8/12/2019 The Language of Pope Francis

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The language of Pope Francis

ByRandy DavidPhilippine Daily Inquirer12:21 am | Sunday, April 13th, 2014

Much has been written about the broad differences that separate Pope Francis from Pope Benedict XVI, and thecomparison tends to be at the latters expense. This must be personally disconcerting for Francis. For, indeed, he hassaid many times that he frequently consults with his predecessor. But, perhaps more than this, it is hard to findanything that Francis has said or written so far that can be taken as contradicting Benedicts thinking. Apart from theobvious differences in personal style, the one thing, in my view, that distinguishes the present pope from hispredecessor is perspectiveand this is most evident in the distinct vocabularies they use.Benedicts language is that of Western modernity. He looks at the complex transformations of the world outside, andasks how the Church must deal with the crises and challenges of the modern world. He says that the Church mustrespect the distinctions that have come with modernityamong others, that between faith and reason, betweengovernment and the pastoral function, between the vocation of politics and the education of consciences,etc. Mindful of these distinctions, he nevertheless warns against thinking of these as unbridgeable dichotomies. Faithwithout reason is blind, but reason without faith is empty, he says.While he acknowledges the diversity of standpoints in the modern world, Benedict rails against the dictatorship ofrelativism. Of modernity, he says (Light of the World): In this world, secularism stands on one side, and the questionof God, in its various forms, stands on the other. The question is: Where is secularism right? Where can and mustfaith adopt the forms and figures of modernityand where must it offer resistance? This tremendous process isthe real, great task of the hour. We can only hope that the inner strength of the faith that is present in people will then

become powerful publicly as well as by leaving its imprint on public thinking too, and that society does not simply fallinto the abyss.Francis looks at the same world, but from a different vantage point. It is not the challenge of modernity heproblematizes so much as the worlds worsening split into center and periphery. This distinctly Latin American visionis the same dependencia perspective that informed the popular struggles of the Third World against imperialism inthe decades of the 70s and 80s. That framework explained poverty in the margins as a consequence of perniciouscapitalist accumulation at the center. Dependency thinking opposed the deception fostered by the so-called trickledown theory of global capitalism.It is this framework that Francis has brought with him to the Vatican, and he applies it not just to the center of theworld economy but to the Church itself. He looks at the Church from the peripherythe outskirts, as he sometimesrefers to itand asks what it needs to do to revitalize its redeeming work in the world.The answer comes in two parts. First, the Church itself must break out of its self-referentiality in order to see howirrelevant many of its obsessions have become in the light of the realities of the periphery. Second, cleansed by self -distance, it may then dare to go out once more into the world to preach what is essential about the faiththe beautyof the saving love of God made manifest in Jesus Christ who died and rose from the dead. The joy of evangelization

which should result from this is often stifled, he says, when we speak more about law than about grace, more aboutthe Church than about Christ, more about the Pope than about Gods word. (Evangelii Gaudium)

Anyone who has read Benedicts works would surely find these ideas familiar. At one point in Peter Seewalds seriesof interviews, Benedict remarks: [W]e really are in an age in which a new evangelization is needed; in which the onegospel has to be proclaimed in its great enduring rationality and in its power that transcends rationality, so that it canre-enter our thinking and understanding in a new way. In the same vein, he says in reply to another question: It isbecoming clear that a Church does not grow by withdrawing into some national shell, by separating herself, byshutting herself up in a certain culture and absolutizing it, but that the Church needs unity, that she needs somethinglike a primacy.It is the vocabulary that spells all the difference. Benedict is very much at home in the language of modernity and itsfunctionally differentiated social systems. He sees a world that more and more leaves little space if any for thespiritual, the transcendental, and the mysterious. Francis, on the other hand, sees a world riven by the logic ofexclusion, where those in the margins of society find themselves irredeemably excluded from meaningful participationin nearly every sphere of modern society. It is to them, he says, that the Church must reach out if it is to find its placein the present world.

Not being a theologian, I cant say if these papal views are in any way inconsistent with one another. But, as astudent of society, I am amazed by the way these variable motifs bring to the fore the limits of modernity. Modernity issupposed to sweep all of humanity into the circuits of a functionally differentiated global society. Yet Francis speaksof the total exclusion of entire nations and societies, and, what is more, that this is occurring in the shadow ofmodernity itself. Like Benedict, he alludes to the limit of modernity, and the beginning of faith.Kierkegaard once wrote that there is a name for that which we cannot think: God. That, in many ways, is what thetwo popes have been saying.* * *public.lives@gmail.com

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