As the news outlets have been reminding us, Pope Francis was the first non-European Bishop of Rome since the very early Middle Ages. But this is not as simple as it sounds. As he himself underlined in his autobiographical musings, his specific non-European experience was in fact experience of displacement, the experience of Italian migrants in Latin America – something that makes sense of his consistent, courageous and vividly expressed solidarity with migrant communities worldwide. He understood something of a world in which clear geographical and cultural boundaries are not timeless fixtures, a world where millions have no choice but to make their homes somewhere other than their homelands.
For all the loud global rhetoric about protecting cultures from contamination by alien influences, this is a world that has already been colossally disrupted by political catastrophe, violence, economic pressure and (increasingly) environmental crisis. Pope Francis’s most lastingly important interventions as a teacher of the faith – not least Laudato si’ and Fratelli Tutti – take it for granted that Christian witness today and tomorrow must address this world, must reckon and engage with the depth of disruption that so many live with. It is a world more and more manifestly at odds with itself, shaped by a set of ideas and practices that seem to be dismantling the bonds of common life and the sense of a shared human fate in a vortex of acquisitive, addictive and selfish habits, profiting only a vanishingly small group of powerful humans – and profiting them only for so long as they can go on persuading themselves that mortality can be held at bay.
The Pope’s critique of late capitalism was not a revolutionary innovation. Both his predecessors – indeed, most popes for the last century – had made similar points. It was Francis’s gift to bring to bear on this situation the perspective of someone who had learned in Argentina a saving impatience with the various evasions that “the West” or “the global North” had refined so as to soften the urgency of the disrupted world’s challenge. It can’t be said too often that his theology was completely in tune with that of Benedict XVI and John Paul II; read Francis’s encyclicals alongside those of Benedict, and it is not too much to say that they simply apply the beautifully clear and classically profound teaching of Benedict to the particular crises of the day. Both popes stand firmly within a continuous pattern of teaching about dignity and solidarity grounded in the vision of humanity in the divine image. Francis washing the feet of migrants, or embracing others who had been displaced, rejected and demeaned, was declaring as plainly as possible that Catholic Christianity has not only a central orthodox doctrine of God but a central and orthodox doctrine of humanity.
It may help us understand why this saving impatience extended to fashionable concerns about the future of “the West”. In different ways, John Paul II and Benedict XVI were preoccupied with the riskiness of a cultural situation in which Western societies no longer had a clue about where and how they had learned the political doctrines they assumed to be true. Both very rightly warned against a chaotic but hyper-confident humanism that lacked any focus on the divine image. Both knew about the authoritarian spectres that waited in the wings for the moment when the chaos triumphed; not an abstract point just at present in the world of Trump and Putin, Orbán and Modi.
Pope Francis was anything but ignorant of these spectres, and had himself learned – painfully – the complications and the cost of naming and resisting it. But he had no interest in culture-war polarisation and retrenchment. For him, the problem was not the survival of the West but the survival of the human family. His ears were open to those outside the northern hemisphere for whom discussions of the fate of Western civilisation might ring a little hollow in the context of endemic civil war over natural resources, collapsing political systems and environmental degradation. The synod on the Amazon represented a powerful statement of alertness to all this. And if at times the Pope’s response to the Ukraine crisis seemed oddly distanced and inconclusive, perhaps he echoed here the collective shrug of the shoulders that was the reaction of many global South nations. I think this was wrong; but it is not incomprehensible.
He tried to keep before us the wholeness of the humanity to which the Easter life is offered. His instinctive generosity was evident in so much of what he said and did, however many loose ends this left for others to tie up. He was able to embody the possibility that the Church might after all be a sign of God’s utter fidelity to all Creation. That is perhaps most of all what we shall remember and give thanks for.
Rowan Williams was the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury (2002-2012).
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