Jim Wallis Book Hype: Embracing the Market Economy?

Coming during the week prior to Easter, I naturally thought the email I received from Sojourners — which I have been reading for my Lenten penance religiously — would contain some spiritual admonishment. “Just one week until … ” the subject line said. Am I at fault for thinking my mind was going to be directed to the good news of human redemption in the Resurrection of the Lord just a few days hence?

Ironically, the organization that so regularly decries free markets and denounces profit-making was merely hyping Jim Wallis’ new book, On God’s Side: What Religion Forgets and Politics Hasn’t Learned about Serving the Common Good. Wallis, as far as I can tell from his previous efforts, wants us to believe that you are on God’s side as long as you are on Jim’s side, because that is God’s side when it comes to economic life.

Fr. Robert A. Sirico Comments on the Election of Pope Francis

Fr. Robert A. Sirico has released the following statement on the election of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio as pope:

“Pope Francis is a man of great spirituality who is known for his commitment to doctrinal orthodoxy as well as for his simplicity of life,” Fr. Sirico said. “Like Benedict XVI, he combines concern for the poor with an insistence that it’s not the Church’s responsibility to be a political actor or to prescribe precise solutions to economic problems. In that regard, he’s a model for all Catholic bishops and clergy throughout the world.”

Vatican Smoke Signals

Here’s a curious tidbit regarding the fumata, the white or black smoke that will rise from the Sistine Chapel’’s chimney signaling whether a pope has been elected or not.

“It is sometimes hard to distinguish the actual color of the smoke, such as in 2005”. Back then, I knew for sure there was a successful vote for pope when I saw the fumata in the middle of the afternoon session, even though it was difficult to tell if it was white or black.

Here’s why. Cardinals cast two ballots in the morning and another two ballots in the afternoon. However, if a pope is successfully elected after the first of the two ballots, then their votes are burned and white chemicals are added to report a positive outcome. “Otherwise, they wait to burn both ballots all in one fumata.

At the very end of the morning or afternoon the smoke can be white or black. But if we see the fumata mid-morning or mid-afternoon, then it has to be white for a successful election.

At the Vatican Conclave: The Lull before the Storm

ROME — For all the ‘Vaticanisti’ (journalists specializing in the Vatican) sitting around Rome and interviewing one another for the last several weeks, the wholesale consumption of high blood pressure medication took a precipitous drop on the announcement Friday afternoon that the Conclave to elect the new pope would occur on Tuesday, March 12, one day later than I had predicted several weeks ago.  Now is the lull before the storm. A Mass praying for the election of the pope will be followed by the first voting session of the Conclave in the early evening.

With many media outlets waiting for that date to be announced, the remaining hotel rooms left in Rome will be gobbled up, and by Monday evening we can expect an influx of the rest of the 5000 journalists accredited to the Holy See to cover the event.

It is difficult not to compare the lead up to this Conclave to the last one I had the opportunity to witness eight years ago.  Then, of course, one of the monumental figures of the twentieth century had passed from the scene after a long and highly visible bout with Parkinson’s disease.  By the time I had arrived to provide commentary at the BBC location above St. Peter’s Square, the body of John Paul II was being translated (an elegant way of saying the body was ‘moved’) from the Apostolic Palace where the pope lived and died, to beneath the Bernini colonnades in the center of St. Peter’s Basilica. It was a slow, mournful and moving sight.  By the time the body of the Polish pope was laid in state at the foot of the papal altar lines, long line, began forming down boulevard leading to the basilica.  The crowds would grow in the following days to estimates ranging from three to four million pilgrims to pay the last respects the John Paul II.

As I arrived in Rome earlier this week, there was, of course, no pope laying in state, not papal funeral in the offing.  The main events were the general congregation of cardinals becoming better acquainted with one another in anticipation of their votes, and developing priorities for the future of the church.  Rome did not appear filled to the brim as I had seen it eight years ago, or evening in other periods of tourism, canonizations or sporting events.

