THE recent history of the Church has witnessed a variety of attempts to contest the secularism and materialism of contemporary culture. These options have largely emphasised the bigger demands of Catholicism on the individual and the need to remain relatively free from the culture. However, with the Francis option the Church seeks to foster a culture of dialogue and encounter that brings the gospel to the peripheries.
What the other options have in common is nostalgia for a world where “culture” meant, exclusively, “Catholic Christian culture”. That was the world of Saints Benedict, Dominic, and Josemaria Escriva, where Christianity was framed in terms of Christendom – an established religion where Catholic orthodoxy was the soul of the social-political realm. It is the disavowal of the ecclesiological turn in Vatican II, especially as articulated in the Constitution Gaudium et Spes (Joy and Hope).
It is no coincidence that all these options became part of the discourse among Catholic conservatives in the crucial decade between the pontificates of Benedict XVI and Francis – and now mostly as a reaction against the Francis papacy. If there is something that disquiets those sceptical of the current Pope it is the complete absence in his speeches of nostalgia for the ‘golden age’ of the pre-Vatican II Catholic church.
Pope Francis is not a liberal – at least not as much as those liberals who would like to assimilate him to advance their reformist agendas. But neither is he an ideologue arguing for anti-modern counter-narratives for the contemporary cultural landscape. In short, he is not a cultural warrior.
But Pope Francis does not have all the answers to the in-roads made by secularism in the present culture. In some cases he does not even have the language. (for example, when he speaks about women in the Church) But he knows quite well that if we fail to take into account the shift from the classicist mindset to the modern mindset, the natural tendency will be to fall back on medieval thinking. And this poses a problem because the medieval and anti-modernist cultural canons speaks only to those who are heirs of Medieval Christendom in the Western world. And this excludes most of the world outside Europe where, incidentally, the Church shows its greatest signs of growth.