Francis’s powerful critique of both Christian-nationalist populism and what he calls “technocratic managerialism” could not be more relevant. Like the encyclical Fratelli tutti, Let Us Dream opens up a space beyond the current polarization in Western politics. Francis is doing for our own era what Pius XI sought to do with his 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo anno—in another age of democratic crisis and authoritarian populism. Both urge us not to settle for the status quo, but to look to a different kind of politics, one that recognizes the human dignity of all people and builds society and the economy on that basis.
Francis reflects on our political moment. By Austen IvereighJanuary 27, 2021 Pope FrancisSocial Justice Economy in Commonweal
Pope Francis leads the midday recitation of the Angelus, January 17, 2021, from the library of the Apostolic Palace at the Vatican (CNS photo/Vatican Media).
When the host of The Late Show asked Joe Biden just before Christmas how the second Catholic president of the United States would take his orders from the pope on how to govern, Biden didn’t get the joke. “He personally called me to congratulate me,” he told Stephen Colbert in all earnestness, adding that he had just been on the phone with the archbishop of Washington, Wilton Gregory, who told him that Francis had signed a book he wanted the president to have.
That book, which I helped put together, is called Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future. It is Francis’s reflection on the pandemic and the possibilities of change the crisis offers to humanity. It ends with a vision for a new kind of politics that seemed timely enough in the lead-up to the November 2020 election, against the background of Trump’s campaign rallies and the Black Lives Matter protests. Now, after the “Jericho March” and the storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters on January 6, Francis’s powerful critique of both Christian-nationalist populism and what he calls “technocratic managerialism” could not be more relevant.
Like the encyclical Fratelli tutti, Let Us Dream opens up a space beyond the current polarization in Western politics. Francis is doing for our own era what Pius XI sought to do with his 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo anno—in another age of democratic crisis and authoritarian populism. Both urge us not to settle for the status quo, but to look to a different kind of politics, one that recognizes the human dignity of all people and builds society and the economy on that basis.
Although both of these encyclicals turn to the people, there is a great gulf separating their “inclusive populism,” as Angus Ritchie calls it in a recent book of that name, and the exclusivist populism of hate and division fomented by Trump and other demagogues. Understanding that difference, and the contrasting spiritual movements involved, is vital if we are to find a way out of the current political crisis.
For Francis, the root of the crisis in liberal democracy is a neo-Darwinist market ideology that treats people as commodities. In Let Us Dream, he points out that homeless people freezing to death behind empty hotels barely raises an eyebrow in comparison to the shock that greets a sharp fall in the stock market. Returning again to a medieval rabbi’s interpretation of the Tower of Babel, in which bricks were considered more valuable than slaves, Francis points out that an economy obsessed with growth and consumption is essentially one of human sacrifice. “People or bricks,” he says. “It’s time to choose.”
Francis understands the pain and political disillusionment behind the rise of populism, “the disjuncture between the awareness of social rights on the one hand and the distribution of actual opportunities on the other,” as well as the anger of those “thrust aside by the ruthless juggernaut of globalized technocracy.” Anger at the loss of opportunity and agency, a sense of displacement that leads people to cling to their identities—these provide fertile soil for authoritarian leaders willing to stoke fears and a sense of victimhood.
In Let Us Dream, Francis laments “the often cruel rhetoric of populist leaders denigrating the ‘other’ in order to defend a national or group identity.” In remarks broadcast on Italian television on January 9, Francis said the attack on the U.S. Capitol showed that when people acted “against the community, against democracy, against the common good,” it was a sign of the spiritual forces at stake. “Thank God this has erupted and we had a chance to see it well,” he added, “because now you can try and heal it.”Francis describes this spirit of opposition to the common good and to unity as the “isolated conscience.”
The spirit behind Trumpian populism is captured in Part II of Let Us Dream, which contains superb teaching on spiritual discernment: how we can detect what is of and what is opposed to God, unmasking the bad spirit when it appears sub angelo lucis—disguised as an angel of light. Christian nationalism is full of appeals to the good and to God, to Jesus and to righteousness, but its real spirit is easy to detect. It exploits fears and suspicions, blames others, and rubs salt in the wounds of grievance. It polarizes and divides the world into us (good) and them (bad), “closing us in on our own interests and viewpoints by means of suspicion and supposition.”
