This is my
commandment:
love one
another,
as I have
loved you.
A man can
have no greater love
than to lay
down his life for his friends.
You are my
friends,
if you do
what I command you,
I shall not
call you servants any more,
because a
servant does not know
his master’s
business;
I call you
friends,
because I
have made known to you
everything I
have learnt from my Father.
John 15:12
-15
The
road to Hobart is very familiar to me. I have travelled it regularly, from
early morning to late at night. I am able to anticipate towns and villages,
overtaking lanes and pit stops. In recent years I have enjoyed using the magic
of cruise control. It’s an easy drive.
That’s
how it is with familiar drives, familiar pathways. We have an urge to recognise
landscapes and landmarks, the twists and turns, looking for patterns, for
regularity, we make sense of our environment. There are, however, always
dangers on the road, unpredictable road conditions, even more unpredictable
drivers. There are other factors, of course, speed, attention (passengers, mobile
phones, audiobooks), tyres. Familiarity, as they say, breeds contempt, and we
can often take unnecessary risks.
As
we progress towards the end of our Easter season, the easy familiarity we
associate with the Alleluias, the post-resurrection stories and the frenetic
energy of the first disciples as they begin to preach the Good News, it is so
easy to accept the familiarity and suddenly find ourselves on cruise control
negotiating the bends without being aware of where we are, of what we are
doing.
John’s
Gospel, the rich landscape in which and through which the story of Jesus wends,
proclaims a message both familiar and extraordinarily challenging: This is my commandment: love one another as
I have loved you. A man can have no greater love than to lay down his life for
his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you (15:12 -14). We
hear it at ANZAC Day, Remembrance services and at funerals. But this is no
charge for bravery under fire, this is about the way we get up every day and
face the world we live in, 365 days a year. Sometimes our days have patterns
that we can no longer recognise and around which we revolve until our day is
complete. This Gospel pericope offers a clear proposition for all humanity: if you live the commandment of love and are willing to lay down your down life for your friends then
you are indeed Jesus’ friend.
Cruise
control is fantastic, but it should be left for long trips. As we drive through
our days before Pentecost, let’s challenge ourselves to be aware of, and open
to, the people around us, to view each twist and turn of our day as an
opportunity to learn and to celebrate our friendship with Jesus. The opening
prayer for the 6th Sunday of Easter reminds us:
Ever-living
God,
help
us to celebrate our joy
in
the resurrection of the Lord
and
to express in our lives
the
love we celebrate.
Peter
Douglas
Pope Francis brings a new lens to poverty, peace and the planet
First published in America, April 23, 2018
Five
years ago, Jorge Bergoglio became Francis,
choosing at the moment of his election in March 2013 a name that no pope had
taken before. His choice of the name served as a signpost for the direction in
which he would lead the global church. In his embrace of the poor, his pursuit of
nonviolence and his care for all of God’s creation, Pope Francis has brought
the legacy of the great saint of Assisi to the very heart of the church’s
proclamation to the modern world.
It
is especially fruitful, then, in assessing the first five years of the Francis
pontificate, to examine how the pope’s contributions to Catholic social teaching have reflected
the three Franciscan priorities of poverty, peace and the planet. In what way
has the leadership of the first pope from the New World enriched or altered the
body of Catholic social teaching? What is it about his papacy or perspective
that has generated such substantial opposition to Pope Francis, particularly
within the United States? How should we characterize the mission that the pope
has taken on behalf of economic justice, building peace and caring for our
common home?
A
New Lens
The
starting point to answering these questions lies in recognizing that the
relationship between the social teachings of Pope Francis and his predecessors
is not, fundamentally, one of continuity or discontinuity. Rather, the
relationship that Pope Francis’ teachings on poverty, peace and the environment
have with the tradition he inherited is one of fundamental continuity but
refracted through a strikingly new lens.
This
new lens reflects in a fundamental way the experience of the church in Latin America. Critics of Pope Francis point
to this as a limitation, a bias that prevents the pope from seeing the central
issues of economic justice, war
and peace and the environment in the context of the
universal church. But St. John Paul II certainly enriched key aspects of
Catholic social teaching from a perspective profoundly rooted in the experience
of the Eastern European church under communism. Contemporary critics of Pope
Francis voice no objection to that regional and historical perspective.
