by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
When in Rome, Use the Present Tense
“Francis’scall for open debate within the church is a pastoral and pragmatic
effort to encourage compromise. But it also represents an
unprecedented use of papal authority, rooted in the theological
conviction that truth and justice will prevail if the faithful put
their trust in God and open themselves and their views to one another
in a spirit of humility. Francis’s invitation for Catholics of
distinctly different views to engage across divides within the church
recalls Jesus’s command to love one’s enemies — as
countercultural today as two millennia ago.”
That’s Berkley Center director Thomas Banchoff, reviewing Garry Wills’ new book for the Washington Post. It’s a striking review in several respects; and what strikes me especially about it is that it is written, as the passage given above suggests, mainly in the present tense. And that tells us something significant about the life of Catholicism just now.
Catholic progressives like Garry Wills began John Paul II’s pontificate by writing in the present tense; but as that pontificate stretched on, and was followed by Benedict’s pontificate, they turned instead to the past tense, on the one hand (in articles about the Second Vatican Council and the immediate postconciliar years), and to the future tense, on the the other (in articles that looked forward hopefully to some future time when the Council’s boldest initiatives would come to pass). It was a rhetorical mode; it was a publishing strategy; and it was a survival tactic, a means of keeping hope alive in what were dark times for progressives.
Wills is still making use of this strategy. So his book nominally about Pope Francis mainly looks to the Catholic past in order to anticipate the Catholic future. It’s a Catholic approach par excellence – taken by an author mindful that in Rome, as in Yoknapatawpha, the past isn’t even past.
And yet if there’s any time when Catholic progressives should be free to use the present tense, it is the present. The present pope is a figure more alive to progressive impulses in the church, and savvier about their blind spots and shortcomings, than any pope progressives could have imagined. The long-anticipated initiatives are up for discussion, albeit fitfully and awkwardly – but is there any other way to discuss them after thirty-five years in which those discussions took place furtively or not at all?
More than at any time since 1965, the future is now. Sure, let’s consider the past and let it be our guide. Sure, let’s look to the future with confidence. But let’s use the present tense while we can.
