallel between Europe of the 1930s and today’s populism. In the pope’s third encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, published in October 2020, the pope described populism as a phenomenon whereby the popularity of leaders denigrates into a political power “when individuals are able to exploit politically a people’s culture, under whatever ideological banner, for their own personal advantage or continuing grip on power” (FT, no. 159). Once again, the Pope discerns human greed and selfishness behind populist agents or movements. His earlier view of populism as an opportunism is confirmed when he writes in the encyclical that populism can be the result of leaders who “seek popularity by appealing to the basest and most selfish inclinations of certain sectors of the population” (FT, no. 159). Another symptom of this populist phenomenon is “the usurpation of institutions and laws”, a point which Pope Francis reiterates in a book published in December 2020: “Today, listening to some of the populist leaders we now have, I  am reminded of the 1930s, when some democracies collapsed into dictatorships overnight” (Francis and Ivereigh 2020, 118).12 In the book, the Pope criticizes populists for emptying the notion of people for meaning since they use it as a way of excluding people: By turning the people into a category of exclusion – threatened on all sides by enemies, internal and external – the term was emptied of meaning. We see that happening again now in rallies where populist leaders excite and harangue crowds, channelling their resentments and hatreds against imagined enemies to distract from the real problems. (Francis and Ivereigh 2020, 118)

Pope Francis and populism – resemblances and differences  77 When he identifies the roots of populism in human egotism, implicitly in immoral sin, the Pope manifests a moral understanding of populism that is clearly at odds with scholarly meanings of the term. It is not that scholarly definitions of populism exclude the dimension of human selfishness, but political self-interest is not something characteristic of populism as a political phenomenon. Nor do scholars typically base their definition on a historical parallel, although they provide historical examples as a background to their populist theories. But German Nazism of the 1930s does not typically figure as the prototypical example of populism. It is far more common for populist theorists to point to a political movement familiar to the Argentinian Pope: the Peronism of the 1940s and 1950s (De la Torre 2017). Peronism serves as one of several examples of how populists typically construct the people as one, unified entity based on an exclusion. In the case of Peronism, this exclusion was enacted through an inclusion of formerly excluded groups based on the notion of class. The political inclusion of the working class in Argentina was manifested in downtown Buenos Aires when these workers and ordinary people physically conquered the streets in mass rallies. “The oligarchy” became the typical enemy of the Peronist version of “the people”. This exclusion can take many forms, but it can hardly be said to empty the notion of the people of its meaning, as the Pope claims. According to populist theory, it is rather the opposite: It is through an exclusion of what does not pertain or belong to “the people” that this term is filled with meaning. Furthermore, populist theory does not generally share the Pope’s view that the intention or the effect of the typical ways in which populists excite their crowds is “to distract from the real problems”. Current research on populism lays bare its epistemological reservations about the question of the truth of populists’ claims. This research does not claim that the ideas of populist leaders and their supporters or voters are symptoms of some sort of false consciousness that displaces real political problems. Instead, it postulates that populist truth-claims may correspond to real societal challenges, or not (Weyland 2001, 11). Populist theory conceptualizes the ways populism works and gains influence in societies, its political logic. It does not make definitive judgements on the realism of populist demands. That said, while the contrast that Pope Francis draws between European and Latin American populism is too stark and too unspecific to reflect the findings and assumptions of current research on populism,13 this contrast has been conceptualized in research as one between the typical exclusionary populism of Europe and the inclusionary populism characteristic of Latin America (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2013a). Besides this, Pope Francis highlights how democracies were overthrown by authoritarian regimes in the 1930s as part of his warning against contemporary populism in ways that are not incompatible with the discussions of populism in current research, where the question of populism and democracy has not reached a scholarly consensus.14

78  Pope Francis and populism – resemblances and differences In sum, the Pope’s idea of populism lacks such a high number of the features of scholarly definitions that we are entitled to conclude that he is not in a real dialogue with scholarship on populism. For a Pope known for his openness towards natural science in the encyclical Laudato Si,15 it is worth noting this unwillingness to engage with the social sciences on the topic of populism. What is more, the footnotes of an encyclical like Fratelli Tutti, which engages with the topic of contemporary populism, reveal a disinterest in current research. Accordingly, the Pope can hardly be said to have refuted the political logic of populism as this is defined by scholarship. But can he rightly be described as a populist Pope, as some have claimed?

Jose Mario Bergoglio and Argentinean Peronism Loris Zanatta has called Latin America “the paradise of populism” (Zanatta 2008, 29). The region has witnessed powerful populist movements and leaders in what now are considered classic forms of modern populism. The combination of long-term democracies and enduring economic inequalities has given rise to populisms from different sides of the political spectrum. Argentinean Peronism marked the social and national context in which Jorge Mario Bergoglio was raised. Bergoglio was born in 1936 in what was a working-class district in the capital Buenos Aires, named Flores. Bergoglio grew up at time when Peronism emerged and developed an increasingly conflictive and complex relationship with the Catholic church in Argentina, a relationship that Zanatta has explored (Zanatta 2013). Argentinean historians have come to see religion and politics in Argentina in the twentieth century through the lens of the notion of “the myth of the Catholic nation” (Di Stefano and Zanca 2015). Although the historians trace the idea to various historical actors and events, they tend to agree about the overall tendency and eagerness in modern Argentinian history to construct the nation as Catholic in its essence and origin. A Hispanic and nationalist form of Catholicism was affirmed, together with the antinational character of the imagined historical enemies of the Catholic church: Protestants, Jews, liberals, masons, communists, and socialists. The power of this “myth” is manifested in the ways in which diverse groups as diverse as liberationists, integralists, nationalists, and reformists embraced the idea of the Argentinian as essentially Catholic (Di Stefano and Zanca 2015, 33). This imaginary of Argentina as a Catholic nation threatened by non-Argentinean and foreign elements gained a stronger foothold in the 1930s and 1940s at the time of a global crisis of liberal democracy and economic capitalism (Di Stefano 2020, 33). Peronism emerged as a nationalist reaction to this crisis, and by 1945 it could present itself as inspired by Catholic teaching and condemn liberalism as an ideology linked to the class interests of the oligarchy (Karush and Chamosa 2010, 5–6). It is against this historical background that Zanatta’s hypothesis of Pope Francis as a populist Pope must be understood. Zanatta argues that

Pope Francis and populism – resemblances and differences  79 Bergoglio’s populism derives from the kind of Catholicism that the Argentinian pontiff represents. According to Zanatta, the Pope is “the child of a Catholicism suffused with visceral antiliberalism, erected, through Peronism, to guide the Catholic crusade against Protestant liberalism, the ethos of which is understood to be a colonial shadow on the Catholic identity of Latin America” (Borghesi 2018, xvii).16 Even if we accept that this identitarian mark has left traces on Bergoglio’s Catholic identity, there are still reasons to assume that pluralization of religion in Argentina and the accelerated secularization of the South American country have challenged and tempered the religious nationalism of an Argentinean Catholic like Bergoglio. Hence, as an archbishop and as pope, Bergoglio has invested considerable moral capital in ecumenism and tied his legacy to interreligious dialogue. Given the complexity of Peronism during Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s lifetime and career in the Catholic church, the common assertion that the current Pope is “culturally Peronist” (Zuleta 2019, 58) is hardly illuminating. The term covers too many ideological positions and historical expressions of Argentinian political life over a long period of time to be able to function as a precise designation. Bergoglio has never been a member of a political party and has been notoriously careful not to publicly embrace concrete political figures. What is more, Bergoglio declared in 2010 that he had not cast a vote in an Argentinean election since Arturo Frondizi led Argentina’s government (1958–1962) (Bergoglio and Skorka 2014, 141). Nevertheless, taking into account the conflictive history between Peronism and Catholicism in Argentina (including Bergoglio’s conflictive relation to the Peronist Kirchners in the 2000s) it is interesting to note how self-critical on the part of the Catholic church and sympathetic to Júan Perón Bergoglio appears to be in a publication from 2010 (published in English in 2014). This book consists of dialogues with the Jewish rabbi Abraham Skorka, and Bergoglio highlights the importance of the famous foundation that the Peronist government created in the name of President Juán Perón’s wife Eva Perón in 1948. According to Bergoglio, this woman hailed as a popular saint “proposed a path of social commitment” and what “Evita” achieved through her work in the foundation was that “she brought in more social integration” (Bergoglio and Skorka 2014, 207). Bergoglio reminds Skorka of Perón’s ties to certain Catholic priests and the interest that the founding figure of Peronism took in Catholic theology. Look, Rabbi, in the beginning the Church did not confront Perón, who was close to certain members of the clergy; Perón wanted to use elements from the Social Doctrine of the Church and incorporate many of them in his books and proposals. (Bergoglio and Skorka 2014, 207–8) Bergoglio emphasizes the closeness of Péron to priests and states that the populist president of Argentina (1946–1955 and 1973–74) “wanted to use”

80  Pope Francis and populism – resemblances and differences (Spanish: quería usar) insights from the social teaching of the Catholic church. Bergoglio does not say “appropriate”, “misuse”, or “hijack”, but merely “use”, as if there is no reason to suspect that Perón was not sincere in his interest in the Social Doctrine of the Church. This is striking, given Perón’s gradual opposition to the Catholic church from 1950 onwards. Perón’s rhetorical attacks would unleash anticlerical energies and sentiments against the church as an institution in a project to install a “Peronist Christianity” with the purpose of outbidding the traditional Catholic authorities and their claim to the true social dimension of the gospel. From having negotiated a cautious alliance in 1946, Perón opted for open hostility to the prelates in 1954 (Caimari 1995). There are few examples of action on Bergoglio’s part, as a church leader in various influential roles over the years, that led to support of Peronist groups or policies. There is one significant exception to this, however. Bergoglio was given the position of Provincial of the Jesuit order in Argentina at the early age of 36 years, in 1973. On a global level, the Jesuits had decided to take measures that would entrust the laity with more responsibility, inspired by Vatican II. Their leader, Pedro Arrupe, decided that one of the two Jesuit universities in Argentina should be handed over to lay people, and the implementation became Bergoglio’s responsibility (Vallely 2015, 44–45). Bergoglio took the controversial decision to hand over the university to “the Iron Guard”, a group of Peronists on the political right (consistently opposed to the Peronists of the left in for instance Juventud Peronista, subordinated to the Montoneros guerilla) whom he had accepted to serve as a spiritual advisor to since 1971 (Cucchetti 2010). At the time, “the Iron Guard” had around 15,000 adherents, mostly youths, and presented itself as an organization that would serve the ideas of Juán Perón in absolute loyalty (Larraquy 2016, 175). The group was officially dissolved after Perón’s death in 1974, but its adherents were entrusted by Bergoglio with the task of taking over the formerly Jesuit Salvador University (USAL). Bergoglio authored a document that was meant to guide the new leadership of the university in the hands of the Iron Guard and inspire them to carry on with a Jesuit spirit (Bergoglio 1974). The document is one the earliest accessible evidence of the present Pope’s theology of the people, which has come to designate a strand of the Argentinean theology of the 1970s. Here, Bergoglio envisions a decisive conflict between two worlds – the world of the Argentinian people’s Catholic faith, which comes from within the nation, and the world of modern ideologies and rational science, which despises and attacks it from outside. Ours is a faithful people; a believing people. That is its strength. This popular faith has been – and is – despised by the enlightened arrogance that, in its blindness, has successively despised it as credulity and alienation. But the Faith of our people is deeper than its critics. . .. And this, as the coldest skeptics know deep down in their soul, is the only source of profound changes, the only sustenance of a revolution for justice

Pope Francis and populism – resemblances and differences  81 and peace. . . it does not consist in the slavish imitation of other people’s models or in the abandonment of one’s own, but in the critical continuity of the popular movements with a national sign, the essential protagonists of the modern Argentina. (Bergoglio 1974)17 One of the discursive effects of “the myth of the Catholic nation” in Argentina could be said to be Bergoglio’s construction of the people of Argentina as one unified subject that believes in spite of being arrogantly dismissed and despised by “critics”. These critics are not named but are imagined as encouraging the pious people to blindly imitate the models of other non-Argentinian peoples or to tempt this people of faith to abandon what is its “own” (propio). The “coldest skeptics” with “enlightened arrogance” resemble the populist notion of a corrupt elite that threatens the common people. The “revolution for justice and peace” may very well function as an allusion to Juán Perón’s slogan, disseminated more freely and intensely after the return of the leader of Peronism from his exile in Madrid the year before, in 1973. “Revolution in Peace” was the slogan of the government of Argentina that Perón led at the time of Bergoglio’s writing in 1974 (Larraquy 2016, 174). What Zanatta calls “the visceral antiliberalism” of Bergoglio’s Catholicism comes to expression in Bergoglio’s criticism of the “liberal-bourgeois claim to homogenize the historical and human reality of the world” (Bergoglio 1974).18 This liberal ideology figures in this scenario as one of the “homogenizing internationalisms” that, under the subtle appearance of representing “reason”, or even by “force”, literally “deny peoples the right to be themselves” (Bergoglio 1974).19 It expresses itself through “the society of luxury and individualism”, which Bergoglio exemplifies as adversaries to community and faith (Bergoglio 1974).20 Having distanced himself from modern Marxism as well as capitalism in the document, Bergoglio in a similar mode to Peronism, and in coherence with the Social Doctrine of the Catholic church, would implicitly call for a “third way”. This third way, envisioned by Bergoglio as a “revolution for justice and peace”, has one source only: The faith of the people. The formerly Jesuit university is to serve on a spiritual battlefield between two mutually exclusive worldviews. In this scenario, there is no pluralist negotiation of various interests. There is one people threatened by forces that deny this people the right of being itself: One believing people defined by Bergoglio’s Catholic worldview. The people is exalted in this theological vision, from which democracy and liberal rights are absent and faith is to inspire a “revolution” that is neither Marxist nor capitalist.

Pope Francis: affinities with populism? Pope Francis has gained popularity as a charismatic leader. In public debate, charismatic leadership is often considered a typical trait of populists’ success.

82  Pope Francis and populism – resemblances and differences In spite of significant scholarly disagreement on defining populism, theorists of populism tend to agree that the charisma of the leader is not a defining trait of populism, although it may function as a facilitator of it (Mudde 2004, 545; Müller 2017, 50; Weyland 2017, 50).21 In other words, an analysis of Pope Francis’ charisma as a religious leader is not the place to start an inquiry about his possible affinities with populism as a Pope. If one accepts the premise of an ideational approach, there are three core concepts in populism: The people, the elite, and the general will (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2013b, 500). Of these three, Pope Francis invests the most in the first concept. Pope Francis often returns in his speeches to the idea of a people in general and a people of God. Unlike the ideal type of populist, Pope Francis does not claim to exclusively represent this people, as if he and only he knows the people’s will. In spite of being the head of the church, he does not claim to be the sole source for knowing this people’s will or the sole leader of this people, which is led by God through its pilgrimage in history. He is not an antipluralist populist in this sense. Furthermore, the distinction between a people and God’s people in Pope Francis’ discourse is often slippery, and the people that enjoys a special relation to God is not clearly delimited in a religious sense, much less restricted to Catholics alone. Pope Francis has an ecumenical perspective on God’s people. Moreover, he fiercely criticizes populist constructions of people, based on Christian identity as an exclusive definition for a nation or a people: [A] fantasy of national-populism in countries with Christian majorities is its defense of “Christian civilization” from perceived enemies, whether Islam, Jews, the European, or the United Nations. . . . To reject a struggling migrant, whatever his or her religious belief, out of fear of diluting a “Christian culture” is grotesquely to misrepresent both Christianity and culture. (Francis and Ivereigh 2020, 118–19) In this sense, Pope Francis’ discourse negates and lacks the characteristic of religious identity-based populisms in their xenophobic versions. While Pope Francis’ notion of a people appears incompatible with exclusionary populisms typical of contemporary Europe, he propagates an idea of the people more in tune with the concept of people cultivated in more inclusive populisms in his home region, Latin America. In an interview from 2016, Pope Francis defends the concept of the people as a “mythical category” and as a reality that one needs to experience in order to understand it: But “the people” is not a logical category. It is a mythical category. It’s a “mythos”. To understand the people, you need to go to a village in France, Italy or America. They are the same. And, there, you live the life

Pope Francis and populism – resemblances and differences  83 of the people. But you can’t explain it. You can explain the difference that exists between a nation, a country and a people. A country is what lies within its border. A nation is the legal and judicial constitution of that country. But a people is something else. The first two are logical categories. The people is a mythical category. To understand the people, you have to live with the people. (Francis and Ivereigh 2020, 98) Distinguished from “logical categories” such as a territory and a nation, “the people” is not the result of a political agreement or a contract between individuals. Claiming that a people has “mythical” origins, the Pope’s definition of a people lends itself to romantic, nostalgic, and identitarian understandings of it – precisely the understandings that often form part of populist constructions of a people (Zanatta 2020, 118). In other words, there seems to be an element in Pope Francis’ discourse that has clear affinities to populism: The non-institutionalized notion of “the people” that is operative in populisms (Müller 2017, 31). It does not seem to be a mere coincidence that the pope exemplifies his vision of a people with a village, this small entity that evokes associations with proximity, reciprocity, and close human relations. In the Pope’s theology, there appears to be a pattern whereby the greater distance the individual finds itself at from its family, its culture, and its roots, the greater is the risk of falling prey to the cardinal sins of the liberal ethos of globalization: Individualism, hedonism, consumerism, and materialism. As the Pope admonishes: “We need to sink our roots deeper into the fertile soil and history of our native place, which is a gift of God” (EG, no. 235). That Pope Francis’ notion of a people is non-institutionalized and therefore prepolitical is confirmed when the Pope exalts the people with a notion from his religious sphere: The people has a soul. And because we can speak of the soul of a people, we can speak of a way of viewing the world, an awareness. Such an awareness is the result not of an economic system or political theory but of a personality shaped in key moments of a people’s history. These milestones have imprinted on the people a powerful sense of solidarity, of justice, and of the importance of labor. (Francis and Ivereigh 2020, 101) The organic view of the people that sometimes characterizes populist conceptions of the people here takes shape in Pope Francis’ discourse. The people becomes a person-like organism and a living being with a soul and an awareness formed through experience that results in a personality. The people as an organic being is thereafter glorified by Pope Francis with moral virtues such as solidarity and justice. These virtues have been endowed by key moments in history. This morally virtuous people seems to be a recurring