The fact that cardinals are vowed not to discuss in any detail the deliberations meant there was very little real news to be had.  I saw a reporter in the famous Gammarelli tailor shop interviewing the four generations of the Gammarelli family on what it is like to be the papal tailor, asking the same questions one can find in most guide books.

So this is the mood presently in Rome as we wait for the Conclave to begin. Even during the Conclave there will be no hard news to report as the Cardinals will be completely cut off from the world, both the Sistine Chapel where the actual voting takes place, and the Casa Santa Marta, where the cardinals will reside as of Monday evening, are all technologically jammed.

What to expect when voting actually begins on Tuesday evening:  Expect black smoke Tuesday.  This first vote will in effect enable the cardinal to determine, who, in fact, the front runners are.  As it will take 77 votes out of 115 to elect a new pope, any candidate with more than 40 votes will attract a great deal of attention – by the cardinals that is, because those of us on the outside won’t even know about it. Stay tuned.

Tradition Guides Selection of New Pope

The whole world is watching as leaders consider new pontiff

Add to this the rumors of financial and sexual scandals among men vowed to chastity, the entire scene becomes a veritable perfect storm. Shakespeare might have condemned it "as improbable fiction" were it portrayed on a stage (Twelfth Night). But this is real life.

Behind the sets and grandeur of Bernini's colonnades and under the frescos of Michelangelo sit human beings, much like other human beings, with all the same foibles, ambitions, vices, as well as sincere piety and hope for the future of an institution they do indeed love, have given their lives to and, yes, even sometimes betray.

And so we come to both the drama and the reality of the election of a new pope. As has already been widely noted, this election is rare in that a successor is being selected even while his predecessor is still alive, something that last occurred almost two centuries before Columbus set sail to find new trade routes to the Indies.

To say the retirement of a pope is a break with tradition is an understatement, and this is made all the more notable in that it has been undertaken by a man most noted for his adherence to Tradition.

But there is tradition and there is Tradition in the Catholic religion. What Benedict XVI was bound to, indeed what any member of the faithful is bound to, is the Tradition of the Apostles, that is, orthodoxy or 'right belief" — doctrines and dogma (that's right, even in this age of inclusivity, Christians still make truth claims expressed in their creeds and doctrines). All this is to say that Benedict, while embracing an option available to him that had been rarely exercised, is not abandoning the Tradition. Canon Law provided for this possibility, and for reasons explained by the Pope Emeritus himself, and speculated upon by pundits and conspiracy theorists of all stripes.

Still, the potential consequences of such a decision are complex and forms part of the discussion that is taking place among the College of Cardinals in their General Congregations, which began Monday. Such General Congregations, a normal part of the process leading up to a conclave, gives all cardinals (including those over 80 who are not electors in the conclave) an opportunity to assess the state and needs of the church as well as one another.

Probably the topic of most speculation since the announcement of Benedict's resignation is who the next pope will be. No one, not even the most well-informed Cardinal or Vatican journalist, has a clear answer to that question. Anyone telling you otherwise is dreaming. From one pontificate to the next, the difficulty of predicting the outcome varies. This time, for a number of reasons, a prediction is as difficult as can be. A quick conclave, over in four ballots (which is what it took to elect Benedict), is unlikely.

The first is that the usual decline in health of a pope provides a period of sifting: Inquiries into the background, experience, competencies and style of those who might be pope (termed papabili, literally "popeable"). Benedict's abrupt resignation eliminated both that gestation period and the time the cardinals would have over the traditional nine days of mourning, celebrating masses together in Rome. Instead, the cardinals have gone directly into the General Congregations.

A second factor is that unlike the transition from John Paul II to Benedict, there is no obvious front-runner, no single cardinal that universally stands out as an obvious successor.

