These remarks were prepared for and read at the “Pope Francis and the Future of the Church” conference sponsored by the Centre for Christian Engagement at St. Mark’s College of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver on May 4, 2023.
If you’ll forgive me, I want to begin in a rather strange place. I’d like to tell you about someone you’ve almost surely never heard of, and someone who may have nothing at all to do with why we all are here together. The person I want to tell you about was named Jerome Kerwin. He was born in Albany, NY in 1896, he died in Santa Clara, CA in 1977.
Kerwin was the first Roman Catholic appointed to the faculty of the University of Chicago, an institution just a mile west of where I work in Chicago. Kerwin was a political theorist, just like me, and (perhaps less like me) Kerwin was a major player in the social action circles of the Archdiocese of Chicago in the 1940’s and 1950’s that were so forward-thinking about matters of racial justice, economic justice, liturgical renewal, and what it means for a fully engaged Catholic faith to come alive in social and political life. He was an amazing figure of 20th century Catholicism about whom I could go on at great length. But I won’t go on too much about him.
Let me rather tell you why I want to begin with Kerwin. It is something he wrote near the end of his life. A decade after the end of the Second Vatican Council, Kerwin wrote about the “strumming guitars and twanging banjos” that had come to the liturgy, “the ear-splitting noise of traps and drums to replace the music of the majestic organ.”[1] That probably sounds a little grumpy. But Kerwin went on, and this is really magnificent. He wrote that reform in the Church had been “too long neglected” before Vatican II, and for too long the Church suffered “the lack of intelligent papal direction” so that the excesses were natural.[2] And, those excesses were natural to a phase along the way toward something greater, which was why he concluded—
If this is an age of frustration [with guitars and drums and all sorts of post-Vatican II experimentation], it may also be an age of purification. Out of it will come a church renewed….Some will find [this] era of challenge too much to bear [but]….We must now depend more fully on a mature faith.[3]
What I want to zero-in on is that description of a “mature faith,” a faith that everyday lay Catholics can be living in our workplaces, in our homes, at the ballot box, and everywhere we go. And, I might be tempted to ask now—fifty years later—what happened to that promise, that an “age of purification” would burn away all of those medieval accretions that encrusted the church because, of course, they still encrust the church. But I offer this beginning because now, perhaps, with synodality, finally fifty years later Kerwin may at last be right. Maybe. If we are ready. But let us come back to that.
The title of my paper (“Full Citizenship”) is just a very small and almost generic quotation from a very important document. In the “Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together,” which Pope Francis signed with The Grand Imam of Al-Azhar in 2019, we read that “the concept of citizenship is based on the equality of rights and duties, under which we enjoy justice” so that, “It is therefore crucial to establish in our societies the concept of full citizenship.”[4] And, what is “full citizenship”? It is the opposite of whatever “engenders feelings of isolation and inferiority.”[5] Full citizenship is a circumstance in which none of us is above or below another, one where we stand side-by-side with one another, looking one another in the eye. I enjoy full citizenship, and you enjoy full citizenship. We encounter one another as equals.
And we should note that this language also is rather ordinary inside the Catholic Church. The language of an “equality of rights and duties” is a near quotation from Pope John’s encyclical Pacem in Terris. And, perhaps you see where I am going with this already. Hearing about equality and rights this way, perhaps your mind runs to the tradition of political liberalism from John Locke to John Rawls when we hear language about equality like this, the sort of politics we take for granted in modern states like the ones where we live. And you are right if your mind does run in that direction because that is the same general direction in which I am headed. But in fact I want to turn just a little bit off that road and try it another way. Listen to this—
…freedom is seen in the republican tradition as a status that exists only under a suitable legal regime….[T]he laws create the freedom that citizens share….For republicans, a person is made unfree by the fact that others have an arbitrary power of interference over them…; freedom requires the non-existence, not just the non-exercise, of such a power.[6]
This is Philip Pettit, a social and political theorist who I promise you is not writing about anything having to do with the Catholic Church. He has written one of the definitive books about republican political theory—the theory of republics. And what he seems to say is that a republic depends on laws that establish freedom among citizens, and freedom depends on equality. We each must be full citizens, a principle Pettit put this way: “each is to count for one, none for more than one.”[7]
Another contemporary republican writer, Charles McIlwain, put it this way: “The state, as a bearer of rights, is the whole of the citizens…; it is no abstraction apart from the people, and therefore these rights inhere in the people themselves, and what is more, in each of them individually….And what was thus true of rights was equally true of duties.”[8] Hear that language here about rights and duties that echoes the Document on Fraternity, itself an echo of a much deeper history. But also hear again the fundamental equality in which citizenship and freedom are rooted.