84  Pope Francis and populism – resemblances and differences pattern in the theology of Pope Francis.22 Furthermore, it is construed as one single, homogenous entity: In Argentina we speak of the ingenuity of the people, meaning its historic ability to identify paths ahead, to “sniff out” solutions to current problems. To know ourselves as a people is to be aware of something greater that unites us, something that cannot be reduced to a shared legal or physical identity. (Francis and Ivereigh 2020, 101) Pope Francis adds another element to the moral purity of the people: Its “ingenuity” that is expressed in the people’s shared capability. Once again, the Pope condenses the people into one element that can be described as one homogenous entity with various moral virtues. Although there is an emphasis here on the “historic ability” of the “the people”, this ability is vaguely defined. It means that the people is identified with a general will that is politicized to a little extent, although it is exalted with moral qualities. Accordingly, the people in Pope Francis’ discourse is constructed more as a subject that possesses a pure moral and invaluable communitarian values than as a subject with a specific political will. This latter aspect limits the populist potential of the Pope’s people, while the moral purity of the people strengthens it. In his Evangelii Gaudium the Argentinian generally writes of “people” either as passively suffering in some form (often compassionately heard and seen by God) or as actively seeking the common good in one or other way (in accordance with God’s will). The people does not commit errors or manipulate individuals. In the document, the people or peoples are never described in theological terms as sinful. Moreover, the Pope does not call for more dissidents to break with their community or their people. If a danger is envisaged in this exhortation, it is not that of being absorbed by the people, but that of being led astray by individualism and abstract forces of globalization. Individualism is mentioned alongside consumerism and materialism (EG, no. 63). “In many countries globalization has meant a hastened deterioration of their own cultural roots and the invasion of ways of thinking and acting proper to other cultures which are economically advanced but ethically debilitated” (EG, no. 62). Peoples have cultural roots that are threatened by the globalization that results in an “invasion” of foreign cultures that represent economically high standards of living but are nonetheless morally inferior. Hence, the Pope holds that there is an illegitimate kind of cultural colonization that prevails in the era of globalization. There is another aspect of the Pope’s image of the people that makes it somewhat less populist: The pure morality of Pope Francis’ people is seldom contrasted with the immorality and corruption of the elite that does not truly belong to the people. There is a contrast between the people and the

Pope Francis and populism – resemblances and differences  85 elite in Pope Francis’ discourse, but the populist potential of this contrast is significantly limited by the vagueness of the definition of the elite and the limited recurrence of the notion of an elite in the discourse. That said, although “the elite” is mentioned in very general terms in the Pope’s thinking, it does appear as a threat to the people. To speak of the people is to offer an antidote to the perennial temptation of creating elites, whether intellectual, moral, religious, political, economic, or cultural. Elitism reduces and restricts the riches that the Lord placed on the earth, turning them into possessions to be exploited by some rather than gifts to be shared. Enlightened elites always end the same way, imposing their criteria, and in the process scorning and excluding all those who do not conform to their social status, moral stature, or ideology. (Francis and Ivereigh 2020, 102) The elite reduces the riches meant for the people on earth, implying that the people share God-given gifts whereas the elite reifies them through their exploitation. “Enlightened elites” are a particular danger to the Pope’s people, since they impose foreign criteria and exclude those who are not of their status or ideology. Furthermore, the Pope imagines this elite as displaying moral vices opposed to the moral virtues of the people. These elitist vices become visible as soon as one refuses to accept a position on the same level as the people: “Setting oneself above the people leads to moralism, legalism, clericalism, pharisaism, and other elitist ideologies, which know nothing of the joy of knowing yourself to be part of God’s people” (Francis and Ivereigh 2020, 106–7). The contrast between the people and the elite can be deemed stark and Manichean, but the two antagonistic groups are described on a vague and general level. The history of Christianity, and of the modern papacy in particular, demonstrates that the Pope could find ample resources in his tradition for construing this antagonism in much more specific terms, while explicitly demonizing religious and political opponents. Although the Pope has refrained from doing so, there is one significant exception to this general tendency during Pope Francis’ pontificate. And although it does not qualify as an explicit demonization, it may constitute an implicit one. In February 2016, Donald Trump gained popularity among Republicans in the primaries in the United States with anti-immigration rhetoric and blaming Mexican migrants in particular, while being dependent upon Catholic and Evangelical Christians’ support in order to run for the presidency. On his papal trip to Mexico that month, Pope Francis uttered what were to become famous words from the Argentinean pontiff: “Whoever thinks that walls and not bridges are to be built is not a Christian”. Trump was not named as the target of the Pope’s polemic, but the impression of the Pope as a religious opposition to Trump’s candidacy was strengthened when

86  Pope Francis and populism – resemblances and differences Trump accused Pope Francis of being an agent of the Mexican government with regard to immigration (Massimo Franco 2016, 45). A similar remark was made by the Pope in a sermon shortly after the inauguration of Trump as the president of the United States the following year, which was interpreted by various media as the Pope’s warning or condemnation of Trump and Trumpism, not least since Trump had famously affirmed that he would make the Mexicans pay for the wall to be constructed on the US-Mexican border. Preaching on Romans 15, the pope actualized the apostle’s words for what many would interpret as the context of Trump’s rise and promise to build the wall in order to prevent Mexicans and Latin Americans from entering the United States: This witness, then, does not remain closed within the confines of the Christian community: it echoes in all its vigor even outside it, in the social and civil context, as an appeal not to build walls but bridges, not to exchange evil for evil, but to conquer evil with good, offence with forgiveness – a Christian must never say: “you will pay for this!” (Francis 2017b) When the Latin American Pope affirms that the one who builds walls is not Christian and adds that “a Christian must never say: ‘you will pay for this!’ ” he appears to be naming Donald Trump as his moral adversary, which is a common populist strategy. Populism needs enemies, and being a moral adversary of the successor of Peter the apostle, of the highest authority of the Holy Church implies that you are representing the opposite of the values of the Church, possibly of Christ himself. There is no explicit demonization, as in the strongest example of a populist construal of the political enemy, but one may nevertheless interpret Pope Francis’ argument as an implicit demonization.23 Like the populists, the Pope is moralistic rather than programmatic in his political interventions. Moreover, he embodies a kind of agonistic political discourse that polarizes public opinion in this case. He is not carefully weighing arguments pro and contra the idea of building a wall, he is not partaking in a deliberative dialogue about the matter. He is instead condemning the persons who are taking this particular political stance, and he is making them into the unnamed enemy of Christianity. This is a highly moralistic argument in politics, typical of populist discourse. He dismisses an argument on the basis of a religious identity, the Christian, which after all has been a rare strategy for Pope Francis.24

Conclusion One aspect of Pope Francis’ public role in our contemporary societies is the diplomatic style and tone of the Pope, speaking of what cultures, societies, and even religions have in common without creating controversies by

Pope Francis and populism – resemblances and differences  87 criticism that causes division in public debates. As we have seen, however, this is not the whole picture. Pope Francis is a religious leader who takes an active role in politics in the sense that he consciously intervenes in political controversies. Rather than solely and passively watching or defensively warning against the various forms of contemporary populism, a church leader and theologian like Pope Francis does not accept a strict modern separation of religion and politics. He cannot miss the opportunities of embracing, enforcing, or contesting populist appropriations of Christian motifs, narratives, and concepts within political rhetoric – figures of speech that can be effectively set in motion in order to mobilize people for a whole range of different practices. Although he fiercely attacks common populist appropriations of Christian motifs for the cause of anti-immigration policies, the pope found this criticism of constructions of the people in ways that actually resemble populism. On the surface he may be said to combat typical populist policies, but on a deeper political-theological level he appears to be complicit with some of the political logic of populism. Like many other religious leaders who make faith-based claims with relevance for political decision-making and the formation of public opinion, Pope Francis’ contribution is moralistic rather than programmatic. As in the public interventions of populists, in Pope Francis’ case, “all political discourse is shot through with moral claims” (Müller 2017, 38–39). Unlike these populists, however, Pope Francis does not consistently connect his moral claims with his morally virtuous people. In his vision of a people, the people is a homogenous subject that is a bearer of moral virtues rather than of a clear and unequivocal political will. His people is a morally virtuous one threatened by an elite that is envisioned in vague and general terms. In other words, Pope Francis’ populism is not a strong one, given that what may be considered the three core concepts of populism are not tied together as tightly and intensely as in more typical cases of contemporary populisms. That said, Pope Francis’ political theology has noteworthy affinities with a populism that the pontiff claims to combat. It illustrates that contemporary religion, in the case of Pope Francis’ Latin American and postconciliar Catholicism, is far from separated from the phenomenon and political logic of populism.

Notes 1 The accusation has even reached the Pope himself, in the form of a question from the Argentinean journalist Hernán Reyes Alcaide (Reyes Alcaide 2017, 58). 2 Quoted in Lyon, Gustafson and Manuel (2018, 4). 3 Even Ernesto Laclau, who has construed some of the widest definitions of populism as a political articulation of the fullness of the political community that is missing, considers the anti-elitist element to be characteristic of populism (Laclau 2005, 87). 4 Zanatta quoted and translated in Zúquete (2017, 445).

88  Pope Francis and populism – resemblances and differences 5 “Latin American populism predominantly has a socio-economic dimension (including the poor), while European populism has a primarily sociocultural dimension (excluding the ‘aliens’)” (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2013a, 167). 6 “no propongo la cultura cómoda de la dádiva o del subsidio permanente” (Reyes Alcaide 2017, 59). 7 Kurt Weyland is one of the theorists who have criticized economic notions of populism, particularly against the background of typical populist leaders who have maintained budget discipline (Weyland 2017, 51). 8 Populism becomes in principle a pejorative term, and the definition becomes logically questionable since “it does not clarify whether the economic irresponsibility that it associates with populism is due to design or mere constraint” (Weyland 2001, 11). 9 “Address of His Holiness Pope Francis to the Heads of State and Government of the European Union for the Celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, Sala Regia, The Vatican” on 24.03.17. Quoted in Francis and Wolton (2018, 112). 10 “Some of these attitudes go back to the period between the two World Wars, when populist and nationalist demands proved more forceful than the activity of the League of Nations. The reappearance of these impulses today is progressively weakening the multilateral system, resulting in a general lack of trust, a crisis of credibility in international political life, and a gradual marginalization of the most vulnerable members of the family of nations” (Francis 2017a). 11 “Que es una palabra equívoca porque en América Latina el populismo tiene otro significado. Allí significa el protagonismo de los pueblos, por ejemplo los movimientos populares. Se organizan entre ellos . . . es otra cosa. Cuando oía populismo acá no entendía mucho, me perdía hasta que me di cuenta de que eran significados distintos según los lugares. Claro, las crisis provocan miedos, alertas. Para mí el ejemplo más típico de los populismos en el sentido europeo de la palabra es el 33 alemán” (Caño 2017). 12 The book is co-written with one of Pope Francis’ biographers, Austen Ivereigh. 13 Pope Francis does, for instance, consistently overlook the class-based and non-xenophobic leftist populism in a major Catholic country like Spain, with Podemos as an important case. 14 Whereas a theorist of populism like Jan-Werner Müller regards populism as ultimately non-democratic (because of populists’ antipluralism and claims to exclusive representation of “the people”), theorists like Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser and Cas Mudde are more open to the ability of populism to contribute to a deepening of democracy. Kaltwasser and Mudde consider populism as a corrective as well as a threat to liberal democracy (Müller 2017; Mudde and Kaltwasser 2013b, 506). 15 See for instance Ceballos (2016). 16 Zanatta translated in Borghesi (2018, xvii). 17 The author’s translation of: “El nuestro es un pueblo fiel; un pueblo creyente. Esa es su fuerza. Esa Fe popular ha sido -y es- despreciada por la soberbia ilustrada que, en su ceguera, la ha calificado sucesivamente de credulidad y alineación. Pero la Fe de nuestro pueblo es más profunda que sus críticos. . . . Y este, como lo saben en el fondo de su alma los más fríos escépticos, es la única fuente de los cambios profundos, el único sustento de una revolución por la justicia y la paz . . . o consiste en la imitación servil de modelos ajenos o en el abandono de lo propio, sino en la continuidad crítica de los movimientos populares del signo nacional, protagonistas esenciales de la Argentina moderna” (Bergoglio 1974). 18 “pretensión liberal-burguesa de homogeneizar la realidad histórica y humana del mundo” (Bergoglio 1974).

Pope Francis and populism – resemblances and differences  89 19 “los internacionalismos homogeneizantes que, por ‘la razón’ o por la fuerza, niegan a los pueblos el derecho a ser ellos mismos” (Bergoglio 1974). 20 “la sociedad del lucro y el individualismo” (Bergoglio 1974). 21 Although Rogers Brubaker emphasizes “the populist style” as a defining trait that “performatively devalues complexity through rhetorical practices of simplicity, directness, and seeming self-evidence”, Brubaker does conceptualize this style in terms of “charisma” or “charismatic” (Brubaker 2017, 367). 22 Another dimension to this morally virtuous people is added in Laudato Si, no. 149. 23 There is also another important dimension to this story: When Donald Trump imposed his travel ban on inhabitants from predominantly Muslim countries, Catholic bishops such as Blase Cupich and Joseph Tobin criticized Trump. Tobin had already defended the cause of Syrian immigrants in Indiana against the policies of the then governor Mike Pence, later Donald Trump’s vice-president. Some months later, these two Catholic bishops were created cardinals by Pope Francis, and in that way given more ecclesial power. Pope Francis had effectively attacked the attitudes and policies carried out by anti-immigration populism in the United States as well as Europe. 24 One may add the example of Pope Francis’ harsh condemnation of abortion. In a similar mode to his approach to the person who builds walls and make others pay for it, in October 2018 the pope gave a sermon in which he condemned abortion in highly polemical terms. He compared abortion to “hiring a hitman to resolve a problem”. Doctors who performed abortions were, in other words, serial killers. These doctors were thus truly elitist enemies of the people, in the logic of Pope Francis’ theology.

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Pope Francis and populism – resemblances and differences  91 Marzouki, Nadia, Duncan McDonnell, and Olivier Roy. 2016. Saving the People: How Populists Hijack Religion. London: Hurst. Mudde, Cas. 2004. “The Populist Zeitgeist.” Government and Opposition 39 (4): 541–63. Mudde, Cas, and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. 2013a. “Exclusionary vs. Inclusionary Populism: Comparing Contemporary Europe and Latin America.” Government and Opposition 48 (2): 147–74. ———. 2013b. “Populism.” In Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, edited by Michael Freeden, Lyman Tower Sargent and Marc Stears, 493–512. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2017. Populism: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. Müller, Jan-Werner. 2017. What Is Populism? London: Penguin Books. Napolitano, Valentina. 2019. “Francis, a Criollo Pope.” Religion and society 10 (1): 63–80. Neumayr, George. 2017. Political Pope – How Pope Francis Is Delighting the Liberal Left and Abandoning Conservatives. New York: Center Street Books. Reno, Russell Ronald. 2013. “Our Populist Pope.” First Things. www.firstthings. com/web-exclusives/2013/12/our-populist-pope. Reyes Alcaide, Hernán. 2017. Papa Francisco. Latinoamérica: conversaciones con Hernán Reyes Alcaide. Buenos Aires: Planeta. Spadaro SJ, Antonio. 2013. “A Big Heart Open to God: An interview with Pope Francis.” America. The Jesuit Review. www.americamagazine.org/faith/2013/09/30/ big-heart-open-god-interview-pope-francis. Vallely, Paul. 2015. Pope Francis: Untying the Knots: The Struggle for the Soul of Catholicism. Revised and expanded 2nd ed. London: Bloomsbury. Weyland, Kurt. 2001. “Clarifying a Contested Concept: Populism in the Study of Latin American Politics.” Comparative Politics 34 (1): 1–22. ———. 2017. “Populism: A  Political-Strategic Approach.” In The Oxford Handbook of Populism, edited by Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul A. Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, and Pierre Ostiguy, 48–72. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zanatta, Loris. 2008. “El populismo, entre religión y política. Sobre las raíces históricas del antiliberalismo en América Latina.” EIAL: Estudios Interdisciplinarios de America Latina y el Caribe 19 (2): 29–44. ———. 2013. Perón y el mito de la nación católica iglesia y ejército en los orígenes del peronismo; (1943–1946). Sáen Peña, Argentina: Eduntref. ———. 2016. “Un Papa populista.” Criterio (2424). ———. 2020. Il populismo gesuita: Perón, Fidel, Bergoglio. Bari: GLF Editori Laterza. Zuleta, Ignacio. 2019. El papa peronista. Buenos Aires: Ariel. Zúquete, Jose Pedro. 2017. “Populism and Religion.” In The Oxford Handbook of Populism, edited by Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, Pierre Ostiguy, and Paul A. Taggart, 445–66. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

5 The eternal feminine in the Catholic church – a gender perspective on Pope Francis

On 6 February 2021, yet another of Pope Francis’s decisions attracted great international media attention. He had appointed the French nun Nathalie Becquart as one of two new undersecretaries of the Synod of Bishops. This meant that Becquart was the first woman to have this position, and accordingly the first woman to have voting rights at the synod. The reporting of this appointment appeared to conform to a pattern in the media coverage of the global head of Catholicism, whereby media with a liberal orientation have consistently interpreted the Pope’s words and actions as signs of a great change in the world’s largest religious organization. Pope Francis has even communicated flexibility in what has been regarded as an area in which the church is particularly strict: the sphere of sexuality and the family (E. Martín 2017, 181–82). One example of the latter came in July 2013, on the return flight from the World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, when the Pope said: “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?” (BBC 2013) The image of Pope Francis as a great reformer was constructed and maintained in the media even after the Argentinian displayed what can be called a striking lack of flexibility in his view of women’s role in the church. On 24 November 2013, the Vatican published Bergoglio’s first Apostolic Exhortation as pope, Evangelii Gaudium, in which the Argentinian declared that the ordination of women as priests was completely out of the question. The fact that Pope Francis did not halt the Vatican investigation of the Catholic organization Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) was an important signal. The investigation was launched under Pope Benedict XVI, above all thanks to the suspicion that this organization was spreading feminist ideas that were incompatible with the Catholic faith. The controversial investigation was officially called off in 2015. Many see the question of women’s position in the Catholic church as a significant litmus test of whether Francis is genuinely a pope who is realizing Pope John XXIII’s vision of an updating of the church’s approach to the modern world. The vision of an aggiornamento motivated John XXIII to convoke a worldwide council, which he opened in 1962. Massimo Faggioli has labelled the theological thinking about women as the most important DOI: 10.4324/9781003349099-5

The eternal feminine in the Catholic church  93 question with regard to the reception of the Second Vatican Council (Faggioli 2015, 263–64). The sociologist Marco Marzano likewise argues that Pope Francis’ view of the position of women is fundamental to the question of whether or not the Argentinian can be called a reforming Pope. Marzano concluded in 2018 that Bergoglio had not carried out a reform in the sense of having brought about essential structural changes in the religious organization that he leads. Taken as a whole, the Catholic church appeared to Marzano to be unwieldy and immobile (Marzano 2018). Or in the words of one of Marzano’s colleagues in the discipline of sociology, Fortunato Mallimaci: “Francis never was and is still not a reformist” (Mallimaci 2018, 435).1 The longer Bergoglio’s pontificate lasts, the clearer the ideological and theological direction becomes. On questions concerning the position of women we can observe continuity rather than discontinuity in the present pontificate, when we compare it with the preceding pontificates after Vatican II. This historical continuity is manifested in three dimensions of Pope Francis’ approach to questions concerning the importance of gender in the church. First, Pope Francis disseminates gender-stereotypical prejudices through an essentialist categorization of women as a group. Second, he refuses to give women access both to priestly ordination and to ordination as deacons. Third, Pope Francis confirms the Catholic church’s construction of the so-called “gender ideology” – a rhetorical figure that has proved to be a politically effective concept, especially over the past decade.

