Holy Troublemaker: The Jesuit Pope Who Challenged the Status Quo with Fr. Bruce Morrill

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
You have to reach out to your friends who think they
are making it good and get themto understand that they, as well
as you and I, cannot be free inAmerica or anywhere else where
there is capitalism andimperialism, until we can get

(00:24):
people to recognize that theythemselves have to make the
struggle and have to make thefight for freedom every day, in
the year, every year, until theywin it.

Speaker 2 (00:38):
Thank you, Welcome everyone to an incredibly
special episode of Religion andJustice.
This episode, in particular,goes out to Sherry Ann Wilson
who is maybe the only Catholic,I think, that listens to the
podcast, at least in terms ofGabby's metrics and we're going

(01:01):
to be talking about today,someone that Rush Limbaugh
referred to as the Marxist Pope,and we're going to be speaking
about the Marxist Pope with ourone and only Father, bruce
Morrill.
Welcome, thank you so much forbeing here.

Speaker 3 (01:20):
Thank you, george and Gabby, and I think it's Mrs
Wilson, so I'm just verygrateful to have a conversation
with you about our recentlydeceased Holy Father Pope.

Speaker 2 (01:36):
Francis, thank you so much.
Could you tell us a little bitabout yourself?
You're a Jesuit priest, but youalso have a bunch of other
lovely titles behind your name.

Speaker 3 (01:46):
Right, thank you, yes .
So yeah, I'm a Jesuit priest.
I joined the Society of Jesusour official name way back in
olden times, 1982, a year aftercollege Did the typical 10 years
of formation.
We go through philosophy,teaching theology, and on to the
PhD at Emory.
So I'm a Roman Catholic priestand, as well, I am a member of

(02:13):
this religious order and we vowpoverty, chastity and obedience
into a communal life and with myfinal vows, even a special
fourth vow, unique to us Jesuits, of obedience to the Pope for
the purposes of mission.
Ok, so, in other words, we'llgo where nobody else wants to go
, we'll go.

(02:34):
And in that spirit, I ended upin Tennessee, where there are no
Jesuits, or were no Jesuits, orwe're no Jesuits, and I was
previously on the faculty ofBoston College for 15 years,
their theology department that'sa Jesuit university.
So you know, right in Jebelland and you know, with lots of

(02:55):
Jesuits and all but, popeBenedict had been exhorting us
back then in 2010, to not becomplacent, and you Jesuits need
to.
You know, go out to the marginsand the frontiers and don't be
complacent.
So when the possibility oftaking the Catholic Studies
chair at Vanderbilt UniversityDivinity School came up, I asked

(03:16):
my provincial like would youmission me to this?
And he's like yep, that's whatwe're talking about and the rest
is history, or at least a 14,coming up on a 14-year history.
So I teach at VanderbiltUniversity Divinity School in
theology, constructive theology.
My specialty is sacramental andliturgical theology, but as

(03:38):
George knows from having taken acourse with me, I also do my
best to keep one oar in thewater of political and
liberation theologies and indeedmy doctoral dissertation, 30
something 30 years ago, was atthe intersection of political
and liturgical theologies.
Yeah, so that might do it.

(03:58):
You know, pastoral ministry ingreater Nashville.
I serve three prisons, one eachweekend, three of them kind of
rotating.
Yeah, that's about it.

Speaker 2 (04:10):
Speaking of liberation theology, that's I
mean well, taking a step back.
Your background is alwaysamazing to me.
You served in Alaska too, rightyeah?

Speaker 3 (04:23):
Yeah, I was right.
After I graduated from HolyCross.
It's a Jesuit liberal artscollege in Massachusetts.

Speaker 4 (04:30):
Wow, that's such a soft spot for Holy Cross.
I'm so sorry.

Speaker 3 (04:33):
Oh, that's great.
Yeah, I do too.
Uh, but there is where I metthe Jesuits.
That's a Jesuit liberal artscollege, uh, and I went.
I joined the Jesuit volunteercorps in 1981, graduated.

Speaker 2 (04:44):
Hey, I was going to do JVC for a while.
I was signed up, I was gettingready to go, but then I fell in
love with a woman and I left andfollowed her to North Carolina.
I don't know if you know thatstory about me.
I don't.

Speaker 3 (04:56):
Yeah, I still respect you, so the.

Speaker 2 (05:02):
thing is I.
That's what this episode isgoing to be like.
That's what it's going to belike for the rest of the time.
I've already feel it.

Speaker 4 (05:08):
Just get comfortable, George.

Speaker 3 (05:12):
So here's the story.
So when I graduated from HolyCross in 1981, I ended up taking
the assignment in a YupikEskimo village at the mouth of
the Yukon on the Bering Sea inAlaska with a classmate.
It was an unusual placement ofjust two of us, a village of 650
people and I yeah, I did a verylong winter there, october to

(05:34):
June, and did my work, but alsoat that point discerned, applied
and was accepted to the Jesuits.
But from 19, excuse me, fromshoot, I'll lose track around
the year 2000 till 2019, I usedto be able to go back out there
for Christmas or Holy Week timesto help out, as there aren't

(05:56):
many priests left out in thatvery remote region.
So quite a bit of experiencewith the Yupik people.

Speaker 2 (06:05):
Now the longer name for the Jesuits, the Society of
Jesus.
But you also, you all, go bysome other names and I was
wondering if you could explainthese George, Soldiers of Christ
and foot soldiers of the church.

Speaker 4 (06:18):
Come on, the church is big.
Do you want to add a little bit?

Speaker 2 (06:20):
more.

Speaker 3 (06:22):
Yeah, well, those are kind of I don't think we're
quite into that militaristicimagery anymore, yeah, but it
was often called, yeah, thePope's Marines, americans would
say, or whatever.
But it basically is because ofthat fourth vow.
Like, if you just settle downand listen, I said we have a
fourth vow of obedience to thePope for purposes of mission,

(06:48):
and so what gave us that titleor that nickname was that we
were willing to go where needed,and the great example of that
there were seven foundingJesuits.
Ignatius of Loyola wascertainly the most famous and
really the father at the centerof it all, the mystic and a
soldier.
Yes, he was a soldier offortune from the Basque country

(07:10):
who in the early 1500s got hisleft knee shattered in a battle
and in his long recuperationended up having this I don't
know, conversion is a trickyword but he opened up to and was
reading a life of Christ andthe saints and stuff and went in
a whole different direction inlife.

(07:30):
So, yeah, maybe that feeds thatold canard as well.
Soldiers of Christ or whatever,or the Pope, but the thing is
Francis Xavier, for example,another guy from a different
part of what's now Spain.
He ended up spending once theJesuits were established by Pope
Paul III, spending the rest ofhis life in India, south Asia,

(07:55):
over on the edge of Japan, butdied off the coast of China
hoping to get into China.
Now, that's an example of thisvow of obedience that that Pope
said I really want us to startreaching into the whole Asiatic
world, and I got nobody.
And you guys got to sendsomebody, and the one that they

(08:16):
thought would be better wasn'tas in as good a help, and so
Francis Xavier ended up beingthe one to go, and it's a
touching story because he andIgnatius were very close friends
, they were super duper bestfriends, and it was the letters

(08:43):
that membership in the Societyof Jesus exploded from seven to
over a thousand within you know,seven or eight years.
Yeah, anyway.
So it's that.
Yeah, the Pope's shock troops,the whatever.
But the key thing now we werealso very involved in the

(09:04):
Catholic Reformation, or youcould call it the
Counter-Reformation in the later1500s, early 1600s, and were
super papist loyalists.
So that also probably fed thatreputation, not only in what we
now would call Central andWestern Europe, but also in
Eastern Europe, the Easterncountries.
So can I?

