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Opinions Two Views

Two Views: Pope Francis and Capitalism

A fear of all things red prevalent in our Western cultural mindset only continues to expound itself in our cultural practices, even as memories of the Cold War fade from the minds of our youngest generations. Popular entertainment pits our favourite Hollywood heroes and videogame characters against stock Russian supervillains. Historical figures from Marx himself to revolutionary Che Guevara are labelled and discarded by religious, educational, and state institutions. Even the most recent twitter trend #SochiProblems can be traced back to massive generalizations about countries that are politically unlike us in favour of an educated knowledge of their governmental systems and Christ-like interest in the wellbeing of their citizens.

alexThis inherent bias lashes out against anything our ‘red detectors’ might suspect, including (what should be considered) apolitical statements by Pope Francis about the inequalities present in many Western economic systems. In an apostolic exhortation entitled Evangelii Gaudium (“The Joy of the Gospel,” for those of us who don’t speak Latin), Pope Francis outlines in five chapters what he believes the evangelical goals of the Catholic Church ought to be.

While my quick scan with the search bar dragged up the word ‘capitalism’ zero times in Evangelii Gaudium, it is evident that parts of the second chapter of the apostolic exhortation released in November of 2013 point directly at some of the glaring inequalities of free market systems. The Pope denounces “trickle down theories” that leave the poor sidelined, and claims that “a rejection of ethics and a rejection of God” are the primary causes of growing economic inequalities. The “new idolatry of money” finds us scrambling to consume and leaving those who can’t keep up behind us.

Read: Communism? “pure Marxism,” to quote Rush Limbaugh? Pope Francis is clearly not an economic theorist (nor does he claim to be), and the Evangelii Gaudium is not a political statement. It’s boldly Christian.

“I exhort you to generous solidarity and to the return of economics and finance to an ethical approach which favours human beings.” Let’s be honest. We live in a culture of overwhelming affluence and comfort. We also live in a culture in which we find homeless beggars on the street to be commonplace, and we are willing to literally kill each other over good sales (American Black Friday death tolls since 2006 amount to seven deaths and up to ninety injuries). Is it possible that our anti-Communist cultural bias has become an excuse to avoid charitable practices?

Those who denounce Pope Francis as a Communist or as simply too liberal for the Holy See are missing the point. Pope Francis’ statements centre on a Christian theological core: the desire for Catholics (and for all Christians, at that) to express love and concern for our neighbours. There’s nothing political, let alone Communist, about sharing wealth with the needy. This financial practice is one that was endorsed both by Jesus himself  (Matthew 19:16-30) and practiced by the early believers (Acts 4:32-35).

Questions about the influence of liberation theology on the Argentinian pope have been raised, but especially for those of us outside of the realm of Catholicism it is difficult to judge the theological beliefs of another. Fair concerns about Pope Francis’ writings being viewed as sweepingly general (and primarily negative) towards wealthy people have also been voiced. It may well be that not all of us will agree with all of the Pope’s exhortations. Yet, as Christians, I think the message at the heart of Evangelii Gaudium’s second chapter is one that deserves our interest.

 

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Arts

Recommended Reads: Jorge Luis Borges’ “Other Inquisitions”

This past week my wife Nancy mentioned that Pope Francis and I have something in common. Naturally I was thinking of the all-too-obvious humble piety connection that everyone would notice between he and I. “No,” she said, “sorry. Pope Francis stated in an interview that two of his favorite authors were Dostoevsky and Borges.” Neither of these authors surprises me as being special for Pope Francis. Dostoevsky remains important to most believers (and many non), and Borges is Argentine, as is Pope Francis. Being the most admired author from his native country it really makes sense…though Ernesto Sabato would reject this assumption.

Courtesy of themodernword.com
Courtesy of themodernword.com

The Brothers Karamazov remains my most treasured reading experience…but second to this would be Other Inquisitions by Jorge Luis Borges. Published in 1952, it was not widely read in English until 1964. Borges is world famous for his mysterious labyrinthine short stories. He was also a poet and a writer of essays. Other Inquisitions is a collection of his essays from 1937-1952.

Like T. S. Eliot, Borges published many of his essays before his more famous poetry and short fiction. Both writers used published essays to prepare a reading public to comprehend (at least to be prepared for) the work to follow. His essays read like his short stories; they are packed with complex circular associations.

Borges was remarkable for his erudition. He had few peers who could keep pace with his prodigious memory. Borges appeared to have read everything from obscure Icelandic sagas to Arab poets to Egyptian mystics, to modern authors like Chesterton, Faulkner, Joyce and Paul Valery.

These essays cover topics such as metaphysics, dreams, absolute languages, the age of the earth, time, and history, and of course the power and meaning of Art. One of his most celebrated essays is “A New Refutation of Time.” It is the longest and most complex essay in the book…notice the irony of the title? Read it again.

“The Wall and The Books” is a highly anthologized essay where Borges reflects upon the Chinese Emperor Shih Huang Ti, who both constructed the Great Wall and decreed that all the books of the empire be destroyed; he wanted history to begin with him. Borges was most gifted with his ability to see metaphors. He made brilliant connections. He asks in this essay what symmetry there might be between an Emperor walling in an empire, while at the same time decreeing that this most ancient and historically sensitive of people eradicate their past. To Borges there was some meaning there. He concludes this essay with a sentence found frequently among those who search for definitions of things ineffable like beauty and art: “Music, state of happiness, mythology, faces shaped by time, certain twilights and certain places, try to tell us something, or they told us something that we should not have lost, or want to tell us something; this imminence of a revelation, which does not occur, is, perhaps, the esthetic phenomenon.” Yes that sense of something just about to become clear and yet…and yet…

The first time I read this I knew I had encountered something special. Right there was succinctly stated that truth about what I felt when I looked at Vermeer’s Girl With A Pearl Ear Ring or read the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, or lost myself in the final movement of Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde.”

