Yesterday I wrote the following about Pope Francis and politics:
…I tend to think that we often seem to get the popes that match our times. Ever notice some sort of harmonic resonance between popes and other public figures of the day?…
…[T]here’s no way for a pope to retreat from politics, unless he is going to speak on ritual matters only and never venture into a single more general statement. To paraphrase Madonna (not the Madonna, but Madonna Ciccone), we are living in a political world. When Pope Francis speaks of any world events or trends, it has political meaning and is a political statement, even if he tries to couch it in more neutral language.
So no matter how hard a Pope tries to speak non-politically, politics enters anyway nearly every time he opens his mouth, unless it’s strictly on Church business. Even then, what he says can have political repercussions.
That said, I think that Pope Francis is being quite political on this visit to the US. It wouldn’t be the first time a pope has visited this country. And it’s not the first time a pope has spoken politically, although always from a perspective of spirituality. Take John Paul II, for example:
“Be not afraid” became [John Paul II’s] rallying cry, and following a 1979 address to the U.N. General Assembly in which he challenged the free world to defend human rights, he embarked on a courageous but dangerous nine-day public pilgrimage to “strengthen the brethren” in Poland. There he warned Communist authorities that the papacy would watch them closely, and he reminded them of their responsibility “before history and before your conscience.” The people responded to John Paul II’s visit with loyalty borne of years of shared suffering””banners with the Communist party slogan “The Party Is for the People” sported the daring addition, “. . . but the People are for the Pope.”
John Paul II’s example encouraged other leading church authorities, such as the Czech Cardinal Frantisek Tomasek, to become fierce critics of Communism. His visit also inspired an unemployed electrician named Lech Walesa to form in 1980 the Soviet Union’s first and only trade union””Solidarity””that in the words of French political scientist Alain Besancon gave the Poles back “the private ownership of their tongues.” Soviet authorities feared Solidarity could undermine Soviet power, and the Warsaw Pact planned an invasion and mass arrest of Solidarity’s leaders. John Paul II intervened by writing directly to Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev, giving his support to Solidarity and warning against the consequences of such an action. While this only delayed a crackdown, the pope had set a precedent. In 1989, when Solidarity swept available seats in a semi-free election, no one doubted who to credit for the moral fiber that had held the party together.
However, Pope Francis is the first pope to ever address an American Congress. And he’s had some curious things to say about politics in the past:
“I always was interested in politics,” Pope Francis told a journalist from his native Argentina last year. That interest was developed in childhood, in the influence on him of his grandmother Rosa, who once defied fascists in Italy while active in a church organization called Catholic Action.
As a teenager, Jorge Mario Bergoglio would drift between local political party offices as he listened to discussions. He was drawn to being a priest, but felt the tug of a political calling, too.
Beneath the gregarious, spontaneous Francis lies an unusually acute political mind. In Argentina, they speak of him as the most talented politician since General Juan Peré³n.
At first I assumed they were speaking of Vatican politics, but reading the entire piece convinced me otherwise. If the article is correct—and I have no particular reason to think it’s not, except the usual caveat about the MSM and what it publishes—then Pope Francis has some very strong political views that I would label roughly as socialist, and he has long been interested in furthering them.
Read the whole WaPo article to get the flavor of it. I was initially puzzled by the way the article uses the word “liberal,” and suspected that the author was not an American and uses the word in the European manner. Sure enough, the author, Austen Ivereigh, is a Brit who specializes in writing about the Catholic Church and has written a biography of Francis called The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope.
More from Ivereigh in the WaPo:
Pope Francis is not a social liberal. As cardinal archbishop, he was deeply opposed to the legalization of same-sex marriage, and, of course, abortion.
So, that sounds conservative, right? But it’s immediately followed by this sentence:
The idea of organizing society around the autonomy of the sovereign individual repels him.
Aha: leftist. The puzzle about the word “liberal” can be solved by saying that the Pope is neither a social liberal nor a classical liberal.
Then we have:
Nor is Pope Francis an economic liberal: he describes sink-or-swim capitalism ”” in which the elderly and the unemployed are condemned to poverty ”” as “an economy that kills.”
Once again, Ivereigh seems to be using the word “liberal” here to mean “classical liberal,” because Francis sure sounds like what we would call a “liberal” or even a “leftist” in this country.
The article goes on:
In his address in Bolivia to workers in the informal sector in July, he warned that “once capital becomes an idol and guides people’s decisions, once greed for money presides over the entire socioeconomic system, it ruins society, it condemns and enslaves men and women, it destroys human fraternity, it sets people against one another and, as we clearly see, it even puts at risk our common home.”
In the same speech he spoke powerfully of the right of all to land, labor and housing.
Well, I suppose that “once capital becomes an idol” (emphasis on the “idol” part), I’d be against that, too. But I also think that the greatest amount of “enslaving” that’s been done in the last century in connection with “capital” has been at the hands of governments that have professed to want to abolish it, and have set about forcing that “social justice” of which Francis also sometimes speaks.