Francis describes this spirit of opposition to the common good and to unity as the “isolated conscience,” a temptation that leads to a sense of alienated superiority from the body (in this case, from democratic society) and turns people into “beleaguered, complaining selves who disdain others, believing that we alone know the truth.” There can be few better descriptions of the mob Trump sent to the Capitol than this—people full of angry self-righteousness and a sense of betrayal, spouting bizarre claims of stolen elections and claiming divine sanction for their actions. (“When God gives you a vision, you don’t need to know anything else,” said the emcee of the Jericho March, Eric Metaxas.)
At the root of the isolated conscience, says Francis, there is always what St. Ignatius of Loyola called an “acquired fortune” (cosa adquisita), or some sense of entitlement or privilege. The fear of losing this acquired fortune leads people to cling more tightly to it, while “the spirit of suspicion and supposition supplies reasons to hold back, concealing my attachments while justifying them through the faults of others,” writes Francis. Those in the grip of this spirit can come to believe almost anything they are told by people who share their grievance, and distrust evidence or argument advanced by those they see as enemies. Hence “Stop the Steal.”
In the nakedly racist, grievance-filled discourse of Trump and his mob, in the guns and Confederate flags they carried, the “acquired fortune” is in plain view: it is the mythology of the Lost Cause, the Christian nationalist myth of the South as the preserver of American exceptionalism and moral superiority. All this is tied up with a sense of victimhood and betrayal to which Trump’s MAGA rhetoric appeals. Building a wall to keep out “Mexicans,” storming the Capitol to overturn a “stolen” election he lost—Trump stokes the grievances and superiority of isolated conscience like no other, oblivious to any notion of the common good or fraternity.
If Jonah is the Biblical icon of the isolated conscience, says Francis, then Zacchaeus—the diminutive tax collector changed by God’s mercy—is the great Scriptural example of one who renounces his isolation to serve the people. The catalyst of his transformation is his response to Christ: rather than accuse others, he accuses himself. Humility, as Francis says, is the antidote to the isolated conscience. In lowering ourselves—in relation not to others, but out of awe for God—we make room for the good spirit to act in us. Then, “rather than find fault in my brother or sister, I see in him or her one who is also struggling, and in need of help, and I offer myself in service to them.”
Humility is the basis of the fraternity envisioned in Fratelli tutti. We see it in the parable of the Good Samaritan, whose identity is not threatened by a fellow human in need. The kind of political conscience the pope is calling for reflects that attention to the needs of others, whatever their allegiances, and a willingness to organize our economy in a way that will meet those needs.
It is a way of doing politics that stays above the fray of polarization, aware of the contagious power of accusation. Rather than feeding this beast, it allows it to reveal itself and wither—much as Biden has done in response to Trump. “Like coronavirus, if the virus of polarization cannot transfer from host to host, it gradually disappears,” Francis observes.
But the pope does not want us to run away from conflict. Part II of Let Us Dream describes a dynamic, God-created reality filled with forces that pull against each other and tensions that demand resolution, which the pope calls “living polarities” or “contrapositions.”
Such tensions—between what is and what should be, between different views and interests—are the stuff of politics. To flee from them, seeking peace at any price, means refusing to accept reality. But what is diabolic is the attempt to exploit these tensions by turning them into contradictions, reducing complicated realities to simple binaries (e.g. the people versus enemies of the people), and demanding that we choose one side to defeat the other.Francis has much to say about the need for government to set new goals for the economy beyond the relentless pursuit of growth.
Francis calls instead for us to “endure” the tension of difference, facing it head on and opening those involved to a new way of seeing that preserves what is good in each side while transcending both. Such breakthroughs come about “as a gift in dialogue, when people trust each other and humbly seek the good together,” he says.
This is just one dimension of a politics of service, one that isn’t just about managing the apparatus of the state and campaigning for reelection, but which cultivates virtue and forges bonds. This “Politics with a capital P,” as he calls it, is “a vocation above all for those disturbed by the state of society,” for those who “burn with the mission” to secure for their people access to land, labor, and lodging. Such politicians—or community leaders—“carry with them the smell of the neighborhoods they serve.” They are men and women of compassion who respect the culture and dignity of those they represent.
