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 Balthasarian 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…