Reading Francis

He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. – Colossians 1:17

This verse is part of a hymn about Christ that St. Paul quotes at the beginning of his letter to the Colossians. It’s a bold theological statement about the second person of the Trinity – that Christ, who we Christians claim walked among us as Jesus of Nazareth, didn’t just appear at that time, but has been an element of who God is since the very beginning. It also argues that now, when that Jesus has long since died, risen from the dead and ascended into heaven, Christ continues to play a central role in our existence. In him all things hold together.

That phrase sticks with me for a different, less Christological reason. 

I haven’t written much this summer for a number of reasons, but mostly because there’s an idea that I’m still working out the words for. Basically, it’s this: if you look around, you might wonder if “all things” can hold together much longer. On what seems like every front, from the life-and-death (wars, violence, etc.) to the trivial (corporate logo changes), our culture seems split into camps that so oppose each other that it’s hard to imagine them coexisting much longer. This has been a problem for a while, but, if anything, it seems to be getting worse.

In response, I’ve seen several groups pushing to revive the practice of “civility”, of a way of relating with those we disagree with that, if not polite, is at least not violent and carries a minimum level of respect for others. The Builders Movement is an example, a network of like-minded groups, but there are others. Braver Angels is a more concrete project along these lines.

I think these are well-intentioned, but I also think they are doomed to failure. Back a few years before the pandemic, I started an effort called “Love Not Fear”, which had similar goals. It was based on the realization that so many elements of our culture (especially political parties and news media) stoke fear of the other as a business model, recognizing at least implicitly that we are evolutionarily wired to react more strongly to fear than any positive emotion. If you want viewers to stay tuned, scrollers to engage, listeners and readers to subscribe, voters to turn out, volunteer and donate, fear beats love every time for results.

In a media-saturated culture, that means we get fear-based messages at every turn, more frequently and constantly than our minds were meant to handle. All that fear leads to some bad outcomes, like mental illness at the individual level and lack of institutional trust at the societal level. The antidote to that, as simple and fluffy as it sounds, is to choose to love the other, to encounter, listen to, and seek to understand the people that your bubble of media is telling you to fear.

Love Not Fear didn’t get very far, which is my own fault; the Builders folks have done much better than I could ever have dreamt to do with my little passion project. But in the Love Not Fear events we pulled off, what was clear to me was that, while there are many people who see the truth in this analysis and want to find a better way of being together, we were never able to really bring in the “true believers”, the folks on either side of our divisions that don’t see value in dialogue and mutual understanding because, well, they’re sure that they’re right. And, ultimately, those are the folks who feed into the narratives of fear, whether they want to or not. I suspect that the Builders Movement, and all the others like it, are limited by that same problem, and while these “coalitions of the willing” might make some progress around the edges in fostering mutual understanding, they ultimately lack the ability to engage enough of those large swaths of true believers who aren’t really interested in mutuality in a way that leads to more civility.

While St. Paul definitely didn’t have this in mind when he wrote to the followers of Christ in Colossae, I think there is a chance that, in this case too, it is in Christ that all things might hold together, in a more pragmatic than mystical way.

While small-scale relationships can develop over any number of things, to hold together big, diverse groups, you generally need one of two things. One of those is a common enemy, which is why we’re in this fear-based mess. The other is a significant goal or a high ideal. This doesn’t have to be a particularly moral one – think of the motley crew of misfits in Ocean’s Eleven, united over the pursuit of an incredibly lucrative heist – but more often it’s something pro-social like solving a vexing problem or curing a disease or winning a sports championship. In these settings, people who are very different, in fact, people who don’t like each other, can coexist and cooperate, if the goal is motivating enough. While the success of a group like this is defined by whether they achieve the goal, a common byproduct is that the disparate players learn to respect and value the teammates with whom they have profound differences, usually by recognizing the common humanity that they share.

In its way, the Catholic Church is such a group project. With 1.4 billion members around the world and more than 50 million in the US, Catholics make up a significant segment of the larger population. Unlike many other Christian denominations, Catholics cross the spectrum of virtually any cultural divide you want to mention. Even on those issues on which the Church professes official positions that its leaders have proclaimed loudly, as in its opposition to abortion or the death penalty, you will find significant blocs of believers who dissent. As we have seen many mainstream Protestant denominations split over ecclesial issues like women’s ordination and social issues like LGBTQ rights, and many non-denominational churches sort themselves over similar issues, Catholics have, so far, stuck together, perhaps because the lofty goal of its members is not just individual holiness but corporate unity, or perhaps just because people from different perspectives still find this Church to be their “spiritual home”. Regardless of the reason, we don’t go to Mass with people we disagree with because we want to overcome division; we go because we celebrate the same sacraments. Because of that, though, the opportunity is there for some form of reconciliation and growth.