Here lies the crucial element in the regeneration of politics the pope is calling for. As in Laudato si’, in Let Us Dream Francis has much to say about the need for government to set new goals for the economy beyond the relentless pursuit of growth, policies that expand access to work and protect the planet. There is much for government to do. Yet the radicalism of this papal politics lies in the faith it puts in popular movements to challenge and shape what government does. “In the post-Covid world,” he says, “neither technocratic managerialism nor populism will suffice. Only a politics rooted in the people, open to the people’s own organization, will be able to change the future.”
In 1931, faced with the polarization of liberalism and collectivism in an age of democratic collapse, Pius XI also called for the regeneration of civil society from below, for “the institutions themselves of peoples and, particularly those of all social life” to underpin “a juridical and social order which will, as it were, give form and shape to all economic life” (Quadragesimo anno). But no pope before Francis has put so much emphasis on what he calls the “people’s movements” made up of those on the margins.
In Part III of Let Us Dream, he writes of social movements with roots in schools and parishes in poor neighborhoods that help people organize for living wages, safe streets, and dignified housing. In the United States, this is called broad-based or faith-based community organizing, of the sort promoted and funded by the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD). The pope himself has hosted and encouraged meetings of these “popular movements” in Rome and elsewhere, and calls for the Church to “open its doors” to them—not to lead or control them, but to accompany and encourage them. This, he says, is the opposite of the way elites think, which he mocks as “all for the people but never with the people.”
Recalling his own involvement with such movements in Buenos Aires—especially the cartoneros, or cardboard collectors—Francis describes celebrating a huge outdoor Mass each year in one of the city’s big squares, which over time became a gathering place for thousands of excluded people. The people came “to ask God for the things they needed,” putting him in mind of the crowd that followed Jesus, “not a mass of individuals hypnotized by some deft orator, but a people with a history, with a hope, who safeguarded a promise.”
The crowd in the Gospel followed Jesus, says Francis, because his preaching evoked in them the awareness they carried in their guts of God’s closeness and their own dignity. Francis saw in the crowds in Plaza Constitución, and in the popular movements, the same spirit. “In mobilizing for change, in their search for dignity, I see a source of moral energy, a reserve of civic passion, capable of revitalizing our democracy and reorienting the economy,” he writes. This is a politics that turns to the people, not to rub salt in their wounds but to help them recover the dignity that is theirs; that sees the outcast not as a weapon but as a resource; that comes not to impose, but to serve; that does not divide from above, but builds unity from below. It is the politics we sorely need. Published in the February 2021 issue: View ContentsTagsPope FrancisSocial JusticeEconomy
Austen Ivereigh, a regular contributor to Commonweal, is a Fellow in Contemporary Church History at the Jesuit-run Campion Hall at the University of Oxford. ‘Pope Francis’s Let Us Dream: A Path to a Better World. Conversations with Austen Ivereigh’ will be published by Simon & Schuster on December 1.
Liberty and Justice for All “Without a dedication to the truth of the equal sacred dignity and worth of every human being, life together is endangered, compromised, even impossible.” By Fr. Bryan Massingale January 20, 2021
Servant of Memory Remembering the remarkable storyteller, Barry Lopez An interview with Barry Lopez By Griffin Oleynick February 5, 2021
Barry Lopez (David Liittschwager)
Barry Lopez, winner of the National Book Award for Arctic Dreams (1986), a nonfiction account of his five years spent living with the Inuit people in the Canadian High Arctic, and author of numerous other books about nature and indigenous peoples, including Of Wolves and Men (1978), Crow and Weasel (1990), and Light Action in the Caribbean (2000), died on December 25, 2020. He spoke with assistant editor Griffin Oleynick for the Commonweal Podcast in August 2019 about his final book, Horizon (2019). This interview is adapted from their conversation.https://player.megaphone.fm/SM6170357419?light=true
Griffin Oleynick: Horizon is a magisterial work. It’s both a record of many decades of travel all across the globe—to places as remote as the Galápagos Islands, the Kenyan Desert, and Antarctica—as well as a reflection on your encounters with indigenous cultures. It also feels like your swan song. Why did you write it, and what do you want it to communicate?
Barry Lopez: The Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, who passed away a few years ago, defined the writer as the “servant of memory.” I once asked him whether he understood the writer as the servant of his or her own memory, or the memory of his or her people? And he said, “Well Barry, it’s both!”
