Laudato Si': Hearing the cry of the world in the Anthropocene

By Lieve Orye

Last Thursday we had the pleasure at the faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at KULeuven to welcome and listen to a public lecture by theologian and biologist Celia Deane-Drummond: 'Laudato Si’ and Pope Francis as prophet and priest in the Anthropocene'. Her lecture was part of a two day interdisciplinary expert seminar on ‘Laudato Si' and progress’, organized by the Centre for Catholic Social Thought in collaboration with CAFOD, Catholic Agency for Overseas Development.

Channeling a cry, Speaking into the heart of the Anthropocene

Photo by Christus Rex.

Laudato Si’ is receiving much attention. Its audacity, philosopher Bruno Latour writes, “is equaled only by the multiple efforts to deaden as much as possible its message and effects”(251). He sees two major innovations behind this audacity, the link between the ecological and injustice and the recognition that the earth itself can act and suffer. Both these innovations, he notes, are associated with the strange word cry: to hear the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor, writes Pope Francis, a true ecological approach must always be a social one, integrating questions of justice in debates about the environment (§49). A cry, Latour notes, is not a message, a doctrine, a slogan, a piece of advice or a fact but rather something like a signal, a rumor, a stirring or an alarm. Something that makes you sit up, turn your head and listen. 

Deane-Drummond recognizes this deep cry of the earth in Laudato Si’  as a cry in the epoch of the Anthropocene, our current geological age, characterized as a period in which human activity emerges as the dominant influence on climate and the environment. Unlike scientists who see the human impact on climate and environment as a problem that can be fixed by means of a technological solution, Pope Francis speaks from a different imaginary that gives science its proper place but invites a cultural revolution, a shift in lifestyle. He has, Deane-Drummond noted, given us a sketch of a different and open social imaginary, one that resists an imaginary in terms of human dominance through a call to inner transformation and the nurturing of ecological virtues.

Listening to birds in the Anthropocene

Though Pope Francis does not use the term, hearing the deep cry of the heart in Laudato Si’ as a cry in the Anthropocene is illuminating. Though scientists still discuss the particulars of the Anthropocene, it is already more than just scientific fact. As anthropologists have started showing, it is what people hear and sense and worry about, for instance in their listening to the birds.

Creative Commons by Deanne Fortnam.

Saint Francis of Assisi spoke, preached to the birds. It is said that he preached to a flock of almost a hundred sparrows, which only left when he said they could. They were as much a part of his brotherhood as the pope. But if, as Andrew Whitehouse suggests, the Anthropocene started with the industrial revolution, ushering in the epoch of anthrophony in which human sounds and human-made sounds of industry, machinery, electronic amplification and so on started drowning out the biophony and geophony in many parts of the world, Francis’ speaking to the birds was clearly still an anthrophony of the pre-Anthropocene kind. We can understand his speaking, in other words, as characterized by an attentiveness that made resonance possible. It integrated more closely with the sounds and attentiveness of other beings rather than disrupting or dominating these (57).

In his article ‘Listening to Birds in the Anthropocene: The Anxious Semiotics of Sound in a Human-Dominated World’ Whitehouse’s informants do not so much speak, nor preach to the birds. They do listen attentively and respond in resonance. But unlike Saint Francis they listen in the Anthropocene and, in the silence they hear more and more, the cry of the earth resounds. Whitehouse points out that the concept of the Anthropocene simultaneously draws humans and non-humans together and separates them out:

According to Lorimer, “The recent diagnosis of the Anthropocene represents the public death of the modern understanding of Nature removed from society.” Human and non-human worlds can no longer be conceived as existing in separate realms, and nature, at least in the sense of that which is separate from society, struggles to be convincing as a concept. And yet, as Crist has argued, the Anthropocene also appears to place humans on a pedestal as the only species in the history of the planet powerful enough to be deemed the primary Earth-shaping force (54).

The notion furthermore emphasizes anxieties that we humans have caused the ‘end of nature’, the disappearance of birds, butterflies and bees. That we are responsible for silent springs, for springs no longer announced by birds singing. The notion indicates both the interconnectedness of human and non-human lives as well as the potential for their destruction and silencing by humans.

Anxious semiotics and ethical relating

house-sparrows-on-branch-by-martha-de-jong-lantink-ccl

Though there is nothing inherently new about the experience of anxiety in relation to environmental conditions, the Anthropocene, Whitehouse notes, brings with it particular configurations. It “relates to real and observable changes in the local worlds people perceive around them and to semiotic elaborations on those perceptions that draw together local and global, human and non-human, present and future, into anxiety-laden narratives” (55). Though there is growing desire to attend to and to care for birds and their ecology, these seem continually outstripped by our capacity to disrupt and endanger.

