Jorge Bergoglio was not an intellectual in the scholarly sense, either before or after ascending to the papacy as Pope Francis. Rather, he was primarily a pastor and a shepherd. Secondarily, he was a kind of organic intellectual in the sense discussed by Antonio Gramsci: an intelligent pastoral minister who thought deeply about the challenges facing his flock, his ministry, his Church, and the world. Indeed, that organic intellectual work is what made him a great leader of the Catholic Church in Latin America and ultimately a great pontiff, despite his inevitable human and pastoral flaws (which he readily admitted).
Here, I describe what I believe to be Francis’ central contributions to the Catholic intellectual tradition. I mean that in the broadest sense. I am a sociologist, not a theologian, and the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies that I lead embraces the full range of the Catholic intellectual tradition: yes, certainly the various branches of theology, ethics, philosophy, and history; but very much also the Catholic dialogue with the social sciences, natural sciences, and secular and religious humanities, as well as Catholic engagement with the other great spiritual traditions of humanity, Judaism and Islam, the multiple expressions of Buddhism, Hinduism, and the historic Chinese and Japanese religions; and the indigenous spiritualities around the world. Within Catholicism’s stake as a comprehensive perspective on the world, human experience, and the human relationship to God, the Catholic intellectual tradition must engage across all those areas of inquiry. Francis’ teaching has implications for all of them.
How can that be so? Because Francis’ key contribution was to embrace a methodological commitment that has ramifications for all those fields of inquiry. That is, his most fundamental contribution was not new content to papal teaching but rather his reorientation of Catholic thinking around one key insight: that the most profound and relevant theological insight—and, by extension, the most profound and useful knowledge in a variety of disciplines—comes not from intellectuals separating themselves from the broad human experience within history expressed by Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum” with its inherent rationalist individualism. Rather, Francis embraces the insight that, for all the theoretical and analytic power of abstract thinking, such knowledge must necessarily be subjected to more grounded insight rooted in concrete human experience.
Augustine represents a paradigmatic exemplar of this kind of theology. Importantly, he draws on personal experience, ecclesial experience, and the broad dynamics of society and history as grist for his intellectual work. The way Scholasticism appropriated Thomas Aquinas can be taken as a paradigmatic example of a narrower rationalist intellectualism abstracted from such experience—but there is irony in that, for Aquinas’ original thinking drew inspiration from Augustine’s grounded experiential work. Scholars from various perspectives have rooted this latter view in traditions as diverse as ancient Aristotelian thinking, American Pragmatism, Gramscian Marxism, feminist analysis, indigenous spiritualities, and the “angelic doctor” Aquinas. I will later outline the key methodological insights relevant not only to theology but to the social sciences and history as well. For now, a taste of it comes across in a recent reflection on Francis’ legacy written by theologian David Albertson and political scientist Jason Blakely: “The teaching office of the magisterium was exercised by Pope Francis as an integrated, holistic pedagogy in living relationship with one’s disciples” (and with human experience more broadly).
The content of Francis’ teaching refined and sharpened the Catholic intellectual tradition in important areas. Perhaps the most significant of these concerned the Church’s social teaching and implicit anthropology—that is, the evolving understanding of the human person that undergirds Catholic intellectual work. Preserving the long-established Catholic emphasis on the inherent human dignity of all, in Laudato Si’: On Care for our Common Home, he embedded that commitment within strongly-formulated conceptions of “integral ecology” and “integral human development” that broke new ground in placing papal teaching firmly in mutual dialogue with the natural sciences and the social sciences. In doing so, he both affirmed the knowledge and insight available through secular disciplines and simultaneously challenged those disciplines to a deeper understanding of the human person and God’s intentions for creation.
Similarly, in Fratelli Tutti Francis not only called Catholics and all people of good will to embrace “social friendship” in the face of the hyper-individualism and isolation of 21st century culture, but also challenged prevailing intellectual models to leave behind the more extreme forms of methodological individualism that reflect intellectual commitments at odds with a Catholic understanding of human persons and their embeddedness in society. In doing so, Francis reiterated the emphasis on social solidarity that he inherited from Benedict XVI and especially John Paul II, but gave it new bite both pastorally and intellectually.
