Christopher Hitchens used to say that, in modern society, a person’s character is judged by their reputation rather than the other way around. This phenomenon was particularly acute, he noted, when the representatives of faith-based institutions were under consideration. For some reason, religious figures are presumed to merit indulgence on complex matters of ethics and justice. This may be why Pope Francis, who is currently struggling with a bout of illness, enjoys a reputation today as a “lonely moral voice.”
That is, at any rate, the verdict delivered by David Gibson in a recent essay for the New York Times. Gibson, director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University, argues that the Pope puts “the needs and interests of others—including the least powerful—ahead of his own.” And it is this example of pious altruism, Gibson maintains, that has inspired 1.3 million Catholics and anyone else who upholds the values of “humility and mercy” in a weary world.
If Pope Francis embodies humility and mercy, the social value of these qualities requires urgent reexamination. His commentary on the war in Ukraine has been perverse and contemptible. He has inveighed against the “madness” of Western democracies imposing sanctions on Russia and providing an invaded nation with the assistance it needs to defend itself. He has echoed Kremlin propaganda by accusing NATO of “barking” at Russia’s door. And he has repeatedly invoked Mahatma Gandhi’s injunction against national self-defence, insisting that there is no such thing as a “just war.”
Brian Stewart
Pope Francis has been no better on other matters of international security. In 2014, for instance, after the jihadist massacre of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists in Paris, Francis declared that while killing in God’s name is an “absurdity,” freedom of speech had its limits and people really should not be mocking or insulting religious faith. One might have expected something more morally serious from a revered religious leader than a statement that sounds like a reader’s letter to the Guardian.
But Gibson wants to use Francis and his meek faith as a foil for Donald Trump’s deranged moral compass. This is a mistake, and the comparison deserves attention because it consecrates a familiar moral binary on the cultural and political Left. On one side, we are invited to recoil from Trump’s howling moral wilderness; on the other, we can contemplate Francis’s serene hostility to inhumane ideologies. But this false choice can only benefit Trump and other demagogues like him.
“The pope is no starry-eyed moralist,” Gibson assures us in a prophylactic bit of throat-clearing. “‘Reality is greater than ideas,’ as he likes to say, and he is realistic about how the world works.” To justify this rather extravagant claim, Gibson cites Francis’s hatred of “ideologies that hijack minds” as well as his fondness for “the old fashioned politics that gets stuff done.” However, this sits uncomfortably with Gibson’s fatuous assertion that, having pushed for “an inclusive church and an inclusive world,” Francis “was a DEI exponent before that became a bad thing.” After all, this plaintive attempt to dress up DEI as something morally righteous is nothing if not an ideological argument.
Still, if political commitments occasionally seep into the papal worldview, it is still firmly arrayed against power and other tragic elements of the human condition in a fallen world. At a time when America is discarding its foundational values, Gibson contends, it is the Vatican under Francis that is adhering to them most scrupulously. He reminds us that Villanova theologian Massimo Faggioli recently remarked: “In this time of neo-imperial powers, I suspect that the Catholic Church is the best anti-empire that we have.” But this sentence is wrong twice. First, it is ahistorical to suggest that America’s liberal principles can be upheld without hard power. And since a pacifist anti-empire is of no use against the bandit empires of our day, the Catholic Church lacks the means to advance global security and welfare.
The professed anti-politics of Pope Francis and his apologists amounts to little more than a plea for sentimental technocracy, and there is nothing remotely old fashioned about that. It is, in fact, a thoroughly modern (not to mention specious) conception of the role of government. Politics is, as Henry Adams said, “the systematic organization of hatreds.” That Francis objects to the division of the world “into friends to be defended and foes to be fought” does not make him some kind of conservative throwback; it makes him a zealous puritan, profoundly ill-suited to the political arena, to say nothing of the geopolitical jungle.
The elevation of “reality” and “getting stuff done” above the sordid business of “ideas” is not just a rhetorical manoeuvre. It is also a kind of realism that is curiously removed from history and human nature. Neither a narrow pursuit of interest nor an equally narrow emphasis on “humility and mercy” encapsulate the full spectrum of human behaviour. Put differently, ideas are not theoretical abstractions, they are salient elements of what has motivated men and nations since time immemorial. Ideas and ideals—including what Thucydides called honour—have always exerted a great deal of influence over human conduct. Since nations from antiquity to the present have not been able to resist the pull of ideas and beliefs, the attempt to exclude them in favour of “reality” is not merely foolish and coldhearted, it is unrealistic.
What gave Pope John Paul II his moral authority was the revulsion he felt for the horrors of Soviet communism and the clarity with which he described them. Francis, on the other hand, has been incapable of identifying the battles between good and evil in our time, let alone taking a firm and unequivocal stand on the right side of them. He has been a one-man advertising agency for a particularly vapid kind of hope, stripped of nobility and purpose. “Hope, detached from faith and untempered by the evidence of history,” noted Roger Scruton in The Uses of Pessimism, “is a dangerous asset, and one that threatens not only those who embrace it, but all those within range of their illusions.”
If the only alternative to Trump is a self-righteous prophet nursing dangerous illusions about the world, many onlookers will opt to throw in their lot with the carnival barker in the White House, who at least seems to be in contact with the world as it is. The political arena today is overheated but bereft of light. To break out of this vicious cycle, citizens of the free world need a realistic and sensitive moral voice that acknowledges the imperfectability of man and the contradictory nature of progress without surrendering the liberal principles central to the American republic and its allies.
In his bracing new book The Technological Republic, Alex Karp writes perceptively about the symbiotic relationship between utopianism and cynicism. He observes how the prevailing ethical framework of Silicon Valley, which has devolved from a “techno-utopian view that technology would solve all of humanity’s problems” to a more impoverished “utilitarian” approach that exhibits superficial concern for civilisation while caring about little more than its own selfish interests. The result of this pervasive disillusion is hard to distinguish from Trump’s own vision of sauve qui peut. It is no accident that Trump’s second inauguration was brimming with high-tech moguls paying their respects to the once and future ruler.
“A world without a pope like Francis,” Gibson notes, “will in some ways resemble a Hobbesian dystopia without a prophet pointing to our better angels or a sensible idealist showing a better way.” Actually, a world without a pope like Francis would hardly be any different. The grim Hobbesian truths of the world would continue to operate as they always have. There would just be a little less moral rot disseminated from the Vatican to its credulous Catholic flock.
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