To hear the cry of the earth in the Anthropocene, attentiveness is key. Whitehouse’s point is that it is to those least alienated from other forms of life that the wounds caused in the Anthropocene become more apparent. It is in them that these wounds provoke a moral disquiet (63). The anxious semiotics, Whitehouse notes, only emerges through active listening.

“The more we care about our world and the more we pay attention to it, the worse things seem to get… the more we listen to birds the more we notice the loss of birds from pesticides, the destruction of habitat, the encroaching dominance of Anthrophonic sounds, the sounds that are out of place and ecosystems that are dissonant”(69).

photo by James Brush

“All ethical relating, within or between species, is knit from the silk-strong thread of ongoing alertness to otherness-in-relation” wrote Donna Haraway (50). This is an ethical relating that, as Whitehouse points out, is importantly grounded in the same kinds of semiotic processes through which birds listen to their own world. Through listening, through paying attention, we can no longer think, indifferently, of birds as part of a separate mindless Nature. Rather, Whitehouse notes, such listening should ground the development of relations of companionship. “It elicits not simply a narrative of encroaching loss and the ever present threat that humans pose to non-humans, but one of enskilment, of how we learn to listen to birds and to the rest of our world…”(70). Precisely in our worrying, in our hearing the cry of the earth, lies hope. In those little daily actions, as little as listening to the birds and worrying about them occurs the nurturing of a different relation.

The song of birds, the song of fellow humans

 As Latour notes,

Laudato Si’ is a funny kind of text – wordy, busy, contradictory, repetitive – but this is because it is itself channelling this immense cry, which is impossible to decode rapidly, which makes one prick up one’s ears, turn one’s head toward those other actors, so different from nature and from humanity: a Sister Mother Earth whom we had almost forgotten was herself capable of suffering, like the poor who are tangled up with her. It is up to the readers now to channel, in turn, this immense cry (255).

Dark-eyed Junco (Photo: William Majoros/Creative Commons)

Laudato Si’  is speaking into the heart of the Anthropocene, urging those indifferent to live attentively. It emphasizes moreover that we should not pay attention to the wounds of the earth as if these could be separated out from the wounds of fellow human beings. Just as we care about the singing of the birds and worry about their disappearance, we must care at least as much about the singing of fellow human beings, being attentive, listening to what their sounds are telling us. Do we hear the sounds and silences of dominance and suffering or the lively chatter of everyday attentiveness, care and hospitality, the songs of human flourishing? Do anxious semiotics also arise from our listening in and do we allow this anxiety to encourage our enskilment in ethically relating to them?

Haraway, D. (2003) The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 50.

Latour, B. (2016) 'The Immense Cry Channeled by Pope Francis', Environmental Humanities, 8(2), 251-255.

Whitehouse, A. (2015) 'Listening to Birds in the Anthropocene: The Anxious Semiotics of Sound in a Human-Dominated World', Environmental Humanities, 6(1), 53-71.

Political Homelessness and the Church

By Patrick Ryan Cooper

Reclaiming the Church’s political homelessness is a matter of urgency today.

However, this affirmation of homelessness in no way annuls the immense breadth of her public commitment and witness. Rather than continuously seeking extrinsic accommodation and unmitigated compromise, the intrinsic search for her innate, public character requires broad, theological vision and an unrelenting commitment to praxis that is ultimately and unwaveringly grafted upon the folly of the Cross if we are to convincingly affirm the fundamental priority that as members of the mystical Body of Christ, we are first and foremost Christians and Catholics over and above, and at times even against, every other polity and national regime.

Crisis of Institutions and Shifting Ideological Landscapes

Having recently returned with my family to the US after living in Belgium for the past seven years, I, for one, acutely feel the dizzying effects of such homelessness on various levels. The truly bizarre political spectacle of American presidential politics has certainly been a rude awakening, dominated largely by the bumbling populist nationalism of Donald Trump. Above every insult and outrage, Trump's brash demagoguery has yet to demonstrate even the slightest impulse of governing in favor of the common good that would in any way interfere with his own private, commercial interests that he so regularly flaunts and ostentatiously puts on display. Adding to the voices of anxiety over a Trump nomination, Catholic neo-con voices have recently joined in the chorus, though the opposition that Weigel et.al. are making so baldly exposes their continuing attempts to reify the Church in service to a neo-liberal democratic polis, and so thoroughly aligned with the Republican party, that the very idea of reclaiming the Church's political homelessness itself is nothing but utterly abhorrent. Their theopolitical vision is both entrenched and waning─perhaps not all that dissimilar from the earlier “alliance” between the Church and the Democratic party decades earlier─and hence, they are vainly seeking to forestall the shifting ideological terrain that a Trump candidacy is currently ushering forth.