What I’m describing is the republican political tradition, which is similar to the liberal tradition we are more familiar with. Yet, they have important differences. Liberalism is individualist, it is based on self-interest and the heart of liberalism is its expectation of private property: liberalism assumes I can keep what’s mine from you. A republic also is a free state, yet it is not individualist. Private property certainly may exist in a republic, but a republican is oriented more toward the common good, toward the good of the community. I am speaking in very broad terms here for reasons of time, but I am hoping you’ll hear that difference even as you’ll recognize that most modern constitutional states today in fact describe themselves as republics and I hope you’ll recognize that republics sound as though they have a lot in common with Catholic social teaching. They do.
I first began thinking this way several years ago, early in the Francis papacy, while I was reading the German political theorist Hannah Arendt. Arendt was an astute observer of the Catholic Church during the time of Pope John (she admired him), and I came across a passage that began to change dramatically how I think about the Catholic Church. In turn, it points toward what I want to say about Pope Francis’s synodal vision. Arendt wrote about the “Roman influence on the Catholic Church.”[9] I don’t want to go too far with this here for reasons of complexity and time, but I certainly want to suggest we can accept as given that our Roman Church inherited much from its classical Roman ethos. One thing it has inherited is its sense of authority as growing from a past, and that is obvious enough when we think about the Catholic sense of tradition. What I am getting at, however, is something else—we can make a good case for a less noticeable but no less certain Roman inheritance in our Roman church. Our church can be seen in republican terms, as a republic.
This is by no means a common interpretation, I think. I do not find a lot of people saying this. But when we think about it, it is an implication of how Lumen Gentium emphasized our common baptism as the basis of the church community. My CTU colleague, Stephen Bevans, identifies this as a fundamental equalizing of all of us within the church so that “lay women and men participate in the priesthood of Christ, a priesthood they hold in common.”[10] But it was that great church historian, John O’Malley, who wrote that, “the first reality of the church [the church’s real character now since Lumen Gentium has reminded us of it] is horizontal and consists of all the baptized without distinction of rank.”[11] The encrustations burn off in purification. And this, I think, is the “mature faith” that Kerwin described, the one that Pope Francis calls us to with synodality. It is a faith where each of us accepts our baptismal calling as a call to “full citizenship” in our church.
I mentioned earlier that the Document on Human Fraternity was very important. Perhaps, if you’ve never heard of it, you may have wondered why I said that. But I said that because that was the document that set Pope Francis down the path to write his 2020 encyclical, Fratelli tutti, on social friendship or solidarity. That encyclical is a blueprint for social life, a way to live in the world as believers in the Gospel of Jesus. But we do not have to work very hard to see that our action in the world need not really be so different from our action together in the church. It is for this reason that it always has caught my attention, the way Pope Francis has talked about politics. Early, in Evangelii Gaudium, he reminded us that politics is a “lofty vocation”(205). In Laudato Si’ Pope Francis told us that “a healthy politics is sorely needed”(181), and chapter five of Fratelli tutti is devoted to describing for us “A Better Kind of Politics.” What this political theorist sees when he reads these things is that Francis is calling us to an understanding of human beings as social creatures, the nature of our communities, and the possibilities that exist in social life. Pope Francis sees the possibilities that we can discover in politics with solidarity. I just simply believe he also thinks that we can discover those possibilities in the church, as well. I am saying that, in a way, I think the call to synodality is a call to see the church as a political community in a particular way, in light of that Roman influence and the Second Vatican Council’s teaching about the primacy of the baptismal vocation—our full equality before God and, so, our “full citizenship” in the church. This is the call to a “mature faith.”
