“Don’t you just love our pope?”
The middle-aged Nashville woman making that joyous exclamation to me, a Jesuit priest, was not Roman Catholic but, rather, a member of a local Church of Christ. We were exchanging pleasantries before my presenting on a panel about Pope Francis during an annual Churches of Christ theological conference at Lipscomb University last year.
The scenario would have been unimaginable just a generation ago. This I knew well, due to a Nashville-native octogenarian in one of the parishes I occasionally serve repeatedly recounting to me the anti-Catholic bigotry pervading the Middle Tennessee of his earlier years. The elderly man invokes bitter memories of the Ku Klux Klan, Church of Christ and Vanderbilt University, the institution where I currently occupy an endowed chair. The sharp contrast between his triumphalist tone (“Now look at us in government, universities, etc. We showed them!”) and the hopeful, ecumenical openness of the lady I briefly met at the conference anecdotally points to the complex religious populous Pope Francis greets in his first U.S. visit.
The appeal of Pope Francis to a wide range of Christians, as well as many other people of good will, lies in the smiling face and unflagging compassion for the suffering he personally offers and pastorally encourages in us all. Such a consistent, genuine personification of the Gospel message has the populist appeal I witnessed in the Protestant lady at Lipscomb. On the other hand, now more than two years into his papacy, Francis’s pronouncements and publications have elicited a mixed response among an ideologically divided American Catholicism, including the clergy.
In the very first months of his pontificate Francis expressed his desire that Catholic bishops and priests shift their focus away from the “culture war” issues of sexual morality, abortion and same-sex marriage and toward listening to people in their struggles and needs, to “smelling of the sheep” (pastor is Latin for shepherd). It was an appeal to abandon an over-against posture toward the dominant culture — not unlike that of the elderly Catholic gentleman I mentioned — in favor of adopting a fundamental practice of dialogue.
The listening essential to genuine dialogue does not come at the cost of deeply-held principles. It does, however, entail openness to having those principles challenged in the real-world contexts of the given times so as to rethink how the essentials can be made vital going forward. The priority is service, service singularly to a fragile humanity and planet, and expressly not to any ideology. Such was the main point of the pope’s homily during a large public mass in Cuba’s capital on Sunday. Analysts heard in that message a rebuke of Castro’s communism, but the open-ended character of Francis’s words invite their applicability to the ideology of clericalism that plagues the Catholic Church. Francis has not been reticent to condemn clericalism explicitly during his remarks on numerous occasions in Rome.
Many people find Francis’ openness attractive. In that openness he functions as a powerful symbol of humanity’s best desires for our selves and societies. And in that openness he proves attractive to the younger generations in the United States, including the many Catholics who have dropped out of the church.
Surely the societal conditions the pope criticizes in his recent social-justice encyclical (“On Care for Our Common Home”) contribute to deterioration in younger people’s commitments to social institutions. But another major factor is the way American Catholic bishops and, increasingly, younger clergy in their preaching, posture, and policies have convinced large portions of their own people that there is no place for them in a closed-off, defensive church alarmed over threats to its religious freedom. The problem with that rhetoric is the extent to which so many U.S. Catholics find themselves outside the lines the bishops and priests keep drawing in what the laity know from personal, often painful experience to be complicated shifting sands. People feel scolded, condemned and shamed — and this pope knows it.
But if shame is corrosive to human well being, so is inordinate pride. That the Bishop of Rome is about to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress may tempt some Catholics, both clergy and laity, to gloat in triumph over anti-Catholic bigotry that has largely (albeit not completely) waned in American society. Discrimination today, in fact, often comes between and among Catholics themselves, along racial, ethnic, economic and generational lines. As important a symbol to Catholics — perhaps especially the clergy — will be this pope’s stepping down from the dais of the U.S. Congress to eat lunch with the poor and homeless in an inner-city Washington parish.
Bruce T. Morrill, S.J., is the Edward A. Malloy Professor of Catholic Studies at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
