The bishops were watching, but were ordinary Catholics? The two synods and Amoris had polarized the hierarchy, the theologate, and the commentariat, but their impact on the pope’s image and popularity among the faithful seemed modest, even negligible. In most surveys of public opinion Francis remained popular with most Catholics, generally slightly more so than Benedict and slightly less than the beloved John Paul II. If you peered closely at the polling, in the United States and worldwide, you could sometimes discern the existence of conservative discontent—but you had to peer very closely indeed, making distinctions between “very favorable” and “somewhat favorable” responses, to find anything that looked like disillusionment.
Here and there a parish controversy flared up: a priest in Italy clashing with his congregation after he criticized the pope, priests in Latin America and Malta clashing with their bishops over the interpretation of Amoris. But these were minor, sporadic, exceptional. There were many anecdotes about how the synods were received, with liberals talking eagerly about ex-Catholics returning to the fold and conservatives talking grimly about confusion and discouragement. But the data didn’t suggest anything all that big was happening—neither a sudden renewal nor major, post–Vatican II–style turmoil. At most you could say that just as nations and dioceses were polarizing in response to Francis’s decentralization of doctrine, so were parishes to some extent—that Francis was giving more liberal parishes and priests a license to experiment, and traditional and conservative congregations a reason to act a little more militant and embattled. But such modest polarization was not an active crisis. The Amoris wars raged fiercely on the Internet, but in everyday parish life they came up as just one controversy among many, if at all.
In the summer of 2017 the American bishops organized a big event in Orlando, Florida—a “convocation of Catholic leaders” in which about thirty-five hundred priests and nuns and laypeople from around the country crowded into a convention center to hold panels and talks and networking events, all organized around “The Joy of the Gospel,” Pope Francis’s blueprint for evangelization from the distant-seeming first year of his pontificate. John Allen, the Vatican reporter, was at the event, and he remarked on the gap between the polarizing elite debate over Francis and the way that most convocation goers talked about him—mostly with enthusiasm, sometimes with a “but” included on the Amoris debate or the pope’s incautious interview style or some other specific point, but without the fear or rancor evident in Rome or among some cardinals and theologians or on Twitter. There is “a mismatch between the public debate about Francis and the reality on the ground,” Allen argued: Vatican conflicts grab headlines in the press and inspire furious online argument, but “if you want to know what most Catholics are actually thinking about Francis, get off Twitter and into the trenches.”1
This gulf was often cited by the pope’s partisans: Because there was no crisis in the pews in the strange months after Amoris, they argued that there was no crisis whatsoever. Just as they had suggested during the synods that any conflict was a creation of the media, in the wake of Amoris and the dubia many of Francis’s admirers argued that the division over the pope’s teaching wasn’t very serious, that Burke was a melodramatist and other critics attention seekers and the journalists giving them aid and comfort were desperate for a headline, that the document itself was quite clear and not remotely controversial to most Catholics, that anyone who murmured about schism or fretted about heresy was a hysteric . . . and that conservative discontent under Francis was just the mirror image of liberal discontent under John Paul II and no more threatening to church unity.
In the end, wrote Austen Ivereigh, the papal biographer and his subject’s most indefatigable English-language advocate, the agita about changes to church teaching was confined to a narrow claque. They were “lay, educated and from the wealthy world or the wealthy parts of the developing world . . . mostly intellectuals and lawyers and teachers and writers who put great store in their reason.” But the mass of Catholics didn’t share their insistent textual criticism and scrupulosity. “Even as they insist that there is a debate to be had, a case to answer, a matter to be settled, the train is leaving the station, and they are left on the platform, waving their arms.”2
Ivereigh was echoing what Archbishop Fernández, the papal ghostwriter, had said a year earlier, between the two synods, when he was asked if he saw a risk of “two churches” developing under Francis—one loyal to the official magisterium as conservatives understood it, and one to the pope’s potential innovations. The archbishop was dismissive: “There’s a schism when a group of important people share the same sensibilities that reflect those of a vast section of society,” he said. “Luther and Protestantism came about this way. But now the overwhelming majority of the people are with Francis and they love him. His opponents are weaker than what you think. Not pleasing everyone does not mean provoking a schism.”3
There was some truth to these points. As yet, nothing Francis had done had transformed the day-to-day life of the church in the way that Vatican II had reshaped things for ordinary Catholics. The specific debates of the synods and Amoris and the dubia turned on questions that could seem abstract and technical, and the groups most excited by them were what you might call professional Catholics—clerics and theologians and the church watchers in the press. There was no massive grassroots rebellion brewing, no vast army of restive Catholics ready to march out of their parishes in protest if their bishops or pastors interpreted the pope’s reforms in one particular fashion or another. The unsettled and unhappy constituted a minority of churchgoers, and they didn’t exactly have somewhere else to walk out to. When observers wrote about the possibility of schism, it was far easier to envision in theory than in practice.
