The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Are Pope Francis's Reforms too Radical for the Catholic Church?

Episode Date: December 21, 2024

In his latest book: "The Jesuit Disruptor: a Personal Portrait of Pope Francis" Michael W. Higgins offers a nuanced look at a complex pope with a simple agenda: radically reforming the Catholic Church. He is the Basilian Distinguished Fellow of Contemporary Catholic Thought at the University of Toronto's St. Michael's College. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Follow and listen wherever you get your podcasts. In his latest book, The Jesuit Disruptor, a personal portrait of Pope Francis, Michael Higgins offers a nuanced look at a complex pope with a simple agenda, radically reforming the Catholic Church. Michael is the Basilian Distinguished Fellow of Contemporary Catholic Thought at the UofT St. Michael's College, and he joins us now for more. It's great to have you in that chair again. Thank you.

How are you doing these days? I'm doing fairly well. Not that chair again. Thank you, Stephen. How you doing these days? I'm doing fairly well, not that I'm talking to you, of course. Amen, amen. Amen. Let's start with the title of the book. You call him the Jesuit disruptor. You didn't say revolutionary, you didn't say rebel,

you said disruptor. Why that word? Well, disruptor seemed to me the right word when talking about Bergoglio's papacy because what he does is he disrupts the patterns, he disrupts the expectations, he disrupts the standard modes of doing things. But he doesn't do it in a malignant way. It's interesting you know, disruptor can be spelled both with an ER and an OR.

If it's an OR it's a largely benign reading. If it's an ER it's somebody who is like a kid who disrupts a class or something like that. How do you even know that? Well, I look it up. I look it up because somebody was complaining about the fact. In fact, a past president of the American Catholic Association, University Association in Washington, who was very supportive of the book, and he said, you know, I think that

word disruptor is going to put a lot of people off. And I said, no, I don't think it will. I think it will attract readers because it says something about the nature of the man which is consistent throughout his papacy. And he said, well, I object to the use of the term, but then I went and I look it up, and you're right. It's the positive.

It's the positive term, and I thought. Because it's OR. It's OR you're right. It's the positive. It wasn't a term but I thought it was. Because it's OR. It's OR. Alright. Let's do an example. Where does he live? He lives in the Santa Marta, which is a house, an apartment complex actually designed for visiting cardinals and for dignitaries and for others. It's really not a housing complex, but it's a residence adjacent to the Vatican.

But the bottom line is he doesn't live where most of the Pope's live. No, he does not live in the Apostolic Palace. And that was his decision from the outset. I think that goes back to our conversation about him being disruptive. Here's another perfect example of it. Not only does he choose to live in the Apost Southerly Palace, the first place he goes to visit Steve is not Argentina. In fact, he's never gone to Argentina. Many of the popes who are non-Italian have gone back very early in their pontificate

to their place of birth. John Paul went off into Poland, Benedict went to Germany. Francis goes to Lampedusa, an island off the southern coast of Italy, which is currently occupied by great numbers of migrants fleeing North Africa. So his decision is to go and to be with the people, with those suffering, with those who have been displaced. So I think that is, those are just examples of how he disrupted expectations, protocols, the ways of doing things that have been cemented, seasoned and matured for centuries.

He just breaks out of them. He's a fascinating paradox because, as you describe him in the book, he simultaneously is the disrupter, at the same time being deeply faithful to the traditions of the church. How do you do both at the same time? Well I think if I had called him the Jesuit innovator, that might have given a slightly different resonance to the book and to my interpretation. He doesn't invent new doctrines.

He hasn't departed from the organic tradition. You're quite right. He's faithful to the tradition as he understands it because he's Peter. He's the principle of unity in the Catholic Church. So he doesn't want to tinker with the tradition he inherited. But he also knows that tradition is inadequate, that in many ways it's deficient, that it's always a struggle with pathologies

of the institutional as well as spiritual. Where do you go to recover the original spirit of the gospel? How do you bring back life into the witness and meaning of the church in ways that are not unfaithful to the tradition, but are a significant departure from the way it's been practiced. I think when we look at Francis, we have to think of somebody who is setting a template for evolving reform. That he's more interested in establishing a process and a culture of understanding and

mutual respect than he is in introducing anything radical in terms of a departure from the Catholic tradition. Well, here's something radical. I think in our lifetime we've had 23 Johns and we've had six Pauls and we've had 16 Benedicts and we've had two John Pauls. Yes. The one Francis. Why did he pick that name?

He's pretty clear about what he did. When he was sitting at the table at the time he was elected and the Cardinal Dean or the Cardinal Chairman or the Cardinal Dean comes over to him and asks him if he accepts, or maybe it's the Cardinal Vice Dean, they all have their different functions, but anyway one of the Card present will come over and ask him if he accepts the vote and by what name he will be known. He's sitting beside the Franciscan, who's the Cardinal Archbishop, Hamas, his name is, of São Paulo. And he says to him, don't forget the poor. And the realization that the poor matter, that the poor mattered specifically for Francis of Assisi, that he was talking to a Franciscan at the time, that his life has intersected with what was often called Iupo Veralo from Ambria, that this specific figure had a huge impact not only on his imagination and the way he thought of doing things, but on his own spirituality.

So choosing the name Francis seemed to him natural. Did he come up with it on the spot? He did. Really? Well, you never know. He may well have been thinking about it, you know, because when they're in there and the Cardinal's electors are gathered, I mean, the idea must cross all their minds at one point. It might be me. If it were me, what name would I take? So my sense is he would have given it some thought.

But it was quite far back in his mind, I think, although he had been number two the last time with Benedict I. But I think I remember being in the CTV studio with Lloyd Robertson at the time. I wrongly assumed that he was thinking of Francis Xavier because, of course, he's the great figure along with Ignatius of Loyola in the first generation of the Jesuits and was famous as a missionary all over the world really, all over the world as we understand it, and very close to Ignatius. And Francis sees himself as a missionary.

So it seemed to me a Jesuit, Francis Xavierav, you know, but I got the wrong Francis. Well, you're half right. Ah, half right. Let's talk about how he has taken positions on some rather controversial issues related to the church. Let's start with residential schools. The Pope came here a couple of years ago, issued an apology on behalf of the Catholic Church for its role in the residential school crisis. Do you think that apology was more in line with Francis the Disruptor or Francis the Preservationist? Oh, I think Francis the Disruptor in many ways.

I think we have evidence that Francis wanted to come before he actually came and he had to deal with the politics of the National Episcopal Conference, which he often has to do. It's not unique to Canada by any means. It's a fraught situation. As you know, the Prime Minister had already confronted him on this personally. He has always had, I think, a very deep regard, as indeed did John Paul II, for indigenous peoples. And so therefore I think he wanted very much to come and he wanted to stamp it with

the notion that this was a pilgrimage of contrition, a pilgrimage of repentance on behalf of the institutional church, but also a journey to understanding. This is always true of Francis. He illustrated very well in the way he handled the situation on the ground in Canada. He was quiet, he was humble, he sat silently. The indigenous leaders and peoples in great measure saw in him an authenticity that not unreasonably they did not see in many other religious and political leaders in the country. I was going to say, Ratzinger didn't get exactly the same approach, did he?

No, that's right. So that Francis, his natural gift for co-sympathy and for imaginative understanding, his depth of just listening, what he calls deep listening actually, I think was evident throughout that trip. So you get all kinds of leaders of the Inuit and the Metis and the First Nations where they talked about his humility, but they also talked about his authenticity. I think that that's what Francis communicated on that pilgrimage to Canada. Again, there were controversies above ground and underground and unhappiness with the fact

that one of the major liturgies was in Latin and not insensitive to indigenous practices and all kinds of other things. There were debates around the meaning of the term genocide, opes, commentary on the plane flying back. There were many things, but I think the one thing that is constant in this is the fact that he came not to proclaim, not to declare, not to berate, but to listen humbly. And that wasn't theater, that was him.

He weighs in on a wide range of issues. Immigration, economic inequality, political populism, environmental threats. To what extent do you believe that puts him, in some respects, at odds with the papacy? I think in most cases he's not at odds with the papacy because if you look back to Paul VI you see already, to some degree with John the 23rd actually, but very especially with Paul VI, attention paid to the

issues that we sometimes call add extra. By which I mean those issues outside the life of the church as a tribe. The ad intra issues which seem to me to predominate during the papacy of Benedict XVI were very different in kind from Francis. Francis has in many ways resurrected many of the overriding concerns around social economic inequity and environmental pollution and the kind of things that John Paul II also addressed during his very long pontificate. But they're very two very different personalities and Francis's is less given to abstractions and to pontificate declarations and more to

actually listening to people, attending to them. He often talks about this, and I read about it several times in the book, Steve, that abstractions are good, ideas are good, we need them, but reality is more important. Let's do an excerpt. Sheldon, if you would, top of page three,

let's bring this excerpt up from the book. This is from Michael Higgins, The Jesuit Disruptor. Francis has, you write, with his commitment to synodality, lit a candle, a candle of hope of possibility, a candle of reform that, if not extinguished by his successor, could affect profound change in the way Catholics live out their lives. In the process, he could make Rome, once the center of an ecclesiastical empire, a treasured seat on the periphery, rooted in its identification with the poor,

a beacon of human and spiritual harmony in a sea of dark turmoil. Now that is disruption. Well done. At a time when organized religion in so many parts of this world seems to be on decline, what makes you think he's the guy to bring it back? But if you look at the end, you're attuned to this better than most,

when you look as a political journalist at the geopolitical reality, you're absolutely right. And certainly there are indications of decline in institutional religious life and have been actually for several decades. But there are also spots of revival and resurgences and some of them I think rather unwelcome because they tend to be quite conservative going back to a time of clearer identity, sometimes even back to Pacelli because that was a Catholic world that seemed impregnable, unassailable, Catholic identity was secure and complete, and from John XXIII on it's been kind of fractured, and Francis is fracturing it further.

That would be the detractor's argument. I don't see it that way. I think what he's concluded is, look, Christendom as we understand it, particularly Europe, is dead. Okay? Simple as that. The institution needs to be revived in several different ways. Maybe recapturing something of the original gospel message, less concerned with the trappings of princes and the large heritage we inherited from the Renaissance.

Maybe we need to recover something of the simplicity of Francis of Assisi, something of the radicality of Jesus of Nazareth, and in order to do that, where do we go? We go to the poor, we go to the disenfranchised, we go to the abandoned, we go to the migrants. We don't go to the powers of state, largely because they're engaged in their own form of nationalism, populism, tribalism, whatever, and they don't have the individual person as their primary locus of care.

The church can bring, and he's used this image many times, can bring its ministry into the battlefield. In other words, it's a field hospital. This is one of his first images as Pope was to talk about the church not as a mystical body of Christ, not as the perfect society, but as the field hospital for the wounded and for the broken. It's a mass unit. It is?

Absolutely. Absolutely. What are you just back from? Rome. You went to the Senate? I did. Second session. What was your big takeaway?

My big takeaway is that it is a success, but not because it introduced radical measures, not because there were new decrees, not because he's altered the discipline, but because he's created the culture. Here's what you need to do in an institution that's 2,000 years old. To get people to think differently, to get them to attend to others. You need to find ways to bring them into conversation, which is built on a reverencing of the other through silence, through care, and through attention. Cardinal Schönberg, at the first session, told us that he was approached

by a Cambridge University professor, political scientist, who had also been an advisor at the UN and whatnot. And he said, you know, if we did at the UN what is going on here in solidarity in Rome, we would minimize the international conflicts on the global stage because you actually are listening to each other, not getting up in your various seats and whatnot and providing some kind of magisterial intervention, but actually listening to each other with a seriousness that comes from respect, he changed that. He changed the way we did sentence Steve.

Because we did sentence the way this man was talking about the UN, where people sit, they get up, they read, sometimes they don't even get up, they read, then they pull back, and occasionally there's dialogue, but rarely is there encounter. All the time Francis argues for the creation of a culture of dialogue and encounter, and that that only happens when you enter into a person's space. So take the church, the imperial church of the Tiber, and take it to the precincts, the peripheries, the forgotten places, and there, there will be the spiritual revival of the church.

There's one line in this book that really stuck with me, and ironically enough, it's not about him. It's about you. You wrote, I have always loved popes, whether pontificating or otherwise, ever since I developed pre-reflexive consciousness. Okay, how come? I don't know. I mean, I don't know.

Maybe it's the theater, maybe it's the high drama, maybe it's even the kind of lonely isolation of an individual over against the world. Now, this would have been the fantasies of a teenager, right, and of a young university student. I don't think like this way at all anymore. But that brought me into an area of interest that has remained with me because I actually trained as a Victorianist. I mean, studying the papacy has become a major life avocation but it was not my primary training.

So the interest I have in the papacy is greatly drawn from those personal qualities of interest. And like you, the first pope I ever encountered was Paul VI in the Castel Gandolfo when he was coming in. And I was standing beside an older Jewish couple from Brooklyn who broke into the Paternoster from the Mississaugurles beautifully. I knew they were Jewish because we talked before the Pope came in and they brought him in the old setis justatoria, which was when they carried him and they would have all kinds of featheries and what not.

Very much like a potentate, an Eastern European, not Eastern European, but Eastern potentate. They carried him and they don't do that anymore, they got rid of that. But the tremendous mystique of the papacy, you know, and that's an important thing to understand is the mystique what Francis has done as a disruptor Has a no small part upset that mystique because what he's saying is look I'm bishop of Rome. I'm a bishop I'm a Christian. I am human. I live in the world. I have responsibilities of the world. I happen to be the Pope But I'm not living in the palace Okay, so they're that that first disruption is discontinuity.

Just for the record here, when you saw Pope the Sixth, how many feet away were you from him? Probably more than you, because I'm shorter than you. Maybe three or four rows. Three or four rows? Yeah. Okay, I was one of 10,000 people in St. Peter's Square looking up at a window in the ballot.

So you had a much... Just for the record, you were much closer to him. And mine was in 1977. When was yours? 1971. 1971. Okay, so... You were one year before he died.

That's right. That is actually right. Yeah. How many have you met altogether? How many popes? Well, I... Benedict, I actually interviewed Benedict, but not when he was pope, when he was Grand Inquisitor, when I was reading the biography of Cardinal Carter of Toronto with my colleague.

And I met him in the Holy Office of the Inquisition. John Paul II, from a distance, he would meet with various Catholic university presidents periodically, but by the time we got to that stage, his various impairments were significant. That was much reduced. The Pope I would have liked very much to meet was John Paul I, right? Sadly, he did not stay around long. No, he did.

Less than a month. I'll be the Luciani. And I didn't, of course, meet John the 23rd. I was in high school when he died. Who was the church basement pope? Me. Yes. Yeah.

How did you get? That's a nickname you have. Yeah, that's the nickname. Where did you get that? Well, I got it from a, I used to write a column for the Zavarian Weekly. And the people on the board of the Zavarian Weekly included Frank McKenna, former premier of New Brunswick

and ambassador to Washington. So there was Frank and there was a well-known ophthalmologist, Peter Doherty, who then became a cabinet minister in New Brunswick. And myself, we were all part of, it was like a university, like varsity, okay, but it was at St. effects in Ande-Ganish. And so the Zavarian weekly was the student newspaper. And my column was as a campus editor was to write about various things that interest me and I wrote about things about the church.

The big crisis over birth control in 1968, right, that kind of stuff, the kind of things you would be interested in as a, you know, a teenager or a late adolescent. And so, really one of the professors who was from Colorado originally, I think, couldn't take it anymore. And he said, I can't tolerate these spoutings and pontifications coming from this church basement pope whose language I admire, but whose zeal I deplore. So anyway, this created a natural crisis among members of the Department of English, some who defended me, some who didn't and whatnot. And I was only a kid, like I didn't know.

I just assumed that my fellow students or peers were reading this. Clearly they weren't. But other people were reading it, I was taking them off. So I was called the church basement pope. And I thought, I'm going to use that. And it was pejorative at the time. I'm going to use that because it's a... It's a badge of honor.

Wear it. Well, that's good. Well, did he understand that by accusing you of pontificating? That's from the Latin word for pope. Well, yes. Pontifex maximus. Pontifex maximus, the big bridge builder. He actually relented and about a year later wrote to say that he had been premature in his judgment, but he had also been right.

Let's finish up on this. How much of what you describe in this book do you think Francis will make permanent and how much of it depends on his successor, whoever and whenever that is, continuing in this vein? I think a lot would depend on the successor, frankly. And he's already, I mean, you're always interested in matters political, I know. So you would know that succession planning is always a key thing, right? But popes are not supposed to be engaged in succession planning, although there was an

indication that John XXIII tipped his tiara, as it were, for Montini. By and large, they keep their distance from it, of course. But they stack the College of Cardinals because those are the electors, right? So the pope currently has created, and the technical word is create, he's created the majority of the College of Cardinals now, it would be in the high 60, maybe even 70 percent, 70 plus percent. But here's the kicker, there's no guarantee that the electors that he created will necessarily look for the same qualities in the successor.

They may feel that, OK, Francis disrupted things. Now we need a pacifier. My sense is that that would be not a good thing. The good thing would be to build on the various movements that he has generated. I think if you look at the Constitution of the current college, there are several who would be what they call papabbale,

but you've got to remember that they're not confined to that. They can go outside the college, right? And the other thing is, it does seem to me that it is very unlikely that he'll be succeeded by a Jesuit. I think they'll say, well, that was fine. We'll leave that alone for a while. Try something else now. Yeah, they've had religious order priests. They've had Franciscans and Benedictines in the past, Dominicans, I think they'll say, well, that was fine. We'll leave that alone for a while. Try something else now.

Yeah, they've had religious order priests. They've had Franciscans and Benedictines in the past, Dominicans. But this was their first Jesuit. And that in itself was a disruption, both for the order and for the church. I've got to tell you, I always love your visits here. They're great fun.

So you're just a delight to speak to. And I'm happy to put on people's night tables they should consider the Jesuit Disruptor, a personal portrait of Pope Francis, the one and only. Michael W. Higgins, always great to have you here. Thank you, Steve. Always good to be with you.