Wounded Shepherd: Pope Francis and His Struggle to Convert the Catholic Church by Austen Ivereigh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Tilting at the Windmills of Linguistic Power

There is more than a hint of hagiography in Ivereigh’s account of Pope Francis’s attempts at reform in the Catholic Church. And he knows it. Francis is clearly a kind, intelligent, canny, charming, and well-intentioned man, and deserves recognition as such. But when it comes to doing anything about the state of the Catholic Church, all of that is irrelevant.

According to Ivereigh, “Francis’s mission is to take the Church to the people, in order to not just save the people but to save the Church.” This sounds right in line with the populism that has come to dominate other political societies around the world. And Francis connects this populism with long-standing doctrine in an innovative way: “The people, he likes to say, are infallible ‘in their believing.’ They may not be able to tell you why they believe in God, but they know God.” According to doctrine, it is the People of God as a whole who are infallible. Francis’s twist is that this infallibility is not about any doctrine in particular, but about believing per se.

Francis clearly knows that the institution of which he is head is corrupt. This corruption shows itself in numerous ways from the hypocritical life-styles of many of its senior members to its resistance to the measures necessary to stop sexual exploitation. But the most profound symptom of its corruption is its self-image as a bastion of undebatably true ideas. It prides itself as the treasury of truths which it must protect at all costs regardless of the consequences for either its members or the world at large.

It is this self-image which Francis is attempting to change. He will fail. In the first instance, the politics of ideas is more intense in the Catholic Church than in any other organisation on the planet. The ideas of Catholicism are not contained either in the Scriptures it has approved, or in the doctrinal pronouncements it has issued from time to time, or in the great body of Canon law through which it functions. These are merely texts which demand more or less continuous re-interpretation. The stuff, the language, of ecclesial politics are interpretations of these documents and their previous interpretations. And the real substance, the payoff, is not correctness of interpretation but the power to interpret, that is, to determine truth.

Hence the rapacity of the internal struggle for dominance. Unlike commercial organisations, the Church is not subject to the disciplines of the market. People don’t get axed for missing targets. Ideas have absolute reign and can’t be verified by sales or profit figures. And unlike other political organisations, there is no accountability to an electorate. This means that individuals are free to conduct unrestricted guerrilla warfare against each other with more or less continuous palace intrigue. Any pope, Francis included, is just a temporary dancer in the continuous political ballet, a member of the cast not the director.

But there is a second and more fundamental reason for his impending failure. Without its resolute insistence on ideas which can neither be verified or disproven, only expressed, the Catholic Church does not exist. Its existence is these ideas, not, as Francis apparently thinks, the people who hold them. The people who hold them are the problem. They keep coming up with new interpretations of the ideas and fight among themselves continuously about whose interpretation is correct. So has it always been. The winners call the losers in these political struggles heretics, and themselves orthodox.

Thus Francis’s populism is supported by those of ‘no fixed belief’ as it were, those who are unable to express anything about their belief except the belief itself, a kind of primordial tribal affiliation. This is curious. He downplays the ‘content’ of belief continuously in order to undermine the politics of the ‘true believers’ who know exactly what they believe and why. While this is the only way to attack their power - ideas are the currency of power in the Church - it is also an evacuation of that which makes the Church the Church, namely ideas.

The paradox of Francis’s position is clear. It is actually the fundamental paradox of Christianity itself. As soon as those early followers of Jesus started promoting the truth of his ideas rather than the urgent necessity of his behaviour, the trajectory of the whole enterprise was determined. It had to become ‘professional’ in order to articulate those ideas clearly. It had to become hierarchical in order to protect the uniformity of those ideas. And its leaders had to become ruthless in their prosecution of their interpretations of those ideas.

So, while one can only wish Pope Francis ‘bonne chance’ on his great mission of saving the Church, one must also recognise that the only chance he has to do this is to destroy it. Perhaps Francis is a saint after all.

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