Feminist critique of scripture and tradition The literary scholar Toril Moi has described Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (Le Deuzième Sexe, 1949) as the most important feminist text of the twentieth century, because “it gives philosophical depth to women’s everyday experiences” (Moi 2000, ix). Beauvoir came from a Catholic family in France, and The Second Sex contains references to authoritative layers of interpretation in the Catholic tradition. On the very first page, she already writes ironically that the essence of femaleness in the days of Thomas Aquinas was “certainly defined as the somniferous virtue of the poppy”. She also mentions one interpreter (Bossuet) who writes that Eve is formed in the biblical creation narrative as “a supernumerary bone” of Adam. Beauvoir presents both Scripture and tradition as centrally important sources of the definition of humanity on the man’s premises (Beauvoir 1956, 15). The man is the starting point. He is the first sex – the woman is the second sex in the God-given ranking. Priests and theologians have joined forces with other intellectuals in this ideologically determined oppression of women: Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, and scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of women is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth. The religions invented by men reflect this wish

94  The eternal feminine in the Catholic church for domination. In the legends of Eve and Pandora men have taken up arms against women. They have made use of philosophy and theology. (Beauvoir 1956, 21) Beauvoir’s criticism of religion, with its feminist motivation, is thus directed against those who employ theology – especially Christian theology – to essentialize femaleness by defining some “eternal feminine” as the result of a Godgiven and natural order of things. No one lives completely independently of one’s own gender. The body’s gender is always present, even if the context will determine how important the gender dimension is. As Toril Moi emphasizes in her interpretation of The Second Sex, “To say that the gendered body is an indispensable background to all our actions amounts to claiming at one and the same time that the body is always a potential source of meaning and to deny that it is always the key to understanding a woman’s actions” (Moi 2001, 99). At the same time, Simone de Beauvoir criticizes the Enlightenment humanism that dismisses the relevance of gender on the basis of an idea about human beings’ universal equality. There also exist more subtle forms of the oppression of women behind the allegedly tolerant Enlightenment humanist that men with a democratic attitude like to proclaim: Refusal to pose oneself as the Subject, unique and absolute, requires great self-denial. Furthermore, the vast majority of men make no such claim explicitly. They do not postulate woman as inferior, for today they are too thoroughly imbued with the ideal of democracy not to recognise all human beings as equals. (Beauvoir 1956, 24) Gender differences, just like ethnic differences, continue to leave their mark on people’s lives even where ideals of equality are championed. The Catholic church’s life and teaching illustrate this. Pope Francis continues an official Catholic discourse that does not “posit” half of humanity as subordinate, as Beauvoir maintains. This discourse cannot do so, since it is far too strongly marked by democratic ideals about equality. Nonetheless, Pope Francis cultivates ideas about essential and natural differences between men and women, while employing an idea about a completely decisive gender difference to justify human beings’ access to the priestly ministry: the socalled complementary anthropology is cultivated in Catholicism alongside a disciplinary praxis where only individuals who are recognized as men can enter the priestly hierarchy and thereby be promoted to influential formal positions as bishop, cardinal, and pope.2

The Pope’s gender essentialism As the head of what is by far the biggest church in Christianity, a Pope is assumed to be an opinion-maker of a wholly unique calibre in societies with

The eternal feminine in the Catholic church  95 a large number of Catholic members. Nowhere in the world is Catholicism stronger than in Latin America. The Brazilian theologian Ivone Gebara is one of those who have been inspired by Beauvoir and others to formulate an alternative to the gender polarity of the complementary anthropology that is anchored in a presumed biological difference (Gebara 2002, 61–66). Gebara has also noted Pope Francis’s generalizations about women and has called them infantilizing and naïve (Gebara 2017). Bergoglio’s most detailed generalizations about women have been made in interviews rather than in church documents. Already in his time as archbishop of Buenos Aires, Bergoglio declared that women have other abilities and character traits than men, because they are women. In a book of dialogues between Bergoglio and the Argentinian Rabbi Abraham Skorka, they take up various topics. Twenty-nine are listed in the table of contents, including “about the woman”. It is typical of Bergoglio’s approach to “the other sex” that his gender perspective touches on the man only to a small extent: when he talks about gender differences, as archbishop or as pope, the main focus is on the woman. Masculinity is scarcely ever touched upon. Womanliness or femininity is defined, and the woman’s value is underlined. In the 2010 dialogue with Rabbi Skorka, Bergoglio affirms that the woman has a different function than the man in Christianity, a function reflected in the Virgin Mary. The woman is the one who takes responsibility in society, like a mother for the fellowship. The woman possesses the talent of motherhood, together with the gift of gentleness and self-dedication (Bergoglio and Skorka 2014, 102). And Bergoglio emphasizes that in the Catholic tradition, the Virgin is greater than the apostles. This makes the point that women are no less valuable merely because they cannot exercise the priesthood: “The fact that a woman cannot exercise the priesthood does not make her less than the male. Moreover, in our understanding, the Virgin Mary is greater than the apostles” (Bergoglio and Skorka 2014, 102). In an interview with the research director Dominique Wolton that he gave as pope in 2016, Bergoglio argues once again on the premise that women share a general trait that seems to be linked to motherhood, either potentially or de facto: “Women have this maternal capacity to unite, children argue among themselves, but the mother imposes unity” (Francis and Wolton 2018, 92–93). Women have a particular ability, as mothers, to create unity, according to the Pope. In an interview with the Argentinian journalist Hernán Reyes Alcaide in 2017, the Pope gives the impression that the roots of such special abilities in women lie in biology. He argues that in general terms, it is the woman who gives life the greatest protection, because she bears life in herself. The man, who impregnates the woman and is external to this shared existence during the pregnancy, experiences this differently. The woman has a specific form of physical and bodily memory. The Pope diverges in a striking manner from Beauvoir and other feminist theoreticians, in that he does not state explicitly that the proof of this essential gender difference is to be found in the Bible or in tradition. However,

96  The eternal feminine in the Catholic church he claims that there are “studies” that support his points of view (Reyes Alcaide 2017, 45).3 As Barbara Green O.P. has remarked, when it comes to the magisterium’s teaching on the ordination of women during the last decades, “official pronouncements on the position of women have proceeded without the sort of careful and critical work on biblical texts that the documents seem to endorse” (Green 2014, 48). The Argentinian admits that the background to these points of view also lies in his own pastoral experience. When he consults women, there is “another vision” than with men, a vision that is “different” and “enriching”. Bergoglio claims that women are more creative than men when it comes to solving problems, and this is why he likes to bring men and women together – he emphasizes that they complement each other’s standpoints in a good way (Reyes Alcaide 2017, 46).4 He writes in Evangelii Gaudium: The Church acknowledges the indispensable contribution which women make to society through the sensitivity, intuition and the other distinctive skill sets which they, more than men, tend to possess. I think, for example, of the special concern which women show to others, which finds a particular, even if not exclusive, expression in motherhood. (EG, no. 103) Woman (in the singular) has a special sensitivity and intuition that is not found in men to the same degree, according to the Pope. This has put Bergoglio on the trail of “the eternal feminine” that Beauvoir mocked and deconstructed. She criticized and opposed essentialism about women, but Bergoglio helps to strengthen it and spread it. It must be said that the Pope has rarely spoken about specific champions of feminism and gender theoreticians. But in his dialogue with Skorka, he criticizes “feminism” when it is regarded as “a unique philosophy” (Bergoglio and Skorka 2014, 104). Without saying clearly what kind of feminism is involved here, Bergoglio criticizes feminists for letting down the women they claim to represent. He says that they are leading women into “a vindictive battle”, and that “a woman is much more than that” (Bergoglio and Skorka 2014, 104). Bergoglio asserts that a feminist philosophy that constantly fights for more and more does not give the dignity that woman deserves, before warning that he intends to caricature feminism a little: “I  would say that it runs the risk of becoming chauvinism with skirts” (Bergoglio and Skorka 2014, 104). Bergoglio has used this phrase many times as Pope in contexts where women’s position in the church was on the agenda, for example, at the international summit about the abuse crisis in February  2019 in the Vatican. The English noun “chauvinism” is a translation here of the Spanish “machismo”, which is used in Latin American studies to denote the idea that men are superior and are entitled to dominate women, as well as a

The eternal feminine in the Catholic church  97 legitimation and naturalization of male aggression and virility, on the one hand, and women’s servility and sexual chastity, on the other. When Bergoglio uses it to designate a vague feminist position that he wishes to attack, he is therefore alluding to a form of male chauvinism that many regard as typical of Latin America. This is therefore a rhetorical device to blacken the opponent’s position – as if the feminists were doing something just as bad as male chauvinism, and merely inverting it: “[M]achismo is a brutality, a negative thing. ‘Machismo in a skirt’ is the same thing. It doesn’t represent what women must represent in society”, the pope claims (Francis and Wolton 2018, 93). Whenever a feminist is a motif in the Pope’s discourse, as one who holds opposing views, this should be read against the background of his Argentinian context. In the last decades, this country has seen some of the strongest feminist movements in the region. After Argentina became a pioneer in guaranteeing the rights of sexual minorities by legalizing same-sex marriage in 2010 (in addition to a law guaranteeing the legal right to a third gender in 2012) (Diaz et al. 2019), feminist movements were particularly active in mobilizing for the legalization of abortion. Bergoglio headed the Catholic church’s campaign against relaxing the abortion legislation from 1998 to 2013, when he was archbishop of Buenos Aires. As Pope, however, he was forced to recognize that the battle was lost when the Argentinian Congress voted to decriminalize abortion in December 2020. The feminists and their wide spectrum of supporters in Argentina had won the political victory over the Catholic church.

Temporary tasks for women and permanent positions for men Nathalie Becquart occupies an influential position thanks to the good favour of the Pope. She does not have the kind of permanent position that a male bishop normally has. Becquart has been an adviser to the Vatican since 2019, but now she is the first woman to have voting rights at the synod of bishops. This position does not meet the demand that has been voiced by many women in the Catholic church, especially since the 1970s,5 that women should be given access to the priesthood. But it can be understood as accepting a broader demand among a greater number of Catholics, that women should have more influence in the church’s decision-making processes; this demand is made independently of the question about women and the priesthood. Nathalie Becquart, for example, does not see women’s admission to the priestly ministry as the most important question with regard to women’s place in the church,6 and this means that she takes the same view as Francis (or at least, that she is not in conflict with his view). Already in his first Apostolic Exhortation, Pope Francis killed the debate about women priests in the Catholic church in the course of his own pontificate. Here, he

98  The eternal feminine in the Catholic church confirmed what the theologian Kari Elisabeth Børresen (1932-2016) called “women’s cultic gender hindrance” (Børresen 2016, 149): Demands that the legitimate rights of women be respected, based on the firm conviction that men and women are equal in dignity, present the Church with profound and challenging questions which cannot be lightly evaded. The reservation of the priesthood to males, as a sign of Christ the Spouse who gives himself in the Eucharist, is not a question open to discussion, but it can prove especially divisive if sacramental power is too closely identified with power in general. (EG, no. 103) The Pope is influenced by the democratic ideal in the sense in which Beauvoir spoke. He defends the equality of men and women and speaks in support of women’s rights. But the question is whether this is an abstract equality, as long as the idea of equality is accompanied in the Pope’s theology by gender discrimination. It is exclusively because of her gender that a woman cannot be ordained a priest. No one who had followed Bergoglio in Argentina need be surprised at this position, which emerges unambiguously in the dialogue with Rabbi Skorka (mentioned earlier), where the cardinal explicitly defends a conventional view of the question of women priests and justifies this by saying that priestly ordination is based on Jesus’ gender: “In Catholicism, for example, many women lead a liturgy of the word, but do not exercise the priesthood, because in Christianity the High Priest is Jesus, a male. In the theologically grounded tradition the priesthood passes through man” (Bergoglio and Skorka 2014, 102). Bergoglio felt no need, either a bishop or as a pope, to speak against those adherents of priestly ordination in the Catholic church who point to Jesus’ humanity rather than to his gender, since according to the Chalcedonian formulation of the incarnation, Jesus takes up into himself the entire and full human nature (Vance-Trembath 2014, 28; Børresen 2016, 149); but he has felt it necessary to make it clear that the question of the ordination of women is not open to discussion. He has, on the other hand, been open to the discussion of the possibility of ordaining women to the diaconate, a question that has been less controversial and more relevant in the period after the council (Zagano 2016). The Pope still kept this question open in an interview in 2016: There’s a real dynamism in women and women’s qualities. Some women say to me, “Why can’t we become deaconesses?” And that’s an office. We can think about that. (Francis and Wolton 2018, 93) Against the background of the media-created picture of a reforming pope, his establishing of a commission to study this question in 2016, and

The eternal feminine in the Catholic church  99 formulations like that in this quotation, led to enormous expectations after the synod of bishops on the Amazonas met in October  2019 – not least because women’s role was a central topic in the synod’s working document. In their closing document, the 185 synod fathers declared that the question of women deacons had aroused great interest. But when Pope Francis published his reply to the synod of bishops in February  2020, in the Apostolic Exhortation Querida Amazonia, this question too seemed to have been killed, or put on hold, presumably for the rest of the Argentinian’s pontificate. The Exhortation emphasizes the importance of women in Amazonas. The Pope writes that they have baptized, given instruction in the faith, and worked as missionaries in this region. For hundreds of years, women have kept life in the church alive, thanks to their deep faith. This broadens the perspective, according to the Pope, unless the understanding of the church is reduced to functional and structural questions. He sees this as a reductionism that brings people to believe that the strengthening of women’s participation in the church depends on their access to holy orders, and he warns that this will lead to a clericalization of women (Querida Amazonia, no. 99–100). From the start of his papacy, Francis has made the criticism of “clericalism” one of the major themes in his speeches. But although his argument invites one to ask how the clericalization of women is worse than the clericalization of men, he has given no answer to this question. What is more, when considered from the pope’s Argentinean context, the clericalism that Pope Francis claims to battle against is rather strengthened by reserving Catholic priesthood exclusively for men. Somewhat unexpectedly the priestly role in postconciliar Catholicism was upgraded whereas the role of women within religious orders become less considered as “a state of perfection”. In that way, male-centred clericalism became reinforced by the gender politics of the church (Suárez 2020, 238). The Pope goes on to presuppose that women have distinct characteristics qua women. The value of what women have achieved in the church would be reduced if they were to end up in positions where they risked being victims or agents of a destructive clericalism. It seems that the Pope believes that woman’s essential qualities are connected with the fact that the sacramental authority in the church is reserved to men: the one is diminished without the other. In other words, Pope Francis idealizes woman, and this idealization functions in part as an argument why women ought not to be ordained as deacons and priests. At the same time, there is an interesting aspect of the Pope’s rhetorical strategy in emphasizing the danger of “clericalizing” women: this functions without any appeal to Scripture or tradition. By not offering any elaborate theological justification, the Pope avoids inviting theologically strong counterarguments – which are part of the rhetorical arsenal of feminist Catholic theologians.

100  The eternal feminine in the Catholic church Sally Vance-Tremblath is one of those who maintain that the conclusions of the Second Vatican Council have not been applied to women’s place in the church. She claims that there is a gap between the richness of the conciliar texts and the lack of implementation in the de facto life of the Catholic church, but she does not thematize the question of women priests or specify what formal positions women ought to have (Vance-Trembath 2014). It is possible that she has political and strategic reasons for not thematizing this matter, and for emphasizing instead that the church needs a new council or a new theology in order to give women their rightful place.

