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The New Yorker Radio Hour
How the Culture Wars Came to the Catholic Church
00:21:58
The pontificate of Pope Francis, which just reached its tenth year, has brought a greater willingness to engage with modern issues. Francis has addressed Catholics on the climate emergency, arguing a religious position against consumerism and irresponsible development. Without changing the Church’s doctrines, he struck a very different tone than his predecessors Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI on the inclusion of gay people and the involvement of women in Church leadership. The traditionalist reaction against Francis has also been unprecedented, with prominent figures in the Church openly seeking to discredit him. The New Yorker contributor Paul Elie, who recently wrote about this decade of Francis’s leadership, explores how tensions in the Church were overtaken by an American-style culture war. Elie speaks with Bishop Frank Caggiano, of Bridgeport, Connecticut, and M. Cathleen Kaveny, a prominent law professor and theologian at Boston College. “For John Paul,” Kaveny says, “th...
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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.
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A co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.
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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Ten years ago, the Catholic Church faced a startling situation unprecedented in modern times. The pope, Pope Benedict, resigned. And when his successor was appointed Pope Francis, he too was a break from the past. He was the first pope from Latin America, in fact, the first non European pope for a millennium. And Francis seemed far more willing to engage with contemporary problems. He wrote an encyclical, a Letter to the Faithful, on the climate emergency, talking about consumerism and irresponsible development. Francis also struck a very different tone on gay rights. But as much as Francis has been more open than previous popes on a series of issues, the reaction against him from traditionalists has been all the more outspoken and truly angry at times. How exactly did the culture wars come to the Vatican and the Catholic Church? Paul Ely just published a piece about a decade of Francis leadership. Paul, after a decade, what stands out for you as the most notable and efforts and achievements of this pope?
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Well, Pope Francis has done so much on the environment, on the opening of the church to non Christian religions, on focusing the church outward toward the poor, on cleaning up the structure of the Vatican and making a lot of fresh appointments both in Rome and around the world. But what really stands out to me is the openness that he's brought to the church. A church that felt closed and locked down after years of fairly authoritarian leadership under John Paul II and then Benedict xvi is now open and showing signs of change.
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Paul, Now I'm looking at this from obviously way outside the church, but it seems, from what I understand from what I read, that opposition to the Pope is much blunter than ever before anything we've ever seen. Sometimes it's even contemptuous of what he's trying to do. Please talk about that.
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So leaders in the church who've had grievances with him have expressed them in any number of ways. One has written a series of incendiary letters criticizing Pope Francis in all sorts of ways and spread them through the Internet, gaining the approval of a lot of traditionalist bishops and some cardinals too. Another, evidently wrote a letter and had it distributed anonymously under a pseudonym, saying that Pope Francis pontificate has been a disaster, insinuating that everybody thinks this and then ticking off all the things that have made it disastrous. So there's secret letters, there's open letters, broadcasters, especially on the EWTN television network, suggesting that Francis is a heretic or something like that now, in their opposition to Pope Francis, the traditionalists have a lot on their side. They really believe that he's wrong to relax and open things up in the way that he's done. They've got a lot of doctrine, a lot of history, and a pretty strong precedent of the two previous popes on their side. And on top of that, and this is the real twist, they're opposing Francis in a church that because he's made it more open, they're free to do so. He's not shutting them down in the way that one of his predecessors might. So they're taking advantage of the open church that he's brought about and using that openness to openly criticize him.
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Paul, you spoke with a number of people in different relations to the church while writing about Francis, including a bishop in the state of Connecticut. Tell me about him.
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When people in the church talk about the next generation of leaders in the church, in big archdiocese like New York, the name Frank Cagiano often comes up. I first met Bishop Cagiano, who's now the Bishop of Bridgeport, when I was reporting an article on clerical sex abuse for the magazine a few years back. He's a native of Brooklyn, where I live, and spent years in various positions in the church in New York, really getting to know the nuts and bolts of how a big city church works for all that. And through his participation in various World Youth days, he's got his eye on the next generation of people in the church, the church's future. Bishop Frank, you said, and this was on your podcast, that Pope Francis has been a counterbalance to Pope John Paul II and to Pope Benedict xvi. What do you mean by that?
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Yeah, Pope John Paul, who is now among the saints, he very much made a priority, the clarity of the teaching of what the church holds. And it was sorely needed when he became pope. And Pope Benedict, his genius, God rest his soul, was that he was a master catechist, that in many ways he took the very complex notions that John Paul would teach in his encyclicals, which many times caused me to pause and read and reread and reread because of his deep philosophical training and make them accessible to the average person. Now, Pope Francis compliments that, how he's complementing the truth with what I'm going to say, the call also to do what Ephesians 4 says, which is to live the truth in love or in mercy or in encounter, whatever word you wish. It is what John Paul and Benedict and Francis together, when you hold them together, you're painting a fuller picture of the human condition, its brokenness, the need for people to be accompanied in their suffering, in mercy, in acceptance, in welcome, but at the same time leading them to a destination. And unfortunately, we live in a time where people are not comfortable seeing the full picture, but would like to emphasize only half the picture. And that's when we kind of get into trouble.
