The late Pope Francis was the least favorite pope of American conservatives. In 2020, when Francis published an encyclical a month before the U.S. election, he seemed to be playing to his part as “the liberal Pope.”
The encyclical envisioned a world “without borders,” sang of a “universal brotherhood,” and called mankind “children of the same earth which is our common home.”
E.J. Dionne, a liberal Catholic, celebrated it almost as some sort of anti-Trump October Surprise — an attack on “Trump’s worldview.”
The Zeitgeist, in 2020, was a radical one. We were supposed to stay home and obey the experts, wear masks, conform to elite opinion, hate America, forget our past, and reject basic biology. Now the liberal pope was publishing an airy ode to Saint Francis?
Hardly.
Fratelli Tutti, the Pope’s third encyclical, will actually stand out to historians not so much as counterprogramming to Trump, but as counterprogramming to the liberal spirit of the day.
Francis regularly inveighed against the hyperindividualism implicit in global capitalism, but in Fratelli Tutti, he also excoriated the hyperindividualism present in an autonomy-worshipping rejection of unchosen things such as family, tradition, and local community.
It’s this liberalism, an individualistic, transactional, modern worship of autonomy, that Francis challenged.
Francis was inscrutable to the American media because he never quite fit the American political framework, and the viewpoint he put forth in Fratelli Tutti embodies this most of all. More than left or right, Francis preached a very embodied, tangible view of humans, that we are fundamentally relational creatures, whose bodies and physical locations are not meaningless accidents, but are central to the identity God gave each of us.
“Human beings are so made that they cannot live, develop and find fulfilment except ‘in the sincere gift of self to others,’” the Holy Father wrote. “Nor can they fully know themselves apart from an encounter with other persons.”
Fratelli Tutti means “brothers, all,” and it gives off some Kumbaya vibes: Everyone is your brother, mankind is your neighbor, let’s tear down all divisions. Francis hit some of those notes, but he was careful to emphasize the indispensability of the local.
“We need to pay attention to the global so as to avoid narrowness and banality,” Francis wrote. “Yet we also need to look to the local, which keeps our feet on the ground.”
Echoing the 20th-century philosopher Hannah Arendt, Francis warned against “an authoritarian and abstract universalism, devised or planned by a small group and presented as an ideal for the sake of levelling, dominating and plundering.”
Mass culture, he argued, “unifies the world, but divides persons and nations, for ‘as society becomes ever more globalized, it makes us neighbors, but does not make us brothers.’” The last line is a quotation from his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI.
“We are more alone than ever in an increasingly massified world that promotes individual interests and weakens the communitarian dimension of life,” Francis added.
This is a conservative message, and it’s a message the American Right and Left both need to hear. “The local has to be eagerly embraced,” Francis wrote, “for it possesses something that the global does not: It is capable of being a leaven, of bringing enrichment, of sparking mechanisms of subsidiarity.”
And Francis was a leading voice in warning about the greatest crisis facing mankind over the next generation: the baby bust.
“A decline in the birthrate,” Francis wrote, “is a subtle way of stating that it is all about us, that our individual concerns are the only thing that matters.”
One reason the local and the nuclear family enrich us is precisely because it involves encountering real, flawed individual people — and ones we didn’t choose. Our neighbors are often something given to us, without our consent. Our brothers, sisters, and parents are even less chosen.
In this age where technology and modern conveniences promise us a fully bespoke, fully consensual life, we need something to ground us again.
Francis was also, in a subtle way, rejecting cancel culture, which was peaking, hopefully, in those heady days. “Even people who can be considered questionable on account of their errors have something to offer which must not be overlooked.”
PETER LAFFIN: POPE FRANCIS ‘WAS NOT LEFT OR RIGHT’ BUT CONNECTED ‘GOD DOWN TO US’
You don’t get to craft your life as a bespoke project. You are not merely an atomized bundle of rights. Autonomy is something of an illusion.
This is a worldview held in disdain in much of the West, especially America. Francis was right to pull us away from it — a pull not to the left or the right, but back down to Earth.