So the crisis, for the time being, was clearly an elite battle, not parish-by-parish trench warfare. But even with that important concession made, the situation was still rather extraordinary. The wrestling matches between conservative bishops and the pope’s allies at the synods, the thirteen cardinals’ intervention, the tension between the pope and his own Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the dubia and the idea of a “correction” of the pope—all of these had no obvious precedent in the modern history of the Catholic Church. The dissent after Humanae Vitae and John Paul II’s conflicts with liberal factions had been serious, but they hadn’t produced these kinds of fractures in the very heart of the hierarchy, this level of rhetorical escalation on both sides. No liberal cardinal had gone as far as Burke in challenging a reigning pope, and neither John Paul nor Benedict had been so personal, persistent, and direct in attacking the motives and indeed the morals of their critics. To the extent that there were precedents for this level of open controversy, they belonged more to the early-modern and medieval periods, and to late antiquity—and they were precisely the cases that scholars and theologians long remembered as major theological crises for the church.
That those past crises had often been accompanied by massive turbulence and this one, as yet, has not, suggested that it might yet be defused. But the turbulence of the past, when arguments over Jesus’s divinity or the nature of the sacraments were tangled up with major popular upheavals, also reflected the church’s greater temporal power and cultural importance in those eras. The political and populist intensity of the Lutheran-Catholic struggle or the Christological battles of the late Roman era were always unlikely to be replicated in an age with a secularized mass culture and a church that no longer wields much temporal power. What was happening in the Francis era—a war of words between Catholic elites, with the mass of churchgoers watching uncertainly or indifferently—was how you would expect a major theological controversy to begin in a more disenchanted and less zealous era, in which theology matters less than in the medieval or Reformation-era past because the church itself is less politically powerful and culturally dominant.
And Francis’s defenders, when it suited them, seemed to understand that. They only downplayed the stakes when the pope faced some sort of setback or opposition; the rest of the time, they tended to play up the significance of what he was attempting to accomplish. Ivereigh’s biography was subtitled “The Making of a Radical Pope”—and he was one of the more moderate, continuity-focused of the pope’s defenders. In the Archbishop Fernández interview in which he dismissed the risk of schism, the archbishop also promised that Francis aimed at “irreversible” changes in the life of the church, with a “deep impact” that would endure and prevent any “turning back.”4 The rhetoric of papal admirers generally was replete with talk of a great renewal, a move of the Holy Spirit, a train rushing down the track, a “Francis revolution,” a struggle for Catholicism’s very soul.