Furthermore,
the church in Latin America constitutes more than 40
percent of the Catholics in the world. When combined with the
Catholic populations of sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, which face similar
economic and environmental challenges, the church of the global south
constitutes more than two-thirds of the universal church. The Argentine pope’s
perspective on Catholic social teaching is, then, one shared by the majority of
Catholics.
There
are four major elements that shape how Pope Francis understands the Catholic
tradition on the issues of poverty, peace and the planet.
See-judge-act. The first and most important element is the
recognition that Catholic social teaching must be comprehensively inductive.
Specifically, Pope Francis employs the see-judge-act methodology, which roots
Catholic teaching and action in the world as it is, rather than the world as
one imagines or wishes it to be. This is the central methodology used by the church
in Latin America to discern how the church is being called to respond in areas
ranging from evangelization to spiritual formation to social justice.
The
see-judge-act method begins theological reflection by seeing the world as it
truly is, then pondering the implications in light of our faith and the Gospel
and, finally, promoting action in concert with those implications. As the
pivotal final document of the Latin American and Caribbean
bishops’ meeting at Aparecida,
Brazil, in 2007 stated, “This method enables us to combine successfully a
faithful perspective for viewing reality; incorporating criteria from faith and
reason for discerning and appraising it critically; and accordingly acting as
missionary disciples of Jesus Christ.”
Throwaway
culture. Next, Pope Francis
approaches the tradition of Catholic social thought through the theme of
exclusion. Marginalization, viewed as a denial of the right to participate
meaningfully in political, economic, social and cultural life, has long been a
major focus of Catholic social teaching. The concept of exclusion that Pope
Francis deploys is broader than marginalization; it is reflective of the
interwoven deprivations that do not merely banish entire populations to the
margins of society but exclude them entirely. In Pope Francis’ memorable
terminology, such people are victims of a “throwaway culture,” discarded from any
meaningful participation in society.
The
colonial history of Latin America and the neocolonialism that endures on many
levels today has attuned this pope to the manner in which grave inequalities of
wealth and power inevitably result in the patterns of exclusion that pulverize
the human spirit.
In
light of this history, the Latin American church is suspicious of
globalization. The bishops’ Aparecida document explicitly
states: “In globalization, market forces easily absolutize efficacy and
productivity as values regulating all human relations.... In its current form,
globalization is incapable of interpreting and reacting in response to
objective values that transcend the market and that constitute what is most
important in human life: truth, justice, love and most especially, the dignity
and rights of all, even those not included in the market.”
Our
common home. The third element of
the pope’s new lens on Catholic social thought is the recognition that integral
human development includes the protection of the earth, our common home. Latin
America is the home of Amazonia, a region so rich in its biodiversity that it
is literally vital for the preservation of life on earth. Francis has seen
firsthand the destruction of the Amazon; there is an environmental catastrophe
underway that can suffocate the earth even while it destroys ancient cultures
and impoverishes vast populations.
Latin
America is a prime example of how economic systems that internalize profits
while externalizing costs and risks must be reformed or replaced. It is also a
prime example of how deep engagement with the environment informed by the
scientific consensus of the world can begin to reclaim the health of our common
home. The see-judge-act method reveals an ongoing abuse of the creation that
God has entrusted to us, and none of the alternative realities painted by the
extractive industries of our nation can obscure that simple fact.
Pacifist
roots. The final element of the
new lens that Pope Francis brings to Catholic teaching on poverty, peace and
the planet is the reintegration of nonviolence into the heart of Catholic
teaching on war and peace. In the early church, pacifism was the dominant theme
of Christian theology. For most of the church’s history, however, nonviolence
has been seen as a heroic though unrealistic choice, an eccentric part of our
patrimony that was displaced by St. Augustine’s powerful logic of war as last
resort.
In
his “World Day of Peace Message” in 2017, Pope Francis reclaimed the tradition
of pacifism as a major theological current in the life of the church. He
reiterated the contention of the early Christian community that Christ’s call
to love of neighbor and enemy alike is, in an unrelenting way, incompatible
with recourse to war. Francis teaches that the time in which Jesus lived was
one of great violence, and yet he preached nonresistance. Can the church do
anything less than seek to construct a powerful and realistic politics of
nonviolence rooted both in reality and in the words of the Lord himself?
