The Pope’s Soundbites

By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK

I have been wondering if liberal Catholics were going to gloat in public over the liberalizing efforts of Pope Francis. So far, they haven’t, as far as I can tell. There may be some chuckling in private among liberal Catholic circles over the dilemma faced by conservative Catholics who have prided themselves on their loyalty to the papacy, now that they find themselves regularly at odds with the Pope’s comments on issues such as homosexuality and global warming. But I haven’t seen much snickering in the open about “conservative cafeteria Catholics.”
At least not in mainstream publications such as America and Commonweal. You will find high praise for Francis’ “compassion” and “openness to change” in these venues, but no “nonna-nonya-nah-hah” smugness.
Why not? Maybe because the editors of these publications are too high-minded to stoop to such tactics. Then again, it could be that they are following Lacy Macbeth’s suggestion to “look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under it.”
What do I mean by that? There is always the possibility that liberal Catholics grasp the implications of needling conservatives who do not support Francis’ on issues such as Communion for divorced and remarried Catholics and immigration. The liberals may fear that conservative Catholics will respond by pointing out that Catholics on the left treated dissent from Church teachings on matters such as birth control and abortion as a noble endeavor.
And you can see where that would lead. Why should conservative Catholics go along with Francis’ push for changes in longstanding Catholic teachings when liberals have told us for decades now that the right to dissent from the Church’s traditional teachings should be seen as a high-minded exercise of freedom of conscience?
In fact, I would say it is not out of bounds to wonder if Pope Francis has had the same thought; whether he has pondered why modern Catholics should give deference to what he says about capitalism, global warming, and homosexuality, when he is calling upon us to change our thinking about what his Predecessors taught on so many issues?
John Allen, the Vatican analyst for CNN and editor of Crux, on March 8, at cruxnow.com, provides us an example of how liberal Catholics are dealing with this dilemma. He concedes that “time and time gain over the last four years, Francis has uttered an arresting phrase” that has “fired both imagination and controversy.” Allen offers his “personal top five quotable quotes” from the Pope:
His “Who am I to judge?” comment in reference to homosexuals, while on his way back from Brazil in 2013.
The observation that “God is not a Catholic,” attributed to Francis by Italian journalist Eugenio Scalfari during an interview in 2013.
The comment: “If [a close friend] says a swear word against my mother, he’s going to get a punch in the nose” — made on a plane from Sri Lanka to the Philippines in January 2015, in response to a question about the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris. (Whatever Francis meant by that, it was generally seen as an expression of his understanding for why Muslim extremists attacked the staff of the magazine that had published satirical drawings of Mohammed.)
“Catholics don’t need to breed like rabbits” — in reply to a question about birth control while the Pope was returning to Rome in January 2015.
“Most marriages today are null” — spoken at a pastoral congress on the family in the Diocese of Rome in June 2016, later amended by the Vatican to read “some.”
Allen adds to his list the Pope’s warnings in mid-March of this year about the dangers of “populism” (which was interpreted by nearly everyone as a criticism of Donald Trump and his supporters).
Allen is not a conservative Catholic. Yet he understands the confusion the Pope has sown: “Whenever these bombshells explode, pundits and commentators go into overdrive trying to explain (and sometimes spin) what the pope actually meant. Less noticed, however, is the grassroots pastoral challenge they create, as parish priests and other Church personnel scramble to answer people’s questions about what was said and what it might mean.”
I submit that Allen provides a wise perspective on this matter, observations that can help Catholics with traditional views wend their way through the maze of press reports from Rome.
He acknowledges for starters that “whatever else these bombshells may be, they are clearly not a formal expression of the pope’s teaching authority. If Francis wanted to declare a new dogma binding on Catholic consciences, he knows how to do it, and a one-off zinger in a press conference isn’t it.”
Allen does not mean we should “simply disregard” what the Pope says in these “informal settings. He’s the pope, and his words always deserve to be received with respect. However, his opinion on the Charlie Hebdo attacks obviously doesn’t have the same standing as, say, declarations about the Trinity or about Christ.”
Allen refers to comments from former Vatican spokesman Jesuit Fr. Federico Lombardi, who “said we’re in the presence of a new genre of papal speech — loose, spontaneous, not vetted by teams of theologians.” This means “we’ll have to adjust our modes of interpretation accordingly.”
Precisely. It is hard to determine why this Pope is so much more “chatty” than his Predecessors, and seemingly unconcerned about making clear the extent to which world’s Catholics have — or do not have — an obligation to abide by his off-the-cuff remarks, but we have to face the fact that he is. Pope Francis is entitled to offer his personal observations about moral and cultural issues, but there should be no presumption that, when he does so, he is articulating the official teaching of the Church. Conservative Catholics are entitled to react to much of what he says in the same manner as John Allen: with a winnowing fan.
There is another thing, writes Allen: “It’s important to remember that these one-liners don’t always capture the pope’s own priorities. Often they’ve come in response to questions other people have asked him, rather than something he brought up himself.”
The Pope may have been responding to “gotcha” questions from the press. Papal infallibility does not guarantee he will not say something unwise in such an encounter.
Allen suggests that we look to conversations the Pope has initiated in the first person — his encyclicals and other documents, for instance — to get an accurate picture of his teachings: “While the soundbite may help define Francis from a media point of view, it’s probably not how he himself sees the heart of his papacy.”
Moreover, we should “put these utterances in context in order to grasp what Francis really meant. The ‘breeding like rabbits’ soundbite, for instance, was initially taken in some circles as a step back from the Church’s opposition to artificial birth control, but in context the pontiff appeared to be talking about Natural Family Planning and other Church-approved strategies for what Francis called ‘responsible parenthood’.”
The bottom line: We should not take the secular press’ interpretation of what the Pope meant, when we read his words in the newspaper or hear them discussed on the evening news. There are secular liberals in the media who would like to make the Vatican the ecclesiastical wing of the Democratic Party in the United States. What they say about Pope Francis needs to be taken with a grain of salt, perhaps even seen as examples of fake news.