The Church of Europe and North America frets defensively against what it perceives to be the great problem of secularization, the Church of Latin America pushes positively forward to the peripheries of the poor. Francis is speaking in the horizon of the person as subject and the consciousness of the person. Those puzzled by the pope are speaking of the individual in conservative or liberal concepts. Ivereigh can be of help here.
Austen Ivereigh
| Mar. 13, 2015
One of the untold
stories behind the election of Pope Francis in March 2013 was the emergence of
Latin America as the new source church for global Catholicism. The cardinals
didn't just elect the man but a program, one that had found expression, above
all, in the great document produced by the Latin American bishops in Aparecida,
Brazil, in May 2007. The document's principal author was the then-cardinal
archbishop of Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Aparecida marked the coming-of-age moment of a theology. Its
approach -- missionary, evangelizing,
pastoral and poor -- now underlies the Francis program, outlined in his
November 2013 apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium.
Just as the church in Spain and Italy was the source for the
Counter-Reformation, and the church of France and Germany the source for the
Second Vatican Council, Latin America is now the wellspring of a new era of
church reform. If Francis perplexes Europeans and North Americans long
accustomed to thinking in liberal-conservative terms, it is because he uses a
lens and a language that come from outside those categories.
For a recent example, consider his remarks in January on
birth control that ended being drowned, in the reporting of the interview
aboard the papal plane back from Manila, Philippines, by his
"rabbits" remark. The remarkable thing was Francis' articulation of
Pope Paul VI's opposition to artificial contraception in terms of a bravely
prophetic stance on behalf of the poor of the world against the powers of the
age, driven by neo-Malthusian and eugenic assumptions that poverty is a
consequence of population.
Liberals in the North, who both inside and outside the church have seen
this as an issue of personal autonomy rather than an anticolonial defense of
the rights of the poor, were taken aback. But so too were conservatives,
accustomed to defending Humanae Vitae in doctrinal terms.
Francis' words were wholly of a piece with the 1968 meeting
of CELAM, the Latin American bishops' council, in Medellín, Colombia. The
meeting had a profound impact on Jorge Mario Bergoglio, then finishing his
Jesuit theology studies.
Medellín -- which famously articulated the "option for
the poor" -- saw Humanae Vitae
in terms of Rome coming to the aid of poor countries besieged by
rich-world-funded development strategies and the imposition of an "eroticism
of bourgeois civilization." This was the church speaking on behalf of the
evangelized poor, defending their culture.
Similarly, more than 40 years later on the papal plane,
Francis spoke of "ideological colonization," just as he had earlier
told parents in Manila, "Peoples must not lose their freedom. A people has
its culture, its history."
This is precisely the language that Bergoglio as provincial
used in the 1970s with his fellow Jesuits, divided at the time by rival elite
ideologies. He urged them to focus on the needs and values of what he called
"God's holy faithful people," a term that mixed the Vatican II idea
of the people of God with Medellín's option for the poor, yet was shaped by
nationalism and culture, rather than the social sciences.
Although the term santo
pueblo fiel de Dios was Bergoglio's, his thinking reflected a specifically
Argentine expression of Latin American theology, identified above all with the
theologians Lucio Gera and Rafael Tello. In essence, teología del pueblo, the theology of the people, rejected liberal
and Marxist categories as imperialist instrumentalizing of the poor, and
embraced seeing the people as subjects of history and culture, as both
recipients and agents of evangelization.
Bergoglio would often say that the people have a way of
seeing, an awareness, a hermeneutic. As he told the Jesuits in 1980: "The
first question any pastor seeking to reform structures [of injustice] must ask
is: What is my people asking of me? What is it calling on me to do? And then he
must dare to listen."
This faith in history and culture, rather than in social
sciences and political revolution, was a major dividing line between the
Argentine version of liberation theology and the better-known Central American
and Andean version. It was also the source of contention between the
"nationalist" bergoglianos and the "liberal"
anti-bergoglianos within the Argentine Jesuit province.
Yet while Bergoglio was eventually displaced within the
Jesuits, it was the teología del pueblo that gradually won out, in Paul VI's
1975 Evangelii Nuntiandi -- a document strongly influenced by Gera and Tello,
and foundational for Latin American churchmen of Bergoglio's generation -- and
at the CELAM meeting four years later in Puebla, Mexico.
For the people theologians, the liberation project is not
one of the seizure of the state by revolution, but the nationalist Catholic one
of people-building, in which God is calling forth his people into a new birth
of justice, protected and encouraged by a church that looks firstly to the poor
and to the margins.