Homo adorans, homo politicus

Beyond however the immediate headlines of “walls” and “bridges” surrounding the recent exchange between Trump and the Holy Father, with the former accusing the pontiff as being a very “political man”, the greater substance of Francis’ response was brilliant in stating:  

Thank God he said I was a politician because Aristotle defined the human person as a ‘homo politicus', a political animal. So at least I am a human person….

And so, in accord with the Holy Father’s statements, we must further qualify the assertion of man as intrinsically political with the necessary Augustinian rejoinder, “Which polis?” The city of man or the city of God?

For the 20th Century German theologian and Catholic convert, Erik Peterson (1890-1960) ─ and his profound Theological Tractates and his superb liturgical angelology, “The Book on the Angels” ─ the political homelessness of the Church reflects an utterly excessive, cosmic (and not merely “salvific”) historical view of the suffering Church as necessarily beyond political confinement and ideological capture. As a pilgrimatic community in-between “the earthly Jerusalem, which is at once polis and temple” and its “ever drawing closer to the eschatological, heavenly temple and its own…polis”, Peterson positions the ekklesia under a clear eschatological proviso. That is, a line of demarcation that at once bears witness to the ontic difference that frames ─ by way of exploding ─ the Church’s distinctly public act, the liturgy, as the site of a transversal commericum: an angelic participation within the earthly cult as well as her “participation in the worship that the angels offer to God.”

In this regard, Peterson's liturgical angelology has little immediate concern with reconstructing either Gregorian or Dionysian hierarchies and perhaps unique in this theological genre, he evinces strong apophatic tendencies ─ what von Balthasar described as Peterson's "ontology of performance" ─ within the liturgy's doxology as necessarily escaping both affirmative predication and political smuggling. (Keep in mind, this is mid-1930's Germany after all.) Rather, Peterson's interest in angelology is both multi-layered and at once counters its stark absence within both scholarly and popular approaches to the liturgy and by extension, recalls us to the liturgy's intrinsically public nature that doxologically explodes any and all idolatrous doubling in the secular political realm. In this, Peterson's angelic turn largely parallels another famous convert, John Henry Newman, who quipped in a famous sermon, "The Powers of Nature", that if the sin of the medieval mind errored too much in its exaggerated focus on the angels, "the sin of what is called our educated age…is just the reverse…to ascribe all we see around us, not to their [angelic] agency, but to certain assumed laws of nature. This, I say, is likely to be our sin….of resting in things seen, and forgetting unseen things, and our ignorance about them."[1]

Furthermore, the very porosity that resists ideological capture simultaneously entails an absence of neutrality. And Peterson certainly does not have in mind a tit-for-tat between liberals and conservatives. Rather, he invites us to patiently recover the cosmic vision of the metaphysical struggle between the angelic and the demonic that transects the historical wherein the militia Christi is embedded in its own apocalyptic struggle that is neither apolitical or blithely escapist, but instead "inevitably stands either under the power of the Antichrist or the power of Christ." In other words, with Peterson, there is no logic here that could support accomodationist views of a "lesser of two evils". Constructively, a more radical Catholic option consequently emerges from Peterson's writings (though one in which he was not immediately aligned with) wherein the supernatural provides a critical contrast as both beyond, yet inseparable that expands and distinguishes the uniqueness of our political vision and commitments. The paradox, as seen in Peterson’s difference with the political theology of Carl Schmitt, demonstrates the necessary resistance of reductively capturing the Church within existing political discourse, though never apart from it either.

Theopolitical Mysticism

Peterson's angelology is heavily rooted in both liturgical sources as well as in the Fathers, as he himself was a notable Patristics scholar. The significance of angels, both cosmically and liturgically, attests to none other than the intrinsic nature of the Church's public nature at its very origins - irreducible and not to be confused with its later legal status - as not extrinsically conditioned by the State. "The relationship of the ekklesia to the polis in heaven is thus…also a political relationship, and on this basis the angels must always be present in the cultic actions of the Church."[2] Peterson illustrates this point by drawing from the commentary of St. John Chrysostom, recalling that for the Eastern Father:

[T]he holy angels accompany Christ in his presence in the Eucharistic celebration that way that soldiers accompany a king, then we realize why they [ angels] appear in the holy Mass. They serve the purpose of making the Eucharist’s public character clear. As the emperor demonstrates the public character of his political authority when he appears in the company of his bodyguard, so Christ demonstrates the public character of his religio-political authority when he is accompanied by the bodyguard of the angels at holy Mass….[which is] public, official ecclesial and not a private processes.[3]

