But as Truman State’s Newman
Center pastor Father Bill says, it’s hard to be in the middle. My beliefs,
which I would never claim as the best or even particularly coherent, are just
where conscience and experience has led me. Many of my friends in college are
amused to find that I’m Catholic. The church seems to be regarded not so much
with suspicion but with cautious interest, perhaps like the kind felt at a zoo
when looking at a rare species of iguana. The iguana has little interest in
them, but they are interested in its unusual form. “Huh,” they say. “Catholic.
Interesting.” I have a tendency to offer fun facts in conversation, and when
one of these is related to Catholicism, my friends acknowledge the occurrences
by calling, “Catholic Fact!”
The one thing that
non-Catholics have actually questioned me about in college is the tradition of
saints. Why pray to saints when Jesus is supposed to be our personal savior,
our direct link to the divine? I’ve never had a perfect, direct answer for that
question, mainly feeling that such spiritual navigation is best left to one’s
own working out. The idea of saints as good examples is too simple. Catholics
and non-Catholic Christians are not likely to come to an understanding on that
issue.
However, I do understand
saints as stories. Many of our early saints are, plainly stated, made up. They
are some of the countless mythic creations that are a large part of our
story-telling species’ lives. That does not have to make the truths they
represent less valuable, or that I don’t have great respect for most of the
saint stories I’ve heard. Like any of our stories, saint stories begin with a
seed of real-world experience. In some cases, it was the verifiable life of the
person in question. In other cases, it is a re-working of messy experience into
terms that can be communicated through a memorable story. Whether we realize it
or not, we own the stories of our saints. They are what we will make of them.
Our new pope, Francis,
formerly Arcbishop Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, is the first pope from
South America, as well as the first Jesuit pope. As my high school was Jesuit,
this connects him to me. We share an important set of beliefs about living in
the world. Many religious orders believe that a relationship with God is only
possible through removing oneself from the world and living monastically.
Jesuits believe that solitude is important, but that one must also find God in
all things, particularly in the chaotic world of human society and of nature.
The language of the Jesuits uses military metaphors because the founder,
Ignatius, saw the new order as on the front lines of carrying out the Gospel,
delving into the messiness of reality and doing their best there. Jesuits value
connection with the world as it is. One of the first stories that CNN told
about Francis is that, as Archbishop Bergoglio, he lived in an apartment and
rode the buses of Buenos Aires to work. Anyone on the bus could chat with him
if they wanted. That’s the mark of a true Jesuit.
Our new pope has chosen a
name that no pope has ever chosen before. And he has taken partial ownership of
a very important name and story, that of St. Francis. I’m thinking, as I would
imagine the new pope was, mainly of St. Francis of Assisi than the other saints
by the name of Francis (though, importantly, Francis Xavier was a co-founder of the Society of Jesus with Ignatius, and Francis Borgia was an early Jesuit.)
The story of St. Francis of Assisi is to us very familiar—that animal saint. He
is surrounded by happy, anthropomorphized smiling creatures when he is painted.
It makes him a fun saint, and much approachable for non-Catholics than some of
our bloodied martyrs or anti-Semitic crusader-saints (I’m looking at you, Louis
IX, namesake of my hometown.)
You might be surprised to
hear that St. Francis’s story was not always told this way—far from it. The
original St. Francis had little patience for animals on their own, and much
less for flawed humanity’s connections to the natural world that animals
usually represent in our stories. One
of the original, canonical tales of St. Francis was his interaction with a sow.
The sow had killed a lamb with its muzzle, and Francis, linking the lamb to the
metaphor of Jesus as the sacrificial lamb of God, vengefully cursed the sow and
proclaimed that no man or beast would eat from its dead body. This curse led to
its death just days later. This sow is our fallen nature, our inclination to
destroy innocence. The historical St. Francis—and even the St. Francis of many
legends—had no particular kindness for most animals. Though he believed in the
communion of all creation in praise of the Creator, he did not believe that all
creation was anything near equal, holding to the medieval Christian conception
of nature, in which humans were the privileged stewards of creation. In the
Victorian period, however, St. Francis began to be pictured as associating in a
friendly way with animals, based on the “Canticle of the Creatures” attributed
to him. In the 1960s and ’70s, during the environmental movement, ecologists,
environmentalists, and theologians began re-popularizing these images of St.
Francis emphasized caring for animals that were created long after his death.
In 1967, historian Lynn White argued that St. Francis should become the patron
saint of ecologists, for he saw St. Francis as a radical that brought about a
new, more humble conception of the relationship between humans and nature.
White viewed St. Francis as what is known as a deep ecologist, claiming that
the “key to an understanding of Francis is his belief in the virtue of
humility—not merely for the individual but for man as a species.” Though
White’s goal was essentially to create a “new religion” of ecology, whose
patron saint was St. Francis, the part of his paper that suggested a
reconsideration of St. Francis as a medieval Christian ecological activist was
accepted by the religious establishment. Pope John Paul II followed White’s
suggestion and canonized St. Francis as patron of ecologists in 1979.
A year later, one of my
favorite poets, Galway Kinnell, published a piece called “Saint Francis and the Sow.” (Yes, short and worth a read. I wrote a paper on it last year, which is
why I’ve got all these fun facts about St. Francis ready to go. Catholic Fact!)
In his poetry, Kinnell tries not to personify animals but to animalize
humanity, and to seek out the natures of animals as valuable in their own
right. In this poem, the reverse of the original story, St. Francis is depicted
awakening the sow to its own powers of self-blessing, playing a surprisingly
humble role for a saint. He “reteaches” the sow “its loveliness,” and the sow
“flowers, from within, of self-blessing.” Kinnell’s St. Francis empowers
animals. He does not presume to lift them above their animal-ness but rather
affirms it, and in so doing affirms the cast-off, looked-down upon parts of
ourselves.
Pope Francis the First
reminded me of this humbler incarnation of St. Francis today when he asked the
assembled crowds at St. Peters’s, as well as the millions tuned in around the
world, to pray for him. The applause and hum on our TV gave way suddenly to a
few moments of meditative silence as he and everyone else bowed their heads. It
is a small sign, but it is a sign of a humble vision of the pope’s role, and a
sign that perhaps this pope is participating in the continued creation of St.
Francis’s story like Galway Kinnell and others. It gives me hope that I’ll be
better able to explain why I am still a Catholic, and that the stories that we
tell about this Francis just might have value for future generations. But we’ll
have to see.
