By Nicolas Bellord
The Problem
Ever since his inauguration
Pope Francis has been an enigma to me and doubtless to many others. There is substantial confusion in the Church
which nobody can deny. So what can we
make of him? There is no point in going
over the various events that have led to this; they are well enough known to
any intelligent Catholic who follows the events of this papacy however much
they may be the subject of disagreement as to their importance and
significance.
So what can we make of Pope
Francis? What driving force makes him
speak and act often in flat contradiction between what he says and what he
does?
The Filial Correction of 16th
July 2017 has a long section on the influence of Martin Luther beginning:
'We feel compelled by conscience to advert to Your Holiness’s unprecedented sympathy for Martin Luther, and to the affinity between Luther’s ideas on law, justification, and marriage, and those taught or favoured by Your Holiness in Amoris Laetitia and elsewhere.'[1]
This is well documented in the
Filial Correction. However, although
this is an aspect of Pope Francis it does not explain everything.
Prior to that Austen Ivereigh, the
Pope's biographer, and fervent admirer, had claimed that Pope Francis was a
follower of the thoughts of President Peron of Argentina writing:
As a young Jesuit he learned leadership lessons from St. Ignatius and the German philosopher priest Father Romano Guardini, as well as from the Argentine master, General Juan Domingo Perón, whose classic 1952 manual of political strategy, Conducción Política, is a good guide to how Francis operates even today.[2]
When Ivereigh wrote this is in
December 2016 I thought he had lost his marbles. How could he possibly suggest that a Pope
follows the political theories of a very controversial South American
Dictator? I may now have to eat my
words.
The Four Principles
An indication of how Pope
Francis thinks is his frequent mention of four principles namely:
1. time is greater than space;
2. unity prevails over conflict
3. realities are more important than ideas
4. the whole is greater than the part.
These principles are mentioned by Pope Francis
in Evangelii Gaudium and in Amoris Laetitia. Two questions arise:
1.
Are these principles invented by Pope
Francis or what is their provenance?
2.
What do they mean? For example 'time is greater than space' has
no obvious meaning.
The first extensive discussion of these
principles, that I was aware of, was by
Sandro Magister on his Espresso blog entitled The Four
Hooks On Which Bergoglio Hangs His Thought 19th May 2016.[3] As to provenance he wrote:
'It is a whole lifetime that Jorge Mario Bergoglio has been inspired by these four criteria, and mainly by the first. The Argentine Jesuit Diego Fares, in commenting on “Amoris Laetitia” in the latest issue of “La Civiltà Cattolica,” extensively cites notes from a conversation with the provincial of the Society of Jesus in Argentina at the time, dated 1978, all “on the domain of room for action and on the sense of time.” '
The 'latest
issue' must have been that of 14th May 2016 wherein Father Fares S.J
wrote an article entitled «AMORIS LAETITIA» E IL RINNOVAMENTO DEL LINGUAGGIO
ECCLESIALE (Amoris Laetitia and the renewal of church language). Unfortunately, you have to pay €15 to read the
article so I have not read it and therefore do not know whether he finds any
provenance for the principles prior to Pope Francis.
Sandro Magister
then reproduced an article by Fr. Giovanni Scalese which tries to see whether
any sense can be made in applying the
four principles to theology: “The four postulates of Pope Francis”. The article does not deal with provenance but
with the meaning of the principles or postulates. Scalese uses the word 'postulate' as he feels
each of the four principles is a “proposition devoid of evidence and not demonstrated
but all the same admitted as true in that it is necessary for founding a
procedure or demonstration.”
In Evangelli Gaudium 221, the pope writes that the four principles “derive from the pillars of the Church’s social doctrine.” Scalese says he cannot find any such principles in that doctrine. Scalese says Pope Francis has talked of these principles as far back as 1974 according to the Argentine Jesuit Juan Carlos Scannone.
