Shortly after the death of Pope Francis, New York Archbishop Cardinal Timothy Dolan was invited onto “The Today Show” and asked what he would look for in the conclave when selecting a new pontiff. His response was characteristically chipper: While he hoped for someone with the “warmth, heart and smile” of Francis, he also wished to see “more clarity in teaching, more refinement of the church’s tradition, more digging in the treasures of the past to remind us what Jesus expects of us.”
Cardinal Dolan’s prioritization of clarity echoes a common criticism of Francis—namely, that Francis was not explicit, consistent or even dogmatically faithful enough in expressing the church’s creedal and moral teachings. For most in the church and most in the hierarchy, Francis was easy to love, even though some who trusted him were frustrated by his seeming imprecision. A smaller contingent, however, delivered this criticism as a protest against a pontiff whom they could not or would not understand.
Within the church’s “magisterium,” or teaching office, the pope, along with the college of bishops, is entrusted with the task of safeguarding the deposit of faith. So the desire for more clarity in teaching from the successor of Peter seems like it could only be a good thing. But before accepting the framing that a lack of clarity was a particular failing of Pope Francis, it is worth thinking more carefully about what he was deeply clear about and how he worked to protect the teaching of the church.
While moral and creedal beliefs are essential to Catholic teaching, the splitting of doctrinal propositions from the embodied witness of the teacher himself misunderstands the role of the magisterium and the particular lessons the church has learned from Francis’ pontificate. Specifically, the focus on propositional and moral clarity misses how the teaching office of the magisterium was exercised by Pope Francis as an integrated, holistic pedagogy in living relationship with one’s disciples. As the world’s attention turns to the conclave that will elect Francis’ successor, he himself provides the example of the kind of teacher that the church—and world—still needs in its next pope.
Francis’ style of teaching the church is closer to the experience of entering into intense friendship and, yes, even love, than attending a lecture or learning a curriculum. Jesus, the master teacher, never began with formal dilemmas, theological lectures or doctrinal tests. To the contrary, the Gospels depict his critics using such methods to ensnare him. Instead Jesus offers his entire person to those he encounters. In the first chapter of the Gospel of John, two of the disciples ask Jesus, “Teacher, where are you staying?” Rather than give an answer, Jesus gives an invitation: “Come, and you will see.” The disciples learn even more because they “stayed with him that day.”
Francis’ critics wrongly assume that his warmth, affection and informality could somehow impede or confuse the content of his teaching. Yet to oppose doctrinal clarity to Francis’ joyful smile is to forget something vital about what his papacy offered the church. After the extensive magisterial contributions of St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI, we should not think of Francis’ papacy as suffering from a lack of clarity because of a difference in prose style. In fact, he was exceptionally clear about the spiritual dangers of prioritizing the wrong kind of clarity at the expense of the mercy at the heart of the Gospel.
In his magisterial role, Francis corrected several mistakes about the nature of church teaching, and he did so with profound clarity and force. These are lessons that we should hasten to recall during the impending conclave. Church teaching is not primarily abstract and intellectual, which would reduce it to merely another ideology. Nor is it a way to escape questioning, risk, ambiguity or dissent. The church’s teachings cannot be passed along well without a certain vulnerability on the part of the teacher, which includes in some circumstances a willingness to draw close to people’s uncertainty and varying situations even at the risk of scandalizing some who see such closeness as moral indifference rather than mercy.
In the Catholic view, truth is an embodied encounter, not simply a downloading of information. Francis himself made this point with startling clarity: “Truth, according to Christian faith, is the love of God for us in Jesus Christ. Truth is a relationship,” he taught in his “Letter to a Non-Believer” in September 2013. “As such, each one of us receives the truth and expresses it from within, that is to say, according to one's own circumstances, culture, and situation in life.” In fact, he was teaching in continuity with Benedict XVI, who had said in 2008 in an address to American seminarians that “truth is not an imposition. Nor is it simply a set of rules. It is a discovery of the One who never fails us; the One whom we can always trust. In seeking truth we come to live by belief because ultimately truth is a person: Jesus Christ.”
“I am the Truth,” Jesus says. But the notion of a living and breathing truth seems strange to us because of the modern picture of humans as disembodied minds or intellects that contain ideas, a recurrent philosophical temptation from Descartes to Kant.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church offers a glimpse of a different possibility. It explains that the magisterium is entrusted with the task of guaranteeing “the objective possibility of professing the true faith without error. Thus the pastoral duty of the magisterium is aimed at seeing to it that the People of God abide in the truth that liberates” (No. 890). Truth is something we live in. The shepherd’s role is to ensure that the sheep fully dwell and live in truth. But this task cannot be completed simply by possessing precise knowledge of propositions and then reiterating them clearly.
Over the last 12 years, Francis has taught the church that the experience of truth is not only about learning answers to questions but about learning how to enter into dialogue, one in which the questions run in both directions. We do not have an experience of truth when we are mere recipients of a monologue; rather, dialogue invites one into a relationship. Clarity and refinement of church teaching are not ends in themselves. They are necessary and laudable—but because they are means to the end of abiding in truth, not because they are the truth themselves.