Speaker 2 (09:25):
give you a fun fact.
I would damn it.
I would love a fun fact.

Speaker 3 (09:28):
All right, got to keep you happy.

Speaker 4 (09:31):
Here's the thing, so he can beat you down again.

Speaker 3 (09:33):
Yeah, yeah, I'll, yeah, just setting them up.
You got my way.
I work now, gabby, so it's soeasy with George.
Anyway, the thing is, mymother's parents were from the
Carpathian Mountains, mygrandmother's natal village Now
in western Ukraine, mygrandfather's southern Poland.
They met in the States asimmigrant teenagers.

(09:55):
The rest is, you know, here Iam who.
Really, she didn't know how toread the whole life.
Anyway, she was very upset thatI was becoming a Jesuit.
In fact, at one point she saidto me when my grandfather was
out of earshot because hewouldn't have agreed.
She leaned into me and saidyour grandfather and I never

(10:20):
thought you'd come to this.
Now, they were Orthodox,russian Orthodox.
I only learned when I was doingmy doctoral studies in at emory
not that I was a history majorright, but learned through a
colleague who specialized inthat whole thing, the whole
reformations in the carpathianregion, austria-hungary that the

(10:43):
word, one of the words fordevil in Carpatho-Rus is Jesuit.
So then it all kind of madesense, you know.
So I'm throwing shade all overmy grandmother, who's long in
the grave.
May God bless her.
I should do some respectfulprayers now, not right now and

(11:06):
uh, but I always kind of likethe story.
I got a kick out of it man,jesuit pr.

Speaker 2 (11:10):
It's an uphill battle from though, because ed any
like any movie with a catholicprotagonist, or like you know
what, like, it seems likethey're always going to be a
Jesuit, though.

Speaker 3 (11:23):
We've got a certain cachet and the movie that came
out when I was in junior high, Ithink the Exorcist, yeah, that
might have also set the pace forthat.
I mean highly successful, kindof a groundbreaking movie in a
lot of ways and what Hollywoodwas willing to do, right, but
that's 50, geez, almost 55 yearsago, I guess early 70s and

(11:46):
anyway.
But it was the Jesuit, is thefigure, who's the exorcist.
But also a certain Jesuit, nowdeceased, was the advisor
throughout the process and theyeven slipped him in a cameo in
the film.
You know, not a big speakingpart or anything.

Speaker 4 (12:04):
But anyway, because each of the orders and the
church have their own sort oflike stereotypes as well, I'll
I'll just show my hand.
Jesuits are my favorite, butthat's because I went to xavier
university, where I was educatedby jesuits.
So, um, I drank, I drank thejuice, I drank the jesuit juice,
and I've never looked back.

Speaker 2 (12:22):
Um, Jesuit Jews, and I've never looked back.
We didn't just invite you here,though, for your expertise in
Jesuit history or the ways inwhich Jesuits are akin to the
devil in certain areas of theworld, but it's also your
expertise in liberation theologythat I also kind of wanted to

(12:45):
tease out just a little bit,because Pope Francis there's a
kind of question, if he was, howmuch liberation theology had an
influence with him, right,because there are some Marxist
scholars who describe him, asyou know, a non-Marxist, and he
had a theology of the peoplerather than sort of the
liberation theology, which iseven sort of questionable, but

(13:07):
he almost in some ways redeemedliberation theology in the
Catholic Church a little bit.
I mean, he met with GustavoGutierrez.
In the research for the show Ieven found an image of Ivo
Morales giving him a crucifix,and the crucifix is made out of

(13:30):
a wooden hammer and then belowit is a sickle, which I think is
just spot on.

Speaker 3 (13:37):
Yeah, well, francis's detractors, of whom there were
many in the Roman CatholicChurch itself, were very aware
of that particular crucifix butwould never mention it was you
know he received it, as hereceived, just you know, endless
gifts, right?
But yeah, the relation withliberation theology, the story

(13:58):
came through early, as he wasnamed Pope and everyone was like
like well, who's this?
You know, francis uh had achallenging life as a young
jesuit insofar as, not unlikemyself, he was ordained a priest
in his early 30s.
Because if you enter in yourearly 20s and have to go through
10 to 14 years of formation,right, dot, dot, dot.

(14:20):
But at that time, in the 1970s,uh uh, jesuit father, general
Arrupe, was busy respondingVatican Council to the Great
Council in the 1960s, which,among its many documents, was
one that mandated all thereligious orders and
congregations to recover theirprimordial charisms, their

(14:43):
original gifts like get radical,go to the roots.
And so the way Arrupe led theSociety of Jesus in of the

(15:05):
middle 1970s is the promotion offaith, justice, and the
promotion of justice which isinspired by the faith.
To get this work, he had toappoint very young men to be
provincial superiors.
A province is a governingdistrict of the Society of Jesus

(15:26):
all around the world.
There are loads of provincesright.
So he taps someone.
He taps Jose Mario Bergoglio,who's like at the time, 36, I
think, or seven, to be theprovincial superior of all the
Jesuits in Argentina, and it's asix-year term, and Francis

(15:48):
admits that it was pretty much adisaster.
He was young, he was extremelydefensive and insecure and it
tapped into his way of beingdefensive and that was to be
doctrinaire and rigid.
But part of that story is thatliberation theology.
We so often know of it here inthe northern hemisphere, north

(16:13):
America.
We think of it in terms of youmentioned the author, gustavo
Gutierrez, for example, fromPeru.
Think of it, I think, quiteoften in terms of those authors,
right, those scholars.
But liberation theology beganfrom the grassroots right I
don't speak Spanish, I'llbutcher it, but la comunidad de
base.
So these grassroots communitiesthat were being grown not only

(16:38):
by Jesuit priests and brothers,but religious of many different
congregations, franciscans andso forth, religious sisters,
others, but religious of manydifferent congregations,
franciscans and so forth,religious sisters trying to help
these people, as it were,peasants in all these Latin
American, central and SouthAmerican countries who are
basically suffering extremeoppression and, as you may know
and recall, the governmentslargely of Central and South

(17:01):
America were militarydictatorships, not all and not
all the time right, but even inthe cases where it was something
more, openly elected andlegitimately elected oligarchies
, yes, and so liberationtheology developed, you know,
with this real idea of thegospel is for the freedom of

(17:22):
people, liberation of people,and it was a grassroots thing.
Well, there were Jesuit priestswho were working in these
grassroots level ways inArgentina, and the Argentine
government started arrestingthem and lots of other people
involved.
And you know, of course,argentina was infamous for the

(17:45):
disappearing of people, and sothere was a lot of controversy
over whether or not youngBergoglio, the father provincial
in Argentina, did as much as hecould to protect his men, and
especially in the case of twomen, uh that were uh in prison

(18:07):
for quite a while, they bothsurvived that uh and um, he was
exonerated.
The press went after it.
Of course, it's like great.
You know, we've got acontroversy that uh back in 2013
, uh, about 40 years before um,but uh, he was cautious.
Well, I wanted to say and he wasreally exonerated about that

(18:30):
that in fact, one of the men hadalready died an old age.
The other was still alive andsaid no, no, no.
He quietly did what he could,but people were very critical
that he wasn't more vocal.
And that's not an unusualproblem in diplomacy.
And that's about as much as Iknow about that, so I'll stop.
But liberation theology.
The other key thing is that Imentioned the Second Vatican

(18:55):
Council and that ended.

Speaker 2 (18:57):
Yeah, could you stop there for just a second?
For those who don't know, whenyou say Vatican II, can you give
like a Wikipedia like paragraph, like what, for those who don't
know Vatican II?
Can you give like a Wikipedialike paragraph like what, for
those who don't know Vatican II,what that is?

