There is a whole lot of righteous indignation brewing on the American right these days thanks to the emergence of a popular and charismatic Pope whose obvious sympathies for a particular take on Catholic teachings flies in the face of decades of concerted efforts by American conservatives to monopolize morality for political purposes.
While I completely agree with Professor Cunningham about this Pope’s utter indifference to partisan politics, I also agree with much of Molly Ball’s argument in The Atlantic about “Why Pope Francis Sounds Like a Democrat.” I think conservatives are right to fear the potential political impact of a Pope who sees the world through the lens of liberation theology, a perspective that has very little use for either righteousness or indignation, two emotional/rhetorical poses that have for decades been absolutely essential to the proliferation and defense of political conservatism in America. When conservative pols and pundits intone that this Pope is a communist or the like, it is just as nuts as any of the right’s paranoid ravings, but unlike their fear of President Obama, Hillary Clinton, immigrants, foreigners, and liberals in general I think this Pope’s message actually does pose a real (though not existential) threat to the modern conservative movement in America.
Pope Francis’ brand of Catholicism is the one I grew up with in Western Massachusetts. I’m pretty sure I never met a Catholic Republican before attending The Catholic University of America in the late 1980s. For me this Pope’s perspective feels familiar and comforting. With only a couple required CUA theology classes under my belt, I don’t feel qualified to make sophisticated connections between the tenets of liberation theology and American progressivism, but I can share a personal story that may illustrate how I see the Pope’s perspective providing aid and comfort, however incidental, to the American political left at this particular time.
On a Sunday long ago when I was a UMass grad student attending Mass at the Newman Center on the Amherst campus. It was finals week, and the unusually crowded pews attested to the perceived power of prayer. The priest was Father Joe Quigley, a UMass fixture from 1963 until his death in 2005. Father Quigley’s homily that day has stuck with me more than any other I’ve ever heard. Sensing the (test) anxiety of his impressionable flock, Father Quigley wasted no time making an impression. He began by not so gently instructing the students before him on how to react if a certain thing occurred while they were taking their final exams that week. He said that if we were “writing an exam and some poor (I never remember if he said slob or soul here) is breaking his neck to get a look at your exam, for God’s sake don’t cover it up!”
I’ve long since forgotten how the assembled students reacted to that forceful, yet counter-intuitive, command, but I have never forgotten what it meant to me then or how it continues to guide my heart, and to a degree my politics. Father Quigley told those anxious students that day something about what Catholic compassion looks like. Catholic compassion is immediate and direct, not clever or polite. It is non-judgmental, uncritical, and reflexive, not moralistic or moralizing. It is entirely selfless, not “self-interest rightly understood.” It’s about universal love and empathy, not right and wrong in the here and now. It isn’t rational and we all fall far short of its mandate virtually every minute of every day. Doing so is both inevitable and very easy to rationalize. Catholic compassion is not political, and its nobility may even be diminished when it is politicized.
Pope Francis isn’t telling American Catholics that they should take sides in any political dispute. His command is far more threatening to American political conservatism than that. He is commanding his flock to actually lift up the poor, welcome the stranger, save the planet, feed the hungry, and heal the sick. He’s not mixing faith and politics, but rather pushing Catholics to live their faith without regard for the political impact or implications. Politically conservative Catholics have been conditioned to forget, or displace, some of their faith’s most pivotal teachings.
“There but for the grace of God go I” may not technically be one of those precise teachings, but in my view it certainly does reflect well Pope Francis’ theological perspective, and his understanding of Catholic compassion. The “grace of God” in this proverb cannot be replaced with “hard work” or “intelligence” or even “good fortune.” It leaves no room for a work/reward ethic or anything resembling the concept of individual merit. “You didn’t build that” is a weak pretender, a poor facsimile the moral implications of which fall well short of the message and mandate implicit in “there but for the grace of God go I.” It is simply inconceivable to me that anyone moved in the direction of this Pope’s theology will be as quick to sympathize with a political perspective that is so rhetorically dependent on distinguishing “the makers” from the “takers” or the deserving from the undeserving poor. Modern American conservatism (in my humble, personal opinion) has become far too dependent upon the rhetoric of moral stratification and rationalized selfishness to be entirely unthreatened by Pope Francis’ radical example of Catholic compassion.
To the extent that Pope Francis' words and deeds impact the perceptions and behavior of American Catholics, his tenure at this particular time and his teachings about the stewardship of "our common home" provide American progressives with an opportunity and pose a problem (of indeterminate magnitude at present) for American conservatives.