Nothing quite plays the role you would expect: the progressives, the conservatives, and our anti-traditional pope.
Nothing quite plays the role you would expect: the progressives, the conservatives, and our anti-traditional pope.
F or centuries, upon their election to the papacy, a new Pontiff would swear his “Attestation of Faith,” otherwise known as the papal oath. It can be found in the Liber Diurnus Romanorum Pontificum, which has prayers and formulas dating back to St. Gregory the Great.
It begins with a vow to “guard with all my strength, even unto giving up the ghost or shedding my blood, the right and true faith.” And it continues with promises “to patiently bear the difficulties of the times.” And to guard “unaltered even by a tittle” the words of previous Councils. Then follows promises to confirm and maintain “all the decrees of the apostolic pontiffs, my predecessors.”
And then it comes to the fireworks:
I shall keep inviolate the discipline and ritual of the Church just as I found and received it handed down by my predecessors and I shall preserve the Church’s property undiminished and take care it is kept undiminished; I shall neither subtract nor change anything from the tradition my most esteemed predecessors have safeguarded and I have received, nor shall I admit any novelty, but shall fervently keep and venerate with all my strength all that I find handed down as verily my predecessors’ disciple and follower; but if anything should come about contrary to canonical discipline, I shall correct it, and guard the sacred canons and constitutions of our pontiffs as divine and heavenly mandates, knowing that at the divine Judgment I shall render a strict account of all that I profess to you whose place I occupy by divine condescension and whose role I fulfill by the aid of your intercession. [Emphasis added.]
Last week, Pope Francis, who has overturned just about everything done by his last two predecessors, told us about a new sin. “Many who call themselves traditional,” he said, “No, they are not traditional, they are people looking to the past, going backward, without roots. And looking backward is a sin.”
Most of the pope’s reported utterances are like this, iconoclastic in spirit. There’s a kind of projection at work. The people most obsessed with fear of going back to the 1950s are those who are anxious to return to the ’60s and ’70s, when everything was supposed to be “ever new.” Pope Francis has made the slogan of his papacy “Hagan lio!” — translated roughly: Make a mess.
Mission accomplished.
The idea of an anti-traditional pope would have been a contradiction in terms throughout all of modern history. Now, it’s strangely normal. And it’s part of the upside-down world in which we live.
Think about it for a moment. Nothing quite plays the role you would expect. The Republican Party is supposed to be the party of conservatives — the people of privilege, who are safeguarding the institutions that pass down the cultural and governmental patrimony. But progressives control all those institutions, and Republicans are at war with them.
Liberals are supposed to be the party of the underdog and the common man. They are supposed to assert democracy over the remaining vestiges of aristocracy and oligarchy. Alas, while they maintain — like legacy software — the programs of the New Deal, America’s liberals are obsessed with giving more breaks to the affluent — relief for student loans, paid for by working stiffs. Liberals are supposed to be skeptical of corporate power. Now, liberals trust corporations to censor the common man for his own good. And this trust is absolute. Christian believers never quite trusted their clerics and churches to do censorship. But liberals know that Facebook and Twitter can do it, as long as middle-management types are put in charge!
The world is more connected than ever. Many billions of people are searchable, and you can reach out and send them an email — or, if you’re a Facebook traditionalist, a “poke.” And yet we are the loneliest people that ever lived, by every psychometric score out there.
A friend relayed to me recently that his wife ran an introductory college seminar to help students get used to the campus and start them thinking about big ideas. She prompted them to think about “human flourishing” and what forms it could take. The students only had one idea: personal mental health. Nobody could think of families, groups of friends, enterprises, or civic groups — or even a garage band. The great pot of gold at the end of young people’s rainbow is just not hating every waking minute of the day.
I don’t know if the upside-down world is all related. But I think it couldn’t hurt if the Roman Pontiff took a reset and plugged himself back into the tradition socket. Maybe it’s back at the papal apartment he abandoned, behind Benedict’s old red shoes. Maybe there would be consequences to that sort of thing. A kind of butterfly effect throughout the world system. One day we’d wake up, and liberals would be demanding that we fund the police even more, because after all, the poor need them more often. And conservatives would start to think seriously about institutions in our life, rather than simply resenting their influence.
Couldn’t hurt.