However,  we would minimize the significance of Peterson’s work by simply aligning him with some communitarian collectivist alternative to the State. Rather, his aims are clearly centered upon a greater recovery of the integral character of angelology and to “grasp clearly the role that the angels actually play in these ways of thinking” within the Tradition. For one, we see this in the intensely pregnant confluence of Peterson's theopolitical mysticism whereby his angelology mediates between the mystical and the liturgical, as the “mystical act of praise, as theologia” is “able to unfold only in inner linkage with the cult of the Church….which praises God with the angels and the whole of creation”. A proper angelology thereby facilitates this inner linkage, which is both profoundly cosmic, and yet entirely antithetical to attempts at naturalizing Christian faith. Instead, such angelic linkages aim to convey the dense realism and requisite worlding of claims within Fundamental Catholic approaches to the nature of Christian revelation. Again, not an immanent worlding that would contain such revelation, yet  as the eschatological tearing open of “God’s eternal world”  that acclaims O Heiland, reiß die Himmel auf. Hence, a proper understanding of the  angels not only act as the guarantor of the public nature of the Church's liturgical cultic actions that are beyond ideological capture, yet they do so precisely in attesting to the cosmic character of liturgical worship, without which humanity’s self-transcending praise would be solely self-reflexive:

The Church's worship is not that of a human religious society whose liturgy is tied to a temple. Rather, it is a worship that permeates the entire cosmos, in which sun, moon, and all the stars take part….It is always the entire cosmos that participates in the praise of God, though this is something that could not be conceived of had Christ's ascension not torn open heaven. The heaven of the angels is…the most central, the most spiritual part of the cosmos… the singing of the angels would never be permitted to disappear from the Church's worship, for that is what first gives the Church's praise the depth and transcendence that are called for by the character of Christian revelation.[4]

In short, the excessive, non-reductive character of our liturgical praise and its mystical, transcendent depths both exceeds political capture, while simultaneously providing the very same grounds for our necessary, continuing public involvement.  A proper angelology that facilitates these linkages by way of excess and porosity, thereby both resists the modern State’s continuing attempt to publically regulate and confine the Church as a private entity as well as helps her reenvision the Church’s innate public character in a distinctly ecclesial manner. Angelology is thus not a "poetic ornament left over from the storehouse of popular fables" for it stands for a porous ontological continuity, a transversal commercium between the metaphysical and the historical that likewise, by way of excess, ensures the ontological difference at the heart of the Church's pilgrimatic homelessness.

[1] See John Henry Newman, "The Powers of Nature", Sermons, vol. II, 358-9.

[2] Erik Peterson, "The Book on the Angels", Theological Tractates, (ed.) and (trans.) Michael J. Hollerich (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011) 135.

[3] ibid.

[4] Peterson, "The Book on the Angels",121-2.

The Politics of the Catacombs

By Jared Schumacher       This past week, renewed attention has been given to the so-called “Catacombs Pact”, an agreement signed by a coterie of bishops in the closing days of the Second Vatican Council. As this year marks the 50th anniversary of the Council’s closure, renewed focus on the Pact makes sense. What is more, the content of the Pact also seems ripe for reconsideration given that its central emphases are in line with Pope Francis’ overall tone and message that the Church be a “Church that is poor, for the poor.”   

In many ways, the document itself is a laudable effort by shepherds of the Church to recover “the smell of their sheep”. Its paragraphs are rife with practical themes treated by the Council, including a renewed emphasis on episcopal collegiality, more focus on lay activity in the vital ministries of the Church, and a rejection of material waste and ostentation in the Church’s life and mission.

Indeed, the Pact goes further than the Council in a few key respects. It calls for a personal renunciation of both honorific titles and personal property by the signees, even the personal resignation of “everything that may appear as a concession of privilege, prominence, or even preference to the wealthy and powerful.” These principles of the Pact thus stand at the hyperbolic vanguard of what later liberation theologians have called “the preferential option for the poor”, now officially part of Catholic social teaching (c.f. Compendium of Social Doctrine of the Church, §182).

In general, the Pact was emblematic of the time in which it was pledged, where leaders in the Church were seeking to find fresh and faithful ways of making a difference in the world in imitation of the poverty of Christ and the early Church.

The economical and political relevance of the Pact for today

Fifty years have now passed, with the Pact largely lost to history. Few ever knew of its existence, let alone felt its influence. It has recently been brought back into the light of day thanks in part to a documentary produced in 2012 and recent traction from theological observers keen to relate the content of the document with Pope Francis’ view of the Church’s mission.

