In his controversial conversation with Portuguese Jesuits on the World Youth Day sidelines, the pope attacked the supposed backwardness (indietrismo) of the American hierarchy and laity: “The view of Church doctrine as monolithic is erroneous.” Because in “a climate of closure. . . . [y]ou can lose the true tradition and turn to ideologies for support. In other words, ideology replaces faith, membership of a sector of the Church replaces membership of the Church.” He added, “Those American groups you talk about, so closed, are isolating themselves. Instead of living by doctrine, by the true doctrine that always develops and bears fruit, they live by ideologies. When you abandon doctrine in life to replace it with an ideology, you have lost, you have lost as in war.”[1]
During the press conference on the September 4 return flight from Mongolia, Pope Francis returned to this doctrine vs. ideology dichotomy. Asked to address the irritation caused by his praise of the Russian autocrats Peter the Great and Catherine II, the pope stated:
There are imperialisms that want to impose their ideology. I’ll stop here: when culture is distilled and turned into ideology, it’s poison. Culture is used, but distilled into ideology. We must distinguish the culture of a people from the ideologies that then appear from some philosopher, some politician of that people. And I say this for everyone, also for the Church.
Within the Church there are often ideologies, which separate the Church from the life that comes from the root and goes upwards. They separate the Church from the influence of the Holy Spirit.
An ideology is incapable of incarnation; it is only an idea. But when ideology gathers strength and becomes politics, it usually becomes a dictatorship, right? It becomes an incapacity to dialogue, to move forward with cultures. And imperialisms do this. Imperialism always consolidates starting from an ideology.
In the Church too we must distinguish doctrine from ideology: true doctrine is never ideological, never. It is rooted in God’s holy faithful people. Instead, ideology is detached from reality, detached from the people . . .[2]
Asked later how to avoid polarization in the next Synod, Pope Francis replied, “There is no place for ideology in the Synod. . . . The Synod is about dialogue: among the baptized, among members of the Church, on the life of the Church, on dialogue with the world, on the problems that affect humanity today.”
What seems to emerge from this profuse and confusing language is that true culture and true Faith (in other words, true doctrine) are an emanation of the soul of the people. Therefore, culture and doctrine are distorted when they become disconnected from people’s lives through intellectual distillation. That refining turns them into the spiritual baggage of a minority that lives cloistered in ivory towers and tries to impose its aseptic and rigid convictions on the people imperialistically.
A Vida Nueva journalist then referred to the foreword for The Synodal Process Is a Pandora’s Box (which I co-authored), wherein Cardinal Raymond Burke warned that calamities would emerge from the Synod. The Spanish reporter asked what the pope thought of this position and whether it could influence the Rome assembly. Having first sidestepped the question to tell the story of some Carmelites who feared the Synod, the pope addressed it generically: “If you go to the root of these ideas, you will find ideologies. Always, when one wants to detach from the path of communion in the Church, what always pulls it apart is ideology. And they accuse the Church of this or that, but they never make an accusation of what is true: [The Church is a sinner.] They never speak of sin . . . They defend a ‘doctrine,’ a doctrine like distilled water that has no taste and is not true Catholic doctrine, that is, in the Creed.”[3]
What seems to emerge from this profuse and confusing language is that true culture and true Faith (in other words, true doctrine) are an emanation of the soul of the people (and, in the case of religious doctrines, of the sensus fidei of the faithful). Further, true culture and Faith remain valid as long as they are embodied in a people’s soul. Therefore, culture and doctrine are distorted when they become disconnected from people’s lives through intellectual distillation. That refining turns them into the spiritual baggage of a minority that lives cloistered in ivory towers and tries to impose its aseptic and rigid convictions on the people imperialistically. Their tenets are disconnected from the real lives of the faithful.
What should one think of this understanding of the origin and development of culture and Faith?
- First, it has been the philosophical-theological axis of Pope Francis’s entire pontificate.
- Second, it dovetails with his socio-political beliefs, which are heavily influenced by the populist overtones of the so-called “Theology of the People.”
- Third, it was expressly condemned by Pope Saint Pius X in his anti-modernist encyclical Pascendi Dominici gregis.
- Fourth, it is wrong to subscribe to a supposed evolution of Catholic doctrine and morals based on a truncated version of Saint Vincent of Lerin’s Commonitorium.
I will expand on each of these points.
1) Pope Francis’s anti-intellectualism derives from an immanentistic and Teilhardian view of the universe and history, one that attributes the impulses of new dynamics in human action to an action that is deemed divine. In his first interview with La Civiltà Cattolica, later reproduced by Jesuit magazines worldwide, Pope Francis explained to Fr. Antonio Spadaro: “Ours is not a ‘lab faith,’ but a ‘journey faith,’ a historical faith. God has revealed himself as history, not as a compendium of abstract truths.” He further stressed:
God manifests himself in historical revelation, in history. . . . God is in history, in the processes. . . .
God manifests himself in time and is present in the processes of history. This gives priority to actions that give birth to new historical dynamics.[4]
Because of this view, the pope pointed out in Amoris laetitia the need “to focus on concrete realities since ‘the call and the demands of the Spirit resound in the events of history.’”[5] How so? Through the “constant tensions present in every social reality,” as he explains in the apostolic exhortation Evangelii gaudium, because “tensions and oppositions can achieve a diversified and life-giving unity,” and “the principal author, the historic subject of this process, is the people as a whole and their culture.”[6]
What is an ideology, though, if not an ensemble of mere opinions? Thus, Pope Francis’s condemnation of ideologies boomerangs back on him because of his relativistic understanding of situational “truth.”
Based on these immanentistic and Hegelian premises, one can understand why Pope Francis wrote in Evangelii gaudium that one of the four principles guiding his actions is that “realities are greater than ideas.”[7] This postulate can have a Thomistic interpretation of the traditional definition of truth: “adaequatio intellectus ad rem” [conformity of thinking to the thing that is thought]. This means that proper understanding and conceptual elaborations should be based on and serve reality. However, the postulate assumes a different connotation in the sociological-pastoral context in which it is inserted by Pope Francis. As Fr. Giovanni Scalese explained in 2016, “It means instead that we should accept reality as it is, without intending to change it based on absolute principles (e.g., moral principles), which are only abstract ‘ideas’ that most of the time risk being turned into ideology.” “This postulate,” Father Scalese pointed out, “is at the basis of Pope Francis’s continuing polemic against doctrine.”[8] And he continued, “In human action, one is inevitably guided by some naturally abstract principles. It is pointless, therefore, to argue about the abstract character of ‘doctrine,’ opposing it with a ‘reality’ to which one should conform. If reality is not enlightened, guided, and ordered by some principles, it risks degenerating into chaos.”[9]
As Prof. Giovanni Turco explains, however, for Pope Francis, truth is relative in the full sense of the word, not in the Thomistic one, “as a vital and pragmatic relationship deriving from a situation. Thus understood, truth has no content of its own. It cannot be ‘absolute,’ that is, ‘valid forever.’ For this reason, it ceases to be truth and becomes mere opinion!”[10]
What is an ideology, though, if not an ensemble of mere opinions? Thus, Pope Francis’s condemnation of ideologies boomerangs back on him because of his relativistic understanding of situational “truth.”
Read the rest at Edward Pentin's blog here.
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