Pope of Ambiguity

One of the constants of the Franciscan pontificate was the favor with which he was treated by the secular English-speaking media. Alongside the tributes that international diplomacy requires, we can expect his obituaries in mainstream outlets to be kind. As the dust settles, however, we can begin to ask: What exactly did Pope Francis set himself to do, and did he do it?

Oddly, the second question is a bit clearer than the first. We can look at the effects of his actions, but Pope Francis never gave us a manifesto. For example, he took a number of measures to centralize the Church, weakening the powers of bishops to establish new religious communities, and to manage the celebration of the pre-Vatican II (“Traditional”) Latin Mass. He also created a vast bureaucracy of “synodality,” which channeled local questions to Rome, where the answers could be carefully stage-managed or else indefinitely postponed. He never made the case for centralism, however, insisting that he wanted local autonomy, while preventing conservative American bishops from making the Traditional Mass a major part of their pastoral strategy, liberal Brazilian bishops from creating deaconesses, and gay-friendly German bishops from authorizing liturgical texts for same-sex unions.

One way of reading this pontificate, therefore, would be in continuity with those of Pope Benedict, Pope John Paul II, and Pope Paul VI: of simply trying to hold things together. We might call it the “Rowan Williams” reading, since Pope Francis’s favored rhetorical weapon, in contrast with those predecessors, was not persuasion but ambiguity, in a succession of documents and statements that were extremely difficult for anyone to understand.

Pope Francis’s conservative critics would point out, however, that his Delphic utterances seemed to serve a very different function from those of Archbishop Williams. Whereas the Anglican primate often had to respond to stridently worded and mutually contradictory statements from constituent parts of his Communion, with a formulation that, with a bit of luck, might be endorsed by Anglicans with a wide range of views, Pope Francis’s statements seemed to open, rather than paper over, the cracks. 

His condemnation of the death penalty stopped just short of saying clearly that it was intrinsically evil. His statements on divorce and same-sex unions stopped just short of saying that these were willed by God. His restriction of the Traditional Mass did not quite say that liturgical diversity undermined the unity of the Church. His various underlings’ responses to the question of female ordination never quite crossed the line into saying that women deacons were impossible. In each case, many people, reading the texts, would say that those conclusions were implied, but this was a rhetorical implication, not a logical one: the distinction that allowed Boris Johnson to say that describing a claim as an “inverted pyramid of piffle” was not the same as saying that it was factually untrue.

The effect of each of these documents was to tear up the terms of a truce that had been established by his predecessors. Pope John Paul II had encouraged his followers to campaign against the death penalty in practice, while conceding its legitimacy in principle, something nearly everyone could live with, but Pope Francis forced many conservatives into open opposition to the view now taken by many liberals: that it is always and everywhere wrong. His document on same-sex unions brought entire African bishops’ conferences out in open opposition to the established practice of swathes of the Church in Germany, the closest we have come to a geographically-defined schism for centuries. Again, Pope Benedict had allowed the Traditional Mass an honored but subordinate place in the Church, something that at first aroused some opposition before settling into a workable compromise, but Pope Francis’s new policy introduced open persecution against some of the Church’s few areas of growth. His position on female deacons alienated his most dedicated allies, the bishops of Latin America and the feminists. Mary McAleese, former president of Ireland, responded by calling the Church an “empire of misogyny.” At the same time, many exasperated conservatives remained convinced that Pope Francis was still plotting to ordain women at some point in the future, something they had never suspected of Pope John Paul II, despite his failure to include the diaconate in his rejection of the ordination of women to the priesthood.

Rather than a Rowan Williams hermeneutic, then, we need some other tool to analyze Pope Francis’s strategy, perhaps one named in honor of Juan Perón, sometime military ruler of his native Argentina. An illustrative apocryphal tale of Perón tells us that one day, while driving along, his chauffeur asked him whether he should turn right or left. “Signal left, turn right,” the great statesman replied.

What, one might ask, is the point of ambiguity, if it is not to create at least the appearance of unity? Cynics will tell us that a ruler can benefit from conflict among his subordinates, whether he participates in it personally to weaken his enemies, or stands aloof, allowing factions to exhaust themselves by fighting each other.

This reading of Pope Francis, it must be said, is a minority view, because it suggests that he was more interested in the exercise of power than in the imposition of a particular set of policies on the Church. To those engaged deeply in the various ideological battles Pope Francis has unleashed, such an attitude seems inconceivable, but history is filled with un-ideological leaders, who spend their time crushing rivals, rewarding friends, and needling the kinds of people they don’t like.

We will see if the cardinals will prefer to continue with the Franciscan way or will choose a pope who wants to unite the Church around a clearly expressed set of militant principles. Pope Francis’s time in office has made the latter project much more difficult. A new pope might be better advised to say little and focus on calming things down: in other words, to borrow a phrase from St. Francis, to be an instrument of peace.