The many (and sometimes puzzling) paths of Pope Francis

Here we go again with yet another papal controversy over remarks made by Pope Francis to a group of young people in Singapore concerning religious pluralism. My friend Christopher Altieri makes a good case here at CWR why this kerfuffle is essentially a big nothing burger. And though I agree with his main point that there is too much hyperventilation going on over the remarks, I do think there are some troubling aspects of the pope’s comments that need addressing.

Before I proceed, however, a couple of caveats are in order. First, these remarks by the pope are clearly not in any way definitive teachings of the papal magisterium. Even if we judge them as imprudent and ambiguous, there is no need to throw accusations of formal heresy around. Let’s not invent crises where none exist. The remarks are problematical, but can also be dismissed as the mere incautious musings of a pope speaking off the cuff.

Second, the pope was not engaging in a sophisticated discourse, attempting in a few remarks to resolve a thorny theological topic. He was speaking to a group of children who were from a variety of religious backgrounds. And as a pastor, he was trying to communicate to them why the path of rancor and division is not a healthy one, and that it is of the very essence of “religion” to seek God first which should, by all accounts, put us on the path to dialogue rather than confrontation.

Therefore, when the pope says “All religions are paths to God” I think we need to cut him some slack since in context what he was alluding to were the major “higher” religions of the world, most of which he goes on to specifically name (“Some Sikh, some Muslim, some Hindu, some Christian.”) So no, I do not think the pope would view Baal worship, Moloch worship, and modern Satanism as paths to God. The word “all” in this context is one of those ambiguities we often see when this pope speaks extemporaneously. And I think that it needs to be interpreted charitably in its context.

Nevertheless, in making these points, Pope Francis chose an unfortunate analogy to describe the nature of religion. He compared the various religions to the different languages of the world and said that religions are just different languages for approaching God. But this simply will not do. Altieri says that the analogy with languages “limps”. Well, with all due respect to my good friend and his excellent article, I think it does far more than limp.

All languages are forms of communication. But it would be wrong to say there is one language that does this best and in an absolute way, which cannot be surpassed by any other language. For example, nobody would say that English is the eschatological in-breaking of the very quintessence of communication in a manner that is constitutive of, and the very ground of possibility for, all other languages.

However, this is what Catholic doctrine says about God’s Revelation in Christ, which has been passed on in the Church and preserved: “Through all the words of Sacred Scripture, God speaks only one single Word, his one Utterance in whom he expresses himself completely” (CCC 102; see CCC 101-04) and “For the words of God, expressed in human language, have been made like human discourse, just as the word of the eternal Father, when He took to Himself the flesh of human weakness, was in every way made like men” (Dei Verbum, 13).

In other words, it is the Absolute nature of the Christian claim for Christ that is directly undermined by this comparison between all religions with language. Because it implies that Christ merely gives us one “grammar” among many other religious grammars, all of which, in their own idiosyncratic ways, are attempting to express the inexpressible, which is what we call “God”.

Thus, the use of the language analogy undercuts those who say that all the pope is referencing here is the teaching of the Church Fathers on the “spoils of Egypt” and the logoi spermatikoi, or the teachings of Lumen Gentium on the presence of truth in other religions (pars 15-17), or the ideas of C.S. Lewis and Tolkien on mythopoesis as expressive of what Lewis called the “good dreams” of the human religious imagination.

Yes, there is natural religion, and human reason can reach out to the divine in a lot of different ways. Yes, the Church has moved inexorably toward a far more expansive understanding of the movements of salvific grace outside of the visible Church. And if that is all the pope meant, I am on board that train.

But that is not what he said. Would that he had said all of that and had done so clearly and deftly with the alacrity of one at home in the thought world of the poetry of the Christian soul. Instead, he spoke in a manner that was evocative of a theological movement known as the “pluralism of religions” school of thought that has a pedigree in the Church that stretches back sixty years or more. In this school, Christ is merely one savior figure among many and in a kind of docetic move is but one avatar of a “divine christic principle” that has also instantiated itself elsewhere. There is one divine ice cream that comes in various christic flavors. There is one genus–“religious experience of God”–and “religions” are merely the various species within that genus.

Nor is this the first time that he has made such allusions, as we saw when he signed the Abu Dhabi declaration which pointedly affirmed that the “pluralism and the diversity of religions, colour, sex, race and language are willed by God in His wisdom…” The Vatican later tried to clean this up and there was some discussion that Pope Francis was merely affirming it is God’s “permissive will” for many religions to exist. But the damage was done and the whole affair was, in reality, just left hanging in mid-air without serious resolution. So there is reason to wonder if his recent remarks comparing religion with language are not a further indication of his leaning toward a pluralism of religions within which Christianity is merely one among many.