Waging war on gender ideology Agnieszka Graff has claimed that weak concepts and powerful politics lie behind the concept of “gender ideology” (Graff 2016, 268). In the twentyfirst century, Latin America, Catholicism’s core area, has been perhaps the most important political battlefield in global terms for gender and for sexual minorities. Apart from Northern Europe and the USA, no other region in the world has seen a more rapid development of LGBT rights than Latin America (Corrales 2017). In the country that has more Catholics than any other state in the world, Jair Messias Bolsonaro was inaugurated as president on 1 January  2019. In his inaugural speech, Bolsonaro promised to liberate Brazil from ideological oppression and to fight against “gender ideology” (Bolsonaro 2019). Gender and sexuality had played a central role in an electoral campaign in which Bolsonaro’s opposing candidate, Fernando Haddad, was accused of wanting to educate children to become gay men and lesbians as one element in a secret strategy by a left-wing elite that sought to spread “gender ideology”. “Gender ideology” has become a powerful slogan in Latin America, and it played an important (and possibly decisive) role in political events such as Bolsonaro’s electoral victory in 2018 and the rejection of the peace accord between the FARC guerillas and the government in Colombia in a referendum in 2016 (Amaya 2017). Many Colombians thought that the text of the accord was promoting “gender ideology”, a concept that was used in an official Catholic document in this region for the first time in 1998 (by the Peruvian episcopal conference) (Pinheiro and Marina Feitosa Coelho 2016). Under Bergoglio’s leadership, it entered the conclusions of the Latin American conference of bishops in 2007, when the Argentinian headed the drafting of the documents in the final phase of the bishops’ discussions. In the light of the disputed history of the reception of this concept in Latin American politics, it would have been possible for the first Pope from the region to have chosen to thematize gender and sexuality without applying this concept and thereby giving it renewed legitimacy. Nevertheless, Pope Francis chose to confirm the value of the concept, and thereby also its theological-political legitimacy, by holding fast to it in sermons and in the post-synodal Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia in 2016. In his sermons,

The eternal feminine in the Catholic church  101 the Pope has also chosen a rhetoric that is strikingly similar to Bolsonaro’s argumentation: on his journeys to the Philippines, Georgia, and Poland (for example), Pope Francis has claimed that “gender ideology” is being forced on people today by means of “ideological indoctrination” and “ideological colonization” (Francis 2015, 2016a, 2016b). In Amoris Laetitia, the Pope employed the concept of “gender ideology” to indicate the dangers that threaten the family, and that lead to rootlessness in people’s identity and to the dissolution of the family (AL, no. 56). And he insisted that there is one ideology at work, as if there is one unified ideological reality. At the same time, the pattern in pontifical documents continues to render invisible both gender theoreticians in general and feminist theologians in particular. None of the main contributions in Catholic feminist theology is cited, and the Pope’s reflections on gender signal rather a rejection than an openness to dialogue with the sciences on this topic. Pope Francis warns in the 2016 Exhortation against the ideology because it leads to educational programmes (compare the accusation against Bolsonaro’s opposing candidate) and laws (such as the Argentinian law about the third gender) that promote personal identity and emotional bonds that are radically separate from “the biological difference between male and female” – without specifying more closely what this difference is thought to consist of. It is equally obvious that one can understand the Pope’s formulations against the background of his experiences regarding the introduction of same-sex marriage in his own country, and the demands for rights for gay men and lesbians. As he said in an interview in 2016: What should we think about same-sex marriage? “Marriage” is a historical word. Forever, throughout humanity, and not only in the Church, it’s between a man and a woman. You can’t change it just like that. It’s the nature of things. That’s how they are. So let’s call them “civil unions.” Don’t let’s joke with the truths. It’s true that, behind it, there is the ideology of gender. In books, too, children learn that they can choose their sex. Why gender, being a woman and a man, is a choice and not a fact of nature? That favors this error. (Francis and Wolton 2018, 225) The Pope insists that the term “marriage” is to be reserved for a heterosexual relationship, while homosexuality also requires a framework in civil law. He justifies the special status of marriage through a vague idea about a universal history and a natural order in the relationship between man and woman that is not found only in the church. The problem here is the idea that the child can choose its sexual orientation or nature; this seems to be the quintessence of what Pope Francis understands as “gender ideology”, something that leads people astray to believe that they can deny or liberate themselves from their natural sexuality as man or woman. The gender

102  The eternal feminine in the Catholic church polarity is absolute here. There are no grey zones or categories between the one gender and the other. At the same time, Pope Francis is not wholly coherent in Amoris Laetitia when he quotes the affirmation by the fathers of the 2015 synod that “biological sex and the socio-cultural role of sex (gender) can be distinguished but not separated” (AL, no. 56). Here, he opens the door to a differentiation between a biologically programmed sexuality (sex) and a societally constructed gender, something that he both rejects and refuses to reflect further upon in other speeches, interviews, and writings, such as the celebrated encyclical Laudato Si (2015). In this encyclical the absence of a critical attitude to androcentrism is particularly noticeable, given that the encyclical criticizes anthropocentrism (Toldy 2017, 184). This text drew considerable attention thanks to its openness to ecological thinking and to insights from the natural sciences, but not so many observers noted how the encyclical insists on a static gender polarity and a gender difference as an epistemological presupposition for experiencing otherness: [V]aluing one’s own body in its femininity or masculinity is necessary if I am going to be able to recognize myself in an encounter with someone who is different. In this way we can joyfully accept the specific gifts of another man or woman, the work of God the Creator, and find mutual enrichment. It is not a healthy attitude which would seek “to cancel out sexual difference because it no longer knows how to confront it.” (LS, no. 155) It is interesting to observe that, while theological innovation is taking place in other areas under the pontificate of Pope Francis, the view of gender and sexuality remains unchanged. Bergoglio simply adopts the theoretical presuppositions of Ratzinger and Wojtyła. His predecessors’ idea about the complementarity between man and woman is incorporated as the basis for the new ecotheology that finds expression in Laudato Si. The body is to be appreciated “in its femininity or masculinity”. Clearly, it is not to be appreciated as both simultaneously, or as something of the one and something of the other. And it is the body that is either masculine or feminine – not our social constructs of the body. In this way, according to Pope Francis, we will realize “a non-ideological ethics” (EG, no. 57). There is, in other words, a way out of gender ideology – an ethical sphere free of every form of ideology, in which nature’s God-given order in human beings is appreciated in either its masculinity or its femininity.

Conclusion Feminist theologians such as the Norwegian Kari Elisabeth Børresen and the Brazilian Ivone Gebara have pointed out that the official theology of the Catholic church is premodern in its approach to sex and gender (Børresen 2016).

The eternal feminine in the Catholic church  103 It is striking to see how unwilling the world’s largest church is to enter into contemporary debates in gender theory and to allow its theology to be brought up to date and contextualized by these debates. With the exception of a brief quotation from the synod fathers in Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis insists that natural complementary gender differences exist and that social ideas of a certain individual freedom in relation to gender identity are false. They are products of the ideological colonization and indoctrination by gender ideology, which affect children in particular. Gender is not, as Judith Butler would have said, “an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts” (Butler 1990, 140). For Pope Francis, gender is not constructed. It has its origin in a sexuality given by nature that is, inherently and wholly, either male or female. The question of women priests is definitely off the table under the theological-political regime of Pope Francis, and there is probably no question of a permanent diaconate for women. Where women are to have significant power in the church’s decisions, this will take place through temporary, not permanent positions. Pope Francis’s understanding of salvation history provides the real justification for the functional precedence of the man in worship: God chose to become a human being by taking his dwelling in a man. Women and men are equal in their dignity, but they are not equal in their functions. According to the Pope, giving women the same functions as men would make women victims of clericalization and reduce the value of the natural virtue that women realize in society to a special degree. And such a move would also be an expression for a “machismo in a skirt” – a female chauvinism. The reforming zeal in the Catholic church in the years following the Second Vatican Council, especially in the form of the demand that women should have the same position as men in the liturgy, was inspired by conciliar texts that took a dialogical and reconciliatory tone in dealing with modernity, after more than a century of Catholic antimodernism. This zeal found its legitimacy in conciliar texts such as Gaudium et spes: Ours is a new age of history with profound and rapid changes spreading gradually to all corners of the world. They are the products of people’s intelligence and creative activity, but they recoil upon them, upon their judgements and desires, both individual and collective, upon their ways of thinking and acting in regard to people and things. We are entitled to speak of a real social and cultural transformation whose repercussions are felt at the religious level also. (GS, no. 4) Many people regard modern feminism, gender equality, and sexual liberation as some of the farthest-reaching cultural changes that have taken place in the world in the last hundred years. This ought therefore to be reflected

104  The eternal feminine in the Catholic church in the theology that regulates religious living in the Catholic church. For others, these cultural changes are instead the proof that the council fathers went too far in their positive approach to the rapid and modern societal changes that are spreading everywhere in the world. Unlike Pope Benedict XVI, Pope Francis does not explicitly warn against the erroneous interpretation of the conciliar texts by those who are zealous for reform in the Catholic church. The Argentinian appears less worried about the way in which the documents are understood. Nevertheless, there is a constant tug of war concerning the interpretation of the conciliar texts, especially with regard to gender. The Second Vatican Council can be understood as the final station, which occasionally slipped off the correct path in its zeal for reform. But it can also be understood as a starting point for a further aggiornamento, with consequences that the church has not yet translated into life.

Notes 1 The author’s translation of Mallimaci’s assertion in Spanish: “Francisco no fue ni es un reformista.” 2 On complementary anthropology and the late-modern papacy, see (Case 2016). 3 “la mujer es la que custodia más la raíz, porque la lleva dentro. La mujer es la que enseña ‘a defender la cría.’ El hombre, come sembró y está afuera, lo vive de otra manera. Y todavía más con la memoria física que tiene la mujer. Hay estudios que confirman que, apenas concibe, algunas células madre del feto y la placenta pasan a la circulación de la mujer, donde anidan mayormente en la médula ósea” (Reyes Alcaide 2017, 45). 4 “Mi experiencia viene de cuando trato un tema en un consejo de mujeres: hay otra visión distinta, enriquecedora. Ellas son más creativas en la gestión y resolución de los problemas. Por eso en los consejos me gusta mezclar varones y mujeres, porque se complementan bien los puntos de vista” (Reyes Alcaide 2017, 46). 5 For a glimpse into the debate in the 1970s and the arguments for and against women’s ordination see Boff (1986, 76–97). 6 Religion Digital, “Nathalie Becquart: ‘En la Iglesia clerical que heredamos, las mujeres no son eschuchadas. Esto debe cambiar’ ”, www.religiondigital.org/vati cano/NATHALIE-BECQUART-mujeres-igualdad-democracia-vaticano-sinodali dad-iglesia-laicos-clericalismo_0_237767237.html.

Bibliography Amaya, José Fernando Serrano. 2017. “La tormenta perfecta: Ideología de género y articulación de públicos.” Sexualidad, Salud y Sociedad. Revista Latinoamericana (27): 149–71. BBC. 2013. “Pope Francis: Who Am I to Judge Gay People?” www.bbc.com/news/ world-europe-23489702. Beauvoir, Simone de. 1956. The Second Sex. Translated by H. M. Parshley. London: Jonathan Cape. Bergoglio, Jorge Mario, and Abraham Skorka. 2014. On Heaven and Earth: Pope Francis on Faith, Family, and the Church in the Twenty-First Century. Translated by Alejandro Bermúdez and Howard Goodman. London: Bloomsbury.

The eternal feminine in the Catholic church  105 Boff, Leonardo. 1986. Ecclesiogenesis: The Base Communities Reinvent the Church. Translated by Robert R. Barr. New York: Orbis Books. Bolsonaro, Jair Messias. 2019. “Discurso Do Presidente Da República, Jair Bolsonaro, Durante Cerimônia De Posse No Congresso Nacional.” http://www2. planalto.gov.br/acompanhe-o-planalto/discursos/2019/discurso-do-presidente-darepublica-jair-bolsonaro-durante-cerimonia-de-posse-no-congresso-nacional. Børresen, Kari Elisabeth. 2016. “Moderne maktkamp mellom pave og konsil.” Teologisk tidsskrift 5 (2): 135–52. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Case, Mary Anne. 2016. “The Role of the Popes in the Invention of Complementarity and the Vatican’s Anathematization of Gender.” Religion & Gender 6 (2): 155–72. Corrales, Javier. 2017. “Understanding the Uneven Spread of LGBT Rights in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1999–2013.” Journal of Research in Gender Studies 7 (1): 52–82. Díaz, María Constanza, Victoria Keller, Constanza Tabbush, and Catalina Trebisacce. 2019. “LGBT Rights Yes.” In Seeking Rights From the Left: Gender, Sexuality, and the Latin American Pink Tide, edited by Elisabeth Jay Friedman, 82–114. Durham: Duke University Press. Faggioli, Massimo. 2015. A Council for the Global Church: Receiving Vatican II in History. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Francis. 2015. “In-Flight Press Conference of His Holiness Pope Francis From the Philippines to Rome.” www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2015/ january/documents/papa-francesco_20150119_srilanka-filippine-conferenzastampa.html. ———. 2016a. “In-Flight Press Conference of His Holiness to Pope Francis From Azerbaijan to Rome.” www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2016/october/ documents/papa-francesco_20161002_georgia-azerbaijan-conferenza-stampa. html. ———. 2016b. “Meeting with the Polish Bishops. Address of his Holiness Pope Francis.” www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2016/july/documents/ papa-francesco_20160727_polonia-vescovi.html. Francis, and Dominique Wolton. 2018. A Future of Faith: The Path of Change in Politics and Society. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Gebara, Ivone. 2002. Out of the Depths: Women’s Experience of Evil and Salvation. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. ———. 2017. “Laudato Si: Algunos desafíos teológicos para una mejor convivencia en el planeta.” Alianza Biodiversidad. www.biodiversidadla.org/Documentos/ Laudato_Si_algunos_desafios_teologicos_para_una_mejor_convivencia_en_el_ planeta. Graff, Agnieszka. 2016. “ ‘Gender Ideology’: Weak Concepts, Powerful Politics.” Religion & Gender 2016 (2): 268–72. Green, Barbara. 2014. “Unexpected, Obvious, Uncertain, Hopeful. Dei Verbum and What Lies Beyond.” In From Vatican II to Pope Francis: Charting a Catholic Future, edited by Paul Crowley, 44–49. Maryknoll: Orbis. Mallimaci, Fortunato. 2018. “Papa Francisco.” In Diccionario de religiones en América Latina, edited by Roberto Blancarte Pimentel, 429–37. México, DF: Fondo de Cultura Económica: El Colegio de México.

106  The eternal feminine in the Catholic church Martín, Eloísa. 2017. “God Is Argentine and so Is the Pope! Catholicism, Popular Culture and the National Imagination.” In Religions, Nations, and Transnationalism in Multiple Modernities, edited by Patrick Michel, Adam Possamai, and Bryan S. Turner, 175–95. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Marzano, Marco. 2018. La Chiesa immobile: Francesco e la rivoluzione mancata. Roma: Laterza & Figli. Moi, Toril. 2000. “Innledning.” In Det annet kjønn, edited by Bokklubbens kulturbibliotek. Oslo: De norske bokklubbene. ———. 2001. Jeg er en kvinne: det personlige og det filosofiske. Oslo: Pax. Pinheiro, Naira, and Fernanda Marina Feitosa Coelho. 2016. “A  mobilização católica contra a ‘ideologia de gênero’ nas tramitações do Plano Nacional de Educação brasileiro.” Religare 13 (1): 27–48. https://periodicos.ufpb.br/index.php/ religare/article/view/30798. Reyes Alcaide, Hernán. 2017. Papa Francisco. Latinoamérica: conversaciones con Hernán Reyes Alcaide. Buenos Aires: Planeta. Sölle, Dorothee. 1994. Great women of the Bible in art and literature. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Suárez, Ana Lourdes. 2020. “El estudio de las congregaciones religiosas femeninas en Argentina: Avances, desafíos y balance.” In Religiosas en América Latina: memorias y contextos, edited by Ana Lourdes Suárez, 221–42. Buenos Aires: Universidad Católica Argentina. Instituto de Investigaciones de la Facultad de Ciencias Sociales. Toldy, Teresa. 2017. “Someone Is Missing in the Common House. The Empty Place of Women in the Encyclical Letter ‘Laudatio si’.” Journal of the European Society of Women in Theological Research 25: 167–89. Vance-Trembath, Sally. 2014. “Women and Vatican II. Theological Excavations and Soundings.” From Vatican II to Pope Francis: Charting a Catholic Future, edited by Paul Crowley, 26–32. Maryknoll: Orbis. Zagano, Phyllis. 2016. Women Deacons? Essays with Answers. Collegeville: Liturgical Press.

6 The non-historical Jesus of Pope Francis’ political theology

The historical point of departure for Christianity is inescapably political. Jesus was crucified under the Roman governor Pontius Pilate in a political execution (Horsley 2010; Sanders 1993, 273). In other terms, there is a potentially political meaning of the New Testament gospels that can be drawn out in nearly endless ways. The history of the interpretation of the Bible attests the multiple ways in which interpreters of the gospels and their Jesus figure have understood and dealt with this political dimension of the most secure historical data of the Christian confession: Jesus was crucified and died under Pontius Pilate. In the words of the Jesuit theologian Jon Sobrino, “Jesus died as a political offender and died the type of death that only the political power, the Romans, could inflict” (Sobrino 1994, 206).1 The history of the reception of the Bible constitutes a complex web of layers of reception of these ancient texts. A pope is a highly interesting case of reception of the gospels, and the interpretation of Jesus in the theology of a Latin American Pope is even more intriguing, given the great controversies that have surrounded Latin American Christology since the Vatican II. To approach Pope Francis’ readings of the gospels from the perspective of reception theory implies a focus on the content and function of these readings rather on the historical accuracy or inaccuracy of these readings (Løland 2020, 3–4). What is more, historical hypotheses about the original context and meaning of these texts can also be considered as layers in the reception history and afterlife of biblical texts.2 In this way, a crucial aspect of how Pope Francis constructs his political theology can be explored and clarified. Hence, the interest is more in the appeal and function of history for political purposes than in the question of the objective reality of this reconstruction of ancient history. Pope Francis is a complex figure who both misses and embraces opportunities of actualizing potential political meanings of the gospel texts, particularly in relation to ancient and modern history. John O’Malley has interestingly pointed out that Pope Francis is not only the first Latin American, the first Jesuit, and the first Francis as the uniquely positioned bishop of Rome. He is also the first Pope since Vatican II who did not participate in the council negotiations. This observation leads O’Malley to conclude that the Argentinian is “the first pope to have grown up in the DOI: 10.4324/9781003349099-6

108  The non-historical Jesus of Pope Francis’ political theology postcouncil church and thus have accepted the council as a fact of life” (O’Malley 2015, 70). Massimo Faggioli has gone as far as to label Pope Francis “the first truly post-Vatican II Pope” (Faggioli 2017, 60). Hence, we should expect Pope Francis to interpret the Bible in tune with the teachings of Vatican II. Is this really the case with Pope Francis’ actual biblical hermeneutics, as it is carried out in his papal teaching? The aim of this chapter is to explore the interrelatedness of history and politics in the case of Pope Francis’ interpretations of the Jesus figure of the gospels in the Pope’s authoritative writings, focusing on what is arguably his most important apostolic exhortation and his two encyclicals. It will show how Pope Francis generally and persistently interprets the four gospels in a non-historical manner, often by relying on isolated sayings by Jesus without their historical or literary contexts. These spiritualizing reading strategies drain the biblical texts of much of their political meaning potential, but they can also have more open and indirect political meanings. Moreover, there are interesting exceptions to the general rule of non-historical readings of the gospels in Pope Francis’ theology, which reveals an unfamiliarity with historical-critical methods and their standards for biblical interpretations.