I am neither a Catholic nor Christian, and certainly no expert on Jesuits—much less twentieth-century Jesuits in Latin America, although even before Francis became Pope I was familiar with the fact that there’s a strong leftist trend among the clergy in that part of the world. But it sure sounds to me as though Francis is here positing some semi-Rousseauvian state of nature in which humans would be exhibiting fraternity, would have an unruined society, and would not be “set against one another,” but for the existence of unchecked capitalism. Now, I would imagine a large part of that vision of the Pope’s comes from the idea that “unchecked capitalism” (which, as far as I know, is not operating in this country nor in most or perhaps any countries in the world today), when curbed, should be replaced by religion and the charity that Christianity preaches. But his words still sound like Rousseauvian leftism to me, with capitalism as the great evil.
Ivereigh goes on, and what he writes may shed some light on why one of the Western Hemisphere countries the Pope has visited this trip has been Cuba:
Francis does have a distinctive political outlook, one that is shaped by his experience as a Latin American Catholic nationalist whose thinking matured in the 1960s, a time of deep political ferment in Latin America provoked by the Cuban Revolution…
“Cuba vs. US” was the Manichean choice of the time and has poisoned Latin American politics since, but the Jesuit Jorge Mario Bergoglio rejected this polarity. He was a Peronist: anti-colonial, pro-worker, offering a “third way” between capitalism and communism that was true to Latin America’s Christian-humanist traditions. That made him naturally sympathetic, in 1959, to the original “national” and “popular” Cuban Revolution, seeking social justice, political and economic independence, but it equally horrified when within two years Fidel Castro allied with the communists and fell into the Soviet orbit.
While in Cuba, Pope Francis has been helping to build a pluralistic Cuba resting on nationalist-Christian foundations. In a 1998 book reflecting on Pope John Paul II’s visit to the island, he wrote that neither “neoliberalism” nor “communism” reflected what he called “the soul of the Cuban people,” a phrase he used in his speech arriving at Havana airport on Saturday. A new politics has to be forged in Cuba, one that takes the original national-popular ambitions of the Revolution and combines them with a social democracy that cares for the vulnerable.
In other words, he wants a kinder, gentler Cuban revolution. Good luck with that; the history of socialism is very poor on that score, to say the least. It’s pretty lousy in the economic sense, too.
To go on:
This is not just about Cuba. Francis is convinced that the whole of Latin America has a key role developing such a politics in the future as it achieves greater continent-wide integration. He regularly uses a phrase first coined by early 20th-century Latin-American nationalists to capture the idea of the patria grande, or greater homeland.
As cardinal, he supported the idea of Latin America playing a key role on the world stage…
As pope, he has spoken of how Latin America can offer “new models of development” that reconcile both technological progress and Christian concern for justice and equity. Francis believes politics must be rooted in, and serve, the values and concerns of ordinary people, uniting them by focusing on the needs of the poorest…
Few realize how deep his vision for the renewal of politics runs. On Thursday, they will find out.
If all of this is true—and again, I see no reason to doubt it at this point—I think it’s fairly clear that Pope Francis has a political agenda rooted in his vision of an ideal society that he believes can actually come about, and that society is what we would call socialist and not really into protecting individual liberty or property. The models of that society are in Latin America, but a perfected Latin America. It’s one that I believe has zero chance of ever occurring in actuality, and is inherently dangerous because it can easily go in a very bad direction (look at, for example, Venezuela).
I just skimmed Pope Francis’ speech today to Congress. As one might expect, he speaks a great deal about poverty and the need to alleviate it, while paying a bit of lip service to business as “a noble vocation, directed to producing wealth…especially if it sees the creation of jobs as an essential part of its service to the common good.” This is followed by a call to protect the environment.
The thing that seems to me to be missing is that in all the emphasis on providing for the poor there is not much about liberty. Yes, there are some words, but if you read the whole speech it’s clear that they are an afterthought compared to the rest, and their context seems rather curious.
For example, Pope Francis quotes the famous Declaration of Independence’s “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” phrase, only to make this further point immediately thereafter:
If politics must truly be at the service of the human person, it follows that it cannot be a slave to the economy and finance. Politics is, instead, an expression of our compelling need to live as one, in order to build as one the greatest common good: that of a community which sacrifices particular interests in order to share, in justice and peace, its goods, its interests, its social life.
But “our compelling need to live as one” seems actually antithetical to liberty, or at least strongly opposed to it. The first comes at the expense of the second, particularly when the former—living as “one”—is compelled by law rather than freely entered into in a voluntary manner, such as through the exercise of personal charity. I don’t see the Pope making that distinction clear, although he may have made it elsewhere, or in his mind. Nations ordinarily make choices, and come down more in favor of one than of the other. The US has been singular in coming down in favor of liberty (at least in the past), and therein lies its exceptionalism.
Pope Francis also mentioned liberty in this context:
A nation can be considered great when it defends liberty as Lincoln did, when it fosters a culture which enables people to “dream” of full rights for all their brothers and sisters, as Martin Luther King sought to do; when it strives for justice and the cause of the oppressed, as Dorothy Day did by her tireless work, the fruit of a faith which becomes dialogue and sows peace in the contemplative style of Thomas Merton.