Their sense of the high stakes involved was also clear enough from the way their own arguments slipped, very easily, from defending the Kasper proposal as the most modest of changes in one breath to cheering sweeping changes in the next. The Kasper proposal is just a change of discipline, not doctrine . . . but by the way, the church should also establish intercommunion with Protestants as soon as possible. Conservatives are wildly overreacting when they interpret Amoris as a kind of surrender to the sexual revolution . . . but by the way, the church should offer recognition to gay couples and grant last rites to suicides and revisit Humanae Vitae and for heaven’s sake stop obsessing about abortion. It is ludicrous to suggest that Francis was changing doctrine on marriage . . . but by the way, his casual comments on the death penalty and just war meant that he was developing church teaching on those issues too, and soon any Catholic who favored capital punishment would be out of step with the modern magisterium. It is absurd to suggest that any core Catholic teaching was at stake in the synodal debates . . . but by the way, Jesus’s strict teachings on marriage probably reflected his mistaken view that the world was about to end, or maybe we just don’t know what Jesus really said, because after all the gospel writers didn’t have tape recorders. It is ludicrous to draw analogies between the Amoris controversies and the great debates over Arianism or Gnosticism or Lutheranism . . . but in fact, now that you mention it, some semi-Arian understandings of Jesus, some semi-Gnostic concepts of the human person, some semi-Lutheran understandings of sin or the sacraments, might actually deserve a home in the Catholic Church. It was ridiculous to say that Catholicism’s intellectual integrity and theological consistency were at stake in the remarriage debate . . . but in fact it’s time for the church to acknowledge that “theology is not Mathematics,” and if necessary “2+2 in theology can make 5.”5
I am plucking from a variety of pro-Francis Catholic sources for these examples—bishops, theologians, and journalists—and one could easily add more. (The tape recorder comment belongs to the new Jesuit superior-general, Arturo Sosa, delivered to a slightly stunned Italian interviewer early in 2017; the 2+2=5 to the indefatigable Father Spadaro, answering his critics on Twitter.) The ease and frequency with which this slippage happened—from support for “modest” reform to support for every reform proposed since 1962; from support for Walter Kasper to questioning the Nicene Creed—suggested that certain Francis’s apologists knew very well that they weren’t just defending simple pastoral flexibility against the rigor of conservatives. Flexibility they surely wanted, but there was also clearly a more revolutionary vision implied and waiting underneath.
The heart of this vision, appropriately for an idea with such strong support in Germany, was Hegelian—the idea that God’s revelation was perpetually unfolding in history, and that therefore it was a mistake to consider Catholicism a closed system in which questions were settled permanently. The liberal Protestant line, “Never put a period where God has put a comma,” was the basic presupposition for this liberal Catholicism as well. Nothing, save Christ’s divinity and not necessarily even that, could be closed to debate, and the message that the church was called to preach in one era might be very different in the next.
Of course this idea was not new to the Francis era. It was woven into liberal Catholicism in the 1960s and 1970s and into modernist Catholicism before that. And the slippage from modesty toward revolution, from a subtle change to a more sweeping follow-up, was likewise characteristic of the long battle over Vatican II’s implications.
So it was fair to say that in the hindsight of, say, twenty-fifth-century Catholic scholarship, the crisis of the Francis era would not be studied in isolation, as a theological storm breaking unlooked-for on the church. Rather it was a particularly dramatic moment in the longer-lasting conflict over how much the church should accommodate to liberal modernity, how much revelation could be revised in the light of new historical contingencies, and how closely Catholicism could imitate Episcopalianism while doing so.
But in the context of that long conflict, the debate that Francis ushered in was not only dramatic but possibly decisive—opening possibilities for reform that had been heretofore only theoretical, opening scenarios for division that had been heretofore seen as dangers only for Protestant churches, and distilling, in the question of communion for the remarried, all the ways that liberals believed that the church must change and all the reasons why conservatives insisted that it could not change and still remain the church.
Which still left open the question of how it would end. And if it were analogous to past theological controversies, perhaps one of them could provide a template.
• • •
For conservatives scrambling to find examples in the Catholic past where a pope had imperiled orthodoxy and then been corrected, two instances—both mentioned in the first chapter of this book as cautionary tales for pontiffs—came up repeatedly. One was John XXII, pope from 1316 to 1334, while the papacy was based in Avignon but before the Great Schism that eventually followed from this relocation. Born Jacques Dueze to a shoemaker in Cahors, educated in medicine and canon law, and elevated to the papacy with the support of France’s Philip V, his relatively long reign (which forms the backdrop to Umberto Eco’s intellectual potboiler The Name of the Rose) featured a number of controversies, but one that was particularly memorable, because the pope ultimately lost.
Late in his reign, John XXII began preaching on the question of whether Christians experienced the beatific vision—in layman’s terms, “heaven”—immediately after death (or immediately after being purified in purgatory). He argued that they did not, that until the end of the world and general resurrection of the dead they were kept in a kind of semi-heaven, “under the altar,” in a state of happiness at one remove from the divine. (To reconcile his position with Jesus’s words to the good thief on the cross that “today you will be with me in paradise,” John argued that Jesus’s human nature somehow would be present to console and bless the blessed dead, even as his divine nature remained hidden with the Father.)
