The Pope of Mercy and Nonviolence

The Pope of Mercy and Nonviolence

It has been an eventful twelve years. I was in the office here at Giuseppe Conlon House, getting

ready to move out after seven years as a full time Catholic Worker, making plans to start a Passionist

house of hospitality in Birmingham, when I heard we had a new Pope. I heard he had chosen the

name Francis, and had asked everyone to pray for him, a sinner. I didn’t want to hope because as

football fans say, it’s the hope that kills you.

After Francis’ first Papal Exhortation was published, “Evangelii Gaudium” – “The Joy of the Gospel”, a

circular email from a well known US Catholic Worker proclaimed “Holy Cow - the week the Pope

talked like us Catholic Workers". Two examples of Francis sounding like a Catholic Worker in that

letter come to mind: he called for a ‘poor church for the poor’ and for a church that came ‘out of the

sacristy and got its hands dirty’. Looking around me at the time, I thought – maybe we’re not doing

too badly at those here. And he actively practised what he preached, by his personal outreach to the

most marginalised, and by, for example, moving out of the Vatican Palace and into rooms in the

Santa Marta guest house, among the many from the world church who come and go there.

Francis continued sounding like a Catholic Worker in his advocacy for hospitality for the poor, for

migrants and refugees, for the practice of mercy generally and the works of mercy in particular, for

active nonviolence and an increasingly strong rejection of war. He declared the mere possession as

well the threat of use of nuclear weapons to be a sin, as well as making the Vatican one of the first

states to sign and ratify the nuclear weapons ban treaty (officially known as the Treaty for the

Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, or TPNW). That would have made Dorothy Day very happy,

although she might have felt a bit ambiguous when he mentioned her name among four

praiseworthy representatives of the American people – alongside Martin Luther King, Abraham

Lincoln and Thomas Merton – when addressing the US Congress in 2015.

Francis sounded like a Catholic Worker in day to day life too. He spoke off the cuff and made

mistakes and asked forgiveness as a sinner, in contrast to previously careful papal ways, perhaps

wanting to avoid the mystique of creeping infallibility. Asking forgiveness for our mistakes feels like a

regular part of CW life too: we are definitely not perfect, always trying hard to respond to immediate

situations and crises, and often making mistakes and asking for and needing forgiveness, and

struggling to give it too. Activists are strong minded and can be difficult people after all.

Possibly Francis’ most significant legacy will be his first Encyclical Letter, published in the run up to

the 2015 Paris Climate Summit. In “Laudato Si - On Care for Our Common Home”, he called us to

hear ‘the cry of the earth and cry of the poor’. His critique of the ‘technocratic paradigm’ echoed the

analysis of ‘the dominance of technique’ by Jacques Ellul, a Christian anarchist writer popular with

Catholic Workers. It sounded a lot like Peter Maurin’s call for a “Green Revolution”, but with longer

sentences.

More recently, Francis has tried to create a culture of mutual encounter, listening and dialogue in

the Catholic Church, in place of our own internal culture wars. Time will tell to what degree he

succeeded. Among the unfinished business many will list more progress on the abuse crisis and the

role of women in the church. We are praying the Holy Spirit leads us to a new universal pastor who

can find the way to continue and deepen what Francis started.

Jorge Bergoglio: Pope Francis I: Pray for us. May he rest in Peace and Rise in Glory.

Statement on UK Rearmament

This editorial was published in the Lent/Easter 2025 edition of our newsletter. Read the rest of it here.

In 1940, Dorothy Day, Servant of God and co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, wrote that “we stand unalterably opposed to war as a means of saving ‘Christianity,’ ‘civilization,’ ‘democracy.’ We do not believe that they can be saved by these means,” with the understanding that support for the industrialised slaughter of men, women, and children which constitutes modern warfare cannot be reconciled with the vision of human dignity proclaimed in the Gospel.

Last year, the Catholic bishops of England and Wales declared that “as Christians, we are called by Jesus to be peacemakers (Matthew 5:9). In the modern world, an integral aspect of this mission involves working to limit the proliferation of weapons and advance the cause of global disarmament.” Pope Francis said that “to allocate a large part of spending to weapons means taking it away from something else, which means continuing to take it away from those who lack the necessities. Continuing to spend on weapons sullies the soul, sullies the heart, sullies humanity.”

