Lumen Fidei: a unique collaboration
If Pope Benedict XVI was a man of the word, then Pope Francis has been so far a man of the gesture. His carefully judged interventions have won him many fans. My Edinburgh taxi driver seemingly spoke for many: “I’m not religious at all, but I like Francis. He speaks to me and unlike most of our political and church leaders I feel like he knows how to connect and talk about things that matter. If there were more like him I’d have more hope in politics and maybe even religion. None of these leaders give us any hope.”
Central to Lumen Fideiis precisely the idea of a God who addresses us personallyand who draws us out from the shadows of isolation into the light of creative social relationships. The letteris a surprisingly poetic meditation on the nature of Christian faith and its role in the modern world. The product of an unplanned and unique collaboration between Benedict XVI and Francis, the letterwill surely prove something of an enigma. Benedict’s last written papal word mingles with Francis’ first. Of course, the stakes and the expectations are high for a Pope who has relied on gesture and fewer than the average papal words, who has proclaimed a Church of and for the poor, and who has committed himself to Church reform.
The letter reveals to us the marks of both Popes: Benedict’s final eloquent meditation on the virtues, a final word to the Europe he hoped to call back to faith in the Church. He gives to us once more the gift of his unwavering belief in the necessity for faith rooted in the institutional Church as the basis for salvation and for social transformation in the modern world. However, it is precisely this gift that will be difficult to receive for many. Those of other faiths and who have suffered grievously at the hands of the institutional Church will be looking for a starting point, or a place of departure that does not come. Yet, this is not the whole story – there are new departures and places of renewed emphasis that do speak to us in the voice of the new papacy.
If the beauty of the language is our first surprise, perhaps the second is that Francis emerges as a theologian of the senses and of the body. Two main sets of images run through his text. Faith is described as a form of seeing and hearing – hearing a personal call to respond to a relationship of love, and seeing a vision of meaning that casts light on the purpose of history.In strong contrast to the assumption that all things migrant are problematic, here Francis describes the very nature of faith as a migrant journey. Faith is a form of purposeful migration rather than endless wandering: the mute gods of consumption entrap us, but the God of Christian faith draws us into a journey with a destination. Today’s ‘idols’ draw us in but don’t speak to usface to face; they frustrate rather than build social relationships. God is personal, but he is not private: His intensely personal ways are always public and social.The personal is always both social and political for Christians. This is what a narrow version of liberal secularism finds so hard to grasp and accommodate.
Nor is this letter completely blind to the deep irony of talking about faith aslight in an age that equates faith withdarkness, a refusal of progress and enlightenment. This association needs to be challenged, faith as light an idea that needs to be recovered, and the authors acknowledge that this will not be easy. To do this Christians need to be able to explain to their culture that they are more than a museum to the past: faith is rootedin a profound orientation towards hope which gives birth to the future. One of the things that Christians have to offer to public life and the common good is a dogged belief in the gift of a future beyond barrenness and despair, a refusal to abandon hope.
Nor is thisa saccharine view of faith as cheap grace. My favourite line was this: “faith is not a light which scatters all our darkness, but a lamp which guides our steps in the night and suffices for the journey.”The darkness is real, but the point is that the darkness is not foundational nor is it ultimate. It is neither our origin nor our destiny.
For a Pope who has championed the poor and excluded it is a little surprising that the letter waits until a final chapter to address the idea of building a city committed to the common good, but what it offers is perhaps the point of departure for the first full encyclical that Francis will write. Familiar common good themes are present: rejecting political and economic talk that values only utility and profit in favour of practices of love in the city; prioritising rebuilding trust as the basis for enduring public relationships. The gift of faith to the common good is found in a distinctive language (and one hopes, practice) of love and hope. This is concrete and challenging talk: for politics, for finance and business, and for public services. But also for faith-based organisations: for Catholic development agencies like CAFOD this means a challenge to develop and articulate a distinctive Christian model of progress and human flourishing, a relational account of creation as a gift. And it is here that the document does acknowledge the presence of other traditions: the common good lies in a wider community of plurality in which we co-exist. We can only hope that this theme and its Catholic implications will be developed.
On the evening of Pope Francis’ election Jeremy Paxman put to his interviewee: “so, this is the austerity Pope for austere times?”This question shows the tough task Francis has in explaining his mission to a secular audience. In this letter his message is precisely not one of austerity.It is a letter addressed primarily to the Church and whilst there is a language of beauty that might tip at points towards romance about the Church, we should make no mistake about where Francis’ challenge lies. If our expectations for him are high, his expectationsfor the Church remain dizzying: he asks Christians “in their poverty [to] plant a seed so rich that it becomes a great tree, capable of filling the world with its fruit.”
Dr Anna Rowlands is Lecturer in Theology and Ministry at King’s College London and founding Director of the Centre for Catholic Social Thought and Practice