Debates about the next life were as potent in medieval Christendom as debates about sexual ethics are in late modernity, and John had placed himself on the wrong side of both popular piety and much of the church’s tradition. (Thomas Aquinas had pre-butted his argument in the century previous.) “The whole Christian world was troubled” by his sermons, a contemporary wrote, and various theologians wrote to rebuke him; when he attempted to impose his views on the university of the Sorbonne, they were joined in the rebuke by the king of France himself. So severe was the controversy that the pope, on his deathbed, agreed to a kind of retraction. He stated that he had delivered the sermons strictly as a private theologian, without the binding authority of papal teaching. Then his successor, Benedict XII, swiftly moved to correct his predecessor and clarify Catholic teaching, formally defining as a dogma of the church that “the souls of all the saints . . . before they take up their bodies again and before the general judgment, have been, are and will be with Christ in heaven,” where they see God “face to face, without the mediation of any creature.”6
The implications of this case for conservative critics of the Francis papacy were obvious. Here was an instance where a pope’s own preaching had expressed a heretical position, less ambiguously by far than anything in Amoris Laetitia, and where resistance from the wider church had forced him to essentially back down.
Similar implications could be drawn from an earlier case, involving Pope Honorius I, pontiff from 625 to 638, who presided over the theological controversy on whether Christ had a single, divine will; or two wills, human and divine, working in harmony with one another. Honorius, in his correspondence and in negotiation with the emperor and the churches of the East, favored the one-will view, known as Monothelitism. The church as a whole did not, and both Monothelitism and Honorius himself were condemned and anathematized by an ecumenical council forty years later, and by one of Honorius’s papal successors, Leo II, who judged him guilty of “profane treachery” against the truths of Catholic faith.
When the debate over papal infallibility was joined more than a millennium later, however, the official view was that Honorius had never formally defined Monothelitism as a doctrine. He had strayed only in correspondence, not in public teaching, and therefore his error, even his treachery, was compatible with the limited view of papal infallibility that the First Vatican Council ultimately defined in 1870. Nonetheless there was no question that he had tacitly supported a heresy—and so again, for Catholics who feared Francis’s moves on marriage, he offered precedent for pushing back against the pope.
But the analogy that had the most appeal to Francis-resisting conservatives was a much more famous one: the grand controversy of Arianism, which consumed the church for much of the fourth century and flared periodically thereafter.
The Arian heresy was named for an Alexandrian theologian, Arius, who rejected Jesus’s full divinity in favor of a kind of halfway position that made the Nazarene a kind of demi-god—adopted and divinized by God the Father, not preexisting and eternal with him. The Council of Nicaea, which helped produce the creed that Catholics (and many other Christians) still proclaim, was summoned by the Emperor Constantine in 325 to address the rise of Arianism, and its attendees voted overwhelmingly for what we know now as the orthodox position on Christology—that Jesus was “consubstantial,” of one being, with the eternal God.
But its settlement was steadily undermined for the next few decades. Despite what Nicaea had ruled, Constantine’s successors favored the Arian position, and so did the imperial elite and many bishops. Under their influence, a succession of church synods adopted various semi-Arian and Arian formulations (until the Christian world “awoke with a groan to find itself Arian,” Saint Jerome wrote) and the defenders of the orthodox position were pressured, silenced, and exiled. Only in the late fourth century, after the Emperor Julian’s pagan interregnum and another round of pro-Arian efforts by one of his successors, Valens, did the orthodox emperor Theodosius ratify and enforce the Nicene position once again. Meanwhile, Arianism had been exported to the newly Christianized Germanic tribes, so the controversy simmered for centuries as Vandals and Visigoths and Franks adapted to orthodoxy.