Speaker 4 (19:08):
Actually hold on.
Before you do this, I have aquick anecdote from my time in
seminary at Union TheologicalSeminary, wherein I was in my
very first class, went straightfrom undergraduate to Union
Theological Seminary Young,bright eyed undergraduate
student.
Basically, as you can see, I'mno longer that, but I was in
union, first classinterreligious engagement.

(19:29):
It's time for the mid classbreak.
Okay, first week meetingeveryone in my cohort.
I'm in a bathroom stallscrolling on my phone as one
does, and I overhear, and thisreally defined my entire time at
Union Theological Seminary Ioverhear.
You know why do theseprofessors keep bringing up

(19:49):
Vatican II?
It can't have been thatimportant, right?
And it was in that moment thatI realized I was far more
Catholic than I ever suspected,because the fire that lit inside
of my body inside of that stall, I said that lit inside of my
body, inside of that stall, Isaid how could you possibly
undercut the importance ofVatican II?
Even if you don't like it, itwas very, very, very important.

(20:12):
So I'm so sorry, but I had toget that out.

Speaker 2 (20:14):
Aside from the digestive fire that was already
erupting in you in that stall,you had a spiritual fire that
was also Any Protestantism I wascarrying into that stall left
in the toilet and I walked out.

Speaker 4 (20:31):
A Catholic once more, yeah.

Speaker 3 (20:33):
There you go, Gabby.
There is the great, you knowevidence for how good it is for
us to get out there and mix itup, you know, with all sorts of
people Right, Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (20:44):
In a bathroom stall, absolutely in a bathroom stall
that right there all sorts ofdifferent people reminds me of
that old joke, uh, in the south,where somebody walks in the bar
and goes, what kind of music doyou play here?
And they go.
Oh, we play all kinds of music.
We play country and western,like all different kinds of
people at Union TheologicalSeminary Christians, protestants

(21:05):
and Christian Catholics.
Oh very good.
Oh, wow.

Speaker 3 (21:10):
That's cute, Jordan.
You got the joke now.

Speaker 4 (21:12):
Thank you, I make some jokes, I just had to
explain to my wife that who iscradle Catholic went to Catholic
school from K all the way upthrough undergraduate, that
Protestants often don't thinkthat Catholics are Christian and
that was news to her.
I said what rock have you beenliving under?
I said I got called fish eaterin middle school.
Come on.

Speaker 3 (21:32):
Fish eater and to think that that stuff carries on
.
But it tells us a lot aboutreligion.
It tells us a lot that, youknow, we highfalutin theologians
, if we are, think that all thisstuff's happening at the
theoretical level and in factit's what's passed on by word of
mouth and so forth right,customs and of course anything

(21:55):
that's controversial like thatright, that's what people love,
so that's a great lead-in toanswer George's question about
Vatican II.
That's a great lead in to answerGeorge's question about Vatican
II, because I mentioned, theanswer I'm going to give is a
little backwards.
It would not get.
It would get edited to the highheavens and Wikipedia.
But I mentioned Vatican II awhile ago and and mentioned that

(22:18):
it had produced 16 documents.
Documents, yes, those documentswere to set the Roman Catholic
Church on or reset the RomanCatholic Church on its journey.
Call it a reset, okay.
And what it was was a meeting ofall at the time, of all the

(22:40):
bishops from around the globe,and it was convened by Pope John
XXIII.
It was a great surprise.
Nobody expected this old guythey elected in 58 would do much
of anything.
They just wanted him to live ayear or two while they get this
other guy ready.
And wow, he just goes for it.
And so it met four autumns 62,3, 4, and 5.

(23:02):
And the bishops all would getin there in the St Peter's
Basilica and they ultimatelysigned off on 16 documents,
which is no small thing To dowhat John XXIII, the pope
convening it, said we need tothrow open the windows of the
church and meet once again theworld, and it's now a modern

(23:24):
world?
Yeah, certainly by 1962.
Hello, yes, good, good, betterlate than never, let's go.
So the Holy Father called this.
And the great thing about it,what was so radical, was that
the officials in the Vaticanlike, ooh, I have a usual term

(23:44):
for them, but I'm not going todo it.
But these bishops andarchbishops, cardinals and their
cadres who run the Vatican said, oh gosh, ok, we'll make the
old man happy, we'll do this.
But Vatican I, which was ameeting in 1870, got cut off by
a war.
We need a constitution on thechurch.
We'll do that and they'll allgo home.

(24:06):
And or they'll go home andwe'll keep running everything
here in Rome.
And what happened was thebishop showed up and rejected
everything that the Vaticancadre had prepared.
They threw it all out.
And that was this remarkablemoment.
And now I was born in 59.
So I wasn't aware of this inreal time, right, but it was.

(24:27):
It was really, george.
I was a precocious kid, youknow, at age three, I just
wasn't up to speed.
Ok, so anyway, the it wasexciting.
And reporting was constant.
Leaking out of it waseverywhere, it was a.
And reporting was constant.
Leaking out of it waseverywhere, it was a big deal.

(24:50):
And so what Vatican II was?
It's a long paragraph.
You asked for one.
We can call it, people call ita reforming council for the
Roman Catholic Church.
I'd rather translate the Latinwords.
That translated reform asrestoring and renewing, and
that's really how the fatherssaw it.

(25:14):
And yeah, so among these 16documents, they did a whole
different constitution on thechurch, which is a high-level
document of constitution.
But they figured out veryquickly they also wanted a
pastoral constitution on thechurch.
In other words, we're going todeal with these dogmatic
questions, which has to do withreally locked in and nailed down

(25:36):
Catholic teaching.
That's what dogma is.
Doctrine is teaching in general, doctrina Latin teach.
Dogma is like the ones thateverybody's got to sign on to
and it's not conditioned by timeand culture.
So there are levels ofteachings in Roman Catholicism
and a lot of them are preciselyproduced with the awareness that

(25:58):
we humans may evolve and knowmore stuff, both historically
and scientifically, such thatthere can be adjustments.
Yes, but when it comes todogmas, boom, you're locked in
and there aren't a whole lot ofthem.
So anyway, they said we need apastoral constitution as well.
We need to write a documentthat's going to inspire and set

(26:20):
the course going forward in theconditions of the world, and
it's called Gaudium et Spes, thejoys and hopes Documents.
In the Roman system, the titlesare the first couple words of
the text.
So the text begins the pastoralconstitution on the church, the
joys and hopes, the sorrows andgriefs.
There's a list of thesecontrasts the people of the

(26:43):
world suffer and enjoy today.
The church joins with them andit goes from there.
And it included a lot ofattention to things like war,
the nuclear of course.
The Cold War was raging, thenuclear threat of annihilation,
so, and John XXIII actuallyissued an encyclical called

(27:04):
pacham, and terrors, peace onearth, really taking on those
things.
But there was that.
There was stuff about familylife, the vocation of marriage.
It was a real breakthrough thatmarriage is, um truly a
vocation and that the couple, umare called and realize their
salvation.
That's how God's saving them.
That's how God is constructingSaving is such a weird word,

(27:27):
right, but how God is makingtheir life, the life God dreams
for them.
They do it with and for eachother.
And then so there was stuff onfamily, there was stuff on
society, there was stuff oneconomics, there was all sorts
of stuff in that document.
And what happens?
We go out of Vatican II.
Four autumns, finishes in 65,16 documents, really really tips

(27:51):
out the apple cart.
And kaboom, the dogmaticconstitution on the church
instituted that the bishops arenot to be what they had been,
what had devolved into theirsimply being branch managers of

(28:12):
this multinational corporationin rome.
And instead, um, to recoverwhat a bishop was originally and
remained to be an EasternOrthodoxy hi, grandma.
That bishops are the pastorwith authority in their local
church, their diocese, right?

