What is the end goal of Pope Francis’s governance?

There’s a scene in Brian De Palma’s 1987 classic, The Untouchables, starring Kevin Costner as Elliot Ness, with Sean Connery as Chicago police Sgt. James Malone, which has been on my mind of late.

Malone is alone in the kitchen of his Chicago row house, when an intruder – one of gangster and bootleg whiskey kingpin Al Capone’s henchmen, or rather a henchman sent by Capone’s smarmy, drippy bodyguard and lieutenant and eventual real-life successor, Frank Nitti (brilliantly portrayed in De Palma’s film by William Burroughs, in art Billy Drago) – makes to assault the street-smart veteran beat cop with a switchblade.

Malone has the intruder made from the get-go, however, and wheels on him, holding a double-barreled (side-by-side) sawed-off shotgun.

“Isn’t that just like a wop,” says the 1860s-vintage Irish-American Malone to his erstwhile assailant, “[he] brings a knife to a gunfight.”

Malone chases the fellow down the hall and into the back alley behind his house. Nitti is there, waiting for Malone, Thompson submachine gun at the ready. Nitti opens fire and riddles Malone’s body with bullets.

I thought of all that again after Pope Francis published Desiderio desideravi, an Apostolic Letter on the liturgy and liturgical formation offering “some prompts or cues for reflections that can aid in the contemplation of the beauty and truth of Christian celebration.”

Bringing Denzinger to a gunfight

People criticizing the doctrinal and theological imprecisions in the pope’s thinking, in other words, have not so much come to a Chicago-style gangland brawl carrying a trusty Enchiridion, as they have chased the knife-wielding bogeyman into the alley with the sawed-off Denzinger they keep in the warming oven. You remember what happens next, right?

Having made his decisions regarding the liturgy, Pope Francis is now discharging his mind more fully. There’s nothing wrong with that. Recognizing it does help toward building a proper framework for understanding the moment we’re living in the Church from the top, down. The Church is a polity – a societas perfecta – which means (I’ve said this all before, and noted it elsewhere not too long ago) “she has all the powers to order lives and regulate conduct necessary and conducive to a flourishing human community.”

How Pope Francis or anyone in Peter’s chair uses the power of the office to direct change or effect it or retard it or thwart it outright is always going to be fair game, but let’s talk about what we’re talking about.

This is, in other words, a political moment in the life of the Church, which one may fairly characterize as a constitutional crisis, because the “trick” to the business is figuring out how to reform the Church without falling afoul of her divinely given hierarchical constitution. “Put the laity in charge!” cuts no ice, but “Welp, there’s nothing to be done,” is false on its face. Whatever else the Church is or may be, she is a power structure. At least, she has a power structure – divinely given, at that – inevitably.

Getting through this moment may require us to “get [our] hands dirty” – Pope Francis has told us it will – and to get nearer the knuckle than perhaps we have been. To say that this is a political moment, however, is most emphatically not to say that it isn’t a theological moment. It means, rather, that we need more of the “right” kind of theology. We need the right theological method, and getting that requires the recovery of theology’s proper objects.

Talking about what we’re talking about

Pope Francis is most certainly correct when he says, “The problematic is primarily ecclesiological.” Ecclesiology is the study of the nature and purpose of the Church. It wants to know who and what the Church is, in history, which means in real life. The proper object of ecclesiology – of all of theology, mutatis mutandis – is not primarily the musings of theologians, so much as it is the Church herself on pilgrimage in time, through history and into eternity.

History is always happening, and almost always messy.

I suppose I had begun thinking of that Untouchables sequence in light of high-level ecclesiastical doings no later than August of 2019. That was the month in which Pope Francis juridically destroyed the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family and established the Pontifical John Paul II Theological Institute for Marriage and Family Sciences in its place.

It was a purge, and everyone knew it. The pope was in a fit of pique over the reception of his post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation, Amoris laetitia, and everyone knew it. Few in or around the Vatican, if any, were willing to say it. Still, that’s what it was.

That’s fine, by the way. The pope can do what he wants with his stuff. Good sense and good manners would have that he say plainly what he’s doing, or at least not say that he isn’t doing the thing he is plainly doing. In fairness to Pope Francis, he left that ugly work to his lieutenants. In any case, it is the height of bad manners to point out another’s bad manners. So, let’s not do it.

