Roman Catholicism is not just a church: it understands itself culturally and geopolitically as “a world” – or “the” world before modernity turned secular. Pool New/ReutersĬatholicism makes the case against “monism” – against the dominance of one intellectual, philosophical and spiritual tradition. The first reason, and perhaps the most obvious one, is that Francis presents Catholics and non-Catholics alike with the idea that there is another “source” for understanding ourselves and the issues that divide and unite our communities. So why is a papal visit interesting, if not essential, for those who want to understand something of the world today? But here’s why you need to watch this papal visit It is undeniable that the culture of Catholics in America has been largely changed by America, and no pope can do much about that. What’s more, and this is not insignificant, Francis is not as comfortable speaking English as his predecessors – indeed, he spent the summer studying the language in preparation for this trip.Īmerican culture has a tremendous ability to absorb every other culture. That is something popes have noticed - one clear example being the Vatican’s condemnation in 1899 of the heresy of “Americanism” or the insistence on the need to adapt Catholicism to America. So how will American lay Catholics respond?Īmerican Catholics (both liberal and conservative) have always, understandably, been very protective of their autonomy. Catholic social teaching works through general principles that need to be applied by lay Catholics. To begin with, the economic message of Francis is deeply dissonant from the tradition of capitalism in America.Ĭatholic social doctrine has always been skeptical of free market ideology, and with Francis’ encyclical on the environment Laudato Si’, the church has updated its criticism of the ruthless nature of market forces and their impact on creation with growing concern about climate change.īut popes do not legislate on the economy, they just point out the values and principles that should inspire a society that respects – and not just in theory – the life of every human person. Indeed, Francis’ trip to the US is probably not going to change the views of American Catholics, much less the deeply polarized politics in this country. They did not bring about a real political change. There were other groundbreaking trips for John Paul II – such as, for example, his visit to Cuba in 1998 – but they were more symbolic in nature. John Paul II’s first trip to Poland in 1979 was clearly a factor in the political change that led, one decade later, to the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. The example of John Paul II, who took 104 foreign trips, is crucial, but it can also be misleading in trying to understand the political importance of these visits. It became a fundamental part of the papal job description with John Paul II, less than 40 years ago. The first modern papal trip took place in 1964 with Paul VI visiting the Holy Land. In 1848, Pope Pius IX had to flee Vatican City because of the political revolution in Italy: he returned to Rome only in 1850. The conclave of 1799-1800, for example, took place in Venice, not Rome, after Napoleon’s invasion of Italy. In the Middle Ages and early modern times, popes did travel sometimes, but only in emergencies or fleeing under threat. And, finally, he is the first pope from Latin America – a fact that presents American Catholics with a particular kind of challenge to their tendency, evident in the writing of George Weigel, for example, to identify themselves as the youngest and most energetic Church in global Catholicism, and to see American Catholicism as representative of the rest of the world.Ī Latin American challenges these tendencies because Latin American Catholicism represent a mix of “global south” and of European Catholicism very different from North American Catholicism.īut why should non-Catholic, non-Christian, non-experts care about Pope Francis coming to America? What does this media fascination in the papal trip (just look at the latest issues of Newsweek, Time, People and The New Yorker) say about our world? Papal trips: a 20th-century inventionĬhurch history is very long, but the history of papal trips is not (there are, for example, no good studies, to my knowledge, of the history of this very particular theological event). He is also the first pope since Vatican II – the council that “opened the church to the world” – who has never set foot in the US, even before becoming pontiff. This is because of what I call the pope’s “American problem” – a cultural and ideological distance between the more socially minded Jesuit from Argentina and the more conservative leadership of the American Catholic Church.įrancis is not only the first non-European pope. The papal trip to the United States that Francis will begin on September 22 is the most difficult of his pontificate so far.
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