Take as an example this recent articulation of the Pact’s import. David Gibbons argues for the significance of the Pact as a call for the Church to resist the excesses of capitalism and the “income inequality and economic injustice” it tends to promote. His argument for semblance between Pact and Pope is strong, given that Francis’ most recent encyclical, Laudato Si’, focuses heavily on the “throwaway culture” of market capitalism and its devastating social and environmental effects, one of which is economic inequality.

But more than a document concerning economic justice, the Pact contains political elements as well. Though he does not mention it directly, Gibbons is sensitive to this political register when citing the words of Brother Uwe Heisterhoff––one of the administrators of the Domitilla catacombs where the Pact was signed––to critique “conservative apologists” who would use the catacombs as a rallying image to maintain political power. In his view, rather, the catacombs represent “a Church without [political] power”, given the Church’s history of secret services in the catacombs in times of political disfavor.

Such politically contentious readings of the Pact find support in one particular paragraph which suggests that it is as much a political call to arms as it is a pastoral call to economic action. As I do research in political theology, it quite naturally caught my eye. It reads:

We will do everything possible so that those responsible for our governments and our public services establish and enforce the laws, social structures, and institutions that are necessary for justice, equality, and the integral, harmonious development of the whole person and of all persons, and thus for the advent of a new social order, worthy of the children of God. See Acts 2,44-45; 4,32- 35; 5,4; 2 Corinthians 8 and 9; 1 Timothy 5,16.

How to (not) read the Pact politically

At one level, this passage can be read as a call to the practical exercise of Christian charity and justice in all aspects of life, even the political. It resembles that ancient type of Christian speech professed by the martyrs, i.e. speaking truth to power. Viewed in this light, it stands on a well-grounded tradition of Catholic social thought. However, closer scrutiny of the passage demonstrates its ambiguities and problems. Two appear most prominent. The first is the extremity of the language used, particularly at the beginning. “We will do everything possible….” It might seem obvious that Machiavellian political options would be off the table for the episcopal signees, and yet the lack of qualification is equally apparent. Not “everything in our God-given power”, not “everything Jesus would do”, not “everything justice calls for”, but “everything possible.” Would supporting an armed insurrection against an ‘unjust’ regime be fair game for the document’s signees? From the text alone that option would be difficult to discount.

[The extremity of the language used is problematic in other parts of document as well, c.f. the already cited “everything that may appear as a concession of privilege, prominence, or even preference to the wealthy and powerful.” It is not difficult to imagine how a radical interpretation of that language could lead to some troubling outcomes.]

The second concern I have with the phrasing of the passage is the immediacy with which actions on behalf of charity and justice are linked with “the advent of a new social order.” Biblical scholars have long noted a change in biblical eschatology, from “imminent return” beliefs of the early biblical authors to a more balanced “delayed parousia” position of the later biblical writers. That arc can be traced on Christian theology as a whole, where immediate eschatological expectation is moderated by a call to patient suffering in the time between times. The problem I have with the language of the Pact is that it can be read against this trend of theological moderation, favoring a radicalized eschatological reading of present political realities.

Moreover, the shift to immediacy is couched within language which assumes that the political apparatus of the State is the instrument responsible for ushering in the Kingdom of God. This assumption leaves far behind the balanced considerations of St. Augustine, whose line of demarcation between the City of God and the City of Man saved Christianity from the political ruin of Rome. Any of those seeking in the Catacombs Pact a political ideology do well to remember the history of the Church and the dangers of confusing any earthly polis with the New Jerusalem of Christian expectation. While it is the Church’s mission to begin forming people in the habits of upright citizenship, that citizenship––until the eschaton––remains in heaven (Phil. 3:20). As a result, Christians are to remain political pilgrims on earth, putting their trust in Christ and not political ideologies.

It is not irrelevant to this final point that the Compendium of Catholic Social Doctrine follows its seminal paragraph on the preferential option for the poor with a paragraph noting the dangers of ideological messianisms (§183). One of the reasons Gibbons notes that the Pact initially failed to garner larger influence was that “it had the odor of communism”; given the ambiguity of this pivotal passage, it is not difficult to see why many might think so.

Surgeons, not revolutionaries

In summation, given both the frequency today with which a call for economic justice is easily captured in political narratives of left v. right, liberal v. conservative, and given the ambiguities internal to the document itself, there is a danger in reading the Pact––which was only ever intended as a voluntary personal profession of pastoral solidarity––as a theo-political program, an affirmation of statist secularism accompanied by an ecclesiology in which the Church is no longer “the people of God”, but a social service organization or advocacy group. Such a reading would do violence to the positive potential of the Pact and to the nature of the Church affirmed at the Second Vatican Council in Lumen Gentium.   

