Papa Pancho

If you want to be the centre of attention at a dinner party, announce that you’ve become a Catholic. The table will go silent. You might as well have admitted to condoning pedophilia or the subjugation of women. At least, this was my experience ten years ago when I converted. “How could you?” was the subtext of even the politest response. Pope Francis’s often cited comment in July 2013, just as I was about to begin my Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults course, helped me justify my decision: “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?” That made conversion feel more reasonable, at least from my perspective as a gay man, because, as many pointed out, why would I join a club where no one wanted me as a member?

A decade later, the Catholic Church is still adamant that “although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.” In other words, nothing much has changed during Francis’s tenure, despite his saying a multitude of things we all wanted to hear — and not just about gay rights. Some might even argue things are worse, given the Pope’s widely reported comment, from this past May, about seminaries having too many “frociaggine,” a derogatory Italian term that translates as “faggots” or “poofs.” Such a remark is retrogressive compared with what was previously perceived as a tacit “don’t ask, don’t tell” attitude.

In The Jesuit Disruptor, Michael W. Higgins makes the case that while the status quo may appear intact, Pope Francis has actually set into motion a necessary evolution of what detractors call a moribund institution. Higgins suggests there’s no hypocrisy in the Pope’s apparent contradictions: Francis accepts the traditional teachings of the Church as he continually toys with notions that many parishioners, as well as potential converts and lapsed Catholics, would consider welcome reforms. The consequence is that Francis is alternately viewed as too progressive or as not progressive enough, and the faithful are aggrieved at either end of the spectrum.

Francis is undeniably less dogmatic than his predecessor, Benedict XVI. (The former Cardinal Ratzinger was known as God’s Rottweiler, and one of his legacies is the alleged cover‑up of clerical sexual abuse.) But what Francis often espouses does sound at odds with what he does or, more accurately, doesn’t do. The harshest critics might claim it’s sophistry. Although Higgins occasionally stumbles into a quagmire of scholarly nuance, he gives a thorough and erudite discussion of this turbulent moment for the Catholic Church. Importantly, The Jesuit Disruptor permits voices critical of Pope Francis into the mix. Higgins is no apologist.

Higgins is one of those rare academics who can communicate to a broad audience without dumbing down content, even injecting an irreverent turn of phrase or a personal anecdote. If he couldn’t do this, The Jesuit Disruptor would be a slog. A former university president, a regular contributor to the Globe and Mail, and an occasional reviewer in these pages, he is also the award-winning author of many books, including Heretic Blood: The Spiritual Geography of Thomas Merton. For a Merton fan like me, Higgins provided a revelation about an original and influential religious thinker, one who has had a significant impact on Pope Francis.

While Higgins includes a slight biographical narrative, his latest book uses Francis’s history primarily as a way to appreciate his thinking and current pontifical strategy rather than to reveal the flesh and blood of the man who began life as Jorge Bergoglio. Higgins’s introduction illustrates the central importance for the Pope of the seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal. To mark the fourth centenary of the French thinker’s birth, Francis wrote an apostolic letter, Sublimitas et miseria hominis (The Grandeur and Misery of Man). This was an unusual work, as most apostolic letters deal with Church administration or explain Church teachings. Higgins surmises that in Pascal, who was, ironically, passionately opposed to the Jesuits of his day, “Francis found a mystic, a poet, and a scientist — a lay Christian — who lived in the ‘now,’ recognized humanity’s innate grandeur and its misery, and placed himself in the service of the Infinite Mercy.” Higgins goes into detail about what he believes Francis learned from Pascal, particularly this relevant lesson: “The existential and the personal take priority over the abstract, as ‘reality is superior to ideas.’ ” For Pope Benedict, by all accounts a brilliant theologian, people were meant to conform to abstraction; if there was dissidence, humanity had better change. But Pope Francis, above all, cares about people, recognizes that real life is messy, and believes the Church must be a “field hospital” for wounded souls — not the means to punish or reject the less than perfect.

Even more influential than Merton or Pascal, Francis’s Jesuit vocation is central to understanding his papacy. “Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life,” writes Muriel Spark in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. The Jesuits make similar claims to anyone educated by them. “When Bergoglio entered the Society of Jesus to begin a decade-long formation,” Higgins writes, “he moved into a world that would shape and define him — his personal life, his priestly life, and his life as the first Jesuit in the history of the papacy.” It wasn’t that he learned hard and fast rules to which one was required to be obedient but rather that “being a Jesuit alive to the world is not a univocal, unalterable, fixed reality.”

At the core of Jesuit life is Ignatian spirituality, as expressed in The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius Loyola. To risk oversimplifying: Saint Ignatius believed in everyday spirituality and asserted that God is present in our world and active in our lives. Having faith is not a static state, not a celestial moment detached from reality; living with faith is a struggle that takes different forms at various times. With this in mind, it’s easier to appreciate the Pope’s pragmatism and meandering approach toward a contemporary expression of the Church, one that can claim to be still harmonious with its original intent. It’s all a work in progress to reveal God’s intentions. Go with the flow and hope that, when you ask for guidance, God points you in the right direction.

Higgins weaves fascinating historical vignettes in with philosophical musings. For example, at thirty-six, the future Pope Francis was named the provincial, or head, of the Jesuits in Argentina. The Dirty War, in which tens of thousands were killed or “disappeared” by the military dictatorship, began a few years later. “Bergoglio did not come out of this period unscathed,” Higgins writes. “His doctrinal rigour and traditionalist piety that had put him at odds with many of his fellow Jesuits in Argentina saw him out of sync with his confreres throughout the Latin American continent.” Much like his stance on contentious issues today, his position was to oppose the brutality of the regime but not to exhort his flock to overthrow the government. He was pragmatic, to say the least.

“Frustrated by his intransigence, his failure to curb his authoritarian tendencies,” Bergoglio’s superiors banished him to Córdoba, some 700 kilometres northwest of the Argentine capital, where “he was in exile, not in formation; censured, not tutored.” He was there for two years of study and contemplation that, miraculously, led to his being appointed as the auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires, in 1992, and then archbishop of that city six years later. He was made a cardinal in 2001. Bergoglio was said to have been in second place in the conclave that elevated Ratzinger to the papacy in 2005. When Benedict retired in 2013, Bergoglio became Francis. For someone opposed to priestly careerism, he climbed quickly to the top after a rocky start.

Subsequent chapters of The Jesuit Disruptor focus on LGBTQ+ rights, women’s role within the Church (and control over their bodies), the unfinished business relating to abuse scandals (and the lack of contrition about how the Church has dealt with them), and the responsibility to champion the environment against human greed and to minister to the poor. In all areas, the Pope has been consistent. “Francis’s approach is not to repudiate official teaching but to open it to the light of deeper inspection,” Higgins argues. But he acknowledges that, to Francis’s critics, “such thinking is woolly and weaselly, averse as it is to clear and organic teaching, a false irenicism, building on a plank that cannot withstand close scrutiny.” Ultimately, Higgins seems to let Pope Francis off the hook: “Simply put, he prefers an existential as opposed to a metaphysical ethics, and that is why he will not foreclose discussion.” This is a bit woolly indeed, but the gist is that Francis wants everyone to keep talking and believes that change, albeit glacial, will come. Even radical shifts will happen without having to issue decrees or dramatically ruffle ecclesiastical feathers. Will the drip, drip, drip of engagement erode the rock on which the Church is built? Are the Pope’s words and actions just delaying tactics? Higgins addresses such questions in a chapter titled “Ragging the Puck,” in which he argues that Pope Francis is doing no such thing.

Maybe being a disrupter rather than a visionary leader is the best any modern pope can expect, without destroying the Church in the process of bringing about change. In the chapter “The Makings of Francis,” Higgins offers a credible explanation of the current state of the papacy. “It isn’t easy being pope,” he writes. “You carry the weight of a tradition two millennia in the making, you trace your roots back to the apostle Peter, you have an institution that claims divine origin but is essentially human in its lived reality, you have a storied record of genius and sanctity admixed with a sordid record of venality and power lust.” His conclusion is that being bishop of Rome is “not a great career choice.”

Another explanation is found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. In the section “How Can We Speak about God?,” the massive tome’s advice is unequivocal: “We must therefore continually purify our language of everything in it that is limited, imagebound or imperfect, if we are not to confuse our image of God —‘the inexpressible, the incomprehensible, the invisible, the ungraspable’— with our human representations. Our human words always fall short of the mystery of God.” Much of the Church’s tumult — and of Pope Francis’s struggles within it — appears to be about issues on which God doesn’t have an opinion, where humans are putting words into a divine mouth. Is the root of the Church’s problem that too much is profane or that not enough is sacred?

One has to wonder about the utility of a Christian religion when it ceases to focus on love and acceptance of all who seek God and instead becomes a mechanism for judging others and claiming that official views — on who we’re allowed to have sex with, on which gender is permitted in the priesthood, on the necessity of clerical celibacy, on sweeping dismissals of capitalism — are divinely inspired and absolutely unassailable.