One of the
writers for The Catholic Herald, Francis Phillips, dedicated a recent post to
Pope Francis’s much-discussed “simplicity”, arguing he was preaching by
behavior:
While I
certainly agree the new pope is preaching by behavior—indeed, it is impossible
not to preach by behavior—I have deep reservations about what he is thereby
preaching. This is how I responded to Mrs. Phillips’s post:
I am deeply
concerned about Pope Francis’s “simplicity”, although I have little doubt it is
genuine.
First, I fear it confuses personality with office. The papacy has existed for 2000 years, and its symbols, traditions, and ceremonial belong not to the personality of any pope, but to the office. To do away with many of its symbols and traditions (within minutes, no less) distracts from the office, calls attention to the office-holder, and does not seem humble. It certainly comes off as a repudiation of past popes, especially Pope Benedict, and so obscures the continuity of the pre-conciliar and post-conciliar Church. It was the effort to make that continuity visible that lay behind Benedict's sartorial and ceremonial choices. With Benedict we had a man who disappeared into his office. Now I fear the office is disappearing and all we will be left with is a man. A good man, but not a good representation of the continuity of the centuries—which is precisely what Peter must do: preserve the Faith that has been handed down to us. If we cannot recognize that the Faith proclaimed today is the same proclaimed by Pius XII and by Gregory the Great, and by Peter himself, how can we believe it?
Second, this “simplicity” reduces Christ to his human nature and sufferings. Yes, Christ was a poor carpenter and itinerant preacher; he is also God gloriously transfigured, resurrected, and ascended. This is not only false, but a great impediment to evangelization. Especially given modernity’s inability to see the spiritual, the transcendent, and the divine, we are in desperate need of signs that point to God’s glory. If we lose sight of his glory, we reduce Christ to the greatest man who ever lived, and we are just as damned as if he had not risen from the dead. The New Evangelization requires a greater, not a lesser focus on this glory.
Third, men need splendor. It is in our nature. When the Church does not use earthly splendor to point us to the divine splendor, men turn elsewhere. This is what the iconoclastic and anti-ceremonial furies of the Reformation showed. With their churches denuded, their clerics in simple clothes, did Northern Europeans live simpler lives? Not at all. They invented mercantilism, capitalism, materialism. They divorced splendor from God, and were left with gorgeous stuff and a God who, within a few centuries, they had completely forgotten.
The splendor of the papal office, as that of all ecclesiastical offices, and most of all the Liturgy, points to and honors God; we give Him our very best because we know all things come from Him, and by so doing we show this to the world.
First, I fear it confuses personality with office. The papacy has existed for 2000 years, and its symbols, traditions, and ceremonial belong not to the personality of any pope, but to the office. To do away with many of its symbols and traditions (within minutes, no less) distracts from the office, calls attention to the office-holder, and does not seem humble. It certainly comes off as a repudiation of past popes, especially Pope Benedict, and so obscures the continuity of the pre-conciliar and post-conciliar Church. It was the effort to make that continuity visible that lay behind Benedict's sartorial and ceremonial choices. With Benedict we had a man who disappeared into his office. Now I fear the office is disappearing and all we will be left with is a man. A good man, but not a good representation of the continuity of the centuries—which is precisely what Peter must do: preserve the Faith that has been handed down to us. If we cannot recognize that the Faith proclaimed today is the same proclaimed by Pius XII and by Gregory the Great, and by Peter himself, how can we believe it?
Second, this “simplicity” reduces Christ to his human nature and sufferings. Yes, Christ was a poor carpenter and itinerant preacher; he is also God gloriously transfigured, resurrected, and ascended. This is not only false, but a great impediment to evangelization. Especially given modernity’s inability to see the spiritual, the transcendent, and the divine, we are in desperate need of signs that point to God’s glory. If we lose sight of his glory, we reduce Christ to the greatest man who ever lived, and we are just as damned as if he had not risen from the dead. The New Evangelization requires a greater, not a lesser focus on this glory.