If the Church is truly going to be “the field hospital” of the world, as Pope Francis rightly declares it to be, this means that it cannot be a combatant in merely political conflicts. As field medics know well, picking up a gun turns the red cross on their helmets into a bullseye. The doctors of the Church serve a higher purpose than ensuring which side wins in a political contest of wills. The Church’s calling is to wash the bodies of political victims indiscriminately, while sharing with all the discriminating message of truth: one has already come to show us a way beyond political tumult, and he will come again to bring a Kingdom of Peace not of this world.

The Church does not have much at stake in whether Democrats or Republicans or Whigs or Tories or Labour parties win an election cycle. For the Church’s war is “not against flesh and blood, but against the spiritual powers and principalities of this present darkness” (Eph 6:12). This does not mean that the Church withdraws from the world or its vast array of sufferings. It rather recognizes that the Church’s fundamental mission is to drop the sword and pick up the scalpel. It is easy to confuse the two, but the differences are vast.

In order to honor the positive message of the Catacombs Pact, the Church must follow the lead of its signees in getting its hands dirty; but it must also remember the danger of confusing the blood on the surgeon’s hands with the blood on the revolutionary’s. For the Church follows the Son of the Father named Jesus Christ, not the political radical Bar-abbas. 

Pope Francis' Apocalyptic Vision & the Anti-Christ in Benson's Lord of the World

By Patrick Ryan Cooper

As a young Catholic theologian with relatively few laurels to rest upon, I nevertheless consider myself wise enough to have critically eschewed the media's partisan Doppelgänger portrait of Pope Francis, preferring instead to pay close attention to what the Holy Father himself has said and done over these utterly remarkable and unprecedented first few years of his papacy. Given the tired and woeful inadequacy of labels such as "right/left", or "traditionalist/progressive", how should we understand Pope Francis? Perhaps we should look at his library and the book recommendations that he has made as Pontiff.  After all, it was at his very first Angelus (March 17, 2013) that Francis would recommend Cardinal Kasper's work on "mercy" – and we all know the centrality this theme has taken, and how it continues to play itself out, in both the Extraordinary and upcoming Ordinary Synod on the Family later this year.

However, there is another trajectory to Francis, one that is clearly less-publicized, though arguably just as relevant and defining. Veteran Vatican correspondent John Allen  captured it in his interview (November 17, 2014) with the ailing Archbishop emeritus of Chicago, Francis Cardinal George, wherein George notes that

It’s interesting to me that this pope talks about that novel, “Lord of the World.” That’s one thing I want to ask him. How do you put together what you’re doing with what you say is the hermeneutical interpretation of your ministry, which is this eschatological vision that the anti-Christ is with us? Do you believe that? I would love to ask the Holy Father. What does that mean? In a sense, maybe it explains why he seems to be in a hurry. Nobody seems interested in that but I find it fascinating, because I found the book fascinating. I read it quite by chance when I was in high school. It was written in 1907, and he has air travel, he has everything modern. It’s really eerie because it seems as if he was looking at our time, meaning right now. Does the pope believe that?....I hope before I die I’ll have the chance to ask him: How do you want us to understand your ministry, when you put that before us as a key?[1]

On more than one occasion[2], Francis has indeed referenced Benson's dystopian novel, which today is largely forgotten (illustrated by the fact that the only extant copy available for my recent purchase was a cheap, photographic imprint edition). Most notably, this past January, Francis cited Benson as providing the key to explaining what he means by the "ideological colonisation of the family". "There is a book that was written in London in 1903, called “Lord of the World”, by Benson: I recommend it to you" Francis said to reporters upon his return trip from the Philippines. "If you read it you’ll really understand what I’m talking about.”[3] However, Francis' comments about "ideological colonisation" specifically in terms of the family are largely enigmatic. For Benson pays little attention to the state of the family (or gender theories) in his apocalyptic drama. Rather, the forced association that Francis is communicating by such references appears to have another intention: namely, as code for speaking about the "Anti-Christ" within  public media, cleverly without mentioning the word itself, as well as communicating something fundamental about himself and his papacy. So what then is Lord of the World all about?