(28:33):
So Vatican II, the Constitutionof the Church, said what we're
going to do is we got thebishops reset up here.
They should work in conferences, regional groups, so they can
do better to help the church'smission in that distinct part of
the world.
So there's a bishop'sconference, for example, of the
US, because it's a big country,right.

(28:54):
But in Latin America it's abishop's conference for Central
and South America, and thenthere are other ones, you know
Asia Pacific, india, you name it.
Okay, so they hold their firstmeeting, the Latin American
bishops, in the late 1960s.
Council ends in 65.
They hold their first meetingin 68.
They produce a pretty radicaldocument about this social

(29:19):
justice that's needed and thatthe cry of the poor throughout
Latin America is the cry ofGod's people and a cry to the
church.
And Gustavo Gutierrez was amongthe, as it were, ghost writers
of the final document.
Just as with Vatican II, so inthese meetings bishops largely

(29:41):
are administrators, politicians.
I mean, they're more than that,but it's that type of
personality usually who writesthe documents.
Are there theologians?
Yes, and so liberation theologywas really getting I'm going to
use this expression baked in tothe mission of the official
church by the late 1960s and wasconfirmed 10 years later.

(30:05):
On a 10th anniversary of thatgroundbreaking meeting, they met
in Pueblo, mexico, a secondtime and affirmed all of it and
advanced it.
And the last such meeting inrelation to it was in a Paracita
I think that's shoot.
Parasita, I think that's shoot.

(30:29):
I'm so ignorant I forget whichcountry that is.
But and that was in.
So 78, that was more liketoward the year 2000, the early
2000s.
So liberation theology was notjust some renegade thing on the
margins of Latin AmericanChristianity.
It was now officially on thebooks, or a type of it.
Now it wasn't called liberationtheology, and here's your to

(30:50):
call Francis or Bergoglio backthen, a Marxist actually is not
accurate right Now the peoplethat hate him and the church and
otherwise, you know, surprisename calling and stupidity.

Speaker 2 (31:03):
Well, when Rush Limbaugh referred to Pope
Francis as a Marxist pope, popeFrancis said oh, I don't really
see that as like a denigratingmoniker.
I find Marxists actually verylovely people.

Speaker 3 (31:18):
Right, there we go and you're fixing up my story.
Actually, I guess I tried toignore that any of that happened
, because I like to imagine, youknow, rush limbaugh didn't
exist or anything um, we allwould like.
To imagine, I know, I know, butbless his heart, um so um.
But the thing is, uh, right, itwasn't that bergoglio was a

(31:41):
straight up like doctrinairemarxist, but the reason that the
theology of liberation and theauthors who wrote the books
about it and so forth werebranded as Marxist included that
, indeed, a lot of theprinciples of Marxist
philosophical analysis of thematerial conditions in Latin

(32:02):
America and in the globalpicture, latin America really,
as suffering, the larger globalcapitalist, you know,
exploitation of the resourcesand so forth, right, um,
certainly that's a part of it.
And Gutierrez himself in hisfamous book, in his famous book

(32:29):
the Theology of Liberation,addresses that.
Yes, so, yeah, right, so PopeFrancis once he was a bishop and
later a cardinal by the early2000s was really quite a leader
among the Latin American bishops.
He kind of emerged more andmore and more, such that
ultimately he became a pope,which was quite a surprise yeah,
he was the first latino pope.

Speaker 2 (32:47):
I mean he was, you know, first latino pope or first
pope from the global south.
I mean a lot of uh first jesuitpope.

Speaker 3 (32:55):
Too might be the last , but first jesuit pope yeah,
right, he was the first jesuitpope, oh yeah yeah, that
actually reaches back to ourearlier conversation about the
jesuits being the, the shocktroops of the Pope or whatever.
Historically, such a meteoricrise for this group from the
middle 1500s forward quest ofupper class people in Europe,

(33:26):
starting lots of schools and weended up having a big influence
through our alums and all thatkind of stuff, a lot of power,
not just ecclesial but social.
Um, it actually got ussuppressed for 50 something
years from 1774 until do themath, 1820 something.
Um, because especially thekings or the power figures of

(33:49):
Spain and Portugal were furiousthat the Jesuits were protecting
the indigenous people up abovethe Amazon into Paraguay to keep
them from the slave trade.
And that's another wholeremarkable historical story of
how they set up these entireseparate settlements but also

(34:11):
the influence in Europe.
So the idea always was thatthere could never be a Jesuit
Pope, that they already have toomuch influence anyway.
And the fact when I was drivingin my car back from a meeting in
Atlanta when the announcementcame on NPR that white smoke had
happened and all that and youknow Sylvia Pagoli was telling
what happened and said that hewas an Argentinian cardinal

(34:34):
archbishop and a Jesuit I saidout loud in my car.
That can't be right.
Like you know, they'rereporting on the fly, you know
they'll get the facts straight.
And I was like, oh, on the fly,you know they'll get the facts
straight.
And I was like oh, and mythought always in that moment
and remained well, it's a signthat good, we aren't that
powerful by worldly standardsanymore.

(34:54):
And they would elect a Jesuit,now one.
Here's a little trivia tidbitfor you when a Jesuit accepts
the direct request of the papacyto become a bishop, he must
turn it down twice and onlyaccept the request on the third
try.

(35:14):
And the idea is that we are tobe humble In our constitution.
We are never to ambition to anyecclesial office.
You see, so it's this game.
You know it's like no, andthey're like, please, no, do it.
Okay, yeah, but when a Jesuitbecomes a bishop, technically,
in a very, very technical canonlaw, which is to say Roman

(35:36):
Catholic Church law way, he'snot a Jesuit anymore, because
his obedience, direct obedience,is no longer to the father
general superior in Rome, it'sto the bishop of Rome, the pope.

Speaker 2 (35:49):
But yeah, go ahead.
It just reminds me of, like the, the, the big class distinction
in the military betweenenlisted and officers.
Right, but like the jesuits aresort of like the enlist george,
you're not helping us debunkthe military myth.
I think it's incredibly accurateand I think you know it's uh,
you know, but the enlisted, likethey're not, they're not

(36:11):
allowed to sort of be officers.
Right, you have to like, youknow you have to get out and
then come back in commission, inas an officer, and even in the
Marine Corps, right, if youspeak within the Marine Corps,
marine officers will describethemselves as officers.
They won't describe themselvesas Marinesines.
They are officers of marines.

(36:32):
But then the, the sort ofgeneral, like everybody else,
will be like, oh, officers,enlisted, they're all marines,
but they don't actually viewthemselves that way.
And it's similar to the jesuitsagain, like this sort of
distinction between, like you'reon the ground doing the work
and then the leadership, sort oflike you change or something
changes.
But but I also what I'm saying.

(36:52):
But I want to get back to this,uh, this big shift that it
seems like it happened betweenrat singer basically becoming
the attack dog, like trying tobasically squash liberation
theology, if I'm understandingthis right.
And then you almost get thisthis person who is not

(37:13):
liberation theology nottechnically, you know the
moniker a Marxist pope is notaccurate, but he's still like,
like you said, sort ofliberation theology is baked
into his DNA in so much Likewhat the hell, how did?