A key figure for Bergoglio's articulation of this
people-building idea over many years was his Uruguayan philosopher friend
Alberto Methol Ferré. Possibly the greatest Latin American lay Catholic
intellectual of the 20th century, Methol Ferré spent most of his life convinced
that Latin America had been moving from being a "reflection church"
-- one that echoed Europe -- to a "source church" that would in time
invigorate the universal church.
He saw the retreat of first Marxism and later neoliberalism
in Latin America as opening up a new era for the people finally to take the
stage. That process had, however, been retarded, both by the takeover of Latin
American theology on the left and by the centralism of the Vatican under Pope
John Paul II.
Methol Ferré and Bergoglio in 2005 believed that Latin
America's moment had not yet come; both believed Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger
should be pope. That was partly why Bergoglio resisted the attempt by a group
of cardinals to elect him in that conclave.
But after 2005, it began to be clear that the hour was at
hand. "In the next two decades Latin America will play a key role in the
great battles which are taking shape in the twenty-first century,"
Bergoglio wrote in the prologue to a book that came out that year.
In Lima, Peru, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the
founding of CELAM, he said it was time for a continent that included half of
the world's Catholics "to lend a service to the universal church," to
share the gifts the Holy Spirit had showered on its people.
First, however, the Latin American church had to gather
again. Methol Ferré was too ill to attend Aparecida, and died two years later.
But like Moses on Mount Nebo glimpsing the Promised Land, he lived to see it
happen. In his Latin America in the Twenty-First Century, the philosopher had
argued that Pope Benedict XVI's election would usher in a new spring of Latin
American Catholic thinking, because as Ratzinger he had deeply engaged with its
theology in preparing his famous instructions on liberation theology.
Indeed, among Ratzinger's first moves was to give permission
for the CELAM meeting at Aparecida, which the outgoing secretary of state,
Cardinal Angelo Sodano, had long blocked. On the flight from São Paulo, Brazil,
to the Aparecida shrine, Benedict said: "I am convinced that from here
will be decided -- at least in part, but a fundamental part -- the future of
the Catholic church."
In his homily at a huge Mass in the shrine after Benedict's
departure, Bergoglio used a striking metaphor when he spoke for the first time
(at least in a major public arena) of las
periferias existenciales, the existential margins. The phrase struck many
chords. It suggested not just the slums, but a world of vulnerability and
fragility, a place of suffering and longing and poverty, yet also -- because of
Christ's proximity -- of joy and hope.
Bergoglio was elected by his fellow bishops to take charge
of the redaction of the concluding document, which is shot through with
teología del pueblo concepts.
In its vision and vigor, its fierce advocacy of the poor and
its missionary spirituality, its bold proclamation of the birth of a new
springtime of faith, Aparecida was now the program, the key to a major new
effort of evangelization in Latin America linked, inextricably, to the
liberation of a people. Nowhere else in the world was there anything to compare
with it. It was the expression of a new maturity, of a local church come of
age.
That is why it is so poignant that Benedict, unsteady on his
feet in Mexico and thinking ahead to Brazil, decided while in Latin America in
March 2012 to stand down a year later. It is hard not to see an exhausted
European church standing back to allow the vigorous church of Latin America to
take its place.
That a transition was taking place was obvious at the synod
on the new evangelization of October that year. The churches of Europe and the
U.S. were anxious, turned in on themselves, focused on what they lacked. Why
was it that an Asian or Middle Eastern bishop whose flock was being killed and
bombed could be so hopeful and joyful, yet bishops in a church where nobody
suffered that real kind of persecution spoke as if Christian civilization faced
annihilation?
"At the synod, the wind blew from the south," an
Argentine theologian sent by Bergoglio told Vatican Radio.
Bergoglio saw it too. The rich-world church was blaming the
culture for its decline. Yet the first obstacle was not the culture, but a church
that had grown worldly and self-referential, that no longer evangelized and
allowed the living water to go stale. The problem, Bergoglio told a group of
Caritas workers on retreat, was that "we have Jesus tied up in the
sacristy."
Only three months later, he told the cardinals that it
sometimes seemed as if Jesus was not so much knocking at the door to come in,
but was on the inside, asking to be let out. He offered them a choice between a
church geared to mission and mercy, or a paralyzed church that had grown
distant and stale.
Two years ago in the Sistine Chapel, the cardinals chose not
just the man, but the program. Whether or not they were aware of it, in
electing Francis they were allowing the fire lit at Aparecida to be brought to
Rome, to shake up the Vatican and to light up the universal church.
Our eyes are still adjusting.
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