Francis: the Fantasy of Church Renewal in a Time of Monsters

 

"Bergoglio played an important role in articulating a new ‘middle ground’ between church traditionalists and the liberationists—a kind of theological ‘third way’. As I argued in an earlier piece on Rebel, it was only after the defeat of liberation theology that opponents within the Church ‘began to endorse some of the language of the movement’ while ‘emptying [them] of their class-based political vision’. The precondition for Bergoglio adopting the role of a critic of ‘unbridled capitalism’ was the success of Rome’s counter-offensive against liberation theology.

Long before he ascended to Rome, Francis had advocated a theology of class reconciliation, of ‘persuad[ing] the rich to surrender power rather than help the poor to take control of their own destiny.’ The source for this was not liberation theology, but the well-known social teachings of Vatican II. Even John Paul had insisted that ‘the development of a more harmonious society is going to require both forgiveness from the poor, for past exploitation, and sacrifice from the rich.’ Francis’s articulation of this well-worn perspective stood out more conspicuously in a neoliberal world, where public discourse was everywhere saturated by the worship of market forces. One sceptic rightly pointed out that in his calls for solidarity between rich and poor and the amelioration of capitalism’s ‘excesses’ Bergoglio had ‘moved from the right to the middle not the left.’

The outlook he brought to Rome was almost explicitly a Catholic articulation of ‘third way’ politics. That Francis’s advocacy of a ‘humane capitalism’ mark him out as a radical iconoclast on the global stage only shows how far politics have lurched to the right in the post-crash period."

MORE IN THE ARTICLE BY BRIAN KELLY

Francis: the Fantasy of Church Renewal in a Time of Monsters - CounterPunch.org