Speaker 3 (37:26):
that even happen, would you say, well, it was a
great, great surprise.
Right, and just to help peopleagain with the context.
Right, and just to help peopleagain with the context.
Joseph Ratzinger was a bishop,then archbishop and then
cardinal, whom Pope John Paul IIcalled from Munich to Rome in
1980.
I think it's exactly 80, maybe81, to run the doctrinal office,

(37:50):
the Congregation for theDoctrine of the Faith, formerly
known as the Inquisition.
But again, all those officeswere revised in the wake of
Vatican II.

Speaker 2 (38:00):
Okay, I did not know that, by the way, so the
doctrinal office, congregationfor the Doctrine of the Faith.

Speaker 3 (38:07):
Ratzinger was a brilliant theologian young man
who even helped to be an advisorat Vatican II fresh out of grad
school I'll stop dropping othernames who kind of mentored him,
blah, blah, blah.
But he was made a bishopeventually straight out of being
a professor in Regensburg, etcetera.

(38:27):
So John Paul II did not likeliberation theology.
Who's John Paul II?
He's a Polish cardinal,archbishop Karol Wojtyla, who
was elected Pope in 1978.
And he was so I think it's fairto say.
The analysis is so he grew up inthe whole bit behind the Iron

(38:49):
Curtain.
Yeah, so we have this very,very negative view of anything
that had any tinges of Marxismor a kind of revolutionary,
military revolutionary, which alot of people on the ground
level that were taken with andwere practitioners, not

(39:10):
theorists, of liberationtheology in Latin America were
also involved in guerrillagroups and other uprising groups
trying to overthrow oligarchiesand juntas and all that stuff.
Right, and our tie to themilitary once more comes out
that all that was going on inthe 1970s and 80s, precisely in

(39:36):
the last escalation of the ColdWar.
Yeah so the Soviet Union waspouring tons of resources into
little places like Nicaragua andEl Salvador, wherever.

Speaker 2 (39:48):
Well, actually, the United States, south Africa.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (39:51):
I mean, actually the united states is who bankrolled
the salvador and junta, um, um,so there's, but, but then the
soviets did for the rebels,right.
So, and that's the storyactually.
So it's the two superpowersreally using these as oh shoot,
I'm not gonna have the word, Iwant help me using them as
actors or proxies, tools reallyof the conflict.

(40:17):
So, john Paul II, this Polishguy, he sees it as in that term
and he's also really concerned,unlike his predecessor, paul VI,
who was elected during VaticanII because the old guy died, who
was elected during Vatican IIbecause the old guy died, who

(40:37):
was more, who was very centristand I don't want to, yeah, but
John, not super heavy duty onstuff, but that it's so
complicated.
But John Paul II for sure isreally into law and order, sees
that the post-Vatican II churchunder Paul VI, whom he respected
, but that Paul VI wasn't firmenough and far too much was
getting out of hand in terms oforder, government, doctrinal

(41:01):
adherence, in other words,proper understanding.
And so he gets a guy like this,joseph Ratzinger, who's
brilliant and who becamearch-conservative by the late
60s, to come mine the doctrinalshop.
Part of that job for John Paulis, you know, basically police,
if you will.
It's a bit of a heavy bird.

(41:22):
But liberation theology andliberation theologians and they
went after Ratzinger went after,for example, franciscan
Leonardo Boff in Brazil andforced the Franciscans to not
allow him to publish and teachand eventually even restrict his
ministry, and so Boff left theFranciscans etc.

(41:42):
That'd be an example.
Gutierrez was under a cloudamong some other guys but never
really stomped out the way theydid on Boff and a lot of that's
political.
He had done his grad studies upin France and it turned out one
of Ratzinger's right-hand guys,next generation, younger like
Gutierrez.
They had been classmatesstudying.

(42:04):
And here we go right, yeah,ratzinger was really hard on it.
Pope John Paul II was prettydarn hard on liberation theology
.
It was only when Ratzingerbecame Pope Benedict XVI from
2005 through 2013.
During those years, thatright-hand man of his, a

(42:24):
Cardinal Mueller from Germany,arranged for Gutierrez to come
and have a visit with Ratzingerand Ratzinger of Pope Benedict
XVI at that point.
And they did and had, you know,a very nice afternoon and dinner
and you know the whole bit, akind of rapprochement.
I don't say rapprochementbecause it was never direct, but

(42:45):
there you have it.

Speaker 2 (42:46):
So, yeah, that's this very strident history, that's
this very strident history, yeah, and so this is where I'm kind
of wanting to lead now, intoGabby's section, where we're
going to get deeper into thesort of views of Pope Francis.
But he had a deep aversion, itseems like, to capitalism, right
, maybe not explicitly, but hewould say things like you know a

(43:09):
culture, you could say marketlogic.
Yeah, he was not.

Speaker 4 (43:14):
I think he would have probably been like well, I
don't know if capitalism is theproblem, I think it's the.
I don't.
He in my reading.
And father, please you can justtell me if I'm an idiot, he
would not.
He didn't really like big,blanket statements.
Like he wouldn't say, oh,capitalism is the evil.
Like he wouldn't say, oh,capitalism is the evil.

Speaker 2 (43:45):
He would say the way that the market uses and abuses
human beings and larger creationis the evil, because anything
can do that he wouldn't reallylike sort of.
He wouldn't say capitalism perse right, but he would.
But there are quotes where hewould refer to things like the
dung of the devil and he wouldbe referring go ahead, sorry for
other moral.

Speaker 3 (44:03):
No, you're right, he loved to use those sharp phrases
that would capture peopleAbsolutely, which made him such
a different Pope from hispredecessor, who was a highly
published academic theologian.
Right A couple of things Firstof all, gabby, I could never
call you an idiot.

Speaker 4 (44:19):
You're a graduate of a Jesuit university, so thank
you, I knew it was going to getme somewhere.

Speaker 3 (44:25):
Just get your head square on your shoulders there
and stop embarrassing us.

Speaker 2 (44:32):
OK, gabby's getting some shit this time yes, so
excited.

Speaker 4 (44:35):
Yeah, but I'm catholic so I like it george, oh
, you see.

Speaker 3 (44:40):
Oh, you're supposed to say thank you, father.
Thank you father, more please,um, so, um how many know how
mary's father?
oh gosh, how many rosaries doyou own?
So the the thing is, um, thelanguage you'll notice in his
documents that he uses a lot hasto do with globalism and has to
do with what I think we wouldphrase more as the kind of the

(45:02):
neoliberal paradigm that'sbasically undertaken Right.
So there's one issue and he isvery critical.
He'll use the languageeconomics or the market in a way
in places, but the bigger issuefor him is how that has taken
the shape that it has in theglobal context and especially in

(45:26):
oppressing the southernhemisphere.
So in other words, the organsof power, which are financial
power you know, I suppose that'sa Marxist analysis.
I head for the base Right, likewhat's going on here, and then
the governmental systems andeverything that go with it in
Europe and North America,especially the US right and
certain wealthy countries inEurope.
That's his big criticism.

(45:48):
His criticism is this is in thelanguage he used in his
apostolic exhortation EvangeliiGaudium.
He goes this is an economy thatkills.
Now, that's a strong statementand it's a sentence.
It's like a six-word sentenceand this economy kills, period.

Speaker 2 (46:07):
Do you think he's just worried about using the
word capitalism, Like you?

Speaker 3 (46:10):
know, yeah, Gabby.
What do you think?

Speaker 4 (46:12):
I don't.
I my reading of the pope andand I haven't read everything
that he's written, becausethat's a lot, but of the ones
that I have read, which are mostof his encyclicals is that I
think I read that there is afear of him applying the cause
to any just one thing, becauseif you just apply it to

(46:34):
capitalism, there is an abilityto reduce that to saying, oh
well, the alternative tocapitalism, let's say socialism,
socialism must not kill, orsocialism must be the better
option or the less harmfuloption, and I think he would
probably push back even againstthat and say actually any of it

(46:55):
can kill what's, but what we'recurrently living in is killing.

