Translated by Richard Dixon. Penguin Viking. 320 pp. ₹1099.00. Paperback.
The Servant of God, Romano Guardini (1910-68) problematised ‘tradition’ and it is the voice of Guardini that we find in Pope Francis when the latter writes in his autobiography, “Tradition is not a statue…Tradition means growing…Tradition means moving forward” (203). This is a counterintuitive understanding of tradition. Guardini burnt into Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s being when Bergoglio studied Guardini for his doctorate at Freiburg, Germany (280), albeit incomplete. A careful reading of the teachings of the Pope synoptically done with this book proves that the Pope never veered from the essential teachings of his Church. Those who criticise him for subscribing to the heresies of modernism and religious relativism have not been scrupulous readers of his studies on Guardini who was influenced by Georg Koch, and by Alberto Methol Ferré, or this book under review. The Pope is very much a traditionalist. Since he wears his learning lightly, his works have not been studied as they should have been. As he mentions here, he thinks that Vatican II’s call for the Church to be more open has not yet been realised and therefore, there does not arise the question for convening a third Vatican Council. The Pope makes it clear that he is implementing the conciliar positions of Vatican II by fighting for love, hesed and agape; for “Hatred kills the soul” (41). His Papacy has been a theodicy; a battle against hatred; an explicit manifestation of evil. For the record, here is Romano Guardini on ‘tradition’; in his own words: “I clearly saw the significance of such investigations for Catholic theology which recognizes the church tradition as the bearer of revelation. However, what interested me [Guardini] was not the question of what someone said about the Christian truth but the question, what is true?” (Romano Guardini, Narratives of My Life: Autobiographical Notes p. 4, first published in German in 1945, this edition translated and commented upon by Robert A Krieg with Fred R Dallmayr, Adelaide 2023). The Pope as he reveals in this book, has never veered from the Servant of God’s understanding of ‘tradition’. And, though he does not mention Methol Ferré in this book; Ferré was a very traditional Catholic lay-theologian. The emphasis that the Pope lays on the primacy of the Catholic laity in the contemporary Church derives from Ferré’s understanding of the role of the Catholic laity within the traditions of the Church. These are not unique to Pope Francis — his Papacy is the logical conclusion to the orthodoxy of Georg Koch who was Guardini’s seminary professor, Guardini himself and Ferré. Though it is beyond the scope of this review, all three, were neo-Thomists and so is Pope Francis.
The Pope deals with the Problem of Evil head-on: he emphasises his inability to respond to the presence of radical Kantian evil in the world we find ourselves in. In this cooling, apparently indifferent world, children are left orphaned and shell-shocked by wars and other forms of systemic sin arising out of global corruption. And he calls out to the corrupt as being not redeemable: “people who are corrupt sell their mothers…[making]…a choice that is self-serving…satanical” (115) and the Pope is emphatic about his views. He stresses that Mary, the Mother of sinners cannot be a Mother “of corrupt people” (115). As a Hindu I can relate to this. The Maha Kumbh has just concluded at Prayagraj. But for the corrupt there can be no mercy. From a Hindu standpoint: bad deeds cannot be washed away by umpteen holy dips unless, as the Pope says, one leaves at least, “a narrow chink for God to enter” as Matthew, the tax-collector did (115). There is always hope for the corrupt whose selfishness leaves millions of children destitute since “Hope is a real and tangible experience. Even secular hope” (252). Hope never betrays us (253). Yet, the Pope is unfairly condemned as woke, probably by those scared of breaking “away from rigidity, which doesn’t mean falling into relativism, but to go ahead, to take risks” (Hope 288). The Pope’s ‘way of proceeding’ is certainly Igantian. As a true son of St. Ignatius, he is unafraid to break with tradition as Ignatius was unafraid to break away from monasticism for the sake of effecting the Counter-Reformation.
Many have failed to notice two important ideological positions of this Pope. His critics attack him for being Hegelian and Marxist without contrasting his definition of “the people”. According to the Pope, “the people” is neither “a logical category” nor are they “a mystical category…[nor] a kind of exalted category”; they are a “mythical and historical category” (170). He goes on to define myth in relation to Guardini’s reading of [Fyodor] Dostoyevsky’s “religious world” (Hope 170). Contrast this with hardline materialist thinkers like Jacques Rancière’s definition of the ‘volk’, the pejorative etymological root of ‘folk’, that is, the ‘petit bourgeoise’. Rancière in What is A People? (Columbia University Press, 2016, translated by Jody Gladding) concludes that “ ‘the people’ does not exist” (Rancière 102). Pope Francis’s definition of the ‘volk’, on the other hand, shows how he is misread by those within the Church who would “attempt to stop [the march of] time” (269).
Pope Francis loves poetry. He refers to everyone from Dante to the French poet Charles Péguy. His comments on Péguy (254-55) are some of the most incisive observations on life, the power of poetry and Péguy that this reviewer has come across. In this too the Pope is traditional. He is simply carrying on the legacy of the Thomist understanding of art as profoundly spiritual. In this autobiography the Pope comes out as a neo-Thomist within the long history of Jesuit involvement with Thomas of Aquinas leading up to Cardinal Henri de Lubac. Lubac is certainly a traditionalist. Pope Francis is most emphatically Thomist when he writes on the liturgy: “From a sociological…view, it is interesting to consider the phenomenon of traditionalism, this “backwardism” that regularly returns each century, this reference to a supposed perfect age…With the liturgy, for example” (201). When Saint Thomas of Aquinas critiques certain Augustinian views; many did not take Thomas’s positions very seriously. They attacked St. Thomas as an upstart. This understanding of shaking the parvenu of liturgical praxes derives from Thomas’s and Guardini’s conception of tradition more than anyone else’s; other than the powerful voices of the Conciliar Fathers. Even the Pope’s understanding of evil as possessing ‘esse’ as against St. Augustine’s ‘privatio boni’ confirms that the book under review, nay, the life of the man under scrutiny, as that of a Neo-Thomist’s. Pope Francis is a man for all nations and times.
The most poignant takeaway for me is the Pope’s exhortation “that the truth must never be hidden and being opaque is always the worst choice…Therefore, onward”. His worldview resonates with that of the Rig Veda’s: चरैवेति .
Subhasis Chattopadhyay Ph.D. is an ex-judge of the Sahitya Akademi.
