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March 15, 2018
Christina Gray
To a roomful of Catholics in Marin County whose frustration with the current presidential administration appeared strikingly shared and vocal, a Catholic ethicist offered the example of Pope Francis in effecting positive change amid deep divisions.
Lisa Cahill, a professor of theology at Boston College, spoke to about 50 people gathered in the St. Rita parish hall in Fairfax on March 6 as one of six guest speakers for the parish’s annual Lenten lecture series. This year’s series, which ends March 27, is themed, “Becoming Church in the Age of Anger.”
Cahill said that when longtime colleague and St. Rita pastor Father Ken Weare first invited her to the parish as one of this year’s six guest speakers, she wasn’t keen about talking about anger. “But I realized it’s very apropos of the situation that we are in in our culture generally, and to a lesser degree, in the church,” she said.
Cahill’s work includes more than 200 scholarly publications and five books on Christian ethics. According to a professional summary, her work attempts to discuss “the complexity of moral issues while lowering tensions about theological disagreements between the church and society.”
In her presentation, “Beyond Anger and Impasse: Pope Francis on Consulting, Discerning and Mobilizing for Positive Change,” Cahill pointed to the pontiff’s leadership style and process in his attempt to break the “gridlock” on controversial topics such as marriage, violence and climate change.
She began by noting the deep polarization in the U.S. since the 2016 election, the “cultural anxiety” it revealed in an apparent majority of the American voting public and the almost immediate rise in bias-related hate crimes including the murder of a protester at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last summer.
Republican voters have responded to a “mixture of resentment of political elites, personal economic stagnation if not loss of ground, and a tendency to blame other racial groups and immigrants for their adversity,” she said.
Democrats and others, meanwhile, are aghast by the administration’s actions or lack thereof on immigration, racism, climate change and gun violence, to name a few, she said.
Speaking to the politically cohesive audience, Cahill named another problem.
“There’s also the problem that we get together to talk with people we already agree with,” she said. “More important is how we reach across the divides.”
Cahill said Pope Francis’ emphasis on consultation, discernment and mobilization symbolizes his approach to positive change.
She offered three models of how the pope has attempted, not always successfully, to “break gridlock” on hot button issues: The family synods of 2014 and 2015, the resulting 2016 apostolic exhortation, “Amoris laetitia,” (The Joy of Love) and the 2016 encyclical “Laudato si’” (On Care for Our Common Home).
In preparation for the family synods, the pope asked bishops around the world to consult with Catholic laity by distributing a detailed, anonymous survey of their attitudes and practices in regard to the church’s teachings on marriage and family.
Pope Francis was unafraid to let conflict out in the open and attempt to deal with it constructively by listening to the other side, Cahill said. Such openness, she said, is “something we are not very good at in the Catholic Church.”
“The family synods and Pope Francis teach us that it’s important to convene and consult even when there may be conflict,” Cahill said.
In the post-synodal “Amoris laetitia,” Pope Francis demonstrated his belief that solutions must sometimes be sought through a process of discernment, she said.
Chapter 8 of the controversial document focuses on the pastoral care of of church members who have been divorced and civilly remarried. The pope encouraged a “responsible personal and pastoral discernment of particular cases” by local bishops, Cahill said.
“Pope Francis shows that sometimes what we should aim for is a negotiated settlement, not a one-side wins-all kind of victory,” the theologian said.
Finally, in “Laudato si,’” Cahill said, the pope challenges all to resist the tendency to “kick the problem upstairs” to governments and others. Instead, he empowers change at the grassroots level by emphasizing the necessity of “ecological conversion.”
This doesn’t happen at the intellectual level, said Cahill, and “Pope Francis gets this.”
“Change happens at the symbolic, practical and spiritual level, the level of our worldview and in our everyday practices,” said Cahill. “This requires conversation and changes in our customary ways of doing things.
“Change requires that we reach across the aisles of party, religion, race, income bracket and even parish and to do that we must be humble, we must be unafraid of respectful disagreements and above all we must be creative,” Cahill said.