Speaker 3 (46:59):
That's exactly right.
Yeah, that he that last pointhe's trying to okay, you're
exonerated that the particularcircumstances in which the world
finds itself.
In his time and in his writing.
You're exactly right, that'swhat he's addressing.

(47:19):
And because a globalized,supposedly market-driven I mean,
I'm not an economist, I try toread and be intelligent or
informed, but, right, this isthe framework in which we're
existing.
Right, we don't refer formultiple reasons, but among them
we don't refer to the thirdworld anymore, because the
second world doesn't exist.

(47:40):
That was the world behind theIron Curtain, and what happened
quickly, right, was markets andinvestors from the so-called
West moved right into theEastern European situation.
Right, and then, what are yougoing to call the economic
system operating in Russia?
You got to help me.

(48:02):
Actually, you guys are the oneswho really know more than me.
I mean, is it a capitalistsystem or is it like in China?
Is it a state-controlled marketsystem?
Because that's certainly thething right for China.
But so, you see, I think you'reright.
You put it well, gabby thathe's trying to describe
something that, if you start tolook at specific places and how

(48:24):
the whole thing's workingglobally, he doesn't want to get
it nailed into these either-orcategories, and I did want to
add just a quick point.
Historically, I mentioned PopePaul VI.
Okay, it's so hard.
People should be taking notesand trying to keep track of all
these popes.
He was elected in the winter of1963 or the spring when Pope

(48:49):
John XXIII died between thefirst two sessions of Vatican II
, and he's the guy they figuredwould be the next.
Anyway, he issued a papalencyclical.
An encyclical is the highestlevel of teaching authority from
the papacy, so it's a big deal.
Document he issued one in 1967,called first two words in Latin
Populorum Progressio, theprogress of people.

(49:12):
In that document he severelycriticized both the East and the
West.
He criticized both the Sovietbloc and China communist systems
and he criticized the freemarket capitalism of the West,
both and along um capitalism ofthe west, both and along,

(49:38):
applying a lot of the sameprinciples to both um.
It's quite a sophisticateddocument.
I'd be fascinated to who thewho?
the authors were that, you know,worked it up for him.
He immediately, as you mightimagine, got no lack of from
westerners, um, especiallywealthy ones, and especially
americans.

Speaker 4 (49:52):
That'll be a theme.

Speaker 3 (49:54):
Yeah, a whole mill of writing started coming out in
their magazines of opinion andother places debunking what he'd
written, branding him some kindof Marxist something or other.
Again, that's not the languagein the document.

(50:16):
Again, he's criticizing bothsystems.
As he sees, a lot of it is theeconomic and political fallout
of the Enlightened.
Let's read our Adorno, okay,and some other figures.
So, paul VI, unfortunately hispersonality was one in which he
would back down.
There was a certain timidity,but that's enough of that story.
But it's just to say thatdecades before Francis's Pope, a

(50:40):
really bold document came outthat in effect rejected the
Soviet and Chinese communistsystems and the Western systems,
definitions of development andinstead he wants development.

Speaker 2 (50:58):
Was in scare quotes there with uh moral, sorry
because there's a.

Speaker 3 (51:01):
they each loaded it with certain meanings and
purposes, practical agendas,right.
But all that development, orsaying we want to develop the
undeveloped third world, was toreally, I guess the language you
want to use now it's popular tobe colonized them more, or
something like that, right,that's the language that tends
to be used but basically to useand abuse continuously, right

(51:23):
and so, or why have them developinto a system where you're
always going to have a massivenumber of people at the bottom?
And that was true, certainly inMaoist China at the bottom, and
that was true certainly inMaoist China at the time.
And we could do analysis with aSino specialist right now about
the current situation in Chinaor in the Soviet bloc, right.
So the criticism was across theboard and I think there's

(51:47):
something of that approach thatwe see carried out in Francis's
own writing, approach that wesee carried out in Francis's own
writing.
And in between, john Paul II,who had a 27-year papacy, issued
not less than three encyclicalson human labor and human rights

(52:08):
with regard to the economy andwork.
And yeah, it's going to bepeople like we keep bringing
back, you know the big mouthradio guy, rush Limbaugh and
others who would say he's aMarxist pope and that kind of
stuff.
But there are also magazineslike one called First Things.
That's a Catholic archconservative Catholic magazine
of opinion.
Some of whom were on it veryearly on would have been critics

(52:31):
of Poplar and Progresso in thelate 60s, though the magazine
was established later.
But who to this day?
I mean a couple of reallydisheartening op-ed pieces
written when the Pope died andthen one by an American bishop
on the day of the funeral.

Speaker 4 (52:49):
It takes one's breath away.
The Pope and the Vatican itselfspeak to the entire Catholic
church and I think that oftengets I mean, that's even the
pushback.
I think queer Catholicsprobably, like myself, probably
have a little bit moreunderstanding of the church
structure, but I think queerpeople that exist outside of the
framework of the church at thiscurrent time one of the

(53:09):
critiques is that, you know,francis was friendly, but he
wasn't progressive enough, hedidn't push the church enough
and, as a queer catholic myself,I I always say to them he was
not just speaking to westerncatholics, he was speaking to
all catholics, catholics thatexist in countries where
homosexuality is a crimepunishable by death.
To have the church extortcertain things is to then

(53:34):
potentially and likely placeCatholics in a position of
danger where the Pope is tellingthem that something is okay and
the government that they'reexisting under is telling them
that that is not okay.
And so I think that's often lostbecause Protestant
denominations are not structuredthe same way the Catholic

(53:57):
Church is, and they do have, Ithink, a little bit more freedom
and flexibility in terms of howdoctrine is developed and
redeveloped and redeveloped, andthey respond.
The church itself does not.
The big church does not respondquickly to societal change,
which is, I guess, what bringsme to Laudato Si, which I think
was, honestly, from myrecollection and I'm pretty

(54:20):
young pretty well receivedconsidering.
And so in Laudato Si, which isanother encyclical that Pope
Francis wrote for our audiencewho's not familiar, it's like
the environmental encyclical,all about, uh, care and creation
for the earth, he says what thehell is an encyclical okay, I
already told you, george, you'renot listening.

Speaker 2 (54:40):
Yeah, but I don't listen to you guys.

Speaker 3 (54:42):
I need to be explicit , okay, um excuse me, gabby um,
but you know, we gotta, we gottahave to help the protestants.
Again, we do yeah, you know,bless his heart.

Speaker 2 (54:52):
My pastor, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, he went to
Union Theological.
I mean, what do?

Speaker 3 (54:57):
you want.
So, gabby, so love Union,theological Great scholars there
and people.
They even produce really goodpastors and so forth.
So yeah, and encyclical is aletter that is for the universal
church, okay, it's going to befor the whole world round.
So it's a letter or a documentissued to the worldwide church

(55:24):
by the pope that wants to layout matters of belief or about
belief, the doctrine, theteaching, okay, and it may
address any number of types ofthings.
John Paul II, like I said, oneof his earliest ones was
Leiborne MacJerson's on humanlabor.
The first one that had to dowith labor was 1891, leo XIII,

(55:48):
rerum Novarum, and really it wasan encyclical written to
support unionization and thatwas pretty radical in the late
Gilded Industrial Age, right.
So encyclicals are issued fromthe papacy at a level of
everyone is to understand, learn, study and, as best they can,

(56:12):
accept this teaching.
But there are other things thatcome out, like an apostolic
exhortation is another term, andthose are usually written after
a synod of bishops takes placeand those are periodic and it's
bishops from all over the world,but not all of them like a
council, but select ones fromall the parts of the earth, who
address an issue.