If I understand what the Pope is saying, the word “liberty” is used there to mean freedom as opposed to slavery. The freeing of the slaves was certainly an excellent thing. But it’s a different thing from a government protecting individual liberty for all of its citizens against the encroachment of a welfare state or statism in general. The fact that Lincoln’s defense of liberty is followed in Pope Francis’ speech by praise for Dorothy Day, an American Catholic convert, activist, and socialist (who is being considered for sainthood by the Church) says a lot, I think.
There was no question about the sincerity of Day’s religious fervor and her desire to help the poor, but there is also no doubt about her socialism/leftism. Here’s some background about Day, in case you’re unfamiliar with her life and work:
[In her early years, before her conversion) she settled on the Lower East Side and worked on the staff of several Socialist publications, including The Liberator, The Masses, and The Call. She “smilingly explained to impatient socialists that she was ‘a pacifist even in the class war.'” Years later, Day described how she was pulled in different directions: “I was only eighteen, so I wavered between my allegiance to Socialism, Syndicalism (the I.W.W.’s) and Anarchism. When I read Tolstoy I was an Anarchist. My allegiance to The Call kept me a Socialist, although a left-wing one, and my Americanism inclined me to the I.W.W. movement.”
She celebrated the bloodless February Revolution in Russia in 1917, the overthrow of the monarchy and establishment of a reformist government…
She maintained friendships with such prominent American Communists as Anna Louise Strong, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who became the head of the Communist Party USA.
Shortly thereafter, Day had a child, converted to Catholicism, and increased her involvement with work for the poor. Of this period she later wrote:
I could write, I could protest, to arouse the conscience, but where was the Catholic leadership in the gathering of bands of men and women together, for the actual works of mercy that the comrades had always made part of their technique in reaching the workers?”
Day’s subsequent work with the poor was informed by her Catholicism, which deepened and became more and more important in her life. But she seems to have continued to support leftist causes, with the addition of an absolute pacifism that included advocating pacifism during World War II and rejecting Catholicism’s Just War theory.
Here’s Day’s reaction to the Cuba Revolution, which tells you a lot:
In 1960, she praised Fidel Castro’s “promise of social justice”. She said: “Far better to revolt violently than to do nothing about the poor destitute.” On January 3, 1962, a Vatican press conference revealed that Castro had excommunicated himself by his persecution of the clergy and bishops…Several months later, Day traveled to Cuba and reported her experiences in a four-part series in the Catholic Worker. In the first of these, she wrote: “I am most of all interested in the religious life of the people and so must not be on the side of a regime that favors the extirpation of religion. On the other hand, when that regime is bending all its efforts to make a good life for the people, a naturally good life (on which grace can build) one cannot help but be in favor of the measures taken.”
So violence was okay in Cuba in the cause of “social justice,” and religious persecution could be balanced by Castro’s supposed economic good intentions?
I could go on and on and on and on, but I’ll close with these two quotes from Day:
In 1970, at the height of American participation in the Vietnam War, she described Ho Chi Minh as “a man of vision, as a patriot, a rebel against foreign invaders”…
In the Catholic Worker in May 1951, Day wrote that Marx, Lenin, and Mao Tse-Tung “were animated by the love of brother and this we must believe though their ends meant the seizure of power, and the building of mighty armies, the compulsion of concentration camps, the forced labor and torture and killing of tens of thousands, even millions.” She used them as examples because she insisted that the belief that “all men are brothers” required the Catholic to find the humanity in everyone without exception. She explained that she understood the jarring impact of such an assertion:
“Peter Maurin was constantly restating our position, and finding authorities from all faiths, and races, all authorities. He used to embarrass us sometimes by dragging in Marshall Petain and Fr. Coughlin and citing something good they had said, even when we were combating the point of view they were representing. Just as we shock people by quoting Marx, Lenin, Mao-Tse-Tung, or Ramakrishna to restate the case for our common humanity, the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God.”
In 1970…she wrote:
“the two words [anarchist-pacifist] should go together, especially at this time when more and more people, even priests, are turning to violence, and are finding their heroes in Camillo Torres among the priests, and Che Guevara among laymen. The attraction is strong, because both men literally laid down their lives for their brothers. “Greater love hath no man than this.”
“Let me say, at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.” Che Guevara wrote this…
It seems to me that such passages are key to the political philosophy of Day and of those who support her. She acknowledges the violent excesses these people committed in the name of social justice. But it seems that she is more deeply moved (and admiring of) what they stated as their do-good aims—which in Day’s mind doesn’t entirely absolve them but certainly mitigates things considerably. She also seems to take those stated aims at face value and does not even consider that they may be lies through which people drunk with power see their way clear towards gaining and using power by justifying that quest with the cover of a fake altruism. She also doesn’t seem to understand that, even if they were sincere, there must be something wrong with the entire leftist endeavor if it keeps leading to such egregious abuses of vast numbers of human beings.
Day never seemed able or even willing to consider making the leap toward rejecting leftism. From what I see, it seems clear that Day’s intentions were good, but she ended up placing herself in the service of some very destructive forces in the world.
[NOTE: Here is some background on the pros and cons involved in the drive to canonize Day.]