This summary skims over a controversy in which theological distinctions were parsed exceedingly finely, and as one pagan writer sniped, “the highways were covered with galloping bishops.” But for the purposes of contemporary analogies a few points stand out. First, while the details of the theological arguments could get esoteric quickly, at bottom the appeal of Arianism was the appeal of a more rationalized Christianity, in which the mystery and paradoxes of the Trinity would give way to a more straightforward doctrine that posed fewer problems for philosophical assumptions about the unity of God. This appeal explains why Arian ideas have returned, under various guises, in many eras: There are Arian influences in the Islamic view of Jesus, in various Enlightenment revisions of Christianity, Unitarianism especially, and in certain tendencies in liberal Christianity and Catholicism in the present day.
Second, the Arian controversy featured numerous attempts to revive the heresy through deliberately ambiguous formulations, designed to allow what remained a minority viewpoint among the church’s bishops to appear as a consensus view. To quote John Henry Newman’s theological history of the period, Arianism presented itself as “a sceptical rather than a dogmatic teaching . . . proposing to inquire into and reform the received creed, rather than to hazard one of its own.”7 As the church historian Claudio Pierantoni notes, even during the high tide of Arian power, the councils of 357–60, “the pro-Arian minority does not venture to put forward a position too clearly in opposition with the traditional view . . . it does not expressly state that the Son is inferior to the Father . . . although holding the reins of power, it seeks to conceal itself.”8 Instead, in synod after synod, debate after debate, there was an attempt to find (to quote Newman again) some formula “so faintly precise and so decently ambiguous, as to embrace the greatest number of opinions possible”9—a formula that did not express Arianism clearly but undermined the orthodox position nonetheless.
Third, in part because they had the refuge of ambiguity, many of the era’s bishops found reasons to go along with the Arianizing drift, sometimes under pressure and sometimes of their own accord. This was the original “suspense of the magisterium,” the period to which Newman’s line was actually applied: It was a period in which, as he wrote, “the body of Bishops failed in their confession of the faith. They spoke variously, one against another; there was nothing, after Nicaea, of firm, unvarying, consistent testimony, for nearly sixty years.”10
Whether this failure included the pope himself remains a matter of some debate. The pontiff in the crucial years, Liberius, was a staunch-enough defender of the Nicene Creed that the Arian emperor Constantius exiled him to Thrace in 355 and installed an antipope, Felix, in his place. While in exile, Liberius supposedly agreed to sign on to Arian formulas in a trio of letters; the letters that have come down to us, however, are likely forgeries, and historians are uncertain whether Liberius actually succumbed to imperial pressure. In either case, no one considers letters written under duress to constitute infallible teaching: “If he really consorted with heretics,” the editors of the 1912 Catholic Encyclopedia wrote, “it was a momentary human weakness which no more compromises the papacy than does that of St. Peter.”11
But nonetheless, if Liberius did not fully succumb to Arianism, the papacy was certainly not orthodoxy’s greatest champion either. That honor belongs to Athanasius of Alexandria, bishop of that city for forty-five years, and memorialized with the phrase Athanasius contra mundum—Athanasius against the world—for the seventeen years he spent in varying periods of exile ordered by four separate emperors, and the multiple condemnations he endured from various Arian-dominated church councils. Turbulent and disputatious, Athanasius and his allies—among them Saint Hilary of Poitiers, the “Athanasius of the West”—are the reason what we know as orthodoxy survived imperial edicts and episcopal compromises, and why Catholics today still say “begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father” every Sunday between the sermon and the Eucharist. The papacy did not turn back Arianism: Stubborn bishops and laypeople played that role, at a time when authorities both secular and sacred were on the other side.
From the conservative perspective, all these elements of the Arian controversy are also present in today’s confusion. In liberal Catholicism as in Arianism you have an interpretation of the faith that seems tailored to the reasonable person, the moderate and balanced mind, and that the leading authorities of the age tend to favor over more traditional ideas. In liberal Catholicism as in Arianism you have a set of positions and aspirations that keep being proposed despite clear and authoritative condemnations—from the Council of Nicaea in the Arian case, from John Paul II and Benedict in the case of the reforms favored by progressive churchmen today. In the present controversies as in Arianism you have an attempt to use ambiguous formulations to do an end-around, to shift teaching without a frontal confrontation with the dogmatic roadblocks, to be “faintly precise” and “decently ambiguous” to coax the orthodox along.