Speaker 2 (56:32):
It's just like a richer landscape for theological
imagination and thinking thanlike a Protestant sola scriptura
kind of world.

Speaker 3 (56:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (56:41):
I think that's so fascinating to me.
And the reason my Catholicism.
Really.
I don't know if I'm going overanytime soon, but I really
appreciate it.

Speaker 3 (56:53):
I think Shadi had a.
I know lots of people do, yeah,so back to low-dose.
See, I was just throwing forthe people's knowledge 2015,.
So it's, the 10th anniversaryis next month.

Speaker 4 (57:04):
I just wanted to.
I actually went and got my copy.
I wanted to read a brief quote.
I always love encyclicalsbecause, even if I don't like
what they say, they're alwaysreally quotable, which I really
appreciate from all the handsthat have touched them.
He writes caring for ecosystemsdemands farsightedness, since no
one is looking for quick andeasy profit, is truly interested

(57:26):
in their preservation, but thecost of the damage caused by
such selfish lack of concern ismuch greater than the economic
benefits to be obtained by suchselfish lack of concern is much
greater than the economicbenefits to be obtained when
certain species are destroyed orseriously harmed.
The values involved areincalculable.
We can be silent witnesses toterrible injustices if we think
that we can obtain significantbenefits by making the rest of
humanity, present and future,pay the extremely high costs of

(57:49):
environmental deterioration.
And then he sort of goes into.
I mean he just rips apart theconcept of globalization and
development, not because ofthose words themselves, but
because of what they have doneand what they are continuing to
do.
He writes a few pages later.
Today, however, we have torealize that a true ecological
approach always becomes a socialapproach.

(58:09):
It must integrate questions ofjustice in debates on the
environment so as to hear boththe cry of the earth and the cry
of the poor.
Obviously very uh.
Embedded within that is thatliberation theology base that he
has from his oh, I kind of lostyou there.

Speaker 2 (58:24):
Gabby, for a second glitch.
Yeah, hold on we'll.
We'll wait for gabby to comeback and then we'll.

Speaker 4 (58:30):
Oh, gabby, there we are, yes when, when did, when
did we, when did you?

Speaker 2 (58:35):
lose, we lost uh did that come through?

Speaker 3 (58:37):
oh sick, just about then you got okay, that's
totally fine.

Speaker 4 (58:40):
So my question is obviously you can see a lot of
the tenets of the liberationtheology in just those two
sentences that I read to you all.
What did Lodato see as a priestyourself, what did Lodato see
mean for the church and what didit call the church to do in
those, you know, in the momentsimmediately after it?

Speaker 3 (58:59):
Yeah, I would say.
First of all, I just wanted tonote Cry of the Earth and Cry of
the Poor, just to tie back tosomething else, was the title of
a very influential book byLeonardo Boff.
A very influential book byLeonardo Boff.
So the Pope is actually drawingon that in the.
You know, without footnoting it, those of us in the game are

(59:23):
like, oh cool.
So the reception of itimmediately in Roman Catholic
diocese and parts of the worldespecially most threatened by
the rising of seas and waterlevels and, more extreme,
especially along the southernSouth Asian and Pacific Rim
areas like that, but alsosub-Saharan Africa which, as you
know, has been undergoingsevere droughts and so forth.

(59:44):
So again in the parts of theworld that are always getting
their butt kicked by the globalneoliberal economic system which
, as don't you love his rhetoric, like he's just saying it's
selfish sinfulness.
You know that only looks forimmediate gains.
I mean, that's Pope Francis.
You know his predecessors, likePaul VI and John Paul, would

(01:00:04):
use much more elegant language.
He just wants to like punch,right.
He just wants to, wants it tocatch.
So it was very quickly adoptedand significantly more broadly
than just in Catholicism, right,and so it had a great influence
over the ensuing years withregard to different world

(01:00:25):
organizations dealing withclimate change, and he did a
follow up short, much, much,much shorter document called
laudate deum, just before theparis climate summit, which was,
uh, I think about two.
How long ago was that?
I lose track of time about twoyears ago, I don't know, 2022,

(01:00:46):
maybe one, okay, but it had ahuge influence, right, not just
in Catholicism, but reallyacross all sorts of people of
goodwill and intention, alreadyby 2015, been writing some of
his own letters and statementsconcertedly about the crisis of

(01:01:17):
global change, climate changeand its human causes.
So, yeah, now I have to tellyou the encyclical was not
popular among a lot of Catholicsin the United States, shocker,
no, yeah, and again, this reallyinfluences.
Really influences, right, or?
This helps us again, you'dmention gabby, rightly, and with

(01:01:39):
your uh, queer, um, companionsand friends and so forth that
were disappointed with the popenot going as far as they thought
he should.
Um, he's.
This document deals with thewhole world.
So it's it.
It's very positively receivedby people that recognize and
want to address human-causedfactors for climate change and

(01:01:59):
all of its perfidious results.
You know, unbridled, uh,reneging on all sorts of
commitments in that regard andenvironmental, you know, and and
all of that right, drill, babydrill, and we shouldn't be
trying to do electricity and allthis kind of stuff.

(01:02:21):
I can tell you.
It's an anecdote, it's a story,it means a lot to me.
I'm just going to own it.
But in 2015 I began helping, asit turned out, in a.
I began helping, as it turnedout, in a parish in Nashville.
I don't have a parish, I'm aprofessor, but I help out if
asked and they wanted help atthis parish, which is one of the
wealthiest in the Diocese ofNashville, and it was the first

(01:02:44):
Sunday of Advent.
So the beginning of the newchurch year in late November,
early December, and the readingson the gospel of the first
Sunday of Advent, whether fromMatthew, mark or Luke, are the
ones at the very end of thegospel, before the Passion, and
they're about the end, and inMark and Luke it's called the
Lucan or the Markan Apocalypse.

(01:03:05):
Right, the teaching of Jesus isstars are falling from the sky,
the earth is having earthquakes,there's upheaval, all this kind
of stuff, right, sounds likethe book of Revelation.
It's a type of literature.
That's the gospel passage I wasto preach on in the lectionary
that first Sunday of Advent inthis posh parish, and so I've

(01:03:28):
George knows I can't stand anyromanticizing of any of this
stuff and so I kind of just givethe people a homily.
You know probably a solid 12minutes which they're pissed off
at 10 minutes.
You know it's gone long.

Speaker 4 (01:03:47):
You lost him at 15.

Speaker 3 (01:03:50):
But I gave him a homily in which I explained the
literary form.
I pointed out that Advent, forthe first 17 days of Advent, is
about the second coming ofChrist, not sweet baby Jesus and
all the ways we've made that amodel, and you know what it is.
And so these are.
You know this is what we got,and so I explained that in
Luke's gospel and in all theapocalyptic literature that is

(01:04:14):
highly symbolic language.
They don't mean literally whatbiblical fundamentalists think.
It means, right, that for thatliterature, the stars are just
what we mean by stars theimportant people, the beautiful
people, the power people arefalling from their heavens and
people can start to understandthat if you that's how I
preached it, right, like you getpeople to understand, and as I

(01:04:36):
went along and talked about thisand that the horrible
ecological stuff described Iknow from doing a lot of reading
on scholarship on the book ofRevelation isn't predicting the
future.
The people would have heard itas that's what's going on right
now.
Rome raped any place they went,raped the earth, and if that's
a violent, I apologize, but I dothink it's a good metaphor.

