The language of Pope Francis

By Randy David
Philippine Daily Inquirer
12:21 am | Sunday, April 13th, 2014
Much has been written about the broad differences that separate Pope Francis from Pope Benedict XVI, and the
comparison tends to be at the latters expense. This must be personally disconcerting for Francis. For, indeed, he has
said many times that he frequently consults with his predecessor. But, perhaps more than this, it is hard to find
anything that Francis has said or written so far that can be taken as contradicting Benedicts thinking. Apart from the
obvious differences in personal style, the one thing, in my view, that distinguishes the present pope from his
predecessor is perspectiveand this is most evident in the distinct vocabularies they use.
Benedicts language is that of Western modernity. He looks at the complex transformations of the world outside, and
asks how the Church must deal with the crises and challenges of the modern world. He says that the Church must
respect the distinctions that have come with modernityamong others, that between faith and reason, between
government and the pastoral function, between the vocation of politics and the education of consciences,
etc. Mindful of these distinctions, he nevertheless warns against thinking of these as unbridgeable dichotomies. Faith
without reason is blind, but reason without faith is empty, he says.
While he acknowledges the diversity of standpoints in the modern world, Benedict rails against the dictatorship of
relativism. Of modernity, he says (Light of the World): In this world, secularism stands on one side, and the question
of God, in its various forms, stands on the other. The question is: Where is secularism right? Where can and must
faith adopt the forms and figures of modernityand where must it offer resistance? This tremendous process is
the real, great task of the hour. We can only hope that the inner strength of the faith that is present in people will then
become powerful publicly as well as by leaving its imprint on public thinking too, and that society does not simply fall
into the abyss.
Francis looks at the same world, but from a different vantage point. It is not the challenge of modernity he
problematizes so much as the worlds worsening split into center and periphery. This distinctly Latin American vision
is the same dependencia perspective that informed the popular struggles of the Third World against imperialism in
the decades of the 70s and 80s. That framework explained poverty in the margins as a consequence of pernicious
capitalist accumulation at the center. Dependency thinking opposed the deception fostered by the so-called trickle
down theory of global capitalism.
It is this framework that Francis has brought with him to the Vatican, and he applies it not just to the center of the
world economy but to the Church itself. He looks at the Church from the peripherythe outskirts, as he sometimes
refers to itand asks what it needs to do to revitalize its redeeming work in the world.
The answer comes in two parts. First, the Church itself must break out of its self-referentiality in order to see how
irrelevant many of its obsessions have become in the light of the realities of the periphery. Second, cleansed by self-
distance, it may then dare to go out once more into the world to preach what is essential about the faiththe beauty
of the saving love of God made manifest in Jesus Christ who died and rose from the dead. The joy of evangelization
which should result from this is often stifled, he says, when we speak more about law than about grace, more about
the Church than about Christ, more about the Pope than about Gods word. (Evangelii Gaudium)
Anyone who has read Benedicts works would surely find these ideas familiar. At one point in Peter Seewalds series
of interviews, Benedict remarks: [W]e really are in an age in which a new evangelization is needed; in which the one
gospel has to be proclaimed in its great enduring rationality and in its power that transcends rationality, so that it can
re-enter our thinking and understanding in a new way. In the same vein, he says in reply to another question: It is
becoming clear that a Church does not grow by withdrawing into some national shell, by separating herself, by
shutting herself up in a certain culture and absolutizing it, but that the Church needs unity, that she needs something
like a primacy.
It is the vocabulary that spells all the difference. Benedict is very much at home in the language of modernity and its
functionally differentiated social systems. He sees a world that more and more leaves little space if any for the
spiritual, the transcendental, and the mysterious. Francis, on the other hand, sees a world riven by the logic of
exclusion, where those in the margins of society find themselves irredeemably excluded from meaningful participation
in nearly every sphere of modern society. It is to them, he says, that the Church must reach out if it is to find its place
in the present world.
Not being a theologian, I cant say if these papal views are in any way inconsistent with one another. But, as a
student of society, I am amazed by the way these variable motifs bring to the fore the limits of modernity. Modernity is
supposed to sweep all of humanity into the circuits of a functionally differentiated global society. Yet Francis speaks
of the total exclusion of entire nations and societies, and, what is more, that this is occurring in the shadow of
modernity itself. Like Benedict, he alludes to the limit of modernity, and the beginning of faith.
Kierkegaard once wrote that there is a name for that which we cannot think: God. That, in many ways, is what the
two popes have been saying.
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