Vatican II and biblical reception The theology of Vatican II renewed the teaching of the church on revelation, emphasizing revelation more as a dynamic process in which the whole people of God participate rather than revelation as a deposit of propositional truth guarded by the magistrates of the institutional centre in Rome. This process does not occur in parallel rooms, as if God would speak with two tongues through Scripture on the one hand and tradition on the other. As Dei Verbum affirms, “Tradition and scripture make up one sacred deposit of the word of God, which is entrusted to the church” (DV, no. 10). This view of Scripture and tradition as reciprocally enriching and dependent mediations of the revealed Word of God brought the Bible more to the centre of Catholic belief and practice after the council. While the Pope who convoked the council had coined aggiornamento as perhaps the main heading for what the council fathers in collegiality were called to do, the renewal of Catholic intellectual life in France in the years leading up to the council was guided by the term ressourcement, the “return to the sources”. The creative intellectual production by vigorous Catholic thinkers and theologians in the years after the War in France attests a return to the sources in the sense of the writings of the church fathers, but not least the Bible. Without the common suspicion of a Protestant inclination to return to the Bible in order to delegitimize Catholic tradition, Catholic scholars were empowered in hitherto unseen ways to study the Bible with the rigor of historical-critical methods that had been primarily developed by Protestant scholarship. One of the foundations for this new critical orientation and passionate interest in the Bible was laid by Pope Pius XII’s 1943

The non-historical Jesus of Pope Francis’ political theology  109 encyclical, Divino Afflante Spiritu, in which Pope Pius XII defied the former Catholic hostility to modern biblical criticism and wrote favourably of the new critical methods while emphasizing the importance of biblical studies for Catholic theology. In France as well as in Belgium and Germany, Catholic biblical scholars benefited from the new tone from Rome and could more freely and openly do research in a critical manner (O’Malley 2008, 84). This prepared Vatican II’s strong assertion about the study of the Sacred Scriptures as “the very soul of sacred theology” (DV, no. 24). John O’Malley has contributed to a deeper historical understanding of the Vatican II by documenting the shift in the rhetoric of official Catholic teaching that took place at the historic council from 1962 to 1965. On a general level, “[t]he responsibilities are laid out” in the council documents “not as a code of conduct to be enforced but as ideal to be striven for” (O’Malley 2006, 25). This is evident in the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation as well. Here, the rhetoric functions as persuading and inviting, not as warning or condemning. In the case of biblical interpretation, the document invites to attitudes and actions rather than setting a limit to them. “Seeing that, in sacred scripture, God speaks through human beings in human fashion”, the readers and interpreters of the Bible “should carefully search out the meaning which the sacred writers really had in mind” (DV, no. 12). The document encourages the interpreter to pay attention to the specific genres of the text and to “the patterns men normally employed at that period” at the time of the writing of the biblical texts. In other words, there is a mandate for literary as well as for historical criticism of the Bible. The absence of clear limits to such a critical view of the canonical texts in the council document does not mean that limits have been erased. There are tensions in Dei Verbum because of a normative defence of orthodox readings against historical relativism. After all, the text works with the notion of “an authentic interpretation” and sets the “living teaching office of the church” (DV, no. 10) as precondition for this correct reading of the Bible. Nevertheless, the conclusions of the council fathers in the document serve as an invitation to exegetes and lay people alike to read and study the biblical texts. What is more, it explicitly values literary and historical methods. Pope Francis seldom refers to Dei Verbum in his papal teaching, and as a church leader in Argentina he never wrote specifically on the matter of biblical hermeneutics. Since its promulgation in 1965, the only magisterial text that deals extensively with the council document and the whole topic of biblical interpretation in the Catholic church is, in fact, Pope Benedict XVI’s post-synodal exhortation from 2010, Verbum Domini (Wright IV 2017, 99). As the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Joseph Ratzinger had already been influential in the Vatican on the topic of Catholic biblical interpretation as the President of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, which issued its conclusions in a 1993 document. As Pope, Joseph Ratzinger was able to back some of these conclusions with the highest authority possible in the Catholic church.

110  The non-historical Jesus of Pope Francis’ political theology On the one hand, Verbum Domini speaks in favourable terms of modern biblical criticism. It underscores the “need to acknowledge the benefits that historical-critical exegesis and other recently-developed methods of textual analysis have brought to the life of the Church” (VB, no. 32). Such methods are deemed no less than “indispensable” by the German pontiff. The exhortation refers to Dei Verbum and reiterates the value of both historical and literary criticism for the understanding of biblical texts (VB, no. 34). Nonetheless, it values these methods in a more wary and suspicious tone than we find in Dei Verbum. First, there is a fixation on the intentional meaning of the biblical authors, as if scholarly inquiries about other matters than these intentional meanings can lead the proper interpretation astray. Second, there is clearly a need to restrict the scope of historical criticism and strengthen the role of theological presuppositions in the interpretive process: “While today’s academic exegesis, including that of Catholic scholars, is highly competent in the field of historical-critical methodology and its latest developments, it must be said that comparable attention needs to be paid to the theological dimension of the biblical texts” (VB, no. 34). Benedict XVI complains that “nowadays” a correct understanding and acceptable scholarly work with biblical texts suffer from a “sterile separation” that “sometimes creates a barrier between exegesis and theology” (VB, no. 35). What is more, biblical studies are endangered by “the lack of a hermeneutic of faith with regard to Scripture”. This lack leads to “a positivistic and secularized hermeneutic” that may result in “interpretations that deny the historicity of the divine elements” (VB, no. 35). In other words, without orthodox theology, biblical exegesis may cause harm to the faith. The Pope is particularly concerned about the “confusion and lack of stability” in the formation of future priests in the seminaries (VB, no. 35). The opening brought about through the conciliatory tone of Dei Verbum can therefore be said to be tempered by the restriction and closure of the warning about its reception 45  years later in the words of Pope Benedict XVI. Moreover, this new tone that signals the need for hermeneutic caution rather than interpretative creativity is introduced by a male-dominated group from the First World who hardly can be said to be representative of the quality and plurality of Catholic biblical scholars during the last decades. In the words of Barbara Green O.P.: “The sense of a small circle of classically trained Anglo-European men as adequate to manage this huge topic seems outdated, especially in an area where Catholic biblical scholarship has come of age and many voices once excluded are contributing usefully” (Green 2014, 48). In the absence of a strong voice of Pope Francis on the matter,3 Verbum Domini with its less conciliatory tone continues to set the future agenda for the interpretation and application of Dei Verbum in the Catholic church (Wright IV 2017, 103).

The non-historical Jesus of Pope Francis’ political theology  111

Reception of the gospels’ Jesus figure in postconciliar Latin American theology To a large extent, the reception of Vatican II in Latin America took place through readings of Gaudium et spes. The description of the mission of the church in a modern world as “reading the signs of the times and of interpreting them in the light of the Gospel” (GS, no. 4) was hugely influential for the way the Latin American churches applied the council to their regional and national contexts, not least at the CELAM meeting in Medellín in 1968: “The bishops’ analysis of the signs of the times – Latin American realities and the experience of the poor – marked Medellín’s point of departure of formulating the church’s vision and mission” (Valiente 2012, 805). While phrases and ideas from Dei Verbum were not quoted by episcopal conferences or theologians as extensively as from Gaudium et spes, the effect of the renewed emphasis in Dei Verbum on profound studies of the Bible among all the members of the church was huge. For many ordinary Catholics in Latin America, the Bible was placed in their hands to be read, or even simply as a manifestation of the value of learning to read, as many were illiterate. Vatican II served as an impulse for Catholic theologians to take modern biblical criticism seriously and to encourage ordinary Catholics to discover the Bible as a source of spiritual renewal of their own life. This turn to Scripture in Latin American Catholicism meant that from partly functioning as a cultic object of worship in the hands of a clerical elite, the Bible was transformed into a unique book to be opened and studied by ordinary people, and even allowed to be interpreted by the poor themselves. The Christian base communities became a motor for the spread of this practice, which was new for many and was never entirely controlled by the clergy. A significant factor, however, was the development of methods the clergy deemed appropriate for pastoral workers to use within these new social contexts for the reception of biblical texts. What was to inspire readings of the Bible among non-scholarly readers and lay people in the Catholic church and in the wider ecumenical community of various Christian churches became known as “the popular reading of the Bible”. In manuals for this supposedly “popular” approach to the scriptural canon, there are vivid traces of the new focus among the Latin American theologians on historical context as a key to a more authentic understanding of the biblical texts. For instance, in one of the many manuals written by the Catholic theologian Pablo Richard, the Chilean describes the popular reading of the Bible as a way of regaining the historical as well as the spiritual meaning of Scripture against the background of human experiences in a particular context and in light of God’s revelation within this human reality (Richard 1988, 8). Within the interpretative process that the educated promoters of this popular reading were aiming at, the participants discover that each text of the Bible has a history. Although the perspective encourages

112  The non-historical Jesus of Pope Francis’ political theology immediate and synchronic interpretations through the emphasis on human experiences in a contemporary Latin American world marked by poverty and oppression, there is a clear emphasis on the diachronic dimension of the biblical text. In order to avoid unwanted subjectivism, spiritualism, and not least arbitrary readings that are vulnerable to manipulations by the dominant ideologies in the societies, the past of the text is invoked as a point of reference that anchors its meaning in something more stable (Richard 1988, 23). In other words, the notion of a historical meaning of the text functions to protect the participants in these reading groups against oppression. Historical insight is liberating when the interpreter, whether scholar or non-scholar, has gone through the epistemological rupture and sided with the poor in a way that adopts their standpoint of the world.4 The reception of the gospels has been perhaps the most controversial field of biblical reception within Catholicism during the last decades, as we see in reactions by the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith (CDF) against the Christological aspects of the theology of the Jesuits Jacques Dupuis, Roger Haight, and Jon Sobrino. Unlike in the case of Verbum Domini, the CDF’s criticism of Sobrino’s historical readings of the gospels is not limited to the level of method. Sobrino is accused by the 2006 Notification not only of insufficient attention to the theological meanings of biblical texts but also of being wrong about history. The CDF reacts against Sobrino’s historical thesis that Jesus did not see the salvific value of his death in the same categories and models that the New Testament writings later attributed to it. As Jon Sobrino wrote in his 1991 work on Christology, “Let it be said from the start that the historical Jesus did not interpret his death in terms of salvation, in terms of soteriological models later developed by the New Testament, such as expiatory sacrifice or vicarious satisfaction” (Sobrino 1994, 201). This basic historical distinction between the possible interpretation of his death by pre-paschal historical Jesus and a post-paschal New Testament interpretation of the same death is judged as simply “erroneous” by the CDF, without any further historical argument or reference to back up this verdict (Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith 2006). Indeed, it rather demonstrates a lack of interest in historical research through a bold rejection of a historical thesis – a rejection that functions to discredit Sobrino’s work within the church. One of the characteristics of postconciliar Christology in Latin America was the insistence on the political nature of Jesus’ message. This assertion was based on historical criticism of the biblical texts from the second quest of the historical Jesus. Taking their cues from the scholarly reactions against Bultmann’s scepticism towards a quest for the historical Jesus (a reaction seen in scholars like Günther Bornkamm and Joachim Jeremias), Latin American theologians such as Leonardo Boff, Juan Luis Segundo, and Jon Sobrino affirmed the necessity of the historical Jesus for histological reflection in the context of social and political oppression in Latin America. They overtook distinctions from modern biblical scholarship like the difference

The non-historical Jesus of Pope Francis’ political theology  113 between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith or between the prepaschal Jesus and post-paschal Christ. They also adhered to the importance of redactional criticism in the second quest, in addition to having adopted the fundamental hypotheses generated in biblical scholarship by the synoptic problem. In the Christological works of Boff, Segundo, and Sobrino, it is argued that the message of the Kingdom of God preached by Jesus is not merely spiritual. Although it is not primarily about liberation from Roman oppression in the days of the historical Jesus (Boff 1978, 55; Segundo 1991, 181), the metaphor of the Kingdom of God is interpreted against the background of both Roman and other types of oppression in Jesus’ historical context. They consider the Kingdom of God as a political concept in the sense of a total renewal of the material and spiritual world in which Jesus of Nazareth finds himself. Although Jesus’ mission cannot be reduced to political agitation, the Kingdom of God he announces and dies for is nevertheless expressed in highly political terms and envisioned as a divine government that renews and replaces the former state of affairs in first-century Palestine. The authority Jesus denounces is both a religious and political one, according to these works. Along the same lines as the argument of Pablo Richard, Jon Sobrino argues that a shift to history in Christological interpretations can function as an ideological shield against two types of abuse of the Christ figure in societies. When Christological interpretation has incorporated the historical insight that can be gained about Jesus of Nazareth, it can contribute both to a “depacification” of Christ and to a “deidolization” of the same figure (Sobrino 1994, 50). This is a critique of religion and of actual expressions of Christianity in a contemporary Latin American context that is constructed in the way that Sobrino believes images of Christ function for the liberation of the poor. He sees these as alienating images, in the sense that they have the effect in various ways of ultimately legitimating the status quo and therefore the oppression that causes human suffering in a Third World context. The images of a peaceful Christ who brings peace to the world without recognizing the conflictive dimension of reality that is expressed both in the Jesus stories of the gospel and in the societies marked by poverty and injustice call for a depacification of these very same images. To preach a Christ who offers a universal reconciliation outside the concrete transgressions on an individual and political level in a contemporary world does nothing to call to repentance and conversion the transgressors who are guilty of these injustices. All it does is to pave the way for the dominant groups to oppress people in Christ’s name (Sobrino 1994, 16). To proclaim the absolute value of Christ in an individual worship without any concrete consequences for the well-being of the neighbour, in particular the poor and most vulnerable, runs effectively counter to the coming of the Kingdom of God of which Jesus is the mediator. And to cultivate what Sobrino calls an “abstract” Christ means to disconnect the divine Christ from the historical

114  The non-historical Jesus of Pope Francis’ political theology Jesus, for instance by cultivating the image of Christ as a “power” without any anchoring in the story of Jesus as a prophet of justice in a sense that also includes the social, political, and economic dimensions of human existence. The Christ figure is thereby left open to potentially justify anything, like “all sorts of authoritarianism and despotism” (Sobrino 1994, 15). The severe dangers of the abuse of images of Christ can be summed up, in Sobrino’s view, as “[a]bstraction without specificity, reconciliation without conflict, absoluteness without relation” (Sobrino 1994, 17). As a tool for oppression, these images of Christ are turned into an idol that effectively demands sacrifices of victims, and Latin America’s unjust societies do indeed demand their victims in the form of poor people who live in poverty and are denied their basic rights. Hence, the need for a “deidolization” of the Christ images that are proclaimed and worshipped in actual expressions of Christianity. A historical approximation to the Jesus figure is crucial in the reasoning of Sobrino and other Latin American theologians. As Sobrino affirms: “If a Christology disregards the historical, it turns into an abstract Christology that is historically alienating and open to manipulation” (Sobrino 1978, 353). The theologian Sturla Stålsett has pointed to a problem in Sobrino’s use of the notion of the historical Jesus. Stålsett acknowledges that Sobrino is informed by hypothetical but valuable historical insights from the second quest of historical Jesus research led by scholars such as Ernst Käsemann and Nils Astrup Dahl in addition to Bornkamm and Jeremias (Stålsett 1997, 93). But Stålsett asks critically how genuinely historical is the depiction by Sobrino and the other Latin American theologians of what they refer to as “the historical Jesus”, that which lays the foundation of their more systematic Christological elaborations of Jesus Christ as “the Liberator”. Stålsett concludes that there is an ambiguity in Sobrino’s notion of “the historical Jesus” as a normative starting point for Christology, since what is historical in Sobrino’s writings is not only a historical reconstruction of the past on its own terms but also a “practical-hermeneutical understanding of history”. For Sobrino, the historical is not an entity that can be limited to the past as such, but is “primarily what sets history in motion” and in the case of the historical Jesus, this is Jesus’ praxis (Sobrino 1994, 51). This is a meaning of the historical that goes beyond the limits that Sobrino sets elsewhere to the meaning of the concept of the historical Jesus when he defines the historical Jesus as “the person, teaching, attitudes, and deeds of Jesus of Nazareth insofar as they are accessible, in a more or less general way, to historical and exegetical investigation” (Sobrino 1978, 3). Accordingly, Stålsett concludes that Sobrino’s use of the concept of the historical Jesus plays a role that is “different from the way it is customarily understood in European and North American Biblical scholarship related to the three ‘quests’ ”.5 Stålsett rightly notes that Sobrino uses the terms “the historical Jesus” and “the history of Jesus” interchangeably or synonymously (Stålsett 1997, 101). This is an important observation that helps us to grasp the

The non-historical Jesus of Pope Francis’ political theology  115 kind of biblical reception that takes place in Jon Sobrino’s writings. For a discussion of systematic theology, as in the case of Stålsett, this blending of becomes a methodological weakness in Sobrino’s Christology (Stålsett 1997, 100). For our analytical purposes here of analysing types of reception, however, the criticism of religion and the ideological dangers of the Christ images in Latin American can be retained and appreciated while distinguishing what Sobrino melts into one single notion of the historical: The historical reconstruction of the gospels as one type of reception and the literary story of the gospels as another. As a whole, the Latin American theologians’ insistence on the necessity of starting with the historical Jesus is generated by a severe problem that is brought to the fore through their awareness of the potentially oppressive function of religion. Hence, the value of the historical in the biblical reception of the gospels of the New Testament. Their insistence, however, is founded on an insufficient distinction between the historical and the literary readings of the ancient gospel texts. But aspects of the basic plotline of the Jesus story in the four gospels and the basic elements, or even a consensus about the historical Jesus, can each in their own way function as resources against the oppressive Christ images against which these Latin American theologians are warning. When approaching the Christ images and interpretations of the Jesus figure in the theology of Pope Francis, it is therefore relevant to ask to what extent they are constructed with these resources of Latin American theology, and it is clarifying to distinguish literary layers of gospel reception from historical ones. Moreover, the literary layers should be separated into those where the literary narratives of the Jesus figure are received and others were Jesus’ words are received without being embedded in these narratives or basic plotlines of the gospels. In sum, one can look for three types of reception: Historical reconstructions, literary representations of the Jesus story and literary representations of Jesus’ words isolated from their literary or historical context.

The non-historical Jesus of Pope Francis’ authoritative teaching Not having permitted, or at the very least not embraced, new notifications from the CDF remains a significant part of Pope Francis’ legacy, which marks him off from Popes Benedict XVI and John Paul II. Pope Francis’ policy has been one of selective inclusion for an outreach to the many rather than the exclusionary condemnation of what the CDF termed “errors”, “ambiguities”, and “harmful interpretations” in order to save the doctrinal truth for the few.6 Pope Francis has directed his messages to the crowds, and it is within this strategy that his biblical readings, particularly his interpretations of the Jesus figure of the gospels, must be considered.