Third, men need splendor. It is in our nature. When the Church does not use earthly splendor to point us to the divine splendor, men turn elsewhere. This is what the iconoclastic and anti-ceremonial furies of the Reformation showed. With their churches denuded, their clerics in simple clothes, did Northern Europeans live simpler lives? Not at all. They invented mercantilism, capitalism, materialism. They divorced splendor from God, and were left with gorgeous stuff and a God who, within a few centuries, they had completely forgotten.
The splendor of the papal office, as that of all ecclesiastical offices, and most of all the Liturgy, points to and honors God; we give Him our very best because we know all things come from Him, and by so doing we show this to the world.
Mrs.
Phillips very kindly responded to my comment in her next post, arguing Francis’s
style of being pope, while different from Benedict’s or the earlier “triumphalist”
model, was just as valid. She called for a distinction between essential and
inessential papal traditions:
Here is how
I responded to Mrs. Phillips:
Thank-you for
responding so carefully to my concerns. Since I’m in my twenties, this is only
the second time I’ve witnessed a papal succession; it is invaluable to hear the
wisdom of more seasoned Catholics.
You note, “We have to distinguish here between what is essential to the tradition and what is inessential.” In the abstract, this sounds clear. Concretely, making these distinctions can be vexing. This difficulty points to something essential about our Faith: that it is received. We are to hold fast to the traditions we have received by word of mouth or in writing (cf. 2 Thess 2:15). Between what is received and its adaptation to a particular culture or age, the priority belongs to what is received.
Now, we might say that what is received, what is essential, is the “substance” of the Faith and not the particular forms through which this substance is expressed and appropriated. This way of understanding the transmission of the Faith is widespread today, but I fear it does not do justice to anthropology or to the deposit of the Faith. As human beings, we naturally appropriate things through our senses, that is, through particular forms. The Apostles appropriated the Faith through the particular cadence of Jesus’s voice, through the particular angles of His body. Nothing in Christ is inessential, neither the numbers of hairs on his head nor the lines on the soles of his pierced feet.
The Church is Christ’s Mystical Body. The visible Church does at times sprout hairs that need plucking and develop lines that need smoothing out. But by definition, a tradition is something that has been passed down, a way of expression that has been tested and found good (cf. 1 Thess 5:21). There are always new ways to express Christ, but the old ways cannot be repudiated, even if they are put aside.
Surely traditions should only be put aside for the good of the Church. You argue, “it does not rock the barque of Peter if [inessential traditions] are put aside”—but haven’t the last fifty years been among the rockiest for Peter’s barque? Now, it would be ridiculous to trace recent gales solely to the abandonment of the sedia gestatoria or the triple crown. But what we witnessed with Paul VI and John Paul II was not the putting aside of a few traditions, but of a whole way of articulating the Faith, a language: the language of “triumphalism”, if you like, but also the language of dogma. Is the Church better off for it? Is the world better off for it? Have more souls been saved for it? Perhaps it is too early to tell, and it is surely simplistic to trace the ailments in the Church entirely to changes within the Church. Still, I think we are fooling ourselves if we do not at least ask: is the self-demolition of the Church in the last decades, the loosening of morals in the Church and the wider society, in some way related to the abandonment of the Church’s traditional language? And if so, is putting aside the vestiges of the “triumphalist” language really the best way to go about the New Evangelization?
I submit that Pope Benedict’s assessment of our culture is spot-on: we are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism. Dogma is not relative. Can we really articulate dogma without dogmatic language? Of course, dogmatic language is not the Church’s only language. The Faith finds expression not only in the canons of Councils but also in St Francis’s canticles to Lady Poverty. But St Francis is not St Peter. Peter’s essential task is to preserve the doctrine of the Faith; Peter speaks dogmatically. The world loves (its version of) St Francis. It hates Peter. The world reacted kindly to Paul VI’s repudiation of the papal tiara, and to Pope Francis’s repudiation of the red slippers, because it wants the Pope to repudiate dogma and sees these acts as signs of this repudiation. Worldy humility means relativism.