Finally, with Pope Francis’s interventions on behalf of the liberal side, the division of the bishops and the simple silence of so many, you have a case not unlike the situation facing figures like Athanasius—where for orthodoxy to win out, it must do so against long odds, in defiance of seemingly authoritative proclamations, without (at certain moments) the clear support of the pope himself. The various synods summoned to push Arianism offer a precedent for the two synods on the family. Athanasius and his fellow troublemakers offer a precedent for Burke’s resistance, for the letter from the thirteen cardinals, for the dubia, for all the objections raised by conservative bishops and theologians to Amoris and its interpretations. And the Athanasians’ eventual success, the victory of orthodoxy and the defeat of Arianism, is the template for the victory that today’s conservatives hope for and expect.
How might this victory transpire? In one scenario, the simplest, Francis might be succeeded by a vigorous conservative—Cardinal Robert Sarah, as Pope Pius XIII—who issues a clarifying teaching on the disputed points, and who uses Francis’s own tactics as a model for stacking the ranks of bishops and bringing doctrinal order to the church. But as this vision is basically a stronger version of what John Paul II already (and unsuccessfully, it seems) attempted, and as a College of Cardinals increasingly filled with Francis appointees seems unlikely to elect a Sarah as his successor, such a scenario seems a little fanciful, leaving aside the escalation of the civil war it would entail. Maybe a revolutionary pope could have a counterrevolutionary successor, but only if the Holy Spirit really wills it, and sees to it that some truly martial figure is elected without most of the assembled cardinals realizing what they’re doing.
The more plausible scenario for conservatives involves a much longer period of theological crisis, in which a succession of weak popes try and fail to contain the fissiparous process Francis has set in motion. The church’s divisions widen rather than close, experiments both doctrinal and liturgical proliferate, and at first it seems that the church will become a liberalized institution with conservative dissenters and traditionalist holdouts. But nothing definitive prevents the two factions from coexisting, conservatives and traditionalists persist in leadership roles because the faithful in many areas demand it, over many decades the conservatives gain ground as their rivals dwindle (or dwindle further, in the case of the Northern Europeans), and reach a level of influence sufficient enough to take over a future ecumenical council—call it the Council of Nairobi, say, circa 2088—as decisively as the reformers took over Vatican II, and use it to rule as firmly for restoration as Trent ruled against Protestantism.
At which point there might come a mess, a parting of the ways, a larger version of the “Old Catholic” breakaway that followed Vatican I, in which some group of liberal clergy and believers depart and form some new World Catholic Church. But in the Roman Catholicism they’ve left behind both continuity and clarity would be restored, the bishops and priests and theologians and laypeople who resisted near-heresy from the hierarchy would be remembered as heroic figures (Saint Raymond Burke, lion of orthodoxy, pray for us, murmur Catholics in the Martian colonies in 2234 AD), and Francis himself, in the memory of the church, would join Honorius and John XXII in the ranks of popes who proved themselves fallible indeed.
This is no more necessarily a fantasy than a similar scenario would have been in 357, when Athanasius was in his third exile, Arian-leaning councils were being organized, and Pope Liberius had been packed off to Thrace. But there is this one key difference: The church of today has spent sixteen hundred years becoming more centralized than the church of the fourth century, and in that centralized church it matters a great deal if the pope is firmly on the side of innovation.
So the conservative hope assumes that the age of ambiguity, the suspense of the magisterium, will last long enough for conservatives to gain a great deal of institutional ground even with the pope and much of the hierarchy against them. It assumes that a Franciscanized Vatican will allow figures like Burke and Sarah to continue to hold major offices in the church. And it assumes that the popes of this Franciscan age will continue to be constrained—by fear of conservatives and their residual power, fear of the Holy Spirit, or both—from simply changing the magisterium directly, and teaching explicitly what for now is only implicit in Amoris Laetitia’s pastoral yearnings and suggestive footnotes. It assumes, that is, that the full theological crisis, the pope-as-heretic, won’t come for conservative Catholics, that it can’t come, and that there will never be a moment where they find themselves forced to contemplate either simple surrender or a schism.
But how might all of this be settled if this assumption proves wrong?