116  The non-historical Jesus of Pope Francis’ political theology Interestingly, Massimo Faggioli has remarked that “Francis’s theological profile is not that of a biblical scholar” (Faggioli 2019, 32). In a similar vein, Jon Sobrino has noted that the tone in the Pope’s theology is quite traditional and lacks a historical-critical awareness of the biblical texts (Sobrino and Mármol 2018, 313). This lack of historical awareness is something Sobrino traces back to the Christology in the Aparecida document, although he makes it clear that he does not have information about the specific role played by Bergoglio in the editing of that document. Nonetheless, Sobrino criticizes the document for its Christology, which he considers to be its greatest weakness. First, Aparecida does not reflect the fundamental fact that Jesus’ gospel was good news for the poor and bad news for others. The bishops in Aparecida do not capture the point that Jesus did not treat everyone the same way; he was compassionate with the poor, but he expressed indignation towards their oppressors. Second, Sobrino does not find one single trace in the Aparecida document of Jesus’ conflict with the elites. But for Sobrino, this conflict is the driving motor of the gospels. All four gospels present Jesus’ mission as a path towards death. Sobrino credits the fathers of the Aparecida document with pointing to Jesus’ love in giving his own life, but he does not find there the fundamental element of Jesus’ love until death, namely, that Jesus was killed. And he was killed for a reason: For denouncing the corruption of the leaders who caused the suffering of the people (Sobrino and Mármol 2018, 305–6). Agenor Brighenti seems to confirm this evaluation of Aparecida’s Christology when he observes that the preparatory document of the conference decontextualized the figure of Jesus in a way that led to a Christological Docetism. There were many changes in the final document, but the topic of the historical Jesus was not one of them (Brighenti 2010, 309). If we consider the Aparecida document at least partly as an expression of the current Pope’s theology, continuities can be discerned when we look at the most authoritative writings of Pope Francis. As an established genre with a particular history, encyclicals are commonly accorded more authoritative weight than homilies and other speeches given by the pontiff. The encyclical Lumen Fidei from 2013 was largely produced during Benedict XVI’s reign and will therefore not be taken into account. Apostolic exhortations are also highly important as expressions of the theology of a pope, and in the history of Pope Francis’ pontificate, Evangelii Gaudium from 2013 has retained its importance as a programmatic statement for the Argentinian’s governance. The continuity with the Aparecida document and the Latin American tradition and its episcopal theology is also indicated by the ten references to the Aparecida meeting in Evangelii Gaudium, not least inspired by Aparecida’s concern about evangelization in a Latin American context. What is of more importance, however, is the persistent decontextualization of the Jesus figure of the gospels in Evangelii Gaudium, in a historical and also partly in a literary sense. This decontextualization stands in a considerable tension with

The non-historical Jesus of Pope Francis’ political theology  117 the call for remembrance of what the Pope labels “the living history” in the exhortation: Nor should we see the newness of this mission as entailing a kind of displacement or forgetfulness of the living history which surrounds us and carries us forward. Memory is a dimension of our faith which we might call “deuteronomic”, not unlike the memory of Israel itself. (EG, no. 13) With the Latin words for “the joy of the gospel” as its title, Pope Francis encourages the whole Catholic church to embark on a mission, to become a true, missionary community. The exhortation is written as response to the and conclusions of the bishops’ eighth synod the year before, which was dedicated to the theme of “The New Evangelization of the Transmission of the Christian Faith”. The pope opens with the words: “the joy of the gospel fills the hearts and lives of all who encounter Jesus” (EG, no. 1) and the motif of this personal encounter with Jesus is one of the main motifs in the extensive exhortation. This focus often leads the Pope to emphasize Jesus as a spiritual reality that is contemporary with his readers. Jesus is most often presented as someone who talks to the pontiff’s present-day realities and only partly as someone who acts in the midst of a concrete world. When he acts as a figure within an earthly existence, the Pope never relates him in Evangelii Gaudium to ancient historical realities. The literary events of the gospel are mentioned only in passing (“when Jesus begins his ministry”) and most often as an occasion for retelling Jesus’ words in order to elaborate on a theological theme – for instance, the main theme of the exhortation, “the joy of the gospel”: When Jesus begins his ministry, John cries out: “For this reason, my joy has been fulfilled” (Jn 3:29). Jesus himself “rejoiced in the Holy Spirit” (Lk 10:21). His message brings us joy: “I have said these things to you, so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete” (Jn 15:11). Our Christian joy drinks of the wellspring of his brimming heart. He promises his disciples: “You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn into joy” (Jn 16:20). He then goes on to say: “But I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you” (Jn 16:22). The disciples “rejoiced” (Jn 20:20) at the sight of the risen Christ. (EG, no. 5) Rather than contextualizing these quotations of Jesus in a literary or historical sense, the pope tends to reflect theologically on the way Jesus reveals himself to the Pope’s contemporaries: “Jesus can also break through the dull categories with which we would enclose him and he constantly amazes us by his divine creativity” (EG, no. 11). This spiritualizing

118  The non-historical Jesus of Pope Francis’ political theology reception of the Jesus figure is deepened by establishing an eternal principle that is valid for him, since, in the pope’s vision, Jesus is “the first and greatest evangelizer” or someone who gives the eternally valid “missionary mandate”, which gives the Pope the occasion to quote Jesus anew, this time from the great commission discourse of Matthew (Matt 28:19–20) (EG, no. 19). Moments in the gospel stories of Jesus serve as theological lessons, generally supplying either models of discipleship (for instance, washing the feet of the disciples in John 13:17, EG 24) or timeless spiritual realities such as the will of Jesus to “pour out an abundance of life” with reference to John 10:10 (EG, no. 75). To some extent, Pope Francis cultivates a somewhat sentimental or humanly sensitive Jesus, as he emphasizes Jesus’ “heartfelt prayer to the Father” by referring to John 17:21 (EG, no. 99) or recalling the moment with the apostles (in John 1:39) when Jesus “touched their hearts”. Jesus as Christ is a spiritual being who “summons to friendship” (EG, no. 27) and is “waiting for us with open arms” (EG, no. 3). In Evangelii Gaudium, Jesus is never explicitly presented as a liberator of the poor. Nevertheless, this is not an “absolute Christ” in Jon Sobrino’s sense of the word, one who is glorified without a special relation to the poor and to the kingdom that is for them. Pope Francis speaks of “a profound liberation” (EG, no. 9) that can be experienced. But this is not a liberation for the individual believer alone. Rather, the effect of this liberation is that the person who goes through it becomes “more sensitive to the needs of others” (EG, no. 9). This human reorientation of the self towards the others is an event that reflects the church’s missionary movement outwards. The others who are to be approached or prioritized in the mission of the church, and the missionary disciples of Pope Francis’ vision, are not just anybody or everybody. With the theological vocabulary of the Latin American bishops, this mission includes everyone, but it is a preferential option for the poor. The universality is expressed in this partiality, which is a partiality that the Pope anchors in the gospel. In his typical manner, he resorts to one of the logia of Jesus to find this theological vision. He quotes Jesus’ teaching as it is memorized in the Gospel of Luke as the parable of the Great Banquet (Luke 14:7–14): If the whole Church takes up this missionary impulse, she has to go forth to everyone without exception. But to whom should she go first? When we read the Gospel we find a clear indication: not so much our friends and wealthy neighbours, but above all the poor and the sick, those who are usually despised and overlooked, “those who cannot repay you” (Lk 14:14). There can be no room for doubt or for explanations which weaken so clear a message. Today and always, “the poor are the privileged recipients of the Gospel”, and the fact that it is freely preached to them is a sign of the kingdom that Jesus came to establish.

The non-historical Jesus of Pope Francis’ political theology  119 We have to state, without mincing words, that there is an inseparable bond between our faith and the poor. (EG, no. 48) Pope Francis concretizes his option for the poor with the preferred guests from Luke’s parable, the poor and the sick. The pope’s focus on Jesus’ teaching effectuates a return to the evangelical sources that makes him reinterpret the ethical commitment of the church by employing the images of the parable. What is more, the pope revives the idea from Pope Benedict XVI’s speech in Aparecida that these are “the privileged recipients” of the gospel. Pope Francis also gives them a key role in the realization of the Kingdom of God. In this way, he places the poor at the centre of Christian belief. Given Pope Francis’ tendency to spiritualize gospel passages, one might suspect him of spiritualizing the gospels’ notion of the poor as well. But already in the next passage, the pope makes it clear that he does not support any such traditional reduction of the meaning of the gospel’s poor. He speaks of people “at our door” who are “starving” and immediately quotes another of Jesus’ logia, this time from Mark 6:37: “Give them something to eat!” By isolating this admonition from Mark’s version of the miracle of the five loaves and two fish, which has been called “the feeding of the five thousand”, Pope Francis excludes the whole problem of the supernatural miracle in relation to material poverty. In this way, he can build a clearer contrast between his image from our contemporary world, of people starving at our door, and Jesus’ call to alleviate their hunger by literally giving them something to eat. In other words, the poor of the gospel, who mirror the poor of today, cannot be limited to those who suffer from what the Christian tradition has so often reduced to spiritual poverty. For the pontiff, these poor are indeed materially poor. Out of several variants of traditional interpretations of the gospel, the next suspicion that could arise is that although the Pope means the materially poor, his solution is still traditional Christian charity. In the words of Jon Sobrino, “for centuries, the ’charitable’ or purely ‘assistentialist’ Christ made us ignore or even reject Jesus the prophet of justice” (Sobrino 1994, 15). But although Pope Francis does not dismiss the importance of such good deeds, he does not limit Christian love or missionary discipleship to spontaneous acts of charity. Without repeating or even mentioning its criticism of Latin American liberation theology, Pope Francis quotes the CDF’s 1984 instruction on liberation theology with its strong call to justice in light of the sad fact that some keep the poor in misery and even profit from remaining indifferent to this: “The Church, guided by the Gospel of mercy and by love for mankind, hears the cry for justice and intends to respond to it with all her might” (Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith 1990, 409). Pope Francis then argues that this provides the appropriate context for understanding the logion already quoted from Mark 6:37. For the second

120  The non-historical Jesus of Pope Francis’ political theology time in the exhortation, he quotes this imperative expressed by Mark’s Jesus to mobilize his readers’ concerns about material poverty, but this second time with a new interpretation: Jesus’ words from the story of the feeding of the five thousand mean, in the pope’s view, nothing less than eradicating poverty through the transformation of social and political structures: In this context we can understand Jesus’ command to his disciples: “You yourselves give them something to eat!” (Mk 6:37): it means working to eliminate the structural causes of poverty and to promote the integral development of the poor, as well as small daily acts of solidarity in meeting the real needs which we encounter. The word “solidarity” is a little worn and at times poorly understood, but it refers to something more than a few sporadic acts of generosity. It presumes the creation of a new mindset which thinks in terms of community and the priority of the life of all over the appropriation of goods by a few. (EG, no. 188) The ethics Pope Francis discerns from his often isolated sayings from the gospel narratives is one of spontaneity as well as the systematic planning of new structures for the well-being of the community, out of a particular concern for the poor that is founded in his interpretation of Jesus’ teaching. To be a disciple or reinvent Jesus’ solidarity in the time and in the globalized context of the Pope means to prioritize “life for all” instead of the concentration of wealth for “a few”. For the Pope, in other words, the disciple who follows Jesus’ command from the gospel is involved in a conflict over resources. Not in one single instance does the Pope appeal to a modern historical sense when he reminds his readers of Jesus’ words, nor does he ever point to the literary representations of Jesus’ conflict with various characters in the gospel narrative in order to interpret the conflict in which an authentic discipleship shares in today’s world. Nonetheless, the reception of these Jesus words in the 2013 exhortation shows that the pope does not construct a reconciling Christ outside the historical context caused by human sins and with the poor as its victims, as Jon Sobrino had warned. There is little in Pope Francis’ interpretation that reflects the conflicts that ultimately led Jesus to be crucified in his time. In that sense, there are potential political meanings of the gospels that never come to the surface as activated meanings in the Pope’s theology. Nevertheless, Pope Francis emphasizes a major conflict in view of a highly unequal distribution between the rich and poor, a conflict that does not leave Christ the reconciler untouched or unaffected. And in order to underline the necessity for a transforming Christian love within this conflict, Pope Francis appeals to Jesus the teacher. In Pope Francis’ text, Jesus functions primarily as a glorified, suprahistorical teacher who provides ethical guidance and spiritual direction for the pope’s readers of today. Pope Francis’ Jesus is constructed and given and authority through

The non-historical Jesus of Pope Francis’ political theology  121 the Pope’s non-historical readings of the gospels. Moreover, the isolated Jesus words acquire meaning within the Pope’s discourse without their literary contexts and are adapted to his contemporary concerns. For the most part, this pattern can also be discerned in Pope Francis’ two encyclicals published after Evangelii Gaudium. In the 2015 encylical Laudato Si, the Jesus figure of the gospels plays a smaller role in the Pope’s theological reasoning, but when he appears he is a figure who proposes “ideals of harmony, justice, fraternity and peace” (LS, no. 82), a teacher from whom the disciples learn about God’s true paternal relationship with the whole creation (LS, no. 96), a spiritual being who calls Christians to an “ecological conversion” so that they protect God’s handwork (LS, no. 217), and a teacher of the contemplation of nature (LS, no. 226). In the 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti, one can once again observe the pattern in Pope Francis’ interpretations of the gospels. The Pope retells and interprets Jesus’ words rather than his actions. He dedicates a long section (FT, nos. 56–83) in the encyclical to an interpretation of Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan. Once again, the potential historical and narrative meanings of the gospels are displaced by the foregrounding of Jesus’ words, this time with a focus on the parable from Luke 10. There are, however, a few exceptions in the 2020 encyclical to the rule that the Pope reads these gospel texts non-historically. First, the pope introduces Rabbi Hillel, who “in the first century before Christ” (FT, no. 59) as a representative of the Judaism that preceded Jesus and that, according to the Pope, gradually expanded the love of the neighbour from being valid only towards members of the same nation (FT, no. 59). This historical development is used to interpret the parable of the Good Samaritan as an expression of a historical transformation that happens with Jesus: The word “neighbour”, in the society of Jesus’ time, usually meant those nearest us. It was felt that help should be given primarily to those of one’s own group and race. For some Jews of that time, Samaritans were looked down upon, considered impure. They were not among those to be helped. Jesus, himself a Jew, completely transforms this approach. (FT, no. 80) The historical claim about Jesus’ transformation of the ethnocentric conception of neighbourly care towards others in his society in the first century is not founded by the Pope in any scholarly work or non-biblical historical source.7 This is a way of historical reasoning that can also been seen in another instance in the encyclical. Pope Francis affirms that through New Testament texts “we can see how the early Christian communities, living in a pagan world marked by widespread corruption and aberrations, sought to show unfailing patience, tolerance and understanding” (FT, no. 239). The pope then claims that the virtuous attitude with which these early Christians

122  The non-historical Jesus of Pope Francis’ political theology met their corrupt pagan surroundings comes to expression in the Pastoral epistles and the Acts of the Apostles: Some texts are very clear in this regard: we are told to admonish our opponents “with gentleness” (2 Tim 2:25) and encouraged “to speak evil of no one, to avoid quarreling, to be gentle, and to show every courtesy to everyone. For we ourselves were once foolish” (Tit 3:2–3). The Acts of the Apostles notes that the disciples, albeit persecuted by some of the authorities, “had favour with all the people” (2:47; cf. 4:21.33; 5:13). (FT, no. 239) Here the pope reads the parenetical and moral exhortations in the Pastoral literature together with the narrative’s descriptions of how much “the whole people” without exception appreciated the apostles’ behaviour in a dramatic contrast to the authorities’ hostility, as narrated in the Acts of the Apostles. The Pope reads them as windows into the historical past, as if the moral ideals of how early Christians should act could provide information about the pagan context these Christians acted in. Such an approach to biblical texts could be deemed historical, but not historical-critical. The Pope, as interpreter, takes it for granted that the accounts in New Testament texts simply reflect historical realities. Furthermore, he depicts the Jewish context of Jesus as ethically inferior and the pagan context of early Christ-followers as evil, without any non-biblical historical source, as if Scripture alone could convince the reader about historical facts in Antiquity. Generally, the Pope evades historical readings of the New Testament texts, and, in that way, he avoids controversies on historical questions on which there might be little consensus. The Pope escapes the risk of founding his biblical interpretations on hypothetical scenarios and assumptions that can be questioned on a scholarly basis. The connection between historical concerns about the gospels and a political focus on the need for a transformation of the societies’ structures for the liberation of the poor is not necessarily as tight as is suggested by the Latin American Christologies formulated by theologians such as Leonardo Boff, Juan Luis Segundo, and Jon Sobrino, when Pope Francis’ theology in his most authoritative writings is taken into account.