What does all this mean for the days ahead? Time. Time for the sifting process to allow the cardinals to get to know one another in this new light; time to get to the bottom of the problems related to the spirituality and governance of the Roman Curia (the bureaucracy that is supposed to help formulate, administer and communicate the decisions of the pope), which, even before the "Vatileaks" exposure, was well-known for its rivalries and cronyism; and time for the actual election process itself, due to procedural changes introduced since the last conclave, now requiring a two-thirds vote of the cardinals to elect a pope for up to 33 ballots.

In the next two weeks or so, you will hear much of the media asking a rotating list of questions as to the profile for the next pope: Will he allow priests to marry, ordain women, permit contraception? Such questions, while of interest to those mildly intrigued or bemused by the church, nonetheless betray a fundamental misunderstanding of how authentic Catholics see themselves.

For them, the church is not some kind of hybrid spiritual-political movement needing to be attentive to its constituencies priorities and preferences, one that was started to respond to various trends in society and culture. The church does see not see itself an institution or a club that must alter its beliefs to reflect the lifestyles of its members or clients. The church is not something Christians design or make up, but something that Christians inherit. It is seen as the revelation of God requiring a loving acceptance of the truth it discloses to the world. People are free to reject that truth, of course. But the church exists to propose (not impose) its claims. In this sense, the church does not reflect or so much respond to culture as it creates culture, centered on Christ and his intransigent claim on the human heart.

For some, this will be repulsive. I hope it, at least, will be informative. But for others, for millions upon millions down the two millennia, it will constitute one's highest call.

I suspect that the cardinals meeting in Rome will be looking to find one of their number sufficiently grounded in this view of existence, in this Tradition, who they believe will be confident and even winsome in communicating these ancient claims to an increasingly secular and skeptical world; a man who will have sufficient insight into the human condition to enable him to uncover the many competent and even saintly gems that exist within the Curia — along with the backbone to eliminate the others. I suspect they will look for a man of sufficient dedication, passion and charity who will emulate the flawed fisherman whose shoes he will fill.

This article originally appeared in The Detroit News. 

On the Pope's Resignation

It is a sobering thought to think that the last time a Pope resigned (Pope Gregory XII in 1415), American had not yet been discovered. Yes, the possibility of a Pope’s resignation is anticipated in Canon Law (Canon 332), as long as it is disclosed “properly” and of his own free will. Pope Benedict met both the conditions in his statement earlier today to the consistory.

Three things are worth noting:

1) Even from before his election as Pope, Ratzinger has seen himself as frail; during his reign, he paced himself with his work load, trips, and meetings. This, despite the fact that he evidently comes from a family that enjoys longevity.

2) Usually, conclaves take place after a period of mourning for the deceased pontiff. It is a time of prayer and reflection, to be sure, but also a time of informal conversations among the cardinals as to who can best serve the Church as successor to St. Peter. This time, such conversations will take place with a different backdrop, and theoretically at least, the conclave could take place soon after the resignation. I would imagine we will have a Pope elected by Easter.

3) Anyone who tells you there is a “front-runner” simply does not know what he is talking about. The ripening period for “papabili” to emerge has just begun, though were I forced to identify one or two possibilities, I would look at the Canadian cardinal Marc Ouellet (head of the Congregation of Bishops), or Cardinal Angelo Scola, archbishop of Milan (the Italians very much want the papacy back), or even Cardinal George Pell from Australia. If we are hoping for an American, of course, the archbishop of New York, Cardinal Timothy Dolan would be great.

This article originally appeared at National Review Online. 

Freedom and Chaos

Freedom is a word that can mean dramatically different things to different people in different settings. The kind of freedom that leads to human flourishing—and that is sustainable over time—is freedom in a much richer sense than what many people mean by freedom today.

Let me take the point even further. True freedom is actually the opposite of what has been called "freedom" at some times and some places. One example from the previous century illustrates what I mean.

