Reformer Pope and contextual theology

Mar 20, 2015

By Austen Ivereigh
One of the untold stories behind the election of Pope Francis in March 2013 was the emergence of Latin America as the new source Church for global Catholicism. The cardinals didn’t just elect the man but a programme, one that had found expression, above all, in the great document produced by the Latin American bishops in Aparecida, Brazil, in May 2007. The document’s principal author was the then-cardinal archbishop of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Aparecida marked the coming-of-age moment of a theology. Its approach — missionary, evangelizing, pastoral and poor — now underlies the Francis programme, outlined in his November 2013 apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium.

Just as the Church in Spain and Italy was the source for the Counter-Reformation, and the Church of France and Germany the source for the Second Vatican Council, Latin America is now the wellspring of a new era of Church reform. If Francis perplexes Europeans and North Americans long accustomed to thinking in liberal-conservative terms, it is because he uses a lens and a language that come from outside those categories.

For a recent example, consider his remarks in January on birth control that ended being drowned, in the reporting of the interview aboard the papal plane back from Manila, Philippines, by his “rabbits” remark. The remarkable thing was Francis’ articulation of Pope Paul VI’s opposition to artificial contraception in terms of a bravely prophetic stance on behalf of the poor of the world against the powers of the age, driven by neo-Malthusian and eugenic assumptions that poverty is a consequence of population.

Liberals in the North, who both inside and outside the Church have seen this as an issue of personal autonomy rather than an anticolonial defense of the rights of the poor, were taken aback. But so too were conservatives, accustomed to defending Humanae Vitae in doctrinal terms.

Francis’ words were wholly of a piece with the 1968 meeting of CELAM, the Latin American bishops’ council, in Medellin, Colombia. The meeting had a profound impact on Jorge Mario Bergoglio, then finishing his Jesuit theology studies.

Medellin — which famously articulated the “option for the poor” — saw Humanae Vitae in terms of Rome coming to the aid of poor countries besieged by rich-world-funded development strategies and the imposition of an “eroticism of bourgeois civilization.” This was the Church speaking on behalf of the evangelized poor, defending their culture.

Similarly, more than 40 years later on the papal plane, Francis spoke of “ideological colonization,” just as he had earlier told parents in Manila, “Peoples must not lose their freedom. A people has its culture, its history.”

This is precisely the language that Bergoglio, as provincial used in the 1970s with his fellow Jesuits, divided at the time by rival elite ideologies. He urged them to focus on the needs and values of what he called “God’s holy faithful people,” a term that mixed the Vatican II idea of the people of God with Medellin’s option for the poor, yet was shaped by nationalism and culture, rather than the social sciences.

Source: NCR