Pope Francis, a pontificate that (also) looks backward

Pope Francis has often warned against ”indietrism” in this last period of his pontificate. It is an unwieldy term in English, but there’s nothing arcane about it. The word comes from the Italian, indietro – “backward” – and could be rendered “backwardism” without too much trouble.

He has repeatedly warned that attending to the history of the Church does not mean looking backward; that tradition is not the preservation of ashes. He’s not wrong about any of that, but he has used the rhetorical trope – an effective homiletic – to justify some acts of his Church governance.

Pope Francis used the kind of reasoning apparently encapsulated in indietrism to justify the restrictive measures he imposed on the celebration of liturgical rites according to the old liturgical books. He has also used it to explain or even defend his proposed solution to borderline pastoral situations, such as the blessing for the so-called “irregular couples” provided by the controversial Fiducia supplicans declaration.

Perhaps none of that is really surprising. What is surprising, though, is how several decisions Pope Francis has made throughout his eleven-year pontificate do look backward, at least to before Benedict XVI’s papacy. These decisions suggest that Benedict XVI’s pontificate has been put on hold and that his legacy has been put aside.

The last of these decisions is reinstating the title of “Patriarch of the West” among the attributes of the Pope. Benedict XVI eliminated the title of Patriarch of the West. The Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, as it was then styled, explained the decision in a lengthy note dated 22 March 2006, underlining that the title was eliminated for a conceptual issue (the West no longer meant a limited geographical territory but a cultural area that also included the United States and New Zealand) and also to improve ecumenical relations, effectively not putting the Pope in competition with the Patriarchates present in the Orthodox Church.

No explanation was given for re-including the title, Patriarch of the West. It is difficult to think that this was prompted by the new ecumenical relationships that have developed in these eleven years of the Francis pontificate. Relationships have progressed very well, with several trips to Orthodox territories and improved ecumenical relations with everyone, at least until the publication of the Declaration Fiducia supplicans.

It is therefore noteworthy that the encouragement of ecumenical dialogue should be among the chief reasons adduced by observers across the spectrum of opinion in the Church, for the restoration of a title that Benedict XVI had eliminated in order to encourage better ecumenical dialogue. That the restoration has come in the first annuario prepared after Benedict XVI’s death is certainly a matter of curious timing, too.

We are still determining whether this decision will have consequences or whether it is dictated by the desire to leave the title of Patriarch of the East to the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, dividing the world into zones of religious influence.

Could be.

It is worth mentioning that the Orthodox were not best pleased by Benedict’s decision in 2006, nor were some Catholics of the Eastern Rites, in part because the patriarchal standing of the See of Rome was one of the things on which there was broad and unambiguous agreement.

The fact is that decisions made without giving any explanation lend themselves to conflicting readings. It is the excellent theme of Pope Francis’ pontificate: everyone is forced to chase the news to try to understand the meaning of some decisions, and there are no explanations for those decisions. This also leads to a further consequence:

• Everyone feels obliged to advise something.
• There are no filters.
• The Pope can decide extemporaneously.

The reintroduction of the title of Patriarch of the West falls in a week that saw the publication of the Dignitas Infinita declaration, the presentation of which opened with a lengthy defense by Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez, prefect of the Dicastery for Doctrine of the Faith of the Fiducia Supplicans declaration.

Dignitas Infinita and the defense of Fiducia Supplicans show how Pope Francis wants to represent the pontificate. On the one hand, a declaration without anything too terribly controversial or even theologically interesting – Dignitas infinita – expresses Pope Francis’s desire to broaden horizons but has minor doctrinal problems. When Dignitas is attacked, it is because it seems at odds with the language – the “style” – of Pope Francis. How can the pope of “Who am I to judge?” then be so harsh on gender ideology? How does the Pope of todos todos todos! then wholly close the experience of surrogate motherhood?

The answer may be that the pope is Catholic after all, but one understands where the people who are asking the questions get them and also why they’re asking.

On the other hand, we’re talking about the reintroduction of the title of Patriarch of the West, which definitely is a step backward – whatever else it is — as there have been several in this pontificate.