A
Threefold Mission
The first five years of Francis’ pontificate suggest
that the pope, through this new lens, has undertaken a different mission within
each of the three major priorities of the Franciscan legacy.
Poverty. On the question of poverty, Pope Francis
has undertaken a mission of application and renewal. Specifically, the pope has
sought to enact Catholic moral teaching in the light of the forces of
globalization that are transforming our economies, cultures and societies. In a
very real way, Pope Francis approaches globalization with the same perspective
that characterized Pope Leo XIII’s critique of industrialization in “Rerum Novarum” in 1891. Francis is under no
illusion that globalization can be reversed. Rather, it is his conviction that
the tremendous upheaval in economic, familial and cultural life caused by
globalization requires the creation of major new structures of social justice
designed to mitigate the consequences and claims of globalization that have
devastated so many sectors of the human family.
The
great theme of the preferential option for the poor, which has resonated in
Catholic teaching since the time of Paul VI, lies at the heart of this renewal.
The methodology of see-judge-act, so consonant with the Second Vatican
Council’s exhortation to look carefully at the
“signs of the times,” provides the pathway for meaningful reform. And the
questions of participation and marginalization, so central to the social
thought of St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, have been amplified by the
prism of exclusion that ultimately is determinative in Pope Francis’ judgments
about the morality of globalization. Even refracted through the distinctive
lens that Pope Francis brings to Catholic social teaching on the issue of
poverty, his project is fundamentally one of continuing the long trajectory of
the church’s commitment to the defense of the poor, using the rich doctrinal
resources that have been forged over the past 125 years.
Peace. If the relationship between the initiatives
of Pope Francis and the tradition he inherited can be seen as one of continuity
and renewal in the area of economic justice and poverty, Pope Francis’ mission
in the area of peace is best seen as one of recovery. On one level, Francis has
continued the trajectory of the modern popes in tightening the moral
requirements under just war theory for recourse to war and the formulation of
nuclear policy. The pope’s bold decision last November to proclaim the very
possession of nuclear weapons morally unacceptable is a sign of that continuing
trajectory.
But
on a more fundamental level, the initiatives of Pope Francis in the area of
nonviolence and peace-building constitute a major shift in orientation in
Catholic social teaching designed to truly empower the church’s ancient
pacifist traditions. This shift is rooted in the see-judge-act methodology that
looks to the demonstrated successes of nonviolence in civil conflicts around
the globe in which violence had been tried and failed. By pointing to the
viability and moral superiority of nonviolence, this recovery of the pacifist tradition
provides a necessary complement to a just war tradition that must become ever
more restrictive if it hopes to preserve a claim as an authentic Christian
ethic.
Planet. Pope Francis’ teachings on the environment
constitute a mission of neither renewal nor recovery but rather of wholesale
transformation. For most of the church’s history, Catholic social teaching on
the environment has reflected a theme of mastery and domination. St. John Paul
II and Pope Benedict both sounded a piercing alarm about the well-being of the
planet in their writings about the pillaging of the earth. But it has fallen to
Pope Francis, in “Laudato Si’,” to construct a breathtaking theology of
creation for an age in which the earth itself is imperiled.
uniquely
equipped to carry out this transformation. The first son of Latin America to be
pope, he instinctively appreciates the richness of biodiversity as the
lifeblood of the planet and has witnessed the degradation of the earth and
destruction of peoples brought by rampant exploitation.
“Laudato Si’” is a prayer; it is a warning; it is an
affirmation of the power and beneficence of God; it is an analysis of the
contending forces and bad decisions that have brought our planet to a point of
deepest peril. Most of all, it is the re-creation of Catholic teaching about
the nature of the human person in relation to the earth that is our common
home.
The renewal, recovery and
transformation that Pope Francis has launched in Catholic teachings on poverty,
peace and the planet are firmly rooted in the doctrinal tradition of the
church. Yet they bring the enriching perspective of the Southern church—the
majority of Catholics in the world today—to bear on the themes of exclusion,
pacifism, the preservation of our common home and the massive threats that
globalization poses for humanity. St. Francis of Assisi must be very pleased.
Bishop
Robert W. McElroy, named
an auxiliary bishop of San Francisco in 2010, was elevated to bishop of San
Diego in March 2015.
