Without Gloss: Francis of Assisi
and Western Catholicism
ARCHBISHOP CHARLES J. CHAPUT, O.F.M. CAP.
Editor’s note: The following essay was written for the “St. Francis of Assisi and the Western Tradition” conference sponsored by the Thomistic Institute and delivered at the NYU Catholic Center on April 25, 2014.
In Isaiah 55, God says, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts [higher] than your thoughts” (8-9). Then in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells his disciples, “You therefore must be perfect, [even] as your heavenly Father is perfect” (5:48).
Scripture tells us that God is utterly different from us, vastly higher than us. Then it tells us to become like him. Therein lies the paradox. The task seems impossible. And yet we know it to be possible. We know it through the witness of the saints. In Hebrew, God is called hakadosh, “the Holy One,” with the word kadosh meaning holy. Our English word “saint” derives from the Latin word sanctus, which means the same thing: holy. Holy does not mean “good,” though holy people are always good and often—though not always—nice. St. Jerome was certainly holy and good, but “nice” might not be the first word that springs to mind in remembering him.
Holy means “other than.” It means different from the world; set apart from the profane; sacred. The saints are ordinary men and women—persons with every kind of talent, weakness and personality—who took a different path, one step at a time, away from the routine habits of the world. They fell in love with God. They followed him. They conformed their lives to him in simple ways that became extraordinary ways. And now their example and their intercession give us hope that we can do the same.
I mention all this because my job today is to talk about “St. Francis and Western Catholicism.” I’m a Capuchin Franciscan, so I’m happy to do that. But I want to do it by posing three questions: Who is Francis, this pope? Who was Francis, the man of Assisi? And after 800 years, what, if anything, can a man from the Middle Ages teach us about being alive and free and human?
So first: Who is Francis, this pope? The short answer is, I don’t know. I’m not sure anyone really knows yet, outside the Holy Father’s friends and close coworkers. A number of Latin American bishops have told me how different the Pope now seems from his years as a bishop in Argentina—much more outgoing and ebullient than they remember. But these are their thoughts, not mine. I did have the privilege of working with him for a month in November and December 1997 when we were both delegates to the Special Assembly for America in Rome. He was an impressive man. He had a keen intelligence, a healthy realism about the problems facing the Church in our hemisphere and a strong emphasis on evangelization. But these are just anecdotes from a long time ago.
I do think we can draw some conclusions from the example he already gives us. He has a deep sense of the continuity of the Church. The respect he shows to Benedict, the Pope Emeritus, literally has no precedent. And his affection for Benedict clearly comes from the heart. On Sunday, he’ll canonize two of his predecessors; the two greatest men of the Second Vatican Council—Pope John XXIII, who had the vision and courage to convene it; and Pope John Paul II, who helped draft some of its key documents and who embedded the meaning of Vatican II in the life of the post-conciliar Church.
John XXIII and John Paul II are perfectly paired in sainthood. In canonizing them together, Pope Francis places them as bookends to one of the central events in Catholic life since the Reformation. They were untiring in their discipleship. Zealous in their love of God and God’s people. And also thoroughly human in their complexity.
John XXIII saved Jews from the Holocaust as a Vatican diplomat. He radiated warmth, humor and a concern for peace. He worked a revolution in Catholic thought and life. And he also frowned on the worker-priest movement in France and forbade Catholics from voting for the Communist Party. John Paul II helped bring down the Soviet bloc. He worked vigorously for the purity of Catholic teaching. He defended the rights of workers, the suffering and the unborn. And he was also a profound shepherd of mercy—a message that runs through his whole pontificate, from his encyclical “Rich in Mercy” to his placing Divine Mercy Sunday on the universal Church calendar.
Pope Francis stands in this line of great recent popes. But in choosing the name “Francis,” he also makes himself distinct from it.
Until now, every pope of the last 200 years—no matter how gifted or how saintly—has been, in a sense, a prisoner of war. The Church has centered herself in Europe. Every pope in recent history has been a European. And the civil war for Europe’s soul that began before the Enlightenment and ran through the bloodiest century in history—the twentieth century—continues today in Europe’s denial of its Christian roots and its self-destroying battles over marriage, family, sexual identity and euthanasia.
Europe has exhausted itself. Europe has exhausted the world. And so, when John Paul II called for a “new evangelization,” maybe he spoke more prophetically than he could know. Maybe a genuinely new evangelization can never be achieved except by a new voice with a new spirit from a new world. Pope Francis is no stranger to poverty or violence, the plague of corrupt politics or the cruelty of human trafficking. But neither is he a child of the Old World, with its cynicism and despair, its wars and its hatreds.
Francis seems to be something different. He embodies a Christian spirit older than Europe’s civil war and younger than its fatigue and loss of hope. He’s a surprise; disarming, improbable, the kind of man no one could have predicted—a surprise that keeps unfolding into more surprises.
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