In Horizon I’m trying to remember the harm that has been caused by human beings and bring it to the foreground. Each day we listen to the news and think, “My goodness, are we never done with this?” If we don’t learn how to have a truly international conversation about global climate change, ocean acidification, and methane gas pouring out of the tundra, we’re a sunk ship. The trouble facing us is much larger than we’re willing to publicly discuss. It’s not just global climate change, but also the failure of democracy to defend itself against incursions by people whose primary goal is the accumulation of material wealth. That’s going to collapse, and then where will we be?
The only answer is that we will have to learn to help each other. I think the disaster that is coming will be overwhelming, and lots of people will not make it. But if we can find some way to encourage each other, to offer mutual assistance, a lot more of us will be able to figure out how to get through it. I’m nobody special, but I’ve been immersed in this stuff for a long time, and I wanted to articulate a sense of possibility, something in which people can place their hope. I don’t mean that as a Pollyannaish thing, but as a legitimate way of saying, “This, too, is us.”
GO: You highlight the key role played by the creative arts, especially music, in this project of cultural healing, of reassembling a broken world. And you write movingly about one instance in which a work of art helped you overcome a personal failure. Tell us about that.
BL: A number of years ago, I was working on an archaeological site in the Canadian High Arctic. We were excavating the former homes of people known as the Thule, who lived eight or nine hundred years ago. They’re the ancestors of modern Eskimos and Inuits.
One night, I decided to bring my Walkman to the site and play Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which for me is one of the most beautiful pieces of music anyone in Western culture has ever produced. I thought of it as a way of conversing with the ghosts of the Thule, explaining to them what we in the West are like, what our culture had achieved, and then asking, “Well, what about you?”
But I walked into a trap of my own making. I quickly realized that this was one of the most despicable, racist things I had ever done in my life. I felt a tremendous sense of shame, and after the first movement I shut the thing down, apologized, and left. This brought about a serious crisis of self-confidence. I lost faith in myself; I thought I was a fraud. I got stuck in a very bad place.
And then I heard a short piece of music, Arvo Pärt’s “Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten,” just six or seven minutes long. It’s a kind of stand-your-hair-on-end tribute, and somewhere in those six or seven minutes I understood both the nature of my trespass and the tragedy of my failure. I can’t today explain how the piece of music helped me put things back together inside myself, but some years later, when I had the chance to meet the composer, I expressed my gratitude.Love can come brilliantly to life in the non-human world, in nature, and that speaks to the fact that we’re all in this together.
One of the things that’s difficult to live with in America is the emphasis we put on the self and on the achievements of the self. This is counterproductive. In order to make a more just world, it’s necessary to cooperate. That’s something that’s struck me very forcefully among native peoples that I traveled with. I’ve been doing this a long time, and I do not want to be something other than what I am. I don’t want to join some other culture. But I do want to learn from other cultures, especially about the nature of God and the divine.
Theologians talk about agape, the love of the divine in another human being. I have been steeped for many years in some kind of intercourse with a non-human world, and for me it too is characterized by this love, by agape—the sense of a world larger than the self. Love can come brilliantly to life in the non-human world, in nature, and that speaks to the fact that we’re all in this together.
When I travel, it has also been my habit to ask native peoples about their use of the word “storyteller.” What does the word mean? What kind of a person is a storyteller? What is their function? In the Inuktitut language, the word is isumataq. In English, it means something like “the person who creates the atmosphere in which wisdom reveals itself.”
In other words, it’s not about the writer. It’s not about the artist. It is about the music, the photograph, the painting, the choreography, the novel, or whatever that thing is that makes the fundamental mystery of life clearer for its audience. It has to enhance our sense of our own self-worth, of being important, of not being marginalized, because we live in a world where many people are left behind, without the wherewithal to protect themselves.
GO: You mentioned theology, and that’s in part a reflection of your Catholic educational formation. How has that shaped your interests and career?
BL: I went to a Jesuit high school in New York City, and I went on to get two degrees at the University of Notre Dame. But when I finished my master’s degree, I thought, “I must have missed the whole thing!” I was “educated” in one sense, but I didn’t know very much about the world because I went to school with people just like me: male, middle-class, Catholic, etc.
So I scratched my head figuratively and said, “How in the world do you think you can call yourself an educated person, when everything you’ve been exposed to is all about you?” That’s what pushed me out of my middle-class comfort; I wanted to go and find out what was happening in the rest of the world.
