The disruptor Pope
A sanctuary Church in a turbulent world
For Burke, this is not a welcoming Church, a Church for the wounded and sinners, but a club of the save
In a forthcoming biography of the Pope, one of Canada’s leading Catholic writers portrays him as both a disruptor and a healer and unifier.
When he gave his homily on Corpus Christi Sunday in June 2023, Fr Bill Burke wanted it to be an invitation to his parishioners to take the forthcoming first session of the Synod on Synodality to heart. This is our Church, after all.
The pastor of St Marguerite Bourgeoys parish in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, has long been engaged in both administrative and pastoral ministry. A former director of the National Liturgy Office of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, fully bilingual (English and French), and with a long history of service to the Mi’kmaq, Burke is every inch a “Francis priest”. That was in sharp evidence when he gave his Corpus Christi sermon.
He spoke of travelling to Florida some 15 years ago with three Toronto priest-friends on what was purportedly a golf holiday. Given his embarrassing skills as a golfer, he knew that his culinary gifts were really the drawing card for his inclusion. At one point, they all trudged off to Sunday Mass in a church that was packed with thousands of worshippers. The homily did little for Burke, with its conservative political coloration, but the pastor’s insistence that only Catholics in a state of grace were to receive Communion, and then listing those who were to be excluded, really provoked him: the divorced, those living together without benefit of the Sacrament of Matrimony, those who are gay, those not opposed to abortion, those who have not gone to confession at least once in the past year.
For Burke, this is not a welcoming Church, a Church for the wounded and sinners, but a club of the saved, the elect, and in that, a desecration of authentic Catholic thinking. This was a Church that excluded.
Just recently, Burke preached to his congregation, he was told a story by a friend from Alberta that provides a striking contrast in ecclesiologies with the Florida experience. The friend often babysits her grandniece; when this happens on a weekend, she and her husband will bring the child to Mass with them. On one occasion, when the dad came to collect his daughter, she said she wanted to go to Mass first. She then proceeded to ask him to accompany them, and although at first he demurred, he finally agreed. At Communion, she took her father’s hand and asked him to join her; once again, he reluctantly conceded. When he went up to the priest to receive Communion, he said, sotto voce: “Father, I’ll be fine with whatever you decide to do, but I need to be honest with you. It has been over 20 years since I have been at Mass.” The priest held up the host and placed it in the palm of the man’s hand, smiled, and said, “Welcome home.”
This is the Church that is the big tent, the field hospital, the sanctuary in a turbulent world. This is Francis’ Church.
Although Burke’s natural instincts are in sympathy with Bergoglio’s, and although their pastoral sensibilities mesh, neither is operating in a spiritual vacuum. They are both theological descendants of the Second Vatican Council, spiritual sons of Roncalli.
For Francis, this has special significance, because, like John XXIII, he is Peter and has primary responsibility for safeguarding the tradition and unity of the Church. It’s his job, after all. He is acutely mindful of this divine charge, and his papacy, regularly denounced by his detractors as a catastrophic usurpation of the Church’s integrity, bears testimony to his overriding conviction that the Church’s theology must be relational rather than disembodied, its mode of enquiry and expression a posteriori (inductive) rather than a priori (deductive).
Emilce Cuda, an Argentine theologian appointed by Francis as secretary of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, insists that Francis’ pastoral theology is not pastoral theology as it is generally framed in North America, where “pastoral” is an adjective rather than a verb, a picture rather than a place.
“For Francis to be ‘pastoral’ is to be with the people in their place,” she told me in June last year in her office in Rome. “This is important to understand, because some people in the Church – important theologians – think ‘theological’. What they fail to understand is that for those of us outside the Eurocentric orbit, for those on the peripheries, doing theology using philosophy as the mediation, or framework/structure for mediating theological reflection and insight, is no longer viable. Theology is mediated by the lived wisdom of the people, and unlike liberation theology, with its emphasis on a preferential option for the poor, Francis prefers a preferential option with the poor. Theologians, the current doctors or teachers of the Church, the professors on the balcony or loggia creating their categories of understanding, must come down and live the realities of the poor and marginalised … The wisdom of God is not the exclusive preserve of those like you and me who went to university and obtained PhDs. No, no, no. It is not like that at all. It is not the experts acting in isolation but the entire People of God thinking and acting together that is the wisdom of God.”
The clearest formal or official statement of this way of doing theology was published immediately after the first session of the Synod ended last October. It leaves no one in any doubt as to the way theology should be exercised in the contemporary world. On 1 November 2023 Francis issued his apostolic letter Ad theologiam promovendam (“Promoting theology”), and the latest paradigm shift entered Catholic consciousness.
It was issued in part as the Pope’s approval of the new statutes drawn up for the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Theology, although it reflects current theological thinking in that it incorporates much of the methodological approach of the social sciences, and further develops Francis’ perspective that theology must not remain secure in its intellectual citadel but be open to the world at the grassroots level.
Francis categorically states that “to promote theology in the future, we cannot limit ourselves to abstractly reproposing formulas and schemes from the past … [for] God has revealed himself as history, not as a compendium of abstract truths.”