Furthermore, whether intended or not, the pope’s recent remarks, insofar as they speak in the language of this theology, contain more than a whiff of a certain kind of apophaticism so exaggerated that it calls into question the very concept of an absolute Divine Revelation as such from within history. Younger Catholics may be excused from seeing the full intellectual genealogy of this idea that religions are merely grammatical expressions of a more generic religious experience of God in natural reason. But those of us who have been around for a while have seen this rodeo before. And one can only assume, given this pope’s age, that he has, as well.

The metaphysical linchpin of this theology of religious pluralism was a deep rejection of the very concept of an Absolute eschatological in-breaking of God into history in a final and definitive expression of the Divine self. This is ruled out in principle, grounded in the Enlightenment’s rejection of the idea that the timeless truths of the Infinite God can be expressed definitively in the contingent truths of history. Thus, one of the more common analogies for the further invention of the Enlightenment–i.e. “religion”—were the differences among languages.

Thus, the religions of the world were treated with a condescending and dismissive “respect” as being all equally ambiguous and incomplete. Like blindfolded people at different ends of an elephant describing what they feel and mistakenly thinking that they have truly grasped the fullness of what an elephant is. In this view, only modern secularity fully grasps the essential unknowability of God. Therefore, this God of secular reason is a Deistic construction at best and at worst is simply an unknowable possibility that becomes increasingly socially irrelevant. All that remains for the Christian theologian who desires to play in that sandbox is to invent out of whole cloth a grotesquely unreal amalgam of “the religions” in some kind of theological Esperanto that, insofar as it seeks for a universal religion, still ironically resonates with the echo of the now vanquished Pantocrator.

One is tempted to say that we should not make too much of this language analogy since the pope was speaking off the cuff. But like so many other instances of these kinds of off-hand remarks by Pope Francis, there is rarely, if ever, any walk-back or clarification, and certainly never an apology from the pope. And so I think one is justified in wondering just how “shooting from the hip” these comments were. It is more likely these off-the-cuff comments are actually unguarded comments and, it seems, unfiltered comments. They are, in other words, what poker players call a “tell”.

There is yet another troubling aspect of the pope’s remarks. He speaks of “religions” precisely in an essentialized and reified manner as these easily identifiable “things” when they are not, as any true historian or sociologist of religion can tell you (and which is discussed by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger in Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions). The Enlightenment invented this notion of “religion” as any organized effort to institutionalize “the God question” but clearly had the Christian Church in view precisely in order to cordon it off as a discrete sociological reality in order to domesticate it and bring it under State control.

Aquinas defines “religio” as that natural virtue whereby the creature, in the run of justice, gives back to the Creator his due homage. This has always been the Catholic approach to the definition of religion and it has its roots in our Lord himself, who linked together the concepts of truth and worship (Jn. 4:24). There is an inherent connection between the Christian religion as the place where “true worship” happens. Grace builds on, and perfects, nature’s impulse to worship. And this is simply not the same as defining religion as a wholly discrete reality grounded in the asymptotic quest for the ineffable.

Finally, ignored by many commentators is an analysis of just what the pope means when he talks of “dialogue” among religions. Pope Francis seems reticent to invoke the name of Jesus in these kinds of interreligious venues and rarely does so. This raises the question of the theological foundations of dialogue in a Christian register. As Joseph Ratzinger makes clear in Dominus Iesus (2), the theological core of the necessity for dialogue (and it is a necessity) is that it is an essential accompaniment to the command to evangelize. There is therefore an ineradicable linkage between dialogue and faith in Christ, wherein the latter informs the former in profound ways.

That is not to say that genuinely Christian dialogue must proceed in a heavy-handed manner. Quite to the contrary, since the evangelizing task requires a listening posture that demands patience, empathy, and a true desire to shape the Christian evangel to the delicacy of the given situation.

Nevertheless, a true dialogue cannot move forward with the apparent presumption that the very mention of the name of Jesus is somehow an off-putting, offensive, and indelicate thing to do. The non-Christian interlocutor would certainly expect a pope to say something about what it is that Christ brings to the table of dialogue. Any dialogue partner who would be alienated by such an endeavor is not one who is seeking a genuine encounter in the first place.

What then explains the reluctance of Pope Francis to ground explicitly his message to the non-Christian in the love of Christ poured out for all? Why not say to the children of Singapore that the God of Jesus Christ is a God of love, who loves all of his children, and who therefore condemns religious violence and acrimony? That it is this God, in whose name the pope speaks, who commands respect for the inviolable dignity of all and thus rejects all haughty forms of religious triumphalism?

Is it perhaps because Pope Francis has a concept of dialogue that is less Christologically-centered and is instead grounded in a sociological and psychological understanding more in tune with the globalism of the modern world? This is a question that cannot be answered here and now, but it is a question that needs clarification if the pope wishes to avoid the criticism that he is hiding Christ under a bushel basket in order to be more in line with the religious egalitarianism of modernity.

Catholic World Report