I also began to believe that there was goodness and wisdom out in the world, and that the strictures that are sometimes rigidly enforced in a Christian education or upbringing can be short-sighted. I don’t think you can find wisdom the way the Desert Fathers did, isolating themselves from humanity and developing a pure relationship with the divine. For me the divine began to be that which is found only in the company of other people—and especially in people not like you!
I once considered becoming a monk. I knew about Gethsemane, where Thomas Merton was, so I went there to sort of get the lay of the land. And it was an elevating experience, to come down in the morning and see those muddy boots lined up outside the chapel and all of those men in immaculate white clothes, with their farm jackets hung on hooks.
At first I thought, “This is it for me”: physical labor, contemplation, seeking enlightened connection with the divine. But I got a very clear message that it wasn’t, that there was something else out there for me.
GO: You conclude Horizon with a meditation on a religious experience you had on a road outside a folk chapel at Punta Arenas, in far southern Chile, nearly thirty years ago. What happened that day, and what does it mean for you now?I felt that a door had opened, and in that moment I chose not to go through it.
BL: That day was, and is, a mystery for me. I was driving slowly from Punta Arenas to Port Famine, and it was beautiful—broken skies, the kind of weather in which you would expect to see a rainbow. I just took it in, this panorama of the Tierra del Fuego, looking out from an altitude of eight hundred feet above the coastline.
I was in ecstasy, and I looked up on this dirt road and saw a man walking toward me. I was so riveted by him, I just took my foot off the accelerator, and let the vehicle roll to a stop. As he was walking toward me, determined, and not paying any attention to me a rainbow opened up above his head. I paused, wondering “What’s going to come now?”
I had that feeling that it was a holy thing. I felt that a door had opened, and in that moment I chose not to go through it. I understood the door as an invitation: to step into the wordless, to step into the evaporation of the self, to become one with what lies on the other side. It’s kind of a Bodhisattva thing: you refuse to go into the holy alone, because you want everyone to go in.
I went on from that encounter to the chapel, and I was overwhelmed with tenderness for the people there. They were desperate, in one way or another, asking the Blessed Mother for intercession. They were pinning up milagros, or miracle votives, which represent their plea for succor, for an easing of their burden.
What came up out of me were feelings of compassion and tenderness, the feeling that you would just embrace everyone there to say, “Don’t be afraid, we’re in this together. We will all be taking care of each other, and we are in the presence of the divine here”—as ordinary as that moment was, with simple benches in that little chapel, with people of no material means.
And it was out of that feeling of tenderness that I thought, “What is out there that is calling to us, what is the music that is coming from the far side of the horizon? What is it saying to us?” So I wanted to conclude Horizon with the reader asking themselves: “What am I to make of this?” The accumulation of material wealth, which was never a good idea, is over now. What we’re talking about is survival, and the elevation of the spirit, cooperation, and the cardinal virtues of justice and compassion.
That, for me, is my particular road into the divine: driving alongside a fence, where on every fourth or fifth fencepost was a caracara bird sitting and watching me. Everyone has the path for them to enter the numinous landscape of the divine. Throughout my life, mine happened to be provided by wild animals. That’s just what I knew, and in some way it’s all I knew.
But that’s not some kind of promotion of natural history. It’s just a metaphor that I understand well enough to be able to write about with some kind of insight. Somebody else can do the same thing in cities, by having a greater sensitivity to their numinous qualities than I do. In the end, Horizon is just one book, and one person wrote it. And God willing, there will be another book from somebody else. And that book will open up the numinous for people who don’t have any interest in reading what I have to say.Published in the February 2021 issue: View Contents
Theological Resistance A new book explores how to build a “theological resistance” when political resistance is futile. By Marcia Pally January 16, 2021
Denys Turner on Julian of Norwich, David Hume, and the problem of evil. It can seem as if faith in God can never convincingly explain away the world’s evil, let alone justify it. When facing the problem of evil, we must start where we are: in the thick of it. Turner writes, “Julian knows that the meaning of sin, its character as behovely, lies in that incomplete narrative of the Cross that is at the heart of her showings, a narrative whose incompleteness is necessary, for ‘not yet’ belongs to the nature of human existence in time.” Read “All Will Be Well” here.
CatholicNetwork.US 