This probably sounds incongruous to those (in the pews as well as outside the faith) who see the Church as a rigid, hierarchical rule generator and arbiter. Most people, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, experience the Church as an organization in which the pope, Vatican officials, cardinals and bishops hand down rulings on what is and isn’t a sin to the faithful, who are expected to “pray, pay and obey.” Those who dissent have, throughout the centuries, been sidelined, silenced, and worse. Dissenters who remain, including those whose life circumstances just don’t align with the prescribed Catholic ideal, tend to stay quiet about their differences with Church teaching.

Very recently, a new model of what it means to be Catholic has appeared. While the Second Vatican Council (in the early 1960s) called for a renewal of “synodality” – a form of shared responsibility and collegiality among the world’s bishops – in the last few years of his pontificate, Pope Francis expanded that idea of synodality to include all Catholics, rooting the authority to engage in discerning the call of the Holy Spirit not in the sacrament of holy orders to the priesthood but in the sacrament of baptism, which Catholics usually receive in infancy. In this framework, even those who have ceased practicing the faith are invited to discuss together what God might be calling the Church to do and be. Francis rolled this out with a multi-year project called the synod on synodality, which, to be honest, was bumpy at best; many at the top of the Church hierarchy hoped that this would be a passing fad, and those in the pews largely didn’t understand what they were being invited to or where it might lead.

Pope Leo has made clear, however, that synodality is here to stay. Even in the earliest days of his pontificate, the new pope has reiterated that he expects to have a more synodal relationship with his brother cardinals. More broadly, as he continues to emphasize the values of unity, listening and humility as a path to peace, he has drawn on his history as a member of the Augustinian order to reinforce the fundamental purpose of a synodal approach to being community – not to lay down laws, nor to convince each other, but to listen to understand so we can grow in unity and openness to the Holy Spirit’s guidance together.

This will be deeply unsatisfying to those with strong opinions about what the Holy Spirit wants. Even during Francis’s global synod on synodality, there was a lot of frustration over whether sitting at tables and making friends (as the synod was characterized by one of its spiritual directors) would lead to any substantive changes (or rejections of change) on hot-button issues inside the Church. This echoes previous frustrating experiences of synodality in Francis’ papacy: the Synod on the Family raised but did not ultimately address the question of allowing the sacraments to believers who had divorced and remarried, and the Synod on the Amazon raised but did not ultimately address the question of ordaining mature, married men. A synodal way is not wired, it seems, to lead to quick changes.

I’d argue that that is because changing rules is fast, but changing hearts takes time. We live in a paradigm that assumes that changing policy will inexorably lead to opinion change. But look around. On how many issues have Supreme Court decisions or Congressional action made fundamental changes to American laws by believers in an issue, only to have opponents undermine and undo those changes later? On how many issues has the Church set forth doctrine which many of the faithful have not followed? While the immediacy of policy change may feed the sense of urgency we feel for a particular issue, real and lasting change requires a different approach. Synodality – a culture of encountering others and making friends – is a surer path to that more enduring sort of change.

Think for a moment about an issue on which you had strong feelings that have changed over time. Why did they change?

Here’s my example: growing up as a Gen X kid in the 70s and 80s, it should be no great shock that I was steeped in homophobia. Along with my friends, I used homophobic slurs as a standard in name-calling. To the limited extent that I thought of same-sex attraction, it was with disgust, and beyond stereotyped characters in mass media, I didn’t really think I knew anyone was gay. The first time that someone in my general circle of awareness was exposed as gay (I don’t recall them being afforded the agency of “coming out” on their own), I joined everyone else in reacting with shock, snickers and shunning. I thought gay people were deviant, disgusting, and damned.

It’s been a really long time since I ditched those beliefs. While policy changes protecting the rights of people regardless of sexual orientation contributed to a culture in which LGBTQ people felt safer in their own skin and freer to be who they really were, those policy changes didn’t do anything directly to change my beliefs about homosexuality.

So what did? Making friends. Through school and work, I came into closer contact with people who were open about their sexual orientation, and I got to know them as the wonderful people that they are. I counted on them at work and knew they counted on me. We shared glimpses of our lives and perspectives on the world over coffee, meals and other occasions. And over time, I was able to realize that the belief system I had about sexual orientation didn’t align with the reality of my friends’ lives.

Synodality is a systematic approach to engaging Catholics in that kind of transformative friend-making. It builds opportunities to see each other beyond labels and stereotypes and understand, at least to some degree, the realities of a life different from our own. Done right, it should soften our hearts toward others. In the end, we should get better at discerning how the Holy Spirit is showing up in the lives of our new friends, as well as in our own.

I should say that this sort of friend-making may not lead to support for particular policy agendas. It may well be that, even a successfully synodal process leaves people in deep disagreement over how we should live together. Even so, what changes is our ability to see those we disagree with not as enemies but as friends. We will appreciate the nuances in which policies affect the lives of others differently than they do ourselves, and grow in compassion for each other in those differences. We may, together, be led by the Holy Spirit to find new pathways forward, opportunities to address challenges together that might be wholly outside of the current (often binary) policy menu. Regardless, we will have a richer appreciation of the diversity with which God has gifted us, and in that appreciation, we may be able to show the world that all things do, in fact, hold together.