Finally, even in his most pastoral writings at the launch of his papacy and during the Covid pandemic, Francis laid down markers that do not offer truly new content to papal teaching but should be seen as staking out a Catholic style of intellectual work. In Evangelii Gaudium (2013), he called all Christians to live within a recognizable “joy of the gospel” rather than the dour cynicism or superficial happiness of libertine consumerism. That implicitly calls upon Christian intellectuals to let their labors be infused with the joys both intellectual and spiritual of rigorous academic labor, with lives grounded in the gospel. In his Statio Orbis blessing on March 27, 2020, titled “Why Are You Afraid?” he marked out a Catholic refusal of fear as the basis of our responses to contemporary challenges—not only the emergent virus but also the rise of autocracy, authoritarianism, and the challenges of new migrations.
But again, Francis’ “organic intellectual” pastoral theology carries methodological moves that run even deeper than its theological content. First, his regular methodology was to strive to view the world from the perspective of “the margins,” by which he meant not only that of immigrants and refugees but all those social locations whose view of things is less clouded by their privileged locations in society. This was never a moral judgment on the privileged in the style of fashionable post-modern left politics. Rather, it was a methodology premised on the insight that none of us is fully objective, the poor no more than the rich; but seeing society from below removes at least some of the blinders that the dominant segments of society employ to shroud their privilege and delude themselves. This is the deeper meaning of the theological “preferential option for the poor” that emerged from Latin American ecclesial life—and it carries deep implications for the work not only of theologians but for social scientists of all kinds.
A second specific methodological commitment can be seen throughout his papal teachings as well as in his leadership at the meetings of the Latin American Conference of Bishops (CELAM) at Aparecida in 2007 and in the teología del pueblo that shaped Bergoglio’s ministry in Argentina. Theology is best done out of the experience-within-history of the Church as the “people of God” as articulated at Vatican II. This broadens the narrower emphasis from liberation theology on theology as “critical reflection on (socio-political) praxis”—but also very much includes that emphasis. Francis’ methodology embraces both Ignacio Ellacuría’s historical realism and Lucio Gera (and others’) emphasis on “the people” as a site of knowledge production—bringing all the ambiguity that this populism brought to movements such as Peronism in Argentina, but also a new dynamism to theology and by implication to the social sciences.
A third specific methodological commitment, perhaps better framed as an existential commitment: Francis embraced the call to theologians and Catholic intellectual not only to “think with the Church” (Vatican II) but also to “feel with the Church” (Gustavo Gutierrez)—that is, to align their intellectual work and their experiential sense of their intellectual role with an ongoing engagement with the Church as a pilgrim in history, in a stance simultaneously appreciative of the grace carried in the Church and critical of any shortcomings or blind spots in the Church’s self-perception or teaching.
In the end, Francis’ call to intellectuals, as I discern it throughout his papal writings, is toward a Catholicism that is simultaneously of, for, and against the contemporary world. “Of the world” in the sense of fully committed to constructive and critical engagement with all forms of human understanding, whether embodied in Catholic teaching, other religious faiths, or secular science. “For the world” in the sense of always striving to do intellectual work in a way that contributes to building up the world as a site of human and ecological thriving—what Christian teaching articulates as “the reign of God” but which can be articulated in multiple ways as we come to understand human thriving more fully, including its embeddedness in ecological systems and the cosmos. But also “against the world”: against all those structures, institutionalized systems, and cultural patterns that undermine what is best in the human person, the meaning of human life, the solidarities that preserve society, and human relationship to God. That is not just the work of theologians and Church leaders, but of us all.
Richard L. Wood is President of the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies at the University of Southern California and Professor of Sociology at the University of New Mexico.
Cover photo: Pope Francis greets followers as he arrives for a pastoral visit in the parish of San Gelasio in the Ponte Mammolo neighborhood on the outskirts of Rome on February 25, 2018. (Photo by Tiziana Fabi / AFP)
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