Borges had given this experience a form for which I had no words.

Each essay is a work of art. Each a careful and complex luminous mediation upon persons and ideas: Pascal, Zeno’s Paradox, The Partial Enchantments of the Quixote, The dream of Coleridge, the mystery of the authorship of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.

While running from the Burning-House-of-literature (I owe this description to Billy Collins) this would be the second book I would grab. Borges rewards re-reading. Although his writing is short, it is dense and you end up re-reading them enough to feel in retrospect that these short works are among the longest ever written.

In the epilogue Borges muses about his collection and states that he notices certain elements to be a feature of all the essays. The first is his tendency to weigh philosophical and theological ideas in terms of their aesthetic worth, “…what is singular and marvelous,” and the observation that the number of metaphors possible for the human mind is limited, but like the apostle can be all things to all people.

Borges has, more than any writer, been my most formative influence. His desire to see and live a life aesthetically has sustained me during many a dark time in my life. Borges believed that reading was an act of art- no less important than the act of writing (and by extension listening and looking). Borges established the post-modern idea of how we as readers create new works each time we experience them.  Every reader makes new connections and continues the creative process. He elevates reading. In one of his most celebrated essays he discusses Kafka and his influence. He refers to them as both precursors and also writers on whom he had influence. One of these is Pascal. Every college graduate should perk up at such an assertion. How indeed can a writer of the 20th century have had any influence upon a writer of the 17th century? How indeed. Borges notes that it took Kafka for us to connect the dots- to detect a common theme. It was in one sense not there until Kafka revealed it to us…hidden in plain sight. The existential thread that leads us through the author of Ecclesiastes to Lucretius to Augustine to Pascal to Kafka is imaginatively engendered by the “active artist reader”. None was ever so engaged as Jorge Luis Borges.

I like a Pope who reads Borges. The leader of the Catholic Church keenly understands that the great skeptic Borges can in his own circuitous pattern ultimately restore us to our Faith, an irony thick and no doubt satisfactory to Borges (who died in 1986). Some would say that there is no way he can enjoy something since he is dead. Readers of Borges know “not so fast”.

One final point: Borges, who remembered and read more than almost any person in the 20th century, who could quote indexes from memory and spoke when he met Anthony Burgess in “Old English”, who could recite Shakespeare and Quevedo and had nearly the entire Comedia of Dante committed to memory…was blind from the mid 1950 until his death some 36 years later. Blind.

It beggars the mind.

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News

Pope to Continue Efforts to Reform LCWR

Pope Francis I declared on Monday, the 15th of April, his solidarity with the controversial report by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) which was released last year, and his desire to advance Pope Benedict XVI’s goal of restructuring the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) in the USA. This is his most controversial action since he entered office last month, as it has been widely misunderstood.

Courtesy of LCWR.org
Courtesy of LCWR.org

Benedict’s crackdown on the progressive nuns of the LCWR roused a significant amount of public ire last year, and Francis’ support of the reform comes as no surprise. While he is intent on building popular opinion of the Catholic Church, he is also conservative. Thus, although many had hoped that Francis would break with tradition on this issue as he has with many others in his short time in the Papal office, it was in full accordance with expectations that Archbishop Gerhard Ludwig Müller informed the LCWR of the pope’s decision on Monday.

In the US media, the conflict between the Vatican and the LCWR has been portrayed as one of “Pope versus Progressive Nuns” and as yet another instance of archaic Catholic dogma oppressing human progress. The matter is more complicated than that, however; although the nuns of the LCWR have indeed been reprimanded for spending “too much time” on social justice issues, and for deviating from traditional Catholic doctrine regarding contraceptives and homosexuality, the Vatican objection arises from the group’s divergence from traditional Catholic teachings regarding some key elements of Catholic doctrine.

The role of the CDF is to ensure that no heretical doctrines are taught by Catholic clergy—they were formerly known as the Office of the Holy Inquisition. Consequently, great weight has been lent to their assessment that LCWR has strayed far from Catholic doctrine. The nuns of the order have allegedly expressed the sentiment of “moving beyond Jesus,” as well as blatantly calling into question his divinity under the guise of progressive feminism. The CDF determined that they were espousing “significant doctrinal or moral content which often contradict or ignore magisterial teaching.” The members of the LCWR have contested the allegations by saying that they never officially supported such views, but the CDF, and now two Popes, have determined that their defense was inadequate to avoid hierarchical reform.

The LCWR is a religious order and therefore distinct from the regular clergy: its nuns do not fall under the jurisdiction of parish priests, bishops, or anyone besides their own intra-order superiors and the Pope. The Pope himself is the sole connecting point between the hierarchies of religious orders and regular clergy. That is why first Benedict and now Francis have had to intervene to correct the alleged doctrinal deviances of the wayward sisters.

There is room to question the fairness of the Papal action on this matter, however. Francis has been accused of repressing movements for social justice during the Argentine “Dirty War.” Also, by reforming the LCWR and bringing it back in line with Catholic doctrine, the Pope stands to gain favor with more conservative Catholics who have been offended by his recent deviations from tradition.