Pope Francis and Living Tradition
With the collapse of the cultural consensus of the West, the Church has lost its privileged place. Some Christians (and others besides) lament this as an apocalyptic catastrophe, and they labor with the sweat of their brows to reestablish that power and place. In recent years, many Christians have opted for reactionary political, social and economic politicians that are happy to use the Church to further their “populist” agendas.
Pope Francis has spoken against these movements and their co-opting of the Gospel, and he has chartered a course for the 21st century and beyond. The pontiff has refused to work for the reestablishing of Constantinian Christianity that is fashionable among Catholic hierarchy the United States. Reactionary Catholicism also finds a place among Catholic authorities and influencers is the wider anglophone world as well as France, Brazil and splattered across social media. The Holy Father addressed this phenomenon in his apostolic visit to Hungary.
Today’s problems cannot be solved with yesterday’s solutions regardless of how effective they may have once been. Integrating Church with the state, might enable some people to feel more confident of their place and position in the world, but it will not resolve the multiple overlapping global crises because that Gospel is not suited for that kind of political partnership.
Consider the compromises and failures the institutional Church has made through the centuries of the Papal States. Consider the corruption, bloodshed and moral turpitude of papal eras ranging from the Theophylacts to the Borgias, Medici and beyond. We could look to more recent times and find Church officials partnering with dictatorial regimes and justifying ungodly abuses of power.
There could never be a high point of the Church in any era of where popes, bishops or powerful laypeople led armies to kill for their own financial, political or egoic interests in the name of the Prince of Peace. To overlook inherent violence as a bug rather than a feature of an integralist vision is reckless at best and completely dishonest at worst.
To live in our anxious age requires a visionary faith that remembers the future by carrying tradition forward, not simply repeating the elements of the past that suit our preferences.
In a talk given shortly before he reposed in the Lord, beloved Orthodox theologian Metropolitan Kallistos Ware stated that, “Identifying tradition with words recorded in books is gravely defective, for it is in danger of suggesting that tradition is something antiquated, ossified, remote in time, fixed and unmoving.”
He shared 20th Century Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky’s description of tradition, “The life of the Holy Spirit in the Church.” Metropolitan Kallistos expanded on Lossky’s view to say, “Tradition is the life of Christ ever present in the church through the Holy Spirit.”
Tradition, then, is a person, not a thing. Tradition is alive today and to be lived, not simply studied. Just as people change and grow, tradition is “not static, but dynamic. Not repetitive and immobile, but pioneering and experimental. It is not merely a deposit inherited passively from earlier generations, but it is also Christ speaking to us here and now in this present moment.”
This is the sense of tradition that Pope Francis is urgently seeking to instill in us.
There simply is no Golden Age of the Church that we can superimpose onto today’s world. Instead of conjuring up a Church from the 1950s (whether real or imagined), Pope Francis is addressing the issues facing the Church and world today, and this seems to be what frustrates his opponents. He shatters their vision of making the Church into what they perceive it once was.
Pope Francis has coined a word for this attitude: Indietrismo. Without a specific English equivalent, it has been translated as “backwardness” or (better yet) “backwardism.” Evoking an echo of the aggornimento (or updating) and ressourcement (going back to the Biblical and patristic sources) of the Second Vatican Council, indietrismo is an ideological “nostalgic disease.”
The Holy Father elaborated. “Indietrism [looking backward] is sin because it does not go forward with the Church. And instead, someone described tradition — I think I said it in one of the speeches — as the living faith of the dead and instead for these ‘indietrists,’ who call themselves ‘traditionalists,’ it is the dead faith of the living.”
Because Pope Francis seeks to address today’s world with the living Gospel and the breathing tradition, his opponents accuse him of laxity, modernism and compromising with the spirit of the age. The pontiff has done nothing of the sort. His approach (the pope has offered an approach more than specific solutions) seems different because it is different — just as the Church of every generation addressed their unique issues in unique ways.
The pope has not, and will not, discard all that came before. That would be not only ridiculous but impossible. Instead, his approach is what philosopher Ken Wilber might describe as “transcend and include.” This involves including all that came before and continually emerging from it into a new context. Transcend and include is a biological principle, and what is the Church and its tradition other than the living body of Christ?
The Holy Father has refused to endorse social and political movements (on the right and left) that promote extreme individualism and isolate whole persons from their families, communities and societies. He will not allow himself or the Church entrusted to his pastoral care to be co-opted by any political or social movement. Pope Francis has taught us from the earliest days of his papacy that the Church and its tradition is a communion of persons in the living Christ incarnate. May we live that Eucharistic personhood in love with one another and given for the life of the world.