Benson's apocalyptic novel itself takes place at the dawn of the 21st Century and it begins amid fierce tension and the threat of cataclysmic war. Then all of a sudden, a relatively unknown junior senator from Vermont, Julian Felsenburgh quickly and extraordinarily emerges upon the world political stage, brokers a peace within Asia's rival factions and thereafter Europe. Benson's prose relishes in describing the messianic enthusiasm that engulfs the various world capitals, in particular London, describing at one point how the "officials were like men possessed….disappear[ing] in the rush to the City, for it had leaked out, in spite of the Government's precautions, that Paul's House, known once as St. Paul's Cathedral, was to be the scene of Felsenburgh's reception." Amid its apocalyptic frenzy and frequent hyperbole, the humor of Benson's satirical edge should not be forgotten, for it was 'Paul's House' that welcomed with open arms none other than the Anti-Christ Felsenburgh himself. We should recall that Benson himself was the son of the former Archbishop of Canterbury and was initially ordained as an Anglican, before leaving and eventually becoming ordained in the Roman Catholic Church in 1904.

One of the central themes to Lord of the World is the manner in which evil insidiously apes the good, while aiming to show the very messianism at work with the Anti-Christ and the perverse simulacra atheistic humanism supplies as a (to use Benson's very post-modern sounding phrase) "Catholicism without Christianity". Benson endlessly exploits this familiar genre thematic, where emergency "ministers of Euthanasia" are now regarded as the "real Priests" of mercy and compassion, while he particularly excels in describing the newly institutionalized mandatory worship that Felsenburgh inaugurates, along with the former Modernist-leaning Fr. Francis, who apostatizes and becomes Minister of Public Worship. Here, the natura pura of neo-Scholasticism reveals its own horrific monstrosity, as the new elite enthusiastically revels in such worship, displaying the "deepest instinct in man", while sacralizing the feasts of Maternity (not surprisingly, on January 1st) and Life (March 25th), in addition to those of Sustenance and Paternity, for "God was man, and Felsenburgh his Incarnation!"

But the most consequential demonic doubling the novel displays is to be found in the profound physical likeness shared between Felsenburgh and the novel's main protagonist, the English Fr. Percy Franklin—who later becomes a Cardinal and eventually Pope Silvester III after the full-scale destruction of Rome and the Church hierarchy. Like the relative obscurity of Felsenburgh, Benson's outsider protagonist Fr. Percy is indeed a very striking character, who equally becomes thrust in the middle of the action, only to ascend to the throne of St. Peter after the tremendous turmoil and persecution of Rome. Immediately contrasted by his more grandiose and monarchial predecessor, Benson continuously emphasizes how the newly ordained Silvester III is in every way imaginable a "model of simplicity". Does any of this sound familiar? It certainly should, for perhaps we can better understand not only why Pope Francis has such a fondness for this book, but furthermore, we can well speculate how he himself envisions the core of the Petrine office today as Servant of Servants, in addition to his own extraordinary ascendency as interpreted by this apocalyptic hermeneutic.

And now it was come to this. Christianity had smoldered away from Europe like a sunset on darkening peaks; Eternal Rome was a heap of ruins; in East and West alike a man had been set upon the throne of God, had been acclaimed as divine. The world had leaped forward; men had learned consistency…the social lessons of Christianity apart from a Divine Teacher, or, rather, they said, in spite of Him. There were left, perhaps, three millions, perhaps five, at the utmost ten millions—it was impossible to know—throughout the entire inhabited globe who still worshipped Jesus Christ as God. And the Vicar of Christ sat in a whitewashed room…dressed as simply as His master, waiting for the end.

And yet, while pushing aside all popular and heterodox accounts of apocalyptic foretelling, what in fact could be the theological significance in describing Francis' ecclesial vision as apocalyptic, as a "field hospital after battle"? To probe such depths, we would be wise to turn to the Notre Dame theologian, Cyril O'Regan, who over the last decade has steadily challenged (contemporary) theology's predilection in maintaining its "cordon sanitaire around itself to repel apocalyptic infection".[4] Instead, O'Regan insists upon the genuine urgency to rearticulate a distinct Christian apocalyptic vision, which alone can sufficiently corral both the retrieval of Christian identity otherwise fragmented by the "corrosive effect of the Enlightenment on Christian discourse"[5] as well as the insistence upon the praxis of justice as "specifically Christian paths of actions and forms of life that may very well exceed what is demanded by secular culture."[6] Such a "necessity", O'Regan reminds us, need not be merely "defensive" and suspicious of contemporary life nor triumphalist, but it certainly does demand an evangelical robustness, for "to speak the truth boldly (parrhesia) is a Christian imperative" and such a theological discourse is by his estimate, "becoming more rather than less imperative as a form of theology".[7] In closing, I would argue that Francis is indeed shaped by this imperative in countless ways amid a fragmented and perilous contemporary moment in which religious persecution and horrific images of martyrdom appear almost daily (i.e. "ecumenism of blood"). And so, we may well call his "vision of God" and that of the Church genuinely apocalyptic as he "suggests that there is much more to do than do enough, that witness even to the point of martyrdom is called for".