Pope Francis gives a kind of explanation of the first principle time is greater than space in Evangelli Gaudium no 223. As usual his explanation is long and confusing. What I think he is saying is that at any given moment in time there is a situation or view of things (space) but that one should wait for the situation to evolve or be changed by time. In giving a preference to this evolution time is seen to be greater than a particular moment or space. Time governs spaces, illumines them and makes them links in a constantly expanding chain, with no possibility of return.[4]
This would seem to tie in with Pope Francis's constant refrain that one should not stick with some rigid doctrinal view but there should be a process of discernment to discover a different view. In the notorious paragraph 3 of Amoris Laetitia where Pope Francis suggests that doctrine could be defined locally at national Bishops' conference level he justifies this with a reference to Christ's discussion of the role of the Holy Ghost: It will be for him, the truth-giving Spirit, when he comes, to guide you into all truth. John (16:13) Pope Francis seems to think that this can be a new and changed truth.
In Evangelli Gaudium 221, the pope writes that the four principles “derive from the pillars of the Church’s social doctrine.” Scalese says he cannot find any such principles in that doctrine. Scalese says Pope Francis has talked of these principles as far back as 1974 according to the Argentine Jesuit Juan Carlos Scannone.
Pope Francis gives a kind of explanation of the first principle time is greater than space in Evangelli Gaudium no 223. As usual his explanation is long and confusing. What I think he is saying is that at any given moment in time there is a situation or view of things (space) but that one should wait for the situation to evolve or be changed by time. In giving a preference to this evolution time is seen to be greater than a particular moment or space. Time governs spaces, illumines them and makes them links in a constantly expanding chain, with no possibility of return.[4]
This would seem to tie in with Pope Francis's constant refrain that one should not stick with some rigid doctrinal view but there should be a process of discernment to discover a different view. In the notorious paragraph 3 of Amoris Laetitia where Pope Francis suggests that doctrine could be defined locally at national Bishops' conference level he justifies this with a reference to Christ's discussion of the role of the Holy Ghost: It will be for him, the truth-giving Spirit, when he comes, to guide you into all truth. John (16:13) Pope Francis seems to think that this can be a new and changed truth.
Mgr Ronald Knox, in a footnote to his
translation, comments:
The teaching office of the Holy Spirit does not consist in imparting to the Church the knowledge of hitherto unknown doctrines, in addition to the deposit of faith, but in making our knowledge of doctrines already revealed fuller and more precise.
This principle
has more recently been considered by Professor Gerhard Hover in an essay of
January 2018 entitled: “Time is greater than space”: Moral-theological
reflections on the Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia* In his discussion of the principle he says that
it is to be found in the writings of St Bonaventure. Hover's essay is difficult to follow but as
far as I can make out he says that Bonaventure thinks Aristotle's view of time
as a sequence of contingent events in history is incomplete. There is a view of time which sees it as a
gradual revelation of truth. However he
acknowledges that that revelation ceased with Christ. As St Augustine wrote in his Confessions:
See: XI vii(9) “You call us, therefore, to understand the Word, God who is with you (John 1:1). That word is spoken eternally, and by it all things are uttered eternally. It is not the case that what was being said comes to an end, and something else is then said, so that everything is uttered in a succession with a conclusion, but everything is said in the simultaneity of eternity.”
Unfortunately
Hover then goes on with some illogical non-sequiturs to suggest that subsequent
to Christ revealed truth can change so that no action can be intrinsically evil
as what is evil can become good.
Scalese
concludes his discussion of the first principle: I cannot help but perceive at the
foundation of the first postulate some threads of idealistic philosophy, like
historicism, the primacy of becoming over being, the origin of being from
action (“esse sequitur operari”), etc.
Scalese tries
to understand the other three principles or postulates in the context of Catholic doctrine but
without being able to shed much clarity on their relevance or their origin
other than in Pope Francis. He concludes
by saying:
That Christian doctrine runs the risk of becoming ideology cannot be denied. But the same risk is run by any other principle, including the four postulates of “Evangelii Gaudium”; with the difference that these are the result of human reflection, while Catholic doctrine is founded on divine revelation.
May that not happen today which happened to Marx, who, while he taxed with ideology the thinkers who had preceded him, did not realize that he was elaborating one of the most ruinous ideologies of history.
The Provenance
of the Four Principles and Theology of the People
It is now
suggested that their origin is not with Pope Francis; indeed the provenance is
astounding. That origin is revealed in
an article entitled “El papa Francisco y la teología del pueblo” (“Pope Francis
and the theology of the people”) by Juan Carlos Scannone S.I. (presumably S.I
in Spanish is S.J in English) dated 12th October 2014[5]. It is a long article about “Theology of the
People (TP)” which he distinguishes from liberalism on one side and Marxist
liberation theology on the other. Father
Scannone is described as one of the Jesuits closest to Pope Francis. He describes TP as elaborated in South
America and in particular taken up in Argentina at the time of the military
dictatorship when Peronism was proscribed as was the Peronist worker movement.