Pope Francis’s decision to include some “remediation” cardinals in every consistory (that is, to create cardinals who had ended up on the margins with Benedict XVI, like the former nuncios Rauber and Fitzgerald), is one. His decision to throw out Benedict XVI’s liberalization of the old liturgical books’ use is another. His raft of financial and judicial reforms that have abandoned the international course charted and undertaken by Benedict XVI in favor of the Holy See’s (and Vatican City’s) older, privileged and complex relationship with Italy is another.

In the middle between the look backward – the restoration of the title of Patriarch of the West – and the look forward, but with orthodoxy - the declaration Dignitas Infiinita - we also have another character of Pope Francis’ pontificate.  

During the press conference, Cardinal Fernandez produced a defense of Fiducia supplicans, which is based on an opinion poll. Not only has the pope’s pastoral language not been understood, not only is it not accepted that the pope does something as he can do and as all popes have done, but ultimately – this is Fernandez’s reasoning — an unidentified survey says that 65 percent of young people between 25 and 35 years old approved of Fiducia Supplicans, a text Fernandez says reached (an unlikely figure) 7 billion internet views.

The image given is that of a Church that looks at numbers and consensus, which indeed builds its innovations on consensus. There are personal decisions of the Pope, and these decisions are based on consensus.

In this sense, it is not surprising that the repudiation of the document of the Doctrine of the Faith on the no to the blessings of homosexual marriages led the Pope, at the Angelus on the Sunday following its publication, to explain that the language of God is compassion and tenderness – and that he would be prepared for the road to the Fiducia Supplicans. And it is not even surprising when Pope Francis said he accepted the resignation of Archbishop Aupetit of Paris on the “altar of hypocrisy” – and in the wake of a press campaign based on claims subsequently proven by French authorities’ own investigation to have been inaccurate.

It isn’t easy to find a common direction in these choices.

Perhaps the point is that there really isn’t a common direction. On the one hand, there is the Curia, the work it does on the documents, the search for balance with the innovation requested by the Pope (in the case of Dignitas infinita, the inclusion of social issues), and at the same time, at least the veneer of continuity with the previous magisterial teaching. On the other hand, there is Pope Francis with his impromptu decisions, which may also be the result of pastoral practice but ultimately turn out to be schizophrenic.

Then, there are the “guardians of the revolution” who defend every choice of Pope Francis as utterly unamenable to criticism of any kind. To entertain, let alone express an opinion critical of Pope Francis’s decision – whatever it is – means pitting oneself against the pope directly, and therefore against the Church.

Fun times for consensus based on dialogue.

The real problem also seems to be a poor understanding of the language of the Church. Cardinal Fernandez said Pope Francis would never speak ex cathedra, almost as if to speak ex cathedra were a bad thing. Perhaps Fernandez meant mostly that the pope would not use infallibility because – he added – that he would never change doctrine.

Fernandez isn’t exactly wrong to think that the pope is somehow teaching either personally or through his curia every time he gives a homily or they produce a document, but it is nonetheless reasonable to wonder when the pope or his lieutenants are mostly teaching and when they are mostly just talking, and the attitude taken and championed by Fernandez strongly suggests that neither he nor his principal believe there’s much difference.

Ultimately, though, papal teaching and papal governance become entangled, and both become highly politicized and sociologically driven. It is a language that divides and polarizes, language that divides the Church into those who agree with the pope and those who do not, into those whom a survey places among the people in favor and those who are considered against, between intietrists and progressives.

The reality is more nuanced.

In this sense, the Pope seems contradictory because there is a difference between what he approves and what he says. The ultimate risk of the pontificate is that it will disappoint everyone. The progressives will feel they got less than they could have or should have gotten, and conservatives will feel marginalized and attacked, because they have been.

People of common sense would also like to hear about the Eucharist, faith, and the meaning of life and not be affected by various para-political arguments. They also have less interest, I would say, in the gossip about the papal election or in papal reconstructions of complex situations aimed at defining final narrative of the pontificate but succeed mostly at making a human pontificate, too human.

In the end, the sense of the divine is missing.

The title of Patriarch of the West can then return because, after all, bringing it back responds to a very practical and concrete logic. Otherwise, it would have remained disused, as it had been since 2006.