Right from the get-go, Amoris came in for a good bit of flack, most of the theological variety. Frankly, very little of that interested me. Apostolic Exhortations are official encouragements, not instruments of governance. Pope Francis said, in words, that he only wanted to start a conversation with the document. “At bottom,” I wrote in a piece for the Catholic Herald a few years back, “the exhortation was a call to think together and publicly about challenges to contemporary family life in search of ways to harness the precious resource that is the family for the good of society and the cause of the Gospel.”

Only, various Church jurisdictions around the world basically skipped the part where we have a conversation, and jumped straight into the part where we get special legislation “implementing” whatever it is that the implementers think Amoris wants them to implement. It’s like we did things backward – and Francis encouraged his favorite implementers and watched as his cheerleaders in the chattering class painted “dissenter” on just about everyone with a question regarding the business.

Truth and Method

Something similar has happened with Desiderio, only the theological reflection Pope Francis would like the Church to undertake isn’t so much in view of a conversation about the liturgy, so much as it is to be over the decisions he has made of late in those regards. “Tiè!” say the Romans, frequently with the left wrist in the crook of the right arm, forearm tense and outstretched, right fist balled. “Take that!”

Amoris, it’s fair to say, generated more heat than light – it continues to smolder – but Desiderio’s light is incandescent heat. With Amoris, the questions were:

Why does a post-synodal exhortation require pastoral guidelines? Why does any apostolic exhortation require implementation by any means, especially ones that amount to special legislation, even when they are not formally couched as such? How are excessive formalism and legal rigorism effectively combatted by more legislation or quasi-legislation?

A major difference between Pope Francis’s decisions regarding the liturgy and those he has taken in regard to the JPII Institute is that the liturgy is not his stuff. The liturgy belongs to the whole Church. The questions one has regarding both Amoris and Desiderio broadly considered are similar. They arise from the desire to know the end of Pope Francis’s governance, with a view to understanding his application of the means available to him for the government of the Church.

Here, US history offers an interesting object lesson, fairly applicable to present ecclesiastical circumstances.

In 1790, the fledgling United States were on very shaky financial ground. George Washington’s treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, had a plan to solve that problem by means of a national bank. There was some question regarding the constitutionality of Hamilton’s scheme, so Washington solicited opinions from Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, his Secretary of State. Jefferson pinned his opinion against the bank on his close parsing of the term, “necessary” – as in, “[Congress shall have power] to make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof” (Art. 1 §8) – and argued that necessity is not reducible to mere expedience.

Congress, in short, could not erect the bank that was the cornerstone of Hamilton’s proposal, because a bank was not strictly necessary and the new Constitution did not grant the power to erect such a thing to Congress in words.

Hamilton, for his part, urged that “[e]very power vested in a Government is in its nature sovereign, and includes by force of the term, a right to employ all the means requisite, and fairly applicable to the attainment of the ends of such power.” The limits, Hamilton explained, are only that the exercise of sovereign power be neither “immoral” per se, nor “contrary to the essential ends of political power.”

In the Dogmatic Constitution, Pastor Aeternus, on the Church of Christ, the Fathers of the first Vatican Council taught that the Bishop of Rome has direct, immediate, and supreme authority over the whole Church, all the Churches, and all the faithful. They also taught that the Roman Pontiff, when he speaks ex Cathedra – when he defines a doctrine regarding faith or morals to be held by the Universal Church – in discharge of the office of Pastor and Teacher of all Christians, he is by the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter possessed of that infallibility with which the divine Redeemer willed that His Church should be endowed for defining doctrine regarding faith or morals: and that therefore such definitions of the Roman Pontiff are irreformable of themselves, and not from the consent of the Church.

All of that is true, but none of it means that the Church, or the Churches, or the faithful are destitute of rights he is bound to respect. The pope is sovereign. He is the lawgiver – the Legislator, as the canon lawyers say – and the limits of his authority are those of law, itself.

Only, what are those?

Respect for the office – whatever office it is or may be – requires a critical stance toward the officeholder, whoever he is. Pope Francis’s insistent, even programmatic, conflation of the office and the man has somehow affected not only perceptions but hermeneutics. To parse not only this pontificate, but the present moment in the life of the Church, we need a political heuristic. Part of building that heuristic will be recovering the core of theology as an essentially political enterprise, that is to say, one that is of its very nature necessarily concerned with “the things of the city” that is the Church.

Catholic World Report