Weissman: 'Francis has said that he wants to move beyond an 'obsession' with hot-button social issues, but his modernist bent loses out to long-standing doctrine on abortion, contraception, and gay marriage.' (photo: Alessandro Bianchi/Reuters)
23 February 14
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Francis is the only man of the left still in Italian political life,”
laughs Stephen Sartarelli, the English-language translator of the
Inspector Montalbano mysteries and a leading authority on the filmmaker
and poet Pier Paolo Pasolini. Sartarelli kept hearing this view of the
pope while on a recent trip to visit family in Rome, where the weakness
of the left is a running joke. Who but the pontiff is speaking out
against the ravages of capitalism in Italy and the neo-liberal economics
of enforced austerity?
Sartarelli lives just down the road here in the French Dordogne, and we share a growing concern with the resurgence of the ultra-right, not only in France, but throughout much of the continent. He and I tend to differ on Pope Francis, whom I see as I believe he sees himself
– not “a man of the left,” but a modern-day follower of the Catholic
social thinking in the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum with a touch of
Argentinian Peronism.
Either way, the big question will not go away. Will
Pope Francis stand up against the growing threat of a new European
fascism? Or will the Catholic Church under his leadership aid and abet
the “fachos” as the controversial Pope Pius XII and so much of his
Church has been accused – rightly or wrongly – of doing in the 1930s?
Most people writing about Pope Francis never discuss
this, but how he answers the Fascist question could become historically
more important than what he does about the Curia, Vatican Bank,
child-abusing priests, or the dozen or so other issues now on the papal
plate.
A possible tell may be his decision to slow down any
canonization of Pius until scholars can fully study the Vatican’s secret
wartime archives. The Sunday Times
of London reported this in January, citing Rabbi Abraham Skorka, a
friend of the pope from Buenos Aires who visited him in Rome in
September and will accompany him on his visit to Israel, Jordan, and the
West Bank in May.
In 2010, the two men published a book called “On
Heaven and Earth,” in which the future pope offered his view on the role
of Church leaders toward the plight of European Jews during World War
II. “Opening the archives of the Shoah [Holocaust] seems reasonable,”
wrote the then Cardinal Bergoglio. “Let them be opened up and let
everything be cleared up. Let it be seen if they could have done
something [to help] and until what point they could have helped.
“If they made a mistake in any aspect of this we would
have to say, ‘We have erred.’ We don’t have to be scared of this – the
truth has to be the goal.”
According to Rabbi Skorka, rector of the Latin American Rabbinical Seminary, this continues to guide the pope’s thinking. Sterner voices
in the Church pushed Francis to make Pius a saint at the April 24th
ceremony in which John Paul II and John XXIII will be canonized. But
Francis has so far stood by his wonderfully open, anti-authoritarian
sentiments, much to the approval of Jewish leaders and respected Catholic historians.
Whether or how soon Pius XII gains sainthood is only
symbolic, I know, but juggling symbols from their bully pulpit is what
popes do, all while riding herd on a global juggernaut of fractious
hierarchs with their own favored symbols to promote. It’s a high-wire
balancing act, and Francis appears to have paired his go-slow on Pius
with giving a go-ahead to the beatification of “522 martyrs of the faith,”
Catholic priests, monks, nuns, and laymen who were killed while
supporting Francisco Franco and his Fascist allies in the Spanish Civil
War. This has not become a major issue outside Spain, but could come
back to haunt the pontiff and show him to be other than a stand-up guy in the ongoing fight against European Fascism.
A bigger threat comes from how the Church thinks.
Francis has said that he wants to move beyond an “obsession” with
hot-button social issues, but his modernist bent loses out to
long-standing doctrine on abortion, contraception, and gay marriage –
and to the Church’s unshaken faith in “natural law.” The Catholic
hierarchy continues to believe it can deduce what is “natural” and
therefore “God’s law” for all men and women, whatever their individual
situation or sense of themselves, and regardless of the constantly
changing state of social and scientific knowledge.
Claims of timeless and universal certainty have their
appeal, no doubt, especially to those educated in Catholic schools (as
well as to Bible-quoting Evangelicals in the United States and Latin
America). But, to unsaved skeptics like me, “natural law” is not at all a
celebration of human reason. It is a dubious philosophic conceit that
has enabled Church moralists, living and dead, to rationalize the
ignorance and prejudices of their own time, place, class, culture,
institutional setting, and patriarchal disposition. While this has
always been self-deluding, it has now become self-destructive, dragging
the Catholic Church into massive, at times violent protests against
gays, same sex marriage and adoption, abortion, medically assisted
procreation for lesbian couples, gender-neutral education, taxes,
socialists, immigrants, Moslems, Jews, and what a leading Catholic
traditionalist calls “the lethal virus of the modern world.”
Nowhere is the Church playing into the hands of
neo-fascists more than here in France, where the most reactionary groups
are using protests against whatever they consider “unnatural” to bring
hundreds of thousands of supporters into the streets. These highly colorful marches and rallies
began in October 2012, after the Socialist government of Francois
Hollande proposed to legalize “Marriage pour Tous” (Marriage for All),
and they have continued into this month. A wide array of far-right
groups and coalitions – including “Manif pour Tous” (Demonstration for
All) and “Printemps français” (French Spring) – have organized the
demonstrations to “safeguard our civilization,” while participants have
included followers of the anti-Semitic comic Dieudonné doing his reverse Nazi salute, the quenelle, and full-fledged neo-Nazis yelling “Jews Out of France.” Catholic associations have played a leading role in calling the marches and rallies, and Church leaders like the Cardinal Archbishop of Lyon Philippe Barbarin have taken a prominent part.
To be fair, Church leaders have tried to distance
themselves from the open hate, as well as from some – though by no means
all – ultra-traditionalist Catholics in groups like Civitas, who see
Catholic identity as integral to being French. These intégrists carry on
the anti-Republican tradition of Action Française, which collaborated
closely with the Nazis, and have worked closely over the years with
Jean-Marie Le Pen and his neo-Fascist Front National.
The problem is fundamental. The Church lends its name
and patina of “natural law” to the demonstrations, but lacks the power
to determine their course or discipline their ranks. Though as many 88% of the French identify themselves as Catholic, no more than 5% attend mass regularly, creating what some have called “a Zombie church.”
In this severely weakened state, the French hierarchs see no
alternative but to collaborate with French Spring’s leader, Beatrice
Bourges, who offers the classic excuse for joining with so many
anti-Semitic and anti-republican elements. “When the house is on fire,” she says, “you don’t ask for the firefighter’s resumé.”
For the Church, and especially for Pope Francis, this
stance is completely self-destructive, and its immediate beneficiary
will be Jean-Marie Le Pen’s daughter Marine and her effort to make the
Front National appear more mainstream. She has pointedly not led any of
the marches and rallies and, like the Church, has even expressed concern
about their excesses. But she has carefully not attacked their
ultra-right organizers and most of the participants, whom she expects to
vote overwhelmingly for the Front National in municipal elections in
mid-March and European parliamentary elections at the end of May. If she
does well, as expected, she will breach one of the main firewalls of
Republican France since World War II, and the Church of Pope Francis
will share in the blame.
A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and
the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in
London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now
lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big
Money: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How To
Break Their Hold."
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