Keir Starmer’s government has announced its intention to enact the largest increase in British military spending since the end of the Cold War, which will eventually cost an additional £13.4 billion every year. For comparison, lifting the two-child benefit cap, widely regarded as the single most cost-effective means of reducing child poverty, would cost £2.8 billion a year – the government has refused to do so on the basis that it would be unaffordable. This vast expenditure on arms will be partly funded by drastic reductions in foreign aid, likely to result in thousands of preventable deaths. Other European nations are making similar commitments in response to the supposed collective threat posed by Russia, a nation with an economy less than half the size of Germany’s, and a military budget which even during a major war is a small fraction of that of the European members of NATO, and roughly a tenth of the USA’s.

There is no moral or practical justification for wasting resources on arms, and we condemn the decision to do so in accordance with the teaching of the Church, the witness of the Gospel, and the evidence of our consciences. Jesus asks us “What profit will a person have if they gain the whole world and forfeit their soul?” Following him, we cannot buy security at this price.

The Divine Sophia

from Issue 77, Advent 2024

There are two ways through life: the way of Nature and the way of Grace.’ Thus begins Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life (2011), a coming-of-age film chronicling the spiritual and domestic struggles of a Texan family in the 1950s. Animating the drama is the austere patriarch figure, played brilliantly by a crew-cut Brad Pitt, whose private failures as an aspiring concert pianist take their toll on his wife and children. With our perspective tidily framed by the opening dichotomy, we watch each character as they decide between that which ‘doesn’t try to please itself’ and that which ‘only wants to please itself’. But is the question of Grace and Nature a zero-sum game?

We are currently enjoying a ‘Bulgakovian moment’ in contemporary theology. Despite being condemned by the Patriarchate of Moscow for his writing, Russian Orthodox thinker Sergius Bulgakov is finally being recognised for his unique insights into Christian thought, complex as they can sometimes be. It is, perhaps, this difficulty that has sparked some controversy, as more traditionalist readers of his work find fault with his shocking, brilliant and elusive ideas about Sophia, the Wisdom of God. To elaborate as best possible this tricky (and historically polyvalent) term, a useful starting point might be Jordan Daniel Wood’s definition: ‘the divine splendor, the Shekinah, the entire content of the divine essence resplendently manifest and brilliantly burning with love in and among the Three Persons.’ As this rather majestic language would suggest, it is, in fact, a word that originates in scripture, specifically Proverbs: ‘The Lord by wisdom founded the earth; by understanding he established the heavens; by his knowledge the deeps broke open, and the clouds drop down the dew.’ (Prov. 3:19-20 NRSV).

Bulgakov attempts with Sophia to bring together ‘Lord’ and ‘earth’, Creator and Creation, without introducing a fourth figure into the Trinity (as his detractors would argue) or collapsing into the kind of dualism that Malick promulgates in The Tree of Life. But how exactly does he avoid these two pitfalls?   Giving a full account of Bulgakov’s sophiological metaphysics is, of course, beyond the scope of this piece. But one facet of his approach provides us an alternative to the more common, binary arguments about Nature and Grace. It is the aspect of his thought that draws not only on his immediate intellectual predecessors (like Vladimir Solovyov) but earlier patristic figures too. It is the idea of Sophia as symbol for the presence of God in our creaturely world. It is the very experience we can all attest to when material existence appears to announce divinity itself, as the unspeakable beauty of a sunset or the wonder of a new-born’s laughter. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins knew it well, writing that ‘the world is charged with the grandeur of God’.

Robert de la Noval, a leading scholar on Bulgakov, takes this notion further when he argues that Sophia is the ‘condition for the possibility of the incarnation of God as a human being’. With our charged world comes the possibility of the Logos made flesh, which logically means, for Bulgakov himself, that ‘man possesses in himself an uncreated-created principle, he pertains to the eternity of the divine world. Belonging to the created-animal world, he is at the same time god by grace.’ Not to be misunderstood as a vague form of pantheism, or worse a form of self-divinising heresy, Sophia is the created world’s yearning for God.

It would be an oversimplification to characterise Nature and Grace in The Tree of Life as simply either/or. In one of the most poignant moments of the film, following the death of his son, Pitt’s character (positioned largely as the embodiment of Nature so far) chastises himself for the way he has treated his boy: ‘When he was sitting next to me at the piano, I criticised the way he turned the pages.’ In a rare moment of self-awareness and humility, he goes to on to lament that he made his son ‘feel shame, my shame’. Here, Malick deftly brings together the two ways of Nature and Grace he had suggested in the beginning were divergent paths. If Malick’s step here is tentative, Bulgakov may offer us a fuller vision. After losing his own son prematurely, he articulated perfectly what may happen when you open your human heart to grace: ‘For the only time in my life I understood what it means to love not with a human, self-loving, and mercenary love, but with that divine love with which Christ loves us. It was as if the curtain separating me from others fell and all the gloom, bitterness, offense, animosity, and suffering in their hearts was revealed to me.’