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But on to particular conflicts, I mean, Pope Francis has done things that you could understand why other bishops would respond to him, his position on gay people. He's leaving the teaching alone, but suggested in various ways that there's gotta be a much more open pastoral outreach towards gay people. Is that effective in your view?
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Well, I think it's a long standing position of the church. I think what's new, if there's something new, is that he is highlighting it as a pastoral priority. But I think, for example, the fact that even the catechism of the church speaks of the need to welcome those who have same sex attraction, gay and lesbian Catholics and others. And it also speaks of the sin of discrimination against those who may be gay or lesbian or any sort of discrimination of any type. It's clear, I think where the difficulty has been is how do you do that in a way where we're not just giving lip service to say you are welcome, but also we engage in the issues that really burn in their hearts and how do we respond to those without necessarily abandoning what the Church has held as its teachings for centuries? That is where you have this legitimate disagreement among voices in the church.
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Pope Francis has spoken of the need for the church to involve women in leadership roles more. You've done that. You've gone boldly. You've named a woman, Eleanor Sowers, as the parish Life Coordinator at St. Anthony of Padua in Fairfield. Now, that's essentially she's the person in charge of the parish. What should Pope Francis be doing along these lines to bring women into greater leadership roles in the church?
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Well, you know what, Paul? I think if you look at the record of what he has done, even at the Vatican, he is beginning to put women in significant positions of leadership. For example, Sister Natalie's in the Synod office.
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Sister Natalie Bakewart, right?
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Yes. She is a voting member of the Synod. That's the first to my knowledge, in history that she is a full voting member.
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This is the Synod of Bishops, which has to do with the appointment of bishops and with other clergy, is that right?
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Correct. Right. And with the Synod on Synodality, when she sits at the synod, she will be Voting as an equal to the bishops, which is a first.
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To what extent can we see it growing? Can we see Sister Natalie leading the congregation for bishops or a woman of like her becoming a bishop at some point?
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My hunch is that that would not happen anytime soon.
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So just to be clear, this is all that you're setting out is based on the understanding that the ordained ministry is going to be restricted to men. And so men are priests and then men can be bishops. So if you're going to look for roles for women, it's going to be non ordained roles.
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Yeah, I do not envision that for whatever reason. I mean, we could talk about it too, if you wish, but I do not imagine that women would be called to ordained priesthood in the Catholic Church. And one could argue the pros and cons of that. I think there are, there are theological reasons for that. I do not imagine that happening. Certainly not my lifetime. I'm 64 years old. It is not going to happen in the next, whatever 20 years or 25 years that I have left. That is not going to happen.
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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come.
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Professor Kathleen Cavaney of Boston College Law School is right at the center of so many of the conflicts in the Church of the United States today. She teaches law at Boston College. She's also trained in theology, two disciplines that make her a match for the male bishops who lead the church. At Boston College and before that at Notre Dame Law School, she was colleagues and rubbed shoulders with many of the most aggressive traditionalists in the Catholic Church today. And that's one reason that I always get so much out of our conversations. Kathy, welcome.
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It's a delight to be here.
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In a comment that I've written for the New Yorker, I note that Pope Francis election was unexpected. And then I go on to propose or argue that a pretty steady run of unexpected developments through his pontificate has brought about a church that's more open and more dynamic than the church that preceded it under John Paul and Benedict. What do you think?
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I think that the mark of remember from John Paul through Benedict, you had almost an extended papacy under much the same vision because Benedict was such an enormous part of John Paul II's intellectual program. Not that they didn't have differences.
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He was working for him, he was working for them. He prefected the Congregation for Doctrine and they were elbow to elbow, I guess.
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Right. And then when people got Benedict, they thought, well, we're just going to continue in this line for the immediate future. I mean, it could have continued from 2005 to late 2022. Right. He died on December 31st. Benedict did. That is. So when Francis comes in and isn't out of that mode is someone who really didn't expect to be pope. My image of Francis is the image they had of him sort of sitting on the subway, you know, in Argentina and, you know, just going about his business as a cardinal who was focusing on, you know, caring for the poor in his own region. And then.
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So that's a great image. And he's. He's wearing black, I think he's wearing a dark overcoat. He's got bags under his eyes. The subway looks much like the subway in New York. And he was known at the time for living simply and traveling to the outskirts by public transport. And so this is an image of Pope Francis prior to his election and all that has happened subsequent. And that really stands out in your mind?
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It stands out in my mind because I think, you know, I mean, I guess I'm kind of a cynical person in some way, you know, so, like, when you look at, like, the Supreme Court justices and that, you know, they all have to live a certain way, get a certain path in order to make it, you know, to the position that they want. Career ladder, you know, same thing. Yeah, the career ladder. Same thing with cardinals. Right. You know, you have to do the career ladder. Same thing. If you're a cardinal and you want to be a pope, and this is someone who was not living this life because he had ambitions of being pope. He thought his chance was over, so he was living how he thought he should live before God. And that was simply in an encounter with the poor.