COVID-19: the indirect political dimension of Pope Francis’ non-historical Jesus In order to back up the claim that the pope’s non-historical Jesus is not an apolitical one, let us analyse Pope Francis’ historic Urbi et Orbi blessing performed entirely alone in an empty, dark and rainy St Peter’s Square. The sermon illustrates the pattern in the reception of the gospel in the Pope’s preaching, but is also a particularly important homily in the history of the

The non-historical Jesus of Pope Francis’ political theology  123 current pontificate. First, the pandemic that the Pope thematized in connection with his gospel interpretation was historic in view of its worldwide impact. Second, the scientific and ethical calls for social distancing were politically controversial and affected the basic religious need for community in a time of an unparalleled health crisis. Third, religious concerns were at the centre of the controversies about the societal and political response to the health crisis in the countries with the biggest Catholic populations. The impact of the pope’s message would be potentially deep in Brazil, given that no other country had a higher number of Catholic inhabitants, and bearing in mind that there was no strong political consensus about how to meet the pandemic. Accordingly, the Brazilian context serves to illustrate some of the significance of the reception of the gospels in Pope Francis’ historic homily.8 In March 2021, Pope Francis travelled on an official papal visit to Iraq. In the midst of a situation marked by the pandemic and the mixed willingness among the population in many states to take one of the newly invented vaccines, the Pope proclaimed that the vaccine was given to humankind by none other than God: We know how easy it is to be infected by the virus of discouragement that at times seems to spread all around us. Yet the Lord has given us an effective vaccine against that nasty virus. It is the hope born of persevering prayer and daily fidelity to our apostolates. With this vaccine, we can go forth with renewed strength, to share the joy of the Gospel as missionary disciples and living signs of the presence of God’s kingdom of holiness, justice and peace. (Francis 2021) The pope effectively sacralized the effect of the vaccine as God-given and a divine gift. It was another expression of Pope Francis’ firm commitment to the struggle against the spread of the coronavirus in alignment with modern states and natural scientists. In November 2020, the pope replaced his physical encounter with the crowds of believers at the so-called “General audience” with a digital streaming of his teaching given in the library of the Apostolic Palace at the Vatican. He explained that the choice was due to the pandemic. Unfortunately we have had to return to holding this audience in the library, to protect ourselves against contagion by Covid. This also teaches us that we must be very attentive to the prescriptions of the authorities, both the political authorities and health authorities, in order to protect ourselves against this pandemic. (Francis 2020c) Rather than invoking the words of Romans 13 or any other biblical text that has been used to justify unconditional submission to the governing

124  The non-historical Jesus of Pope Francis’ political theology authorities, the Pope founded his argument on the need for obedience in the form of “attention” to the regulations of the political authorities in the need for protection against the coronavirus. What is more, he gave a theological interpretation of the authorities’ call for social distancing as an offering to God and as a tool for meditation on the sick and those who cared for them in the hospitals. Let us offer to the Lord this distance between us, for the good of all, and let us think, let us think a lot about the sick, about those who are already marginalized when they enter the hospitals; let us think about the doctors, the nurses, the volunteers, the many people who work with the sick at this time: they risk their life but they do so out of love for their neighbor, as a vocation. Let us pray for them. (Francis 2020b) Pope Francis deepened his theological reflection on the care for the victims of the pandemic by depicting the workers and employees at the hospitals as exemplary figures of Christian love for the neighbour. This was a trope that had become dear to the Pope in his sermons since the pandemic had reached Europe some months earlier. The key moment in Pope Francis’ public response to the COVID-19 pandemic was undoubtedly his powerfully orchestrated “Urbi et Orbi” blessing given on a dark evening in an empty St Peter’s Square on 27 March 2020. The contrast to the normally crowded square created a somewhat apocalyptic atmosphere that served to underscore the seriousness of the pandemic and reflect the dramatic change it had caused for lives across the globe. The excerpt from the New Testament chosen for the evening was Mark 4: 35–41. This is a miracle story from the gospel of Mark. In this literary scene, Jesus performs the miracle without encountering opposition by the leadership from his literary scene. Nor is there a possessed person to be cured or a demon to be exorcized. But the usual sequence from the typical miracle stories from the gospels is present: A problem, a miraculous solution, and a proof (Bailey 1992, 137). The problem to be solved is a storm on a lake, and Jesus provides the main solution as he demonstrates his supernatural power to control the forces of nature, including this storm that threatened the lives of his followers during the evening. In this text, there are three characters: Jesus, the crowd, and the disciples. Already in verse 36, the crowd is moved to the background and disappears from the unfolding of the events. Jesus and the disciples remain in the story as the disciples obey Jesus’ command in 4:35 to travel to the other side of the lake. When the storm sets in, Jesus is sleeping, and since the disciples’ lives depend on his action, their decision to wake him during the storm appears as part of the main solution to which Jesus holds the key.

The non-historical Jesus of Pope Francis’ political theology  125 Pope Francis begins his homily by quoting the first words from the pericope in 4:35 and then directs the viewers’ and listeners’ attention to their contemporary context: “When evening had come”. The Gospel passage we have just heard begins like this. For weeks now it has been evening. Thick darkness has gathered over our squares, our streets and our cities; it has taken over our lives, filling everything with a deafening silence and a distressing void, that stops everything as it passes by; we feel it in the air, we notice in people’s gestures, their glances give them away. We find ourselves afraid and lost. (Francis 2020a) The Pope constructs an analogy between the evening in the gospel and the evening of his contemporaries that has lasted “weeks” and laid “thick darkness” over their lives. The evening of the gospel is not identical but bears similarities to the present reality of the pandemic. While in the gospel of Mark, the disciples are set apart from the crowd for an extraordinary experience alone with Jesus, the Pope likens the broad category of “we” who have experienced the evening and darkness of today with the disciples. This allows the Pope to deepen his established analogy with some of the miracle story’s main motifs, a “storm” and a “boat”: Like the disciples in the Gospel we were caught off guard by an unexpected, turbulent storm. We have realized that we are on the same boat, all of us fragile and disoriented, but at the same time important and needed, all of us called to row together, each of us in need of comforting the other. On this boat . . . are all of us. Just like those disciples, who spoke anxiously with one voice, saying “We are perishing” (v. 38), so we too have realized that we cannot go on thinking of ourselves, but only together can we do this. (Francis 2020a) Although the pope does not state this explicitly, the interpretation of the listener’s storm as the reality of the pandemic as a uncontrolled force of nature makes powerful sense out of the metaphorical effect of the pope’s analogy. The Pope stops in the sequence of the story and dwells on the disciples’ encounter with the unexpected storm. The gospel story does not pay attention to the disciples’ emotions or inner state of being, other than in the form of their verbal reaction to Jesus in 7:38: “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” (NRSV). The Pope, in contrast, emphasizes the fragility and disorientation people of today, who are confronted by the reality of a pandemic and can imagine how the disciples in the story felt in the face of a similar phenomenon. The Pope also employs the common

126  The non-historical Jesus of Pope Francis’ political theology and widely known metaphor of being in the same boat, which works effectively to further elaborate the analogy between the world of the text and the world of the listener. And he uses the anxious words and the attempt of the disciples to wake the sleeping Jesus as an ethical model for how human beings today should think and behave: To stop thinking only of ourselves and recognize that only by joining forces and working together can we solve the problem. The Pope also makes use of the motif of the storm in the gospel story and its associations to the pandemic to prepare the ground for a confession of sin or to acknowledge the need for salvation in Christ. Through this motif, Pope Francis generalizes about the “we” and the listeners’ lack of morality and their sinful state of being: The storm exposes our vulnerability and uncovers those false and superfluous certainties around which we have constructed our daily schedules, our projects, our habits and priorities. . .. In this storm, the façade of those stereotypes with which we camouflaged our egos, always worrying about our image, has fallen away, uncovering once more that (blessed) common belonging, of which we cannot be deprived: our belonging as brothers and sisters. (Francis 2020a) Whereas prominent Christian leaders sometimes interpret catastrophic events, such as the pandemic, as expressions of God’s punishment, Pope Francis avoids this theodicy in his reading of the biblical storm. By referring to the storm in the biblical story as exposing human falseness and the camouflaging of sinful selfishness, Pope Francis only indirectly alludes to the pandemic as exposing human sin. But this is a possibility within the logic of the Pope’s gospel reading, not least since what follows in the homily is a shift from a focus on the symptoms of the storm in the present to a focus on Jesus’ response to the disciples in 7:40 after he had miraculously stilled the storm: “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” (NRSV). The pope reflects on Jesus’ response in the miracle story through formulating a prayer: “Why are you afraid? Have you no faith?” Lord, your word this evening strikes us and regards us, all of us. In this world, that you love more than we do, we have gone ahead at breakneck speed, feeling powerful and able to do anything. Greedy for profit, we let ourselves get caught up in things, and lured away by haste. We did not stop at your reproach to us, we were not shaken awake by wars or injustice across the world, nor did we listen to the cry of the poor or of our ailing planet. We carried on regardless, thinking we would stay healthy in a world that was sick. Now that we are in a stormy sea, we implore you: “Wake up, Lord!” (Francis 2020a)

The non-historical Jesus of Pope Francis’ political theology  127 First, the Pope underscores the human being’s inferior position vis-à-vis Jesus the Lord by further elaborating on the human sinfulness in new forms (“greedy for profit”, etc.) through exploiting the motif in the gospel story of a Jesus that woke up to reality, in contrast to “us” human beings, since “we were not shaken awake by wars or injustice across the world”. What is more, the Pope plays with the image of staying healthy, which lends itself to associations to the ongoing pandemic where many who formerly felt safe with regard to their health can no longer feel safe after the coronavirus made the world sick. The Pope places humanity in the stormy sea of the gospel pericope and gives himself the position as an ambassador for it by pleading for divine help, just as the disciples did: “Wake up, Lord!” Jesus has now effectively been made into the answer for the problem of a humanity that grapples with a global health crisis caused by an ongoing pandemic. Jesus is the answer for the world today, the Pope proclaims in this way. This is not a particularly innovative idea for Christianity, but the way in which the Pope makes Jesus into the answer in this urgent situation and context of global uncertainty is something that distinguishes the Roman pontiff from many other Christian leaders. For what the Pope does next in his homily is to guide the listener’s attention to the work of the Spirit amid the darkness left by the pandemic. Instead of calling for spectacular divine interventions to cure people’s ills, the pope discerns the work of the Spirit in ordinary people’s loving gestures and sacrifices for others: It is a time to get our lives back on track with regard to you, Lord, and to others. We can look to so many exemplary companions for the journey, who, even though fearful, have reacted by giving their lives. This is the force of the Spirit poured out and fashioned in courageous and generous self-denial. It is the life in the Spirit that can redeem, value and demonstrate how our lives are woven together and sustained by ordinary people – often forgotten people – who do not appear in newspaper and magazine headlines nor on the grand catwalks of the latest show, but who without any doubt are in these very days writing the decisive events of our time: doctors, nurses, supermarket employees, cleaners, caregivers, providers of transport, law and order forces, volunteers, priests, religious men and women and so very many others who have understood that no one reaches salvation by themselves. (Francis 2020a) According to traditional Christian theology and Catholic doctrine, Christ is present through the work of the Holy Spirit in the world. The Second Vatican Council affirmed the following: “Appointed Lord by His resurrection and given plenary power in heaven and on earth, Christ is now at work in the hearts of men through the energy of His Holy Spirit, arousing not only a desire for the age to come, but by that very fact animating, purifying and strengthening those noble longings too by which the human

128  The non-historical Jesus of Pope Francis’ political theology family makes its life more human and strives to render the whole earth submissive to this goal” (GS, no. 38). In his homily, Pope Francis builds further on the idea that was reaffirmed at the council of Christ’s salvific work within humankind and the Holy Spirit’s encouragement for the world here and now to become more human. The ordinary and forgotten people whom the Pope sees as exemplary figures of the life in the Spirit are listed in an order and with a selection that does not look arbitrary in the time of a pandemic. First, the doctors and nurses mentioned, then the supermarket employees and cleaners, in addition to caregivers and drivers. In other words, the pope exemplifies the force of the Spirit by mentioning professional groups that deliver services recognized by many states as critical and essential for society during the pandemic. It is important that he lists titles of typical religious professions or roles after the secular titles. In that way, the pope gives importance but not priority to “the priests” or “religious men and women” as expressions of the pouring out of the Holy Spirit in times marked by the storm of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this way, the Pope secularizes the work of the Spirit along the lines of the Second Vatican Council, and he secularizes the miraculous stilling of the storm of Jesus from the gospel. This secularization, or demythologization, of the miracle story unveils what the Pope considers to be the deeply Christian meaning of the courageous and generous actions taken for the sake of others by the wide range of secular agents or agents with another religious belief than the Pope’s own. Nowhere in his homily does the Pope deny the possibility of supernatural miracles in general or the truthfulness of a more literal understanding of the gospel’s narrating of Jesus’ miracle on the stormy sea. As I have mentioned, Pope Benedict XVI warned against readings of biblical texts that expressed denial of “the historicity of divine elements” (Verbum Domini, no. 35). He underscored that the “secularized hermeneutic” which led to such denials would harm the life of the church. While there is not an entirely secularized hermeneutic embedded in the Pope’s readings of Jesus’ stilling of the storm, there is nevertheless a secularizing hermeneutic at work in the meaning and implication Pope Francis draws from it. He sees the exemplary life primarily seen in the professional tasks of ordinary workers in societal institutions such as supermarkets and hospitals, and only secondarily in the Catholic church. And the exemplary actions are secular services. That said, the homily does not end in a pure secularity. The pope also proclaims the human condition under the pandemic as a new opportunity to rediscover dedication to religious practices: How many people every day are exercising patience and offering hope, taking care to sow not panic but a shared responsibility. How many fathers, mothers, grandparents and teachers are showing our children, in small everyday gestures, how to face up to and navigate a crisis by adjusting their routines, lifting their gaze and fostering prayer. How

The non-historical Jesus of Pope Francis’ political theology  129 many are praying, offering and interceding for the good of all. Prayer and quiet service: these are our victorious weapons. (Francis 2020a) Having left the direct interpretation of the miracle story in the gospel of Mark, the Pope concludes his homily by directing the listener’s attention to the contemporary reality of the life affected by the pandemic. He emphasizes the value and importance of prayer and silence under these new conditions. For Pope Francis, these are nothing less than “victorious weapons”. In this way, he reclaims a space for faith practices within the new reality. The battle is to be fought with the essential services of society and the prayer of parents and grandparents as examples for their children. This homiletical achievement is not made by the Pope via the route one could have expected a Christian pastor to take in leading his flock, that is to say, by means of the idea of Jesus as offering the cure for the pandemic through supernatural divine interventions that would make scientifically based policies of social distancing and health care superfluous or less effective than the divine cure. This idea, after all, was one of the very reasons that made the policies of social distancing, which partly led to the closing of physical church buildings, so controversial in the predominantly Catholic region of Latin America, and not least in Brazil. Religious leaders in Latin America met the COVID-19 health and social crisis with various responses, but one influential type of response emphasized the importance of keeping the churches open for people to gather in God’s name so that they could mobilize spiritually against the evil behind the pandemic.9 This idea of a spiritual solution to disease, including the effects of COVID-19, is not inherently connected to religiously based scientific negationism in Latin American Christianity, although it can be coupled with it.10 Pope Francis, by way of contrast, provides room for the legitimate role of science for policy-making and for the self-understanding of the church. What is more, the Pope makes the practice of social distancing into a moral duty. He also prepares the ground for the worldwide cooperation of national Catholic churches with local authorities on appropriate measures and interpretations of religious freedom in light of the pandemic. His reception of the miracle story in Mark 4:35–41 can be said to constitute a key moment in this special period of Pope Francis’ pontificate.

Conclusion The overall tendency in Pope Francis’ theology, as it comes to expression in his speeches, is to spiritualize and decontextualize Jesus’ words and acts as we encounter them in the gospels. In the reception of the gospels that takes place in the Pope’s most authoritative writings, Jesus is consistently interpreted in a non-historical manner, with only a few exceptions. What is more, Pope Francis mostly also dispenses with the literary depiction of

130  The non-historical Jesus of Pope Francis’ political theology Jesus’ life, and his theology relies to great extent on isolated sayings of Jesus. In other words, the non-historical in the reception of the Jesus figure in the Pope’s discourse has two forms or dimensions. First, the Pope does not read history, in the modern historical sense of the words, into these gospel texts. Second, he seldom draws out the greater narrative framework or story of Jesus when he reads the gospels. Like any interpreter, the Pope reads meaning both into the biblical texts and out of them. The interpretative process can hardly be reduced to either an exegesis of the texts or an eisegesis of them. This means that Pope Francis interprets the four gospels in a non-­historical manner, in contrast to what Dei Verbum at the Second Vatican Council allowed for and much of Latin American theology called for. When considered as a reader of Latin American postconciliar theology, Pope Francis is a reader who assumes many aspects of that tradition and leaves out others. It is interesting that the productive intersection between historical Jesus scholarship (primarily the second quest) and Latin American theology has not left traces on Pope Francis’ teachings. Nevertheless, his non-historical Jesus is not an apolitical figure in Pope Francis’ interpretations, nor can he be reduced to the abstract or absolute Christ that Jon Sobrino considered as oppressive and that he deemed the historical Jesus to be a safeguard against. There are political aspects and implications of the Pope’s interpretations of gospel passages, as seen in his 2013 exhortation and his encyclicals from 2015 and 2020. This is also illustrated by his homily on the story about Jesus stilling the storm, which the Pope interprets in light of the COVID-19 pandemic in March  2020. The Pope brings certain meanings to the fore, while there are other potential meanings of the same text that are not actualized or defended in the historic homily. Although his interpretation of the story does not tell citizens and politicians exactly how to act in their situation, his justification of social distancing and emphasis on hospitals rather than on the churches as the place where the Spirit’s presence is most clearly felt has obviously political consequences. Although his message is not directly political, the Brazilian context for the handling of the pandemic reminds one that what he says functions indirectly as an intervention in a sphere of health management that is utterly political.

Notes 1 Or, as Juan Luis Segundo maintains: “Even the non-Christian historical witnesses of the time insist on one point, which seems to be beyond doubt: Jesus of Nazareth died, after having been condemned by the Roman authorities, as a political agitator” (Segundo 1985, 75). 2 Reception theory presupposes that texts to some extent exert power over their readers and therefore focuses on the effect of the text on the reader without positing an original meaning of the text. Scholars of biblical reception are therefore

The non-historical Jesus of Pope Francis’ political theology  131 hesitant to posit an original historical meaning of a text, since they reject the notion of a univocal original historical meaning of a text. In the words of Ian Boxall, “Claims of multivalency sit uneasily alongside the historical-critical belief that the foundational meaning of a text is its original meaning” (Boxall 2013, 179). 3 It should be noted, however, that there are some passages from the magisterium under Pope Francis that deal explicitly with biblical interpretation, such as no. 147–148 in Evangelii Gaudium. 4 This reliance on the liberating message of the written biblical text that can be redeemed through the appropriate interpretation is one of the cornerstones of Latin American liberation hermeneutics that has been criticized by postcolonial theorists. “[W]hat is so striking about liberation hermeneutics is its textualism. It emphasizes the written word. .  .  . The hermeneutical suspicion with which ideological interpretation of the text is viewed, is not accorded to the Bible” (Sugirtharajah 2002, 114). 5 Stålsett also discusses Sobrino in relation to the third quest and its main protagonists, John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, and John P. Meier. Meier has also expressed criticism of Sobrino’s historical Jesus (Stålsett 1997, 98). 6 Several of the somewhat sectarian statements of Benedict XVI (as cardinal) that pointed in the direction of envisioning the future Catholic church as a small community, united in a higher degree of doctrinal purity and battling against the evil of societies, can be found in Ratzinger (1997). 7 In a book co-written with Austin Ivereigh, there is another rare example of the Pope’s historical reconstruction of Jesus and his context. Here too, the historical reconstruction is put forward without any scholarly sources. Nor does the Pope provide any biblical or primary source for his historical claim: “Jesus had to reject the mindset of the religious elites of his day, who had taken ownership of law and tradition” (Francis and Ivereigh 2020, 122–23). 8 The homily is referred to in scholarly works on religion and the pandemic in Brazil as particularly important (Almeida and Guerreiro 2020). 9 This type of religious response characterized Evangelical more than Catholic leaders in Brazil, although Catholic leaders did not make a univocal response to the pandemic, as many also expressed support for Bolsonaro’s handling of the health crisis. “Brazilian religious leaderships aligned with the bolsonarismo contributed to the political and informational crisis that has characterized the government’s management of the pandemic. Besides that, they advocated the importance of the churches because their services are essential and fought the pandemic through spiritual actions, rather than as support for pandemic management actions” (Bandeira and Carranza 2020, 190). 10 Although scientific negationism is easier to detect among Brazilian Evangelicals, its influence cannot be limited to this religious group, since the borders between various types of Protestantism and Catholicism are often porous and the religious mobility is high (Kibuuka 2020).