The Constitution guaranteed freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion. I'm not talking about the U.S. Constitution, although the same could be said of it. I'm talking about the Soviet Constitution of 1924. And after that constitution took effect, political dissidents were brutally suppressed; priests, ministers, and rabbis were deported to the Gulag; houses of worship were shuttered; and the press was hammered into line with an iron fist. Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev did all of this even while the text of the nation's constitution proclaimed a paradise of liberty. In the minds of those men, freedom wasn't about the God-given rights of individuals that must be respected by governments. It was about free scope for the will of the proletariat—for whom they were the only legitimate representatives, of course.

This kind of confusion about freedom didn't end with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Visit almost any major university in America and you'll find individuals praising freedom while admiring ruthless totalitarians, usually without the least sense of irony or awareness of the contradiction. And often the totalitarians being praised are the ones who, while busily stamping out freedom, are reassuring everyone that they're stamping in order to free the people, stamping in pursuit of "national liberty and equality," stamping for "the pacific co-existence and fraternal collaboration of peoples."

Why does all of this matter? When liberty and freedom can mean so many different things—sometimes diametrically opposing things—we are no longer free to have a meaningful conversation about political freedom, at least not until we talk about what exactly we mean when we use these terms.

To some, freedom means nothing more than the license to do whatever they want, when they want—as when a wild teenager longs to be "free of all these stupid rules." To others, freedom means the liberty to worship God freely according to the dictates of their conscience, or the right to govern themselves through duly elected representatives. President Franklin Roosevelt talked about freedom in terms of government-supplied security and even welfare—freedom from want, freedom from fear, and so forth. But the Founders who wrote the U.S. Constitution thought about liberty as limiting what government was allowed to do, and their understanding of freedom was tied up in the old notion of freedom in Christ, which is why they repeatedly emphasized that the constitutional republic they had formed was, as John Adams put it, "made only for a moral and religious people" and "wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

Freedom has a wide variety of meanings—some people think of it as the ability to do what they know they ought to do, even when it is not attractive at the moment, as when a lonely husband remains faithful to his wife while on a business trip, or a recovered alcoholic has achieved enough self-control to live a life of sobriety. For still others, it means what the great twentieth century Dominican theologian Servais Pinckaers called "freedom for excellence," as when a pianist strives to master a demanding piece by Rachmaninoff and is finally able to play it with ease and fluidity.

So let's look at what freedom is and can be. This need not be a terribly abstract and philosophical examination. We can use our common sense and elementary logic. The best of philosophy is looking simply but seriously at things as they really are. Let's begin with what we know, each of us, about ourselves.

I think it can be easily observed that there is something innate in the human heart that responds positively to the idea of liberty— no doubt in more than one sense of the word. People have pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to its defense. Over the course of the last century, countless men and women risked their lives to flee from totalitarian domination into a realm of freedom. People— perhaps even some we have known personally—swam shark-infested waters, climbed electrified fences, catapulted over barriers, dug their way through tunnels, and outran guard dogs and border guards— all to escape bondage and reach a place where they could breathe free. To be aware of what human beings have sacrificed for freedom is to understand that freedom is not a garnish on life but one of the central quests of the human experience. The human heart has a natural orientation toward liberty. We are built this way, regardless of our religion or ethnicity; indeed, all men are endowed with liberty and a deep desire for it.

What is it about freedom that makes it so irresistible a goal—and yet still so complex an idea that we can become confused about what it is? Alexis de Tocqueville—perhaps the greatest observer of the uniqueness of America—can help us get a grasp on it. "Freedom is, in truth, a sacred thing," he insists. "There is only one thing else that better deserves the name: that is virtue." And then he asks, "What is virtue if not the free choice of what is good?"

The yearning for freedom is built into our bones. Of course, human beings are corporeal like other animals. We are bodies, subject to the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology. But unlike other animals, the human person has the additional capacity to transcend himself. Even non-believers can observe this aspect of human personhood, for example when a person falls in love and discovers more of himself or herself, even while giving that self away to the other. We also experience this transcendent aspect of the human person in the exaltation we feel in beautiful music, great art, or poetry.


This article, which originally appeared in "Religion & Liberty Vol. 22 No 3," is drawn from my new book, Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy. (Regnery, May 2012).