The document being a crystallisation of much of his thinking around the role of theology, Francis is not shy in declaring that the science of theology is “called to a turning point, to a paradigm shift, to a ‘courageous cultural revolution’”.
Called, in fact, to become a “fundamentally contextual theology”, by which he means a theology that must be “capable of reading and interpreting the Gospel in the conditions in which men and women live daily, in different geographical, social and cultural environments … theology cannot but take place in a culture of dialogue and encounter between different traditions and knowledge, between religions, openly confronting all, believers and non-believers”.
In addition, invoking the insight of the Italian thinker Antonio Rosmini, who argued that all knowledge is “oriented towards the Idea of Wisdom”, Francis, with his fondness for emblematic symbols like the polyhedron, the pyramid and the balancing dance of the Contraries or human and ecclesial tensions, is attracted to the “Idea of Wisdom [holding] Truth and Charity together internally in a ‘solid circle’, so that it is impossible to know the truth without practising charity”.
This papal summons to get theologians on to the streets, to be pioneers in effecting a cultural revolution, is not a diminishment of intellectual rigour or a departure from ecclesial connectedness but rather a clarion call for meaningful and credible witness. Theology in the marketplace need not mean that theology in the academy is to be abandoned. Rather, by being aware of Bernard Lonergan’s shift of consciousness from a “classicist to historicist” model, Francis is committed to an enlivening theological enterprise rooted in the reality of the people, grounded in experience, not ideology, a science that is a way of life open to an endlessly unfolding culture of encounter.
Traditionalist theologians may find Ad theologiam promovendam a sad consolidation of the Pope’s woolly thinking, best exemplified by the commentary of Capuchin friar Thomas Weinandy, who told the US news website The Pillar that he saw it as a “typical Pope Francis document – a great deal of high-sounding words that are very ambiguous. It is mostly bells and whistles … There can be no authentic paradigm shift without being faithful to upholding and promoting what the Church has authentically taught through the centuries.”
But the disruptor Jesuit Pope has done precisely that: inaugurate a paradigm shift by being faithful to the organic tradition. He has disrupted the established pattern of doing things as the premier occupant of the Vatican; he has disrupted the protocols that are the mainstay of institutional life on the Tiber; he has disrupted the way we see the Church working in the world; he has disrupted the pattern of church priorities by centring the believing community on and with the poor; he has disrupted the settled questions by introducing a new perspective, replacing a magisterial with a synodal way of being Church.
And he has managed to hold to the tradition he has sworn to protect as Peter by refusing to alter church teaching either by papal fiat or parliamentary consensus; by refusing to disregard forms of devotion or what sociologists now call popular religiosity; by refusing to dismiss the work of his predecessors and instead building on their scaffolding.
What the disruptor Pope has disrupted is our spiritual and intellectual complacency, our foreclosure through fear of fresh ways of seeing the Gospel as the leaven of society, our ahistorical sense of the Church that shields us from the reforming gusts of the Spirit.
The New Zealand Catholic theologian Christopher Longhurst, in reviewing Ad theologiam promovendam for La Croix, writes that Francis’ point that theology “cannot but take place in a culture of dialogue” implicitly recognises that the “central presupposition of a theology of dialogue is that anyone can understand what is believed about God more deeply when they open themselves to the truth statements of all religions”.
When Francis spoke to the joint session of Congress in Washington DC in September 2015, he celebrated four American moral prophets: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr, Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton. In his life as Pope, Bergoglio has come by a different route to share the comprehensive embrace of a culture of dialogue articulated by Merton in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander: “The more I am able to affirm others, to say ‘Yes’ to them in myself, by discovering them in myself and myself in them, the more real I am. I am fully real if my own heart says ‘Yes’ to everyone. I will be a better Catholic, not if I can refute every shade of Protestantism, but if I can affirm the truth in it and still go further. So, too, with the Muslims, the Hindus, the Buddhists, etc. This does not mean syncretism, indifferentism, the vapid and careless friendliness that accepts everything by thinking nothing … If I affirm myself by denying all that is Muslim, Jewish, Protestant, Hindu, Buddhist, etc., in the end I will find that there is not much left for me to affirm as a Catholic and certainly no breath of the Spirit with which to affirm it.”
In his struggle to contain “all divided worlds”, Merton realised that he needed to evolve even further beyond healing the rifts in Christianity and to affirm and not refute the truth in Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism. And this is precisely what Pope Francis has done in his papacy, the fruit of his culture of genuine encounter and dialogue.
The Jesuit disruptor, the pontifex maximus, is a bridge to a greater and encompassing unity.
Extracted from The Jesuit Disruptor: A Personal Portrait of Pope Francis by Michael W. Higgins, forthcoming in October from House of Anansi Press at £15.99 (Tablet price £14.39).
Michael W. Higgins is president and vice chancellor emeritus, St Jerome’s University in the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. His books include Heretic Blood: The Spiritual Geography of Thomas Merton. He lives with his wife Krystyna in Guelph, Ontario.
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