Ron Sachs / CNP
It's a word so chic, so common now, that it's become cliché. But it so perfectly suits Pope Francis, that I must deploy it. The pontiff, you see, is a disruptor.
He disrupts, with his ostentatious humbleness (oh, that adorable Fiat!), your notion of what a pope should be. He speaks harsh truths in a lovingly pastoral tone, and harsh judgments in a voice of equanimity. Deeply conservative on matters of gender equality and sexual orientation, he's been know to serve up words on those topics that lead the world to see him as liberal. (As I've written here, he is not.) With all this talk, though, he mashes up labels and categories that once seemed so clear, perhaps busting up old alliances as a consequence.
Speaking yesterday in the U.S. Capitol Building before a joint session of Congress-the first pope ever to do so-Francis was by turns subtle and blatant in his list of appeals to the lawmakers, but always with the calculated messaging for which his order, the Jesuits, is known. Of the former sort, he appeared to refer to the recent nuclear deal reached with Iran by the U.S. and other Western powers without ever mentioning the name, Iran. Of the latter, he offered this condemnation of the defense industry:
Why are deadly weapons being sold to those who plan to inflict untold suffering on individuals and society? Sadly, the answer, as we all know, is simply for money: money that is drenched in blood, often innocent blood.
He flatly stated "human activity" was responsible for "environmental deterioration," and that lawmakers have a duty to avert that damage. He made a forthright appeal for the welcoming of immigrants to the U.S. In a single sentence he alluded to his opposition to abortion, and then delivered a paragraph calling for the abolishment of the death penalty and the rehabilitation of convicted criminals. He not only decried poverty, but chided lawmakers for serving the wealthy. "If politics must truly be at the service of the human person," he said, "it follows that it cannot be a slave to the economy and finance."
On the matter of marriage equality, the pope was less than explicit, stating only his concern that "the family… is threatened, perhaps as never before, from within and without," and that the "very basis of marriage and the family" is "being called into question." Yet he offered no prescription for that vaguely stated crisis.
Yet the statement made by Francis of perhaps the most potential consequence for the dynamics of U.S. politics went largely unnoticed. "[W]e must be especially attentive to every type of fundamentalism," he said, "whether religious or any other kind." He went on to warn against the dividing of people into camps of "the righteous" and "the sinners." This, he said, is a grave source of polarization.
Now sure, he could have just been talking about ISIS, but I have my doubts. He was standing before a Congress that is teetering on the brink of yet another threatened government shutdown, which would interfere with the provision of what few benefits the nation offers its poor in order teach presumably loose women a lesson by defunding the health care given poor women in Planned Parenthood clinics.
In decrying all fundamentalisms, Francis took aim at a longstanding (and, at one time, improbable) alliance between right-wing Catholics-including much of the Catholic hierarchy in the U.S.-and fundamentalist Protestants. Since the dawn of the Moral Majority in the late 1970s, those two forces have worked together against the liberation of women and LGBT people.
And by using the term "fundamentalism" in a non-specific way, he was likely sending a signal as well to his own bishops, who he has warned against overemphasizing the church's opposition to abortion, contraception and rights for LGBT people, which a bishop who regarded church doctrine through a fundamentalist lens might be wont to do.
And then there's the U.S. Congress itself, populated with many Protestants and Catholics who view themselves as "social conservatives," an identity they derive from either fundamentalist readings of the Bible or the Catholic magisterium. "We know that no religion is immune from forms of individual delusion or ideological extremism," the pontiff told the lawmakers. "A delicate balance is required to combat violence perpetrated in the name of a religion, an ideology or an economic system while also safeguarding religious freedom, intellectual freedoms and individual freedoms."
In his condemnation of fundamentalism, Pope Francis struck at a mode of religious thought that is deeply entwined in the DNA of the American identity, at least as it exists in the United States, with our Puritan heritage and history of religious "awakenings." At the same time, he appeared to take a swipe at his own bishops for making common cause with the fundamentalists from across the denominational divide. If the U.S. bishops were to abandon their fundamentalist allies, that would amount to a significant reordering of American politics.
But I wouldn't bank on that happening just yet. On his way to the Capitol building, the pope stopped off to visit the Little Sisters of the Poor, the order of nuns that sued the Obama administration for the contraception mandate that is part of the Affordable Care Act. That's same provision of the health-care law to which a chain of stores called Hobby Lobby posed a challenge, and won exemption from in a Supreme Court case. The owners of Hobby Lobby are fundamentalist Protestants.
When it comes to keeping women in their place, and seeing them punished for the crime of having sex, the Catholic Church and fundamentalist Protestants will likely collude for some time to come.
