Lumen Fidei: a unique collaboration
If Pope Benedict XVI was a man of the word, then Pope Francis has been
so far a man of the gesture. His carefully judged interventions have won
him many fans. My Edinburgh taxi driver seemingly spoke for many: “I’m
not religious at all, but I like Francis. He speaks to me and unlike most of
our political and church leaders I feel like he knows how to connect and
talk about things that matter. If there were more like him I’d have more
hope in politics and maybe even religion. None of these leaders give us
any hope.”
Central to Lumen Fidei is precisely the idea of a God who addresses us
personally and who draws us out from the shadows of isolation into the
light of creative social relationships. The letter is a surprisingly poetic
meditation on the nature of Christian faith and its role in the modern
world. The product of an unplanned and unique collaboration between
Benedict XVI and Francis, the letter will surely prove something of an
enigma. Benedict’s last written papal word mingles with Francis’ first. Of
course, the stakes and the expectations are high for a Pope who has relied
on gesture and fewer than the average papal words, who has proclaimed
a Church of and for the poor, and who has committed himself to Church
reform.
The letter reveals to us the marks of both Popes: Benedict’s final eloquent
meditation on the virtues, a final word to the Europe he hoped to call back
to faith in the Church. He gives to us once more the gift of his unwavering
belief in the necessity for faith rooted in the institutional Church as the
basis for salvation and for social transformation in the modern world.
However, it is precisely this gift that will be difficult to receive for many.
Those of other faiths and who have suffered grievously at the hands of the
institutional Church will be looking for a starting point, or a place of
departure that does not come. Yet, this is not the whole story – there are
new departures and places of renewed emphasis that do speak to us in
the voice of the new papacy.
If the beauty of the language is our first surprise, perhaps the second is
that Francis emerges as a theologian of the senses and of the body. Two
main sets of images run through his text. Faith is described as a form of
seeing and hearing – hearing a personal call to respond to a relationship
of love, and seeing a vision of meaning that casts light on the purpose of
history. In strong contrast to the assumption that all things migrant are
problematic, here Francis describes the very nature of faith as a migrant
journey. Faith is a form of purposeful migration rather than endless
wandering: the mute gods of consumption entrap us, but the God of
Christian faith draws us into a journey with a destination. Today’s ‘idols’
draw us in but don’t speak to us face to face; they frustrate rather than
build social relationships. God is personal, but he is not private: His
intensely personal ways are always public and social. The personal is
always both social and political for Christians. This is what a narrow
version of liberal secularism finds so hard to grasp and accommodate.
Nor is this letter completely blind to the deep irony of talking about faith
as light in an age that equates faith with darkness, a refusal of progress
and enlightenment. This association needs to be challenged, faith as light
an idea that needs to be recovered, and the authors acknowledge that this
will not be easy. To do this Christians need to be able to explain to their
culture that they are more than a museum to the past: faith is rooted in a
profound orientation towards hope which gives birth to the future. One of
the things that Christians have to offer to public life and the common good
is a dogged belief in the gift of a future beyond barrenness and despair, a
refusal to abandon hope.
Nor is this a saccharine view of faith as cheap grace. My favourite line was
this: “faith is not a light which scatters all our darkness, but a lamp which
guides our steps in the night and suffices for the journey.” The darkness is
real, but the point is that the darkness is not foundational nor is it
ultimate. It is neither our origin nor our destiny.
For a Pope who has championed the poor and excluded it is a little
surprising that the letter waits until a final chapter to address the idea of
building a city committed to the common good, but what it offers is
perhaps the point of departure for the first full encyclical that Francis will
write. Familiar common good themes are present: rejecting political and
economic talk that values only utility and profit in favour of practices of
love in the city; prioritising rebuilding trust as the basis for enduring
public relationships. The gift of faith to the common good is found in a
distinctive language (and one hopes, practice) of love and hope. This is
concrete and challenging talk: for politics, for finance and business, and
for public services. But also for faith-based organisations: for Catholic
development agencies like CAFOD this means a challenge to develop and
articulate a distinctive Christian model of progress and human flourishing,
a relational account of creation as a gift. And it is here that the document
does acknowledge the presence of other traditions: the common good lies
in a wider community of plurality in which we co-exist. We can only hope
that this theme and its Catholic implications will be developed.
On the evening of Pope Francis’ election Jeremy Paxman put to his
interviewee: “so, this is the austerity Pope for austere times?” This
question shows the tough task Francis has in explaining his mission to a
secular audience. In this letter his message is precisely not one of
austerity. It is a letter addressed primarily to the Church and whilst there
is a language of beauty that might tip at points towards romance about
the Church, we should make no mistake about where Francis’ challenge
lies. If our expectations for him are high, his expectations for the Church
remain dizzying: he asks Christians “in their poverty [to] plant a seed so
rich that it becomes a great tree, capable of filling the world with its fruit.”
Dr Anna Rowlands is Lecturer in Theology and Ministry at King’s College
London and founding Director of the Centre for Catholic Social Thought
and Practice