[1]See John Allen, http://www.cruxnow.com/church/2014/11/17/chicagos-exiting-cardinal-the-church-is-about-truefalse-not-leftright/

[2] See Pope Francis Homily 18.11.2013 and his reference to the "adolescent progressivism" of apostasy and spiritual worldliness, wherein he specifically mentions Benson. http://www.news.va/en/news/pope-lord-save-us-from-the-subtle-conspiracies-of

[3] See http://vaticaninsider.lastampa.it/en/the-vatican/detail/articolo/francesco-filippine-38640/

[4] See Cyril O'Regan,  Theology & the Spaces of Apocalyptic, from The Pére Marquette Lecture in Theology (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2009) 15.

[5] ibid., 26.

[6] ibid., 126.

[7] ibid., 127.

Politics, Love and the Inner Life

Julia Meszaros

What, if any, is the role of Christian love in the political sphere? Where politics is understood as the Machiavellian effort of securing power over others, of erecting barriers rather than of breaking them down, the answer is, most likely, ‘none’. The case is similar where Christian love is deemed to obstruct a Nietzschean will to power, where it is seen to breed nothing but weakness and resentment. Is Christian love not inherently paternalistic, as the problematic implications of traditional forms of development aid might suggest?

Even a more favourable view of Christian love does not amount to its political relevance. Christian love, like other moral and religious convictions, is, so contemporary manifestations of liberalism tend to imply, a private matter. Good citizenship, so this argument would imply, rests on whether we hold to the principles of freedom and justice, keep the law, and cast our vote.

Indifference as a failure of love

Yet, can these important ‘public’ acts and commitments be separated from my ‘private’ life, from my interior disposition and, more particularly, from Christian love? The fact that the default mode in which we live our lives is one of indifference towards the other suggests otherwise. Retreating, by and large, into the private sphere of work, homes and cars, we typically vote only according to our own immediate (especially financial) interests; we have a flippant relationship with the law (tax law being a prime example); and we often look past the old, the sick and the homeless. These tendencies slowly but surely undermine our political structures and principles in a way that inevitably damages first of all those who are most vulnerable. 

And this, I now want to suggest, is because our sins of political indifference and materialistic individualism constitute nothing less than failures of love. They manifest a lack of passionate concern for the other and for the Good that unites all human persons. And it is for this reason that they present an almost insurmountable political challenge. For love cannot be politically enforced.

Love’s ground in the inner life

One reason for this is that love, like its opposite, indifference, consists in a particular disposition towards the world. As much as it is an act, love implies a valuation of and delight in the other, a profound longing for the other’s well-being. And as such, love is inseparable from a particular inner life—from the cultivation of truthful perception for instance and of our conscience and, ultimately, of a life of prayer. For love is ultimately rooted in a love of Love itself—in that Spirit of Love which animates our own love.

The inner life as a political challenge

The political importance of our inner lives that follows from this is one of the modern state’s greatest challenges. For contrary to socialism’s assumption that the political sphere can foster, even produce, the kind of persons it needs for its own vitality (on the principle that a good society makes good individuals), love is not learnt through political programmes and policies but only through love itself—that is, through free relationships of love. And contrary to contemporary political liberalism, a state religion of neutrality and disinterestedness is likely to foster a hazardous sense of the political irrelevance of the inner life. 

What, then, is the political realm to make of the fact that love and, with it, the individual person and their inner life, form the inevitable foundation of a vital society? How can we acknowledge the political relevance of our inner lives without giving up on our liberal principles of freedom and toleration?

An albeit rather personal response to this difficult question was, perhaps, offered by the new Pope Francis, minutes after his election. After greeting the cheering crowds, the Pope, a powerful leader, bows before them. And before giving them his blessing, he asks them to pray for his blessing. And rather than asking them to say the ‘Our Father’, he asks them to pray in silence, thus underling the simultaneously communal and individual nature of prayer. This act of humility is at once a political act and an act of love: the leader places his trust in his flock and unambiguously affirms the importance of each individual and his or her inner life of prayer and of love, for the whole. In doing so, Francis boldly proclaimed that even in a world tormented by war and poverty the individual’s turn inwards, Augustine’s reditum ad cor, is no luxury. Indeed, it is the first step towards building the fraternity of the true polis.

This post is an excerpt of a paper given at the workshop Politics of Love? Christliche Liebe als politische Herausforderung (org. Anthropos Research Group and Katholische Akademie Berlin), Berlin, 21-23 March 2013.​​

​Julia Meszaros is a post-doctoral researcher at the K.U. Leuven and a member of Anthropos, a research group in theological anthropology.