(01:04:58):
You aren't going to find thecedars of Lebanon in Lebanon,
much today, you know, becausethat's great wood for ships and
they just deracinated,defoliated.
Lebanon, for example, pollutedthe water.
So all those descriptionsaren't about stuff that's.
It's stuff that's alreadyhappening.
Last step of the homily, Iquoted two passages from Laudato

(01:05:21):
Si.
I said now the Holy Father'sissued an encyclical on the
ecology and so forth, and that'show I wrapped it up and, you
know, exhorted everyone to readthe encyclical and to see, as
with the people 1950 years agoliving in degradation, this is
what we got.
And now the gospel passage fromluke isn't just some weird

(01:05:42):
piece of shit.
After the mass, I'm standing inthe door.
You know, very catholicamerican thing, you know.
Stand on the door and peoplecome out.
You know, a lot of catholicsdon't even give you eye contact,
they just walk by you.
Um, other people thank you foranything.
And then this guy I'm a littleguy, I'm five, six this guy,
who's like probably 5'11", loomsover me, shakes my hand and he

(01:06:03):
goes, father you know who areyou.
I never knew you.
And so I told him.
I said, well, I think I'vementioned but, and he said and
he wouldn't let go of my handand he kept gripping it hard, he
goes.
I got a lot of problems withwhat you just did in there.
I said, well, first of all, letgo of my hand.
And I just stopped there andstared at him.

(01:06:23):
And so he told me he didn'tappreciate my bringing my
left-wing politics into thechurch.
And I said what was left-wingpolitics about it?
And he said when you startedtalking about the environment, I
said I was quoting a papalencyclical, mr, I didn't say Mr
Campbell, I said I was quotingthe Pope of Rome in his
encyclical, which is the highestlevel of teaching authority in

(01:06:46):
the papacy for the church.
I might as well have said thatto him.
You know Slavic, nothing goingin right.
And I said to him and he hadsome rebuttal I said no, no.
I said I need you to hear me.
You have to acknowledge what Isaid.
I said I'm not just bringing inmy stuff.
I said I worked hard on thatand I was giving you stuff from
the Bishop of Rome.
And so he stormed away and hestarted coming at me with some

(01:07:10):
other angle.
I said look, I said there's nopoint in continuing.
I said you're you're nothearing me and I'm.
I really do not agree with you.
Let's go Like thank you, goodday.
Of course all the other peoplejust walking by, right, and as
he walked away down the frontsteps, right out toward the curb
, he turned over his shoulderand boomed out.

(01:07:30):
I mean really yelled you're notwelcome here and you better not
come back American Catholics.

Speaker 2 (01:07:36):
Ladies and gentlemen, oh that's.

Speaker 4 (01:07:40):
I mean, the West itself is not good at taking
critiques, period.
I think, just our discussion ofthe Western response to
encyclicals.
But I do think that there's alarger threat of Catholics and
this might just be me beingoptimistic, but I do think that
there's a larger threat ofCatholics and this might just be
me being optimistic, but I dothink there's a larger threat of
Catholics that are pretty chillin terms of even listening to,

(01:08:00):
maybe, beliefs that they may notagree with during a homily.
I just sorry this has nothingto do with Laudato Si.
I just really resonated withthat because being able to say
that Pope Francis said this,this and this, or for the past
gosh 12 years, has been soempowering for so many groups.
I mean queer people, theeco-justice movement, for

(01:08:23):
example, being able to rely onthat in Catholic circles.
I think it means more to us whounderstand the structure of the
church.
But then you have folks likethat where if they don't like
something they hear, they'rejust going to toss it out the
window and not even reallyengage with it.
But you mentioned earlier thatLaudato Si' meant a lot to even
areas outside of the Catholicchurch.

(01:08:43):
I know there, I know a fewchurches and parishes that have,
like they describe themselvesas eco-parishes.
Now they do like carbon audits.
There's a big youth-ledmovement for Laudato Si and even
, like parishes and dioceses,have organized action plans to
align themselves better with theteachings of Laudato Si.
Do you envision this sort ofmovement itself being carried

(01:09:07):
forward, regardless of who thenext pope is?

Speaker 3 (01:09:10):
Thank you so much for describing all that, gabby.
And to answer your questiondirectly, yes, it has a momentum
of its own Generation.
Your generation, the generationyounger than you, are
especially engaged in this, butnot exclusively people, even old
people like me in their 60s andolder, very, very concerned.
So yeah, it was veryself-indulgent to tell my story
about that guy, but it was arepresentative story of a

(01:09:34):
significant number of people whoin our country do reject, and
selectively reject, right?
But yes, and you know, theNational Catholic Reporter is an
independent newspaper which nowis like everything else, like a
site that puts up new articlesdaily.
This week there's an article bya young man who graduated from

(01:09:58):
Vanderbilt Divinity School aboutfive, six years ago and the
title of the article is LaudatoSi made me a Catholic and he'd
grown up Southern Baptist, wentto William and Mary where he
first encountered Catholicism abit, but the way he encountered
it was Laudato Si, and I forgetthe details in the article how
he got his.

(01:10:18):
I guess he was involved in ecostuff at William and Mary and so
forth and when he came toVanderbilt Divinity he became
more and more interested.
A couple of years aftergraduating a few years ago he
did become a Roman Catholic andhe said it wasn't anything ever
expected growing up in a supersteep, small Georgia Baptist
world.
But I think it's some of whateven George was saying briefly

(01:10:41):
there a while ago.
People that are thinking peopleand have a historical
consciousness can recognize thatthese documents are not just
off-the-cuff diatribes.
Right, they're not op-eds.
They typically can have 200footnote and they're

(01:11:02):
encyclopedic that way.
But yes, the people being takenwith Laudato Si, catholic
parishes, as you mentioned Iknow of some who've gone and
done solar panels, all sorts ofstuff Loads of Catholic parishes
have twinned ever since the1970s and 80s with a parish in

(01:11:22):
the US, twins with a parish inHaiti or some other Caribbean or
Latin American country, notonly to give financial help but
to do exchanges, culturalexchanges and travel, and the
eco thing has certainly becomean integral part of it.

Speaker 2 (01:11:39):
It reminds me too of, like you know, wendell and Cook
.
We describe it as the thingsthat are extractive and
oppressive to labor and humanityare the same forces that are
extractive and oppressive tolabor and humanity are the same
forces that are extractive andoppressive to the earth.
And you know, quoting Boff hereagain, like the cry of the

(01:12:00):
earth and the cry of the poor,like linking those two struggles
together is fascinating to me.
But I almost like want todouble down a little bit on what
Gabby said at the end of thequestion too, which was how much
do you think this eco-Catholickind of position is going to
continue forward, regardless ofwho the next Pope is?

(01:12:24):
Does this kind of AmericanCatholicism that's sort of like
I'm going to take a scalpel knowscalpel to whatever I feel like
when it comes to stuff comingout of the Vatican that cuts
both ways too, right?
So is there going to be?
Do you think that is going tosurvive with whatever you know,
whatever comes after the whitesmoke, right?

Speaker 3 (01:12:44):
Yes, yes absolutely it will, and you did a good
summary there of Laudato Si'itself.
Thanks, george.
That was a very good rehearsalof the point Gabby presented and
you repeated, looping backaround after all my words, what

(01:13:12):
do you like to call is throwaway society?
So, just as we throw awaypeople and that, I suppose, can
sound very Marxist again thatyou use, you control the means
of production and you treatpeople simply as tools in it and
discard them.
He said that's the sameattitude that is pillaging the
natural environment, and so,exactly right.
I can see evidence in alldirections that people that are

(01:13:34):
deeply committed to thisCