Having received multiple requests for interpretation of the document from the moments of the first related news reports, and therefore having stayed up late to read it the night the Vatican released Pope Francis’s “apostolic exhortation,” Evangelii Gaudium, I’d thought to have some sort of complete and considered commentary before the long weekend was through.

Although I’d managed to develop my thesis in time to express it on the week’s Wingmen segment, there’s just too much to the document for me to have come to sufficient specifics for a single coherent piece.  Truth be told, the professional and familial demands of life are such, these days, that I haven’t the time for anything resembling a formal explication.  That leaves me considering a series of shorter essays, in informal voice, as time allows.

So, where to begin?  For some reason, the answer that I find I can’t resist is “with Shakespeare”:

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this—and all is mended—
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend;
If you pardon, we will mend.

Those lines are from the comments with which Puck closes A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and I heard their echo in a paragraph toward the end of Evangelii Gaudium’s lightning-rod section about economics:

If anyone feels offended by my words, I would respond that I speak them with affection and with the best of intentions, quite apart from any personal interest or political ideology. My words are not those of a foe or an opponent.  I am interested only in helping those who are in thrall to an individualistic, indifferent and self-centred mentality to be freed from those unworthy chains and to attain a way of living and thinking which is more humane, noble, and fruitful, and which will bring dignity to their presence on this earth.

As I said on Wingmen, the second significant aspect of Pope Francis’s essay — after the laying out of the assumptions and principles behind his economic thinking — is its call for us to listen, each in our sphere and our capacity, and to discuss.  And as I quipped on Twitter after reading the essay, one must read it not as the work of a crazy uncle who might embarrass, but as the musings of your papa, working out mysteries.

As one might expect, the first wave of commentary on the essay has been after the fashion of the talking heads — as if all statements are laid out as final talking-pointed opinions meant to spark as they slash against each other for the viewer’s entertainment.  In that style of public discourse, the marketplace of ideas is a tug of war; everybody takes a position along the rope and can only lean back and pull.

One does not, generally speaking, find prelates in those lines, at least inasmuch as, by their occupations, they must balance the intellectual and ideological threads of the day with the reasoning and dogma of their Church.  The history and presentation of Pope Francis suggests that, even more than usual, one should read his writing as one listens to a homily.

On any given Sunday, you could stand and quibble with the priest’s summary of some movie or characterization of some technical finding in the news.  But that would miss the point in the same way that it misses the point to object that Jesus calls on us to prepare for His return as a homeowner prepares for a thief in the night.  Jesus was not saying that He would come with a malicious intent to take other people’s property, and Francis is not claiming to enter his analysis alongside the exchanges of Hayek and Keynes.

Anybody who reads the literature produced by the Catholic hierarchy with any more dedication than the occasional sensationalized mainstream media summary can only admit that the ideas that Pope Francis expresses have been, at the least, implied from time to time.  Although, there is variation from region to region and religious order to religious order. Again, practical economics is not the central concern of clerics, and as individuals, they’ve tended to follow the assumptions of the secular ideologies that most closely matched their spiritual tendencies.

A progressive Franciscan isn’t exactly a contradiction in terms, nor would be a conservative Dominican.  It isn’t surprising that a Jesuit pope would have liberal leanings.  But again, alignment with political ideologies is, at best, incidental and therefore inconsistent, like asking what type of musician prefers which sport.

In recent years, however, I’ve been inclined to advise my free-market friends that the Church has seemed to be following threads that lead away from this treatment of economics as merely an incidental matter.  How the economy works, and how we use economic policy to achieve our righteous ends has spiritual implications.

If economics is of concern because of its practical effects, rather than its ideological significance, then it matters whether an economic prescription actually works.  Furthermore, if a particular economic approach has deleterious side effects, even if it might achieve the desired ends, then the Christian insistence that the ends don’t justify the means comes into play.

In this context, if one reads Francis’s commentary as an assertion of fully convicted progressivism, then it’s understandable to declare this or that assertion to be breathtakingly wrong, if one disagrees.  But if one reads it as explaining the interplay of Catholic principle with a particular understanding of economics, then it becomes possible for him to be right in his observations of what is wrong with the current state of affairs and its direction while also being incorrect about the culprit.

He isn’t saying, I don’t think, that free-marketers are “individual, indifferent and self-centred” and therefore must be led, in the interest of Christian charity, to progressive statism.  He’s saying, rather, that those three adjectives describe a “mentality” that is undeniably to be found in modern life, and this is his initial entry into the debate about how to root them out.

What excites me about Evangelii Gaudium, is, in brief, that it strikes me as an invitation: “Let’s address this, now.”  Because the principles that I share with Pope Francis are the very principles that lead me to be a small-government, free-market conservative, I’m happy to have the subject laid upon the table for full review and debate, rather than merely creating indistinct bumps and ripples in the ideological cloth that none can help but throw over the top of it all.

 

Note: I’ve extended and clarified the quip about progressive Franciscans because, trying to fit the writing between family obligations, I’d relied too heavily on conversations within my own memory.  Simple sloppiness.  The point wasn’t to say that Pope Francis could have been expected to have progressive leanings because he’s Franciscan… because he’s not Franciscan, he’s a Jesuit.  I had in mind exchanges I’ve overheard between Franciscans and Dominicans in which political leanings could almost (almost) be inferred.

 

1. Introduction
2. Autonomy