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You've written that since Francis was elected 10 years ago, we've seen a divide among the US bishops not between liberals and conservatives so much as between what you call culture warrior bishops and culture of encounter bishops, what does that mean?
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Well, I think it means a couple of things. I think for both Pope John Paul II, Pope St. John Paul II, and Pope Benedict, the main problem that the Church faced in. In the west was a kind of moral relativism, a sense that the moral norms that protected the dignity of the human being and the community were being eroded by capitalistic liberalism. And they saw a very stark choice. And Pope John Paul II issued an encyclical, I think it was in 1995, called Evangelium Vitae, the Culture, the Gospel of Life, which set the gospel of life, on the one hand, against death, a culture of life, against a culture.
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Of death, which he identified with liberal, progressive, capitalist, anything goes society. In places like the United States, anything goes society.
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Exactly. And the marks of the culture of death were each individual gets to decide what's best for them. Acceptance of autonomy and choices of abortion, contraception, assisted suicide, euthanasia, but also lack of care for the poor, too. That part of it was missing when it was encountered versus a culture of life rather, which prohibited behavior like abortion and euthanasia, but also provided support for, for the vulnerable, you know, great support for families. So, you know, what happened in the United States was that the culture wars that were marking the United States were kind of fused with John Paul II's culture of life versus culture of death and parceled out to each party. So many bishops, many conservative Catholics, saw the Republican Party as advancing the culture of life and the Democratic Party as the culture of death. Now, if you just look at John Paul II's encyclical, that's NotYou know, that's not an accurate parsing of the parties, because it's true that the Republican Party opposed abortion and euthanasia, but the Democratic Party called for all the social support for the vulnerable. But that's how it got configured in the US Culture of life. Republican Party, culture of death, Democratic Party. And then once you have that as your frame, then some bishops start to enforce that frame, sometimes by threatening to deny communion, as we've seen happen.
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So those are the culture warrior bishops, taking a diminished reading of John Paul II's vision and applying it to American politics. So then the culture of encounter is an expression and a, a way of seeing things associated with Pope Francis. Can you explain that? And then how it works itself out in the mission of certain of the bishops that Francis has appointed?
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Well, I think that the conservatives are worried. I think that, you know, the big problem that John Paul and Benedict saw, moral relativism that was kind of pushed back against by their culture wars, is not appreciated by Pope Francis. That's what their, I think their fear.
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Is, care about the truth.
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Right? That's what they worry about. In my view. However, Francis recognizes that the problem is much deeper than moral relativism, that the problem is actually moral nihilism. Moral nihilism says on an existential level, nothing matters. The question of truth doesn't even come up because nothing matters. And I think Pope Francis, culture of encounter, I am going to encounter you. I am going to say that you matter in your wholeness is a response to the deeper problem of moral nihilism.
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So given all this, that we have culture of encounter as really one of the most important ideas to come out of Pope Francis pontificate and his attempt to push beyond the culture wars. It's rich, isn't it, that his pontificate has coincided with a moment of great intensity in the culture wars driven by Catholic public figures, traditionalist Catholics for the most part. Isn't that right?
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Yeah. I think some of this is a parochialism of America. I mean, North America, not the whole America, but the North American bishops, I think have see the world, not all of them, but you know, through the frame of American politics. And because the culture of life versus culture of death had gotten fed into American politics, they can't see how what Pope Francis is doing in the culture of encounter is actually a continuation in a new context in some ways of what Pope John Paul II was doing. They view him as an opposition to that. And that's the problem. Right. Because what happened is Pope Francis looks like he unlocked Pandora's box and is allowing conversation about things that they don't think that people should talk about. He's also, I think, de centering academic theology in a helpful way. I mean, what he is ultimately saying is something that the Church teaches, which is faith is an encounter with a human person. Faith is an encounter with Jesus Christ mediated by the Church. But there's a reality here. Faith isn't simply repeating a proposition that's included in the catechism that on its own isn't life giving. So Pope Francis recognizes that the Church isn't dead. You know, the Church is the living faith of the dead, not the dead faith of the living.
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That's Kathleen Cavaney, a professor in theology and law at Boston College. And we heard earlier from Bishop Frank Cagiano. Paul Ely has written for the New Yorker since 2014 and he's a senior fellow at Georgetown University. You can read him on Pope Francis and much more@newyorker.com that's our program for today. Thanks for listening. See you next time.
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The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbes of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Cuadrado and Louis Mitchell. This episode, the episode was produced by Max Balton, Breda Green, Adam Howard Kalalea, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell and Ngofen Mputabwele, with guidance from Emily Bottin and assistance from Harrison Keithlein and Meher Bhatia. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Tsarina Endowment.