One would need
to analyse this article carefully but TP seems to be a watered down version of
Liberation Theology (LT). Class warfare
is not to be the determining hermeneutic but it is still to be taken account of
as a result of structural sin of which
there is much mention. He claims that TP
had the approval of St John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger. He sees
Evangelli Gaudium as being based on
TP. Generally he sees Pope Francis as
applying TP to the Church as a whole.
Whatever one
thinks of TP and its relevance to the world outside Latin America it seems to
be a very narrow theology dealing with political issues peculiar to Latin
America; there is nothing about salvation for example. It claims to be free of Marxism and Hegelism
but I remain unconvinced.
Caudillos Rosas and Quiroga
However leaving aside those issues the most
remarkable passage in Scannone's article states the origin of the four
principles:
Según se
dice, están tomadas de la carta de Juan Manuel de Rosas (gobernador de Buenos
Aires) a Facundo Quiroga (gobernador de La Rioja en la Argentina) sobre la
organización nacional argentina, escrita desde la hacienda de Figueroa en San Antonio
de Areco (20 de diciembre, 1834), donde Rosas no las explicita, aunque las
tenga en cuenta implícitamente.
Which
translated reads: It is said that,
that these [four principles] are taken from the letter from Juan Manuel de Rosas (governor of
Buenos Aires) to Facundo Quiroga (governor of La Rioja in Argentina) about
national Argentine organisation, written from the hacienda of Figueroa in San
Antonio de Areco (20th December 1834)[6],
where Rosas did not make them explicit, although he took them into account
implicitly.
Reading this
letter [7] the
principles do not appear explicitly and it is difficult to find them referred
to implicitly. The transcription of the
letter covers 16 pages and one suspects
that the original in long hand covered many more pages. The letter sets out General Rosas's ideas on
how to create a federal state of Argentina on the model of the United
States. At the time Rosas and Quiroga
were caudillos or military leaders in the thick of the constant violence assailing
Argentina and its provinces.
Juan Facundo Quiroga General Rosas in 1835
Rosas as political thinker: Unity prevails over conflict?
Rosas wanted to unite the
country to stop the fighting between the states or provinces which he refers to
as 'pueblos' or 'peoples'. One of his
ideas was that each province should decide on its own constitution and there
should be no imposition of a constitution from the centre. Each state should first get its act together
so that it can send deputies to the centre to set up a federal system. Time and time alone would enable this to
happen in the shadow of peace and tranquillity.
Time is greater than space? He sees the establishment of
stability in each state as more important than trying to create a federal state
where all the states would be governed by the federal state in a unitary manner
as was proposed by his opponents the Unitarians. In a way this would seem to be the opposite
of the principle that the whole is greater than the part. Rosas wanted to wait to see how each state
developed rather than imposing some theory from the top. Realities are more
important than ideas? One can see a
reflection of Pope Francis's constant refrain of the importance of starting
processes rather than trying to cobble something together out of the present
position or 'space'. In the end when
federation is achieved the whole is greater than the part?
It may be that there are other
writings of Rosas which support the principles.
For example on a Peronist website (with the motto “Peron conquers
time”!) there is an article proposing Rosas as a great political thinker[8]. In 1873 Rosas told Quesada that making a
Constitution "was my ambition, but I spent my life and my energy
without being able to make it"; "because a Constitution should
not be the product of a dreamy book but the exact reflection of the situation
in a country." "I always repelled the farce of pompous laws on paper
that could not be put into practice."
which could support the principle
Realities are more important than ideas. However even if you accept that Rosas was
a great political thinker promoting constitutions and democracy his extreme dictatorial actions do not
conform to his thoughts.
Rosas as Dictator
Within two months of the above
letter Quiroga had been assassinated.
Rosas continued to lead a life which could be described as colourful to
say the least. Wikipedia has an
excellent article recounting his life and it is well worth reading.[9] Briefly he was born in 1793 and quickly
amassed a fortune.
Some quotes from Wikipedia in italics:
Some quotes from Wikipedia in italics:
….In December 1829, Rosas became governor of the province of Buenos Aires and established a dictatorship backed by state terrorism. Prior to this letter he had been involved in the desert war which to-day would probably be described as genocide of the indigenous people. …..In the desert war of 1833 to 1834 the government gave Rosas command of an army with orders to subdue the Indian tribes in the coveted territory. Rosas was generous to those Indians who surrendered, rewarding them with animals and goods. Although he personally disliked killing Indians, he relentlessly hunted down those who refused to yield.
Rosas (mounted on
dark horse) leading the war against Indians in the Desert Campaign, 1833
…. Rosas established a totalitarian regime, in which the government sought to dictate every aspect of public and private life..... Rosas was himself a slave-owner, and helped revive the slave trade. [Although he was involved in the abolition of the slave trade in 1839].... Despite doing little to promote their interests, he remained popular among blacks and gauchos. He employed blacks, patronized their festivities and attended their candombles. The gauchos admired his leadership and willingness to fraternize with them to some extent....
Rosas in gaucho costume
(smelling of the sheep?)
|
|
And so on and so on until his
downfall in 1852 when he was welcomed by the British and became a very
contented tenant-farmer at Swathling, near Southampton until his death in 1877
and burial in Southampton.
The Legacy of Rosas
General Rosas has ever been a
major influence on Argentinian politics right through the 20th century and into the 21st. Argentinian
President Menem had his body repatriated in 1989. Menem (and his fellow Peronist presidential successors Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner) have honoured Rosas on banknotes,
postage stamps and monuments, causing mixed reactions among the public. Rosas remains a controversial figure among Argentines,
who "have long been fascinated and outraged" by him.
Two strands to Pope Francis –
Theology of the People and Dictatorship
So, if Austen Ivereigh is correct
that Pope Francis is an admirer and follower of Peron, has Pope Francis also taken the much more dictatorial General Rosas as inspiration?
So we have two strands to
understanding Pope Francis. That
elaborated by Father Scannone S.J to the effect that Evangelli Gaudium is based on Theology of the People – a watered down
version of Liberation Theology without Marx and Hegel. However, it is a version of the Catholic Faith
that is questionable at the least and still owes much to Hegel and historicism. It
strikes me as more of a political program where peoples in a group are
redeemed rather than individuals acting on their own based on a skewed
interpretation of paragraph 9 of Lumen Gentium. Join the right political movement and you
will be saved. If it is the group that
is saved the moral behaviour of
individuals is of no great concern.
We then have the four
principles. It seems a hopeless task to
make any sense of attempted theology based on these principles but if Father
Scannone is right that the four principles derive from an interpretation of the
writings of General Rosas then it is legitimate to ask whether Pope Francis's
admiration for Peron extends to admiration of General Rosas. That is the second strand. Is the day to day utterly ruthless behaviour
of Pope Francis modelled on that of two Argentinian dictators where he believes that any means are
justified to promote the Theology of the
People as an end? Perhaps he sees himself as a new liberator from Latin America out to
reform the euro-centric Vatican with a new political theology and the use of
whatever political means he needs to effect
an end that justifies those means?
Perhaps the title “ The Dictator Pope” is not far from the truth. I have yet to read the book!
[1] Correctio
filialis de haeresibus propagatis pages 12ff at
http://www.correctiofilialis.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Correctio-filialis_English_1.pdf
[2] https://cruxnow.com/analysis/2016/12/16/francis-80-redeemed-leader-looks-like/
[3] http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/1351301bdc4.html?eng=y
[4] One could equally argue that as time is
measured by a movement in space outside of which there is no time then time
cannot exceed space and space is therefore greater than time!
[5] http://www.encuentromundi.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Bergoglio-y-teologia-del-pueblo.pdf
[6] Cf. E. Barba, Correspondencia entre Rosas,
Quiroga y López, Buenos Aires, Hyspamérica, 1984, 94.
[7] https://issuu.com/clasesdeipc/docs/carta_de_hacienda_de_figueroa_de_ro
[8] http://www.peronvencealtiempo.com.ar/historia-argentina/confederacion-argentina-1828-1852/114-rosas-y-el-constitucionalismo
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Manuel_de_Rosas