Pope Francis’s humility is not relativism. He will surely have his Humanae Vitae moment and be rebuffed by the world. But I fear that in divorcing form and substance, in divorcing sign and signified (the essence of postmodernity), our beloved Holy Father may unwittingly make the Faith harder to perceive and so to believe. If the color and signification of the pope's shoes become his to change and interpret at will, he puts on the shoes of relativism. So I pray that along with the pope's red slippers, the Church recover a robust Petrine language—the language of dogma, of triumphalism, of “the golden roof, the marble walls, the Vatican’s majestic halls.”
You note, “We have to distinguish here between what is essential to the tradition and what is inessential.” In the abstract, this sounds clear. Concretely, making these distinctions can be vexing. This difficulty points to something essential about our Faith: that it is received. We are to hold fast to the traditions we have received by word of mouth or in writing (cf. 2 Thess 2:15). Between what is received and its adaptation to a particular culture or age, the priority belongs to what is received.
Now, we might say that what is received, what is essential, is the “substance” of the Faith and not the particular forms through which this substance is expressed and appropriated. This way of understanding the transmission of the Faith is widespread today, but I fear it does not do justice to anthropology or to the deposit of the Faith. As human beings, we naturally appropriate things through our senses, that is, through particular forms. The Apostles appropriated the Faith through the particular cadence of Jesus’s voice, through the particular angles of His body. Nothing in Christ is inessential, neither the numbers of hairs on his head nor the lines on the soles of his pierced feet.
The Church is Christ’s Mystical Body. The visible Church does at times sprout hairs that need plucking and develop lines that need smoothing out. But by definition, a tradition is something that has been passed down, a way of expression that has been tested and found good (cf. 1 Thess 5:21). There are always new ways to express Christ, but the old ways cannot be repudiated, even if they are put aside.
Surely traditions should only be put aside for the good of the Church. You argue, “it does not rock the barque of Peter if [inessential traditions] are put aside”—but haven’t the last fifty years been among the rockiest for Peter’s barque? Now, it would be ridiculous to trace recent gales solely to the abandonment of the sedia gestatoria or the triple crown. But what we witnessed with Paul VI and John Paul II was not the putting aside of a few traditions, but of a whole way of articulating the Faith, a language: the language of “triumphalism”, if you like, but also the language of dogma. Is the Church better off for it? Is the world better off for it? Have more souls been saved for it? Perhaps it is too early to tell, and it is surely simplistic to trace the ailments in the Church entirely to changes within the Church. Still, I think we are fooling ourselves if we do not at least ask: is the self-demolition of the Church in the last decades, the loosening of morals in the Church and the wider society, in some way related to the abandonment of the Church’s traditional language? And if so, is putting aside the vestiges of the “triumphalist” language really the best way to go about the New Evangelization?
I submit that Pope Benedict’s assessment of our culture is spot-on: we are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism. Dogma is not relative. Can we really articulate dogma without dogmatic language? Of course, dogmatic language is not the Church’s only language. The Faith finds expression not only in the canons of Councils but also in St Francis’s canticles to Lady Poverty. But St Francis is not St Peter. Peter’s essential task is to preserve the doctrine of the Faith; Peter speaks dogmatically. The world loves (its version of) St Francis. It hates Peter. The world reacted kindly to Paul VI’s repudiation of the papal tiara, and to Pope Francis’s repudiation of the red slippers, because it wants the Pope to repudiate dogma and sees these acts as signs of this repudiation. Worldy humility means relativism.
Pope Francis’s humility is not relativism. He will surely have his Humanae Vitae moment and be rebuffed by the world. But I fear that in divorcing form and substance, in divorcing sign and signified (the essence of postmodernity), our beloved Holy Father may unwittingly make the Faith harder to perceive and so to believe. If the color and signification of the pope's shoes become his to change and interpret at will, he puts on the shoes of relativism. So I pray that along with the pope's red slippers, the Church recover a robust Petrine language—the language of dogma, of triumphalism, of “the golden roof, the marble walls, the Vatican’s majestic halls.”
As always, I invite your comments below.
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