Guardians of the Faith

C.C. Pecknold reflects on Pope Francis and the broader historical significance of his pontificate.

History is full of extraordinary reversals.

Even as a protestant, I can remember feeling the gravitational pull of ”the Catholic” in the world. I was in college when Pope St. John Paul II promulgated Veritatis Splendor, and I can remember rolling those words around in my mind like some mysterious wine.

The Catholic Church had a weight to it that I could not understand at the time. It was a Church that spoke of the splendor of truth in a way which was absolutely credible, despite being told ad nauseum of its every failure. Long before I became Catholic, I somehow intuited that Catholicism was simply “official Christianity.” It was objective, and somehow more rooted in reality. It felt more ancient than my world. And then, by some miracle, I became Catholic.

Being received into the Catholic Church just as God was seating that master theologian Benedict XVI upon St. Peter’s Chair was a stroke of divine genius. It gave me enormous confidence in the papacy as a bulwark against the liberalization of Christianity that seemed to be destroying one protestant denomination after another. Benedict XVI strengthened and deepened my faith in the solidity of the Church in the world. And then he did the unthinkable, or at least it hadn’t been thought of for 800 years. He resigned. Like so many, I was hit hard by the reversal — as if the foundations of the solid thing were inexplicably shaking.

Being a theologian at a pontifical university has sometimes put me in strange situations, and one of the strangest was finding myself being invited to the NPR studio to be part of their “live coverage” of the Conclave which had just been called. Historically, conclaves could last months, though in more recent times weeks. Little did I know that this would be the shortest conclave in history, lasting just over 24 hours. The staff scrambled, and asked me to stay to give commentary as they announced the new pope whom few knew much about. Earlier I had been handed a dozen files on all the papabile, though Bergoglio wasn’t among them — I was suddenly handed a file on the Jesuit from Argentina. He was already being called “the people’s pope” in the studio, and still looking for my sea legs, I reached for a more traditional analogy for understanding a pope who championed the poor — and I continually worked at the task of making Francis sound like Pope Leo XIII Redivivus. It was plausible at the start.

All the “pope-splaining” that followed — mine and many others — was, in retrospect, an attempt to deal with a reversal which seemed to make the Catholic Church seem less rather than more solid than the world. Pope “Emeritus” Benedict XVI was still living in his contemplative silence, while occasionally writing about our need to trust that the Lord is in the boat! Things were choppy. It was a papacy of many soundbites — some good, some unclear, some apparently wrong — set alongside many scandals which revealed a certain generational rot which had settled into the Church’s hierarchy in the post-war settlement which proclaimed that liberalism was “the end of history,” and so the Church better get itself updated.

In some profound way, it was perfectly right to have Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis combined into some strange Petrine dialectic. Afterall, the two men represented two Romantic wings of the Second Vatican Council — Benedict standing with those who sought to “return to the sources” and Francis standing, more or less, with those who sought the “updating.” It makes sense that a Balthasian of patristic depth, and a Rahnerian of poetic fervor would somehow converge at a kind of conclusion to an ecclesial era which had given itself to a dialogue with the governing philosophy of the global order…

Eventually, though, after all the confusing statements, and the reversals of confusing statements, and the synods, and the synodality, and the synods on synodality, many Catholics just stopped listening to the “dialectic.“ People had grown weary of endless dialogue with a world that was rapidly collapsing.

Perhaps that is also why Pope Francis’s most important teaching came with absolutely no audible words at all. With the whole world on lockdown in the silent dread of an unknown pandemic, Pope Francis walked alone through the rain-swept colonnades of St. Peter’s Square, clutching the Eucharist in a monstrance that gleamed like a beacon against the darkness. As the Carthusians say, Stat Crux Dum Volvitur Orbis: “The Cross is steady while the world turns.” This is the one really solid reality — Reality — which gives solidity to everything that is solid, including the Catholic Church.

History is full of extraordinary reversals.

The words returned. Just this February, the Holy Father seemed to differ with Vice President Vance’s application of a classical and Christian account of the ordo amoris to immigration policy — but even here the clash was ambiguous as he also affirmed the right of nations to control their borders. Pope Francis was dying, but he initiated one last conflict in honor of the world which was passing away.

Which brings me to the iconic image of Pope Francis meeting with the most important Catholic Statesman in the world today. Was it a reconciliation? Or was it a recognition that one world was passing away, and another was beginning anew? Perhaps it was both of those things, and that both worlds are Catholic. It was most certainly an image of a pope and a ruler — and that is a classic image of western civilizational order.

There have been kings, such has Henry IV arriving as penitent in the snows of Canossa seeking reconciliation with Pope Gregory VII. There have been popes, such as Leo III who crowned Charlemagne Holy Roman Emperor. But neither of these images apply here. This is a different kind of iconic image, one which involves neither a penitent king, nor a pope in search of a Defensor Fidei. Rather than an image of the relation of spiritual and temporal power in concord or conflict over the Faith, it is an icon of an epochal shift in both the Church and the world:

A pope who represents the battles of last 75 years in the Church made his last public appearance with a Catholic convert and statesman who represents the next 75 years of the Church.

History is full of such extraordinary reversals precisely because the world turns. It’s full of change. But the Catholic Church is still the really solid thing in the world I always thought it was — it turns on the Stat Crux. It is this Faith which must be guarded by Peter’s Successors, but also by all of us. We all depend on this grace which is permanently present in the world.

Pope Francis was not the Guardian of the Faith Delivered Once For All that I always wanted him to be, and that I think he had a duty to be. But he knew enough when to stop talking, he knew enough when to raise high the Cross for the salvation of nations.

Requiescat in pace.