But I’d like to make just a few final remarks that look back to Jerome Kerwin and return us to what I said about Pope Francis’s call to engage the church as a kind of political community through the synodal process being rich with possibility, but only if we are ready for it.
As a graduate student at Columbia University, Kerwin wrote a master’s thesis about the Council of Basel, which took place between 1431 and 1445. I won’t dwell on that council too much here, but you should go look it up. It was a disaster, and it makes for interesting reading. The main issue was what historians call conciliarism, the idea that a council made up of bishops could function as a sort of legislative assembly while the pope is merely an executive who carries out what the council decides. In plain fact, what Basel proposed was a sort of democratic representation in the church that would have sidelined the pope’s authority. And, as I say, it did not go well. Not only did Pope Eugene IV strenuously object (futilely trying to dissolve the council, but no one would go home), but the political machinations of the feudal powers who all had interests at stake in the church collided with the messiness that you’ll find in any democratic process or legislative assembly. Basel fizzled out in 1445, and Kerwin’s appraisal was tart: “Democracy in the Church had its trial at Basel; unfortunately it lent itself to the selfish, nationalistic desires of [those who attended].”[12] The selfish motives of interested parties kept conciliarism from becoming the model for the church, and that was that.
I mention this because of something Pope Francis said in October, 2015 when the Synod on the Family got underway—"The synod is not a parliament, where in order to reach consensus we start to negotiate, making deals and compromises. The lone method in the synod is to listen to the Holy Spirit.”[13] This, finally, is the important point. It is good and, I think, important to think of the church as a kind of political community. It also is good and important for us to hold politics, itself, in esteem and to see it as something noble, dignified, and honorable. But for as much as the church is and can be lived in as a political community or a sort of republic, it is not a political community in exactly the same way as the Dominion of Canada or the United States of America or the United Kingdom. Those other political communities are political communities based on reason and interest. The church can be lived in as a republic or a political community, but it still must be a community based on faith. This is why what Pope Francis has said about the method of the synod is so important—“to listen to the Holy Spirit” who in fact is the legislator and the executive and the judiciary, while we each are full citizens.
In other words, I am saying that this synodal church we are invited to become still depends on us. It depends on our seeing the church as a republic of faith, a place where we gather and discern and listen together all as equals. It depends on not bringing our own interests and reasons and agendas to the church. And, that can be very difficult.
This however is the challenge that Pope Francis is inviting us to accept, the challenge to live up to and live the mature faith that Jerome Kerwin hoped one day we would reach. Whether purification comes or frustration continues, that is entirely up to us.
[1] Jerome G. Kerwin, “Despite Frustration, Purification,” in: Michael F. McCauley (ed.), On the Run: Spirituality for the Seventies (Chicago: Thomas More Press, 1974), 145.
[2] Ibid., 147.
[3] Ibid., 154.
[4] Pope Francis and Grand Imam Ahmad al-Tayyeb, “A Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together,” Abu Dhabi (4 February 2019), published online at: https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/travels/2019/outside/documents/papa-francesco_20190204_documento-fratellanza-umana.html.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 36, 298.
[7] Ibid., 110.
[8] Charles Howard McIlwain, Constitutionalism: Ancient & Modern Rev.Ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1947), 46-47.
[9] Hannah Arendt, “What Is Authority?” in: Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 98, 138.
[10] Stephen Bevans, “The Church in Mission,” in: Richard R. Gaillardetz (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Vatican II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 146.
[11] John W. O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2010), 178.of
[12] Jerome G. Kerwin, “Nicholas of Cues and the Council of Basel” (master’s thesis, Columbia University, 1920), 16.
[13] Quoted at: Inés San Martin, “Francis Tells His Bishops: The Synod Isn’t a Parliament,” CRUX (5 October 2015), published online at: https://cruxnow.com/church/2015/10/francis-tells-his-bishops-the-synod-isnt-a-parliament.