Editorials

Do you feel that lately it’s been All Pope All the Time?

If you do, you’re not alone. And it’s not news.

To someone raised in Catholic schools as I was, Pope Francis is just not a big surprise. The minute that former insiders like me heard that they’d elected a Jesuit as Pope, we knew that a change gon’ come, yes it will. Though as Sam Cooke also said, it’s been a long time coming. 

Many outsiders are not aware that in addition to the Church’s ostensible hierarchy—Cardinals, Archbishops, Monsignors and the like—there’s been an intellectual caste system of which the Jesuits form the top tier. It’s possible for a bigoted ignoramus like San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone to rise through the parish ranks, but the men who choose to join the Society of Jesus are held to a higher standard if they’re accepted. 

Jesuits are expected to be smart, well-educated, witty, and just a bit more worldly than their parish priest counterparts. One can assume that Jorge Mario Bergoglio was all of those before he was elected to the papacy, but that wouldn’t necessarily make him popular with his fellow cardinals. Many priests of lesser pretentions have considered Jesuits too clever by half—“Jesuitical”, in fact. Jesuits have always prided themselves on being able to argue any side of a question. 

On the other hand, the non-Jesuit German and Polish popes who preceded Francis seemed to score low on such traits, which could be one reason he got the nod from a conclave which, still predominantly Italian, might well be tired of dour Northerners. Bergoglio was a two-fer: both from the under-represented New World and culturally Italian—what’s not to like?  

The new Pope’s characteristics which seem to surprise newsies who came of age in the 1980s and later are not so novel to those of us who were around in the 50s, 60s and even 70s. In his speech to Congress he called out (along with Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King and Thomas Merton) Dorothy Day, a radical women who was called a Communist and worse when she agitated for pacifism and care of the poor. I first ran across her work in 1957 in the library of my young ladies’ convent school in Pasadena, the female equivalent of the elite male-only Jesuit high school, or so we hoped. 

Our nuns weren’t particularly political, but our music teacher, a prim buttoned-down laywoman, was the daughter of Dorothy Day’s fellow-troublemaker Ammon Hennacy (“half-Quaker and half-Irish”, he called himself, both a pacificist and a fire-breather). She snuck The Catholic Worker, their rabblerousing leftish publication, into the library magazine rack, and it was quite an eye-opener for the girls who happened to read it, many of whose parents were anti-communist Southern California Republicans. A favorite slogan, often repeated in the paper, was the need for “blowing the dynamite of the Church”. 

A year later, along came Pope John XXIII who did his best to do just that. He made lots of changes in less than 5 years, and the explosions he started lasted through the 60s, in the person of radical civil rights activists and pacifists like the Jesuit poet-priest Dan Berrigan. Liberation theology spread in Latin America. Even parish priests in the U.S. caught the wave. In Ann Arbor, where I lived then, the local parish priest, Father Pat Jackson, was a leader in civil rights and anti-war protests, as was Father Bill O’Donnell in Berkeley.  

But eventually things went downhill, and later popes (hard even to remember who they were) reverted to a more conservative pattern, as did many of the lesser clergy. Many political people working toward a better world in the here-and-now, instead of in the hereafter, lost interest in the Church, including me. Sexual scandals didn’t help matters. 

Many of my friends these days, and many would-be pundits who’ve this week been trying to get a handle on the pope, especially those whose education was deficient on the humanities side, know very little about the less sensational parts of the history of the Roman Catholic Church. They don’t know, for example, that for good or ill the Church was long suspicious of capitalism, slow to come around to the idea that making money from the needs of the less fortunate was a social good.  

The new pope has already declared that John XXIII was a saint, bypassing the usual requirements that the candidate has to perform a miracle or two. I would say that if Pope Francis’s name comes up for possible canonization, he might be given credit for at least one and maybe two already.  

Number One: columnists have been falling all over themselves speculating about why John Boehner is quitting. But several people in my day-to-day orbit have independently come up with this dramatic explanation: He heard his Pope and he repented. 

Yes, yes, I know, that seems improbable, but just looking at the externalities, what happened? Pope speaks, tells Congress what to do to be saved, Boehner’s in tears and then he quits.  

Cause and effect? Could be. St. Augustine, St. Paul, there’s a long line of stories like this, so why not the Speaker? 

And then there’s this brilliant rhetorical feat in Pope Francis’s address to Congress, Jesuitical in the best sense of the word: 

Pope: “The Golden Rule also reminds us of our responsibility to protect and defend human life at every stage of its development.” 

Republicans, anticipating abortion condemnation: Thundering Applause. 

(Pregnant pause.) 

Pope, turning on a dime: “This conviction has led me, from the beginning of my ministry, to advocate at different levels for the global abolition of the death penalty. I am convinced that this way is the best, since every life is sacred, every human person is endowed with an inalienable dignity, and society can only benefit from the rehabilitation of those convicted of crimes.” 

Many Democrats: Thundering Applause.  

Historically, Roman Catholics in general have had quite an assortment of sins to atone for—they’ve generally been the Christians who have taken the position that it’s always possible to repent. They’ve needed to do so with some frequency, as Pope Francis has been doing on this trip and earlier.  

A significant percentage of my ancestors were not of that persuasion—they were from the unforgiving New England Protestant stock which as far as I know has still not officially repented for the witch trials. The Pope, on the other hand, in his prison visit suggested that we’re all sinners, including himself, and endorsed repentance of all kinds. 

And that second miracle? The wickedest Supreme, Antonin Scalia, who claims to be a devout Catholic, was recently quoted saying that (A) he thought the court might soon do away with the death penalty and (B) if his religion conflicted with the Constitution, he’d quit. This one might be too much to expect, but we can hope, can’t we? We’ll be the first to cheer if he actually repents. That really would be news.