As the cardinals gather to select Francis’ successor, there is a danger of over-correcting for what critics saw as his deficiencies. This risks not only failing to appreciate Francis’ pastoral witness to truth, but also falling into a pattern of errors that he consistently warned against. One of the most systemic mistakes exposed by Francis is what he called a kind of gnosticism, or the habit of prioritizing knowledge and intellectual definitions over authentic moral and spiritual transformation.
As Francis wrote in “Evangelii Gaudium,” gnosticism is “a purely subjective faith whose only interest is a certain experience or a set of ideas and bits of information which are meant to console and enlighten, but which ultimately keep one imprisoned in his or her own thoughts and feelings…. A supposed soundness of doctrine or discipline leads instead to a narcissistic and authoritarian elitism, whereby instead of evangelizing, one analyzes and classifies others, and instead of opening the door to grace, one exhausts his or her energies in inspecting and verifying” (No. 94).
Such a conception of teaching is sometimes found in the academy but sprouts up within the church, too. When this happens, the church becomes not unlike an endless seminar in which the superior knowledge of the teacher, or the competition of students for attention, becomes the main event.
In Francis’ vision, by contrast, Catholic teaching does not simply inform but also transforms. This might mean asking questions, posing provocations or even inducing puzzlement as the church seeks the Spirit of wisdom. After all, Jesus taught by asking difficult—often open-ended—questions to his closest followers. What are you looking for? Do you want to be healed? Who do you say that I am? Do you love me?
Francis developed an approach to the magisterium that entered into encounter with his hearers, ultimately seeking not only knowledge but mercy and healing. He had a kind of genius for teaching in this way, as is evidenced in the moment where he spoke to a young boy who asked if his atheist father was in heaven. Loving those whom one teaches requires taking into account their personal histories, desires, dreams, ambitions, political preoccupations, health, economic situation and even their sense of beauty.
A masterful teacher like Francis enters into the open questions, wounds and traumas of others without fear. This can be risky: It always seems safer to take the modern disembodied route and deliver another lecture. The alternative is to enter into what Msgr. Luigi Giussani famously referred to as “the risk of education.” A few decades before Francis, Giussani saw that Christian education was losing its force precisely by assuming a narrowly “rationalistic framework, which neglects the important fact that existential engagement is a necessary condition for one to have a genuine experience of truth, and, therefore, to have a conviction.”
The deepest risk of Catholic teaching is the same one that we take when we venture into the deepest of life’s relationships: the risk of sharing one’s entire existence, and the possibility of being misunderstood, humiliated and even forcefully rejected.
A near-absolute prioritization of clarity offers a comfortable but illusory invulnerability. It reduces the living demands of Christian witness to a moral and theological system long-since worked out and only requiring defense from lofty battlements and obvious enemies. But Francis the teacher had the courage to remain open, to let his guard down, even as he taught the church and even in the face of the vocal doubts of others.
Francis’ approach of entering into relationship in order to teach through embodied encounter took on a familiar cast over the years. It is an astounding feature of Christian faith that its master teacher gives himself over to his students in a radical pedagogy that allowed himself to be betrayed, tortured and killed by them. We cannot forget that Jesus taught as much from the Cross as from the Mount.
Christians cannot teach mercy and love as propositional truths without living mercy and love as a concrete relationship with those they encounter—let alone those they instruct. Over and over again, Jesus first offered a friendship to those he met, despite their false ideas—the woman at the well, the rich young man, Bartimaeus, Zacchaeus. He never first demanded their assent to an abstract code.
When the cardinals convene in conclave, let us pray that their mandate to defend the truth with perfect fidelity also means traveling to the limits of human vulnerability, even to the point of martyrdom. St. Peter was crucified, and St. Clement was martyred with an anchor, according to tradition. Martyrdoms of different kinds—giving away authority, self-sufficiency, simplicity and even clarity on occasion—are an inalienable part of the church’s authentic magisterium.
Among Francis’ gifts to the church as a teacher is a lesson in this kind of pedagogy—one that patiently stays with the learned and the ignorant, those near and those far away, those still able to walk and those lying by the side of the road, with compassion and profound humility.
In the last hours before his death, Francis left a final, unmistakable sign about the meaning of the magisterium. In dangerously poor health, struggling to breathe and speak, he resisted the counsel of his advisors to stay indoors. He insisted on traveling outside to greet the faithful at Easter, even at his own mortal danger.
Francis taught the church, in short, that the magisterium finds its clarity not merely in propositions but in acts of mercy. His words from 2013 ring even more powerfully today, still echoing as the cardinals gather for the conclave:
I prefer a church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security. … More than by a fear of going astray, my hope is that we will be moved by the fear of remaining shut up within structures which give us a false sense of security, within rules which make us harsh judges, within habits which make us feel safe, while at our door people are starving and Jesus does not tire of saying to us: “Give them something to eat” (Mk 6:37).
