Since the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI and the election of Pope Francis, there has been an ongoing debate about the aspects of continuity and discontinuity between them. Both men have been respectful and even deferential in their relationships with one another. Still no one can deny the impact Francis has had both internally in the Church and internationally where it seems the media cannot get enough of him.
The question remains whether this is a difference in style or in substance. Is he saying the same things but in a more communicative style, or is he actually saying different things?
Francis himself has downplayed the prospects of major doctrinal changes. However there have always been competing theological approaches within Catholicism. Some are more world-denying and pessimistic, viewing the world as a place of temptation and corruption. Others are world-affirming, humanistic, viewing the world as the arena of salvation requiring engagement and transformation. Broadly speaking, with a risk of oversimplification, one could speak of these two camps as Augustinian and Thomistic respectively.
Pope John Paul II had a foot in both camps. Philosophically he claimed a Thomistic lineage and his great social encyclicals, together with his missiological epistle, Redemptoris Missio, bear witness to a church open to engagement with and transformation of the world. However, particularly as he got older, a more combative stance against the world emerged, a battening down of the hatches within the Church.
Benedict on the other hand was more thoroughly Augustinian in approach, pessimistic about the possibilities of transforming the world, hence more focused on spiritual and liturgical issues. Benedict was also closely aligned with the Communio school which included vocal critics of liberation theology, notably Hans Urs von Balthasar.
Francis on the other hand has an approach which seeks to engage the world and through that engagement to transform it to more closely resemble God's kingdom. In his pre-conclave speech he warned of the danger of the Church becoming 'self-referential' and 'sick', and of a 'theological narcissism'. He referred to the Gospel image of Jesus knocking on the door wanting to enter our lives: 'But think of the times when Jesus knocks from within to let himself out. The self-referential Church seeks Jesus Christ within and does not let him out.'
There have been two indications of this shift in recent time.
The first has been the rehabilitation of liberation theology. Emerging out of the political and social turmoil in Latin America in the '60s and '70s, liberation theology directly addressed issues of social and economic transformation, taking its stand on the preferential option for the poor.
In 1983 under the leadership of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and with the approval of John Paul II, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a doctrinal instruction spelling out the various 'errors' of liberation theology: too worldly, too Marxist, too sloppy in its categories, a tendency 'to misunderstand or to eliminate [certain aspects], namely: God and true man; the sovereignty of grace; and the true nature of the means of salvation, especially of the Church and the sacraments'.
Now the new head of the CDF, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, has declared an end to hostilities towards liberation theology. At the launch of his recent book, Poor for the Poor: The Mission of the Church, which includes a preface by Francis, Müller's old friend Gustavo Gutierrez, the grandfather of liberation theology, gave a brief address. Previously Müller had offered unreserved support for liberation theology.
It is ironic that Müller was appointed by Benedict prior to his resignation. Clearly Müller does not agree with the earlier assessment of liberation theology by then Cardinal Ratzinger, and is closer to Francis on this issue.
The other shift relates to the bringing in from the cold of Cardinal Walter Kasper. Kasper has famously been described as a theologian of the 'extreme centre', always seeking to find the middle ground. As Bishop of Rottenburg-Stuttgart, Kasper had signed a proposal with a number of other German bishops which would have allowed divorced and remarried Catholics to return to sacramental practice. This proposal received a reprimand from the then head of the CDF, Ratzinger.
Kasper also had a very public, if friendly, disagreement with Ratzinger over the ecclesiology of the local church. At that time Kasper noted that the root of their difference lay in their foundations — Ratzinger adopted an idealist Platonic approach (in line with his Augustinian background) while Kasper adopted a realist Aristotelian approach (more oriented to Thomism).
As president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, Kasper was sidelined by the CDF under Ratzinger on a number of occasions, notably with the issuing of the document Dominus Iesus. This document noted that other churches, apart from the Orthodox ones, were not properly churches, merely ecclesial communities, which of course upset most of the Church's ecumenical dialogue partners. Kasper was publically very critical of Dominus Iesus.
Now Kasper has been praised by Francis for his latest book on divine mercy and was chosen by him to address the gathering of bishops for the synod on the family. In his address to the synod participants he returned to the type of solution to the problem of divorced and remarried Catholics that he had previously supported.
Perhaps not tectonic shifts, but shifts nonetheless. They complement the much greater focus on the Church's mission that we can find in Francis' approach. As he has noted in his pre-conclave speech:
The Church is called to come out of herself and to go to the peripheries, not only in the geographical sense but also to go to the existential peripheries: those of the mysteries of sin, of pain, of injustice, of ignorance and of religious indifference, of thought, of all misery.
Neil Ormerod is Professor of Theology at Australian Catholic University, a member of ACU's Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry and a Fellow of the Australian Catholic Theological Association. His latest book is Re-visioning the Church: An experiment in Systematic-Historical Ecclesiology (Fortress Press, 2014).
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