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Conclusion

There is a theology behind the words and actions of Pope Francis. This theology has political implications for the governing of material and immaterial resources in church and society. In other words, there is a political theology of Pope Francis that seeks to distribute these resources and govern societies in specific ways. Under Pope Francis’ governance of the Catholic church we have seen a broader profile of what the public perceives as Catholic concerns. Through a wider accentuation of the established theology of the magisterium the strong focus on sexual politics or biopolitics (contraception, abortion, rights of sexual minorities) has been complemented by, and sometimes supplanted by, social issues (migration, poverty, economic inequality). As pointed to, Pope Francis has not been willing to enter into dialogue with feminist theology or recent gender theory. Nevertheless, gender is an inseparable aspect of Pope Francis’ political theology. The way Pope Francis seeks to regulate gender roles within the church and disseminates his view on gender and sex in the wider society is not only theological but also deeply political. Pope Francis does not see gender as something partly constructed, but as naturally given. It has its origin in a sexuality given by nature and is, inherently and wholly, either male or female. While confirming the position of the church on topics related to sexual politics, the political theology of Pope Francis has incorporated theological positions that are new to the global leader of the Catholic church. Pope Francis has developed the ecological dimensions to this political theology in significant ways, not least by explicitly acknowledging the scientific theses of climate change caused by human activity as valid and through connecting the deterioration of the natural environment to poverty and social exclusion. The Argentinian has also postulated a link between this ecological destruction and social exclusion on the one hand and the idolatry of money on the other. This link has been made possible by Pope Francis’ recognition of the theological critique of unregulated market economy formulated by Latin American liberation theologians as a form of a biblical critique of the idolatry of money. DOI: 10.4324/9781003349099-7

Conclusion  135 This theological criticism of the absolute rule of the logic of the free market also exemplifies how Pope Francis’ political theology is of a denunciative rather than affirmative nature. The pope denounces unregulated laissez-faire economy in the name of the poor without pointing to positive alternatives. Similarly, on the topic of migration the pope denounces the policies and the attitudes behind closed borders for migrants, but he refrains from suggesting concrete new policies on how to solve the challenges that arise from migration. He sharply condemns what he sees as structural injustice. Meanwhile, there are few political initiatives for justice that the pope finds worthy of his explicit support and religious legitimacy. In general, the pope’s theological rhetoric is denunciative of the economic and political status quo without any embrace of real alternatives. Pope Francis draws the world’s attention to the ethical responsibility for the poor and most vulnerable, without providing political solutions to the alleviation of their suffering or the eradication of their poverty. His political theology signals a respect for the relative autonomy of political decision-making. Pope Francis’ criticism of populism is another example of this denunciative tone in his political theology. On the very same day that Donald Trump was inaugurated as the president of the United States, the primary authority of the global Catholic church was interviewed in El Pais. As if he wished to warn against contemporary forms of populism, the Pope described Adolf Hitler’s takeover of Germany in 1933 as a culmination of populism and said that Nazism was “the most typical example” of the European sort of populism. A condemnation of populism in a European context could hardly be formulated in starker terms than this. This is one example of Pope Francis’ pejorative use of the term “populism”. But as shown here, Pope Francis’ criticism of populism does not derive from a scholarly understanding and debate on this term and the significant political phenomenon it seeks to describe. In his own imagination of the people as a homogenous subject that is a bearer of moral virtues Pope Francis displays the affinities between the political logic of contemporary populisms and his own political theology. There are continuities as well as discontinuities in the manner Pope Francis constructs his political theology on a fundamental level when compared to his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI. Pope Francis’ approach to canonical texts in Christianity and his theological method is of great importance for understanding the first Latin American pontificate, for instance for how Francis in contrast to Benedict XVI concludes on global climate change. On a formal level, Francis follows Benedict XVI’s textual strategy closely for how to construct a social encyclical that partly is to define his papacy, such as Laudato Si has done. Both Popes follow the old pattern of reserving references to the Bible in the main text and references to sources outside the Bible in the endnotes – as if the Bible was their primary inspiration. This primacy is, however, often rather formal than actual when it comes to how the popes argue theologically. Like Benedict XVI, Francis is also heavily centred on the discourse of his predecessors in the encyclical, as if to legitimize their

136  Conclusion own theology in the writings of these predecessors. Furthermore, Francis refers to the same extent to Vatican II texts as Benedict XVI, particularly on Gaudium et spes from Vatican II. The similarities on a formal level in their construction of their political theologies, however, appear to mask some of the more radical shifts that take place in Francis’ political theology in relation to Benedict XVI. When Francis reformulates the social doctrine of the church in Laudato Si, he does so within a wider theological horizon than Benedict XVI does in Caritas in Veritate, engaging with a higher number of theological voices from late Antiquity, the medieval period, and modernity. Laudato Si is also more ecumenical than Caritas in Veritate in that it quotes several non-­ Catholics. Even more significantly, there is a clear break with Pope Benedict XVI’s deductive reasoning in Francis. This shift alters the way biblical ideas used in the theological argumentation, but not least it provides more room for observations of the state of the world (including scientific observations) in Francis’ theology. By replacing Benedict XVI’s deductive approach with a more inductive one, Francis makes these observations condition more of the theological conclusions than what is the case in Benedict XVI’s theological reasoning. Scientific findings from natural sciences are given more argumentative weight. In sum, there are interesting shifts not only in the content of Pope Francis’ political theology compared to his predecessor but also in its form and methodology. The first Latin American Pope in history was soon turned into an icon of great change within Western media after the election of him in 2013. As Pope Francis, Jorge Mario Bergoglio has been hailed as a sort of a radical reformer and as a revolutionary figure by journalists and even some researchers since his ascendency to papal power in 2013. Pope Francis has surely changed the Catholic church through his style and way of leading the institution through his period of governance since 2013. For instance, Pope Francis has had a huge impact on the church through replacing persons in powerful positions in the church. But picking individuals for important tasks, accentuating a broader social agenda, or even moving the theology of the magisterium in some significant new directions do not make Francis into a reformer of the structures of the church. After nearly a decade-long pontificate, Pope Francis stands out as a decisive governor that points out clear directions for the church. Whether Pope Francis is also a reformer of the church remains a matter of debate. Pope Francis is sometimes compared to Pope John XXIII, on the basis of the warm and human charisma and pastoral orientation of the two men. With time it will become clear which of them proved the more influential in the history of the Catholic church. The decision of Pope John XXIII to convoke a council and announce that it would be a council of aggiornamento, rather than condemnation in the typical anti-modernist fashion of the past, proved to be historical. But Pope John XXIII did not write the drafts, nor

Conclusion  137 did he control the votes of radical documents of Vatican II. Moreover, if one were to look for a revolution in the Catholic papacy, perhaps one should look to Pope Benedict XVI rather than Pope Francis. It may be the case that no single action taken by Pope Francis so far can be said to surpass the radicalism of Pope Benedict XVI’s decision to abdicate as pope in 2013 – a decision with historical consequences that we have yet to realize.

Index

abortion 2 – 3, 9, 74, 89, 97, 134 alienation 51, 113 – 14 Allende, Salvador 49 Alves, Rubem 61 Ambrogetti, Francesca 54 Angelelli, Enrique 16, 57 anthropocentrism 29, 102 anticapitalism 58, 61 antimodernism 103 Aparecida, conference 30, 51 – 2, 60, 119 Aquinas, Thomas 27, 31 – 2, 93 Argentina, recent history of 6 – 9, 45 – 6, 50, 78 – 80, 97 armed struggle 42, 45, 62 Arns, Paul Evaristo 62 Arrupe, Pedro 80 Assmann, Aleida 22 Assmann, Hugo 48, 63 atheism 59 Augustine 32 Australia 33 Azcuy, Virginia Raquel 42 – 3 Bartholomew, Patriarch 35 base communities 17, 41, 46, 51, 61, 111 Basil, the Great 32 Beauvoir, Simone de 93 – 6, 98 Becquart, Nathalie 92, 97 Belgium 109 Benedict XVI, Pope 2, 11, 22 – 3, 50 – 1, 55, 92; and biblical hermeneutics 110, 128; comparison with Pope Francis 2, 25 – 35, 59, 70, 104, 115, 135 – 7; consequences of abdication 11 Bible, the 22 – 4, 29, 32, 95, 107 – 11, 135

biblical criticism 23, 109 – 11 biology 95, 101 – 2 Boff, Leonardo 32, 39, 48, 52, 55, 59 – 60, 62, 112 – 13, 122 Bolivia 33, 63 Bolsonaro, Jair 2, 3, 70, 100 – 1, 131 Bonaventure 32 Borg, Marcus 131 Bornkamm, Günther 112, 114 Børresen, Kari Elisabeth 98, 102 Boxall, Ian 131 Brazil 2, 17, 41, 57, 61, 92, 100, 123, 131 Brighenti, Agenor 62, 116 Brockmann, Miguel d’Escoto 56 Brubaker, Rogers 89 Bultmann, Rudolf 112 Butler, Judith 103 Câmara, Dom Helder 55, 57 canonical commentary 26 – 7, 35 canonicity 23 – 35 capitalism 12, 47 – 50, 58 – 60, 64, 78, 81 Cardenal, Ernesto 52, 56 Casaldáliga, Pedro 55 celibacy 35 centralization of the church 26, 33 Chardin, Theilard de 32 charisma 1, 15, 82, 89, 136 Chávez, Hugo 41, 51, 73 Chile 9, 16, 49 christology 107, 112 – 13, 116 clericalism 69, 85, 99 climate change 2, 3, 28, 31, 134 – 5 Coelho, Allan da Silva 58, 59 college of cardinals 11, 53, 55, 74 collegiality, episcopal 14, 33, 108 Colombia 36, 100

Index  139 communism 40, 47 – 8, 60 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith 39, 45, 46, 55, 112, 115 constitution, of Argentina 8 coronavirus 123, 127 Costa Rica 8, 62 COVID-19 122, 124, 129 creation 29, 93, 121 Crossan, John Dominic 131 Cuda, Emilce 61 Cupich, Blase 89 Dahl, Nils Astrup 114 decentralization of the church 26 democracy 3, 5, 7, 15 – 16, 72, 74, 77 – 8, 81, 88 demonization 14, 70 – 1, 85 – 6 diaconate, for women 25, 98 – 9 Dirty War, in Argentina 7, 42, 45 Dominguez, Lidio 43, 44, 62 Dri, Ruben 40 Dupuis, Jacques 112 ecology 28, 31 – 2, 35, 48, 59 – 60 economy 48, 58, 59, 64 ecumenism 79 encyclical, authority of 27 Episcopal Commission for Pastoral Practice (COEPAL) 42 episcopal conferences 33, 111 Espinal, Luis 63 ethnicity 70, 73 Faggioli, Massimo 4, 69, 92, 108, 116 family 10, 83, 92, 101 feminism 60, 96, 103 financial crisis, of 2008 28, 58 France 93, 108, 109 Frondizi, Arturo 79 Gaillardetz, Richard R. 34 Galli, Carlos María 55, 69 Gebara, Ivone 60, 95, 102 gender 2, 6, 13, 15, 62, 72, 92 – 104, 134 gender essentialism 94 – 7 gender ideology 93, 100 – 3 Georgia 101 Gera, Lucio 42, 43, 62 Germany 76, 109, 135 globalization 3, 48, 83 – 4 Graff, Agnieszka 100 Green O.P., Barbara 96

Guardini, Romano 32 Guevara, Ernesto “Che” 50 Gutiérrez, Gustavo 39, 48 – 51, 55, 58, 60 Haight, Roger 112 Hebblewaithe, Peter 45, 47 heresy 45 Hillel, the Elder 121 Hinkelammert, Franz 48 humanism 94 Hummes, Claudio 53 ideology 46 – 7, 53 – 5, 58, 80, 93, 112 idolatry 48, 58 – 9, 114 incarnation 52, 98 individualism 50, 81, 83 – 4 interreligious dialogue 79 Iraq 123 Iron Guard 80 Islam 4, 24, 73 Ivereigh, Austen 88, 131 Jalics, Francisco 12, 47 Jeremias, Joachim 112 Jesuit Society 7, 47, 60, 80 Jesus, the historical 15, 112 – 16, 130 John of the Cross 32 John XXIII, Pope 28, 36, 63, 92, 136 John Paul II, Pope 26, 31, 33, 39, 41, 43 – 5, 53, 56, 58, 64, 115 Judaism 24, 121 Juventud Peronista 80 Kaltwasser, Cristóbal Rovira 88 Käsemann, Ernst 114 Laclau, Ernesto 87 Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) 92 Lecour, Guzmán Carriquiry 53 – 4 Leo XII, Pope 4 LGBT rights in Latin America 100 liberalism 58, 78 – 9 liberation theology 24, 39 – 64, 73, 107 – 22 Luther, Martin 27 Maduro, Nicolás 4 Malik-el-Kamil, Sultan 3 Mallimaci, Fortunato 93 Martyr, Justin 32 martyrs 56, 61

140 Index Marxism 40, 44 – 5, 49, 51, 54 – 5, 57 – 8, 60, 81 Marzano, Marco 11, 93 mediatization 26 Medellín, conference 14, 33, 36, 41, 44, 49, 51, 62, 111 Meier, John P. 131 Mexico 16, 43, 47, 53, 85 migration 2, 70, 86, 134 Moi, Toril 93 – 4 Montoneros guerrilla 46, 80 Morales, Evo 63 Movement of Priests for the Third World 6, 42, 62 Mudde, Cas 88 Müller, Gerhard Ludwig 39, 50, 55, 63 Müller, Jan-Werner 88 nationalism 72, 78 natural sciences 102, 136 Nazism 76 – 7 neoliberalism 48, 59 Neumayr, George 70 Nicaragua 56 Obama administration 4 O’Malley, John 107, 109 Orio, Yorlando 12, 47, 62 orthodoxy 39, 45, 50 – 1, 55, 109 – 10 Paul VI, Pope 25 Pelikan, Jaroslav 24, 28 Pence, Mike 89 Pentecostalism 32 Perón, Eva 79 Perón, Júan 79 – 81 Peronism 6, 69 – 70, 77 – 8 Peru 55 Pilate, Pontius 107 Pironio, Eduardo 42 Pius XII, Pope 108 – 9 Philippines, the 33, 101 Poland 101 Politi, Marco 2 political theology 4 – 6 Pontifical Biblical Commission 109 Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace 31 popular culture 23 populism 41, 69 – 87, 135 populist theory 71 – 3 postcolonial biblical criticism 131

poverty 46, 50, 60, 112 – 14, 119 – 20, 134 priestly ordination of women 92, 97 – 8, 103 Puebla, conference 30, 43 – 4, 46, 49, 51, 53, 55 Protestantism 7 – 8, 24, 32 Quarracino, Antonio 7 – 8 Ratzinger, Joseph 57, 63, 102, 109, 131 reception: of biblical texts 22 – 35, 107 – 30; of papal texts 27 – 35 redactional criticism 113 religion, definitions of 4 Reno, R. R. 69 revolution: on Cuba 50; in Nicaragua 50 Richard, Pablo 113 Romero, Óscar 14, 39, 52, 56 – 7, 60 – 1 Rourke, Thomas R. 62, 63 Rubin, Sergio 54 Sabato, Ernesto 7 Salvador University (USAL) 80 same-sex marriage, in Argentina 8, 97, 101 Santa Ana, Julio de 48 Santo Domingo, conference 36, 51 – 2, 63 Scannone, Juan Carlos 32, 42, 43, 55, 59 scientific negationism 129 second quest of the historical Jesus 112 – 14, 130 Second Vatican Council 7, 10, 24, 34, 41, 63, 92, 103 – 4, 107 – 9, 127 – 8, 130, 136 – 7 secularization, of Argentina 6 – 8, 79 Segundo, Juan Luis 43, 112 – 13, 121, 130 sexuality 62, 92, 100 – 3 Skorka, Abraham 79, 95 – 6 Smith, Wilfred Cantwell 25 – 6 Sobrino, Jon 39, 56, 59, 61 – 2, 107, 112 – 16, 119 – 21 social doctrine, of the Catholic church 28, 57 – 9, 80 – 1, 136 socialism 49, 50, 57, 64 soteriology 45 Soviet Union 62 Spadaro, Antonio 3 Spinoza, Baruch 23 Stålsett, Sturla 114 – 15, 131

Index  141 Stordalen, Terje 23 structural sin 46 Sung, Jung Mo 48 synod, of bishops 25 Tello, Rafael 42 – 3, 62 theocracy 74 theodicy 126 theology of the people 42, 55, 57, 80 Therese of Lisieux 32 Tobin, Joseph 89 torres, camilo 50 totalitarianism 76 tradition, definition of 22 Trigo, Pedro 52 Trujillo, López 46 Trump, Donald 2, 70, 76, 85 – 6, 89, 135 Tutu, Archbishop Desmond 7 Twitter 28

United States, the 2, 4, 24, 76, 85 – 6, 89, 135 vaccine 123 Vance-Tremblath, Sally 100 Viganò, Archbishop Carlo Maria 11 Vincent, of Lérins 32 Vulgate translation 27 Weyland, Kurt 88 White, Lynn 29 Wolton, Dominique 95 Workers’ Party, of Brazil 41, 61 World Youth Day 92 xenophobia 70, 82 Zanatta, Loris 69 – 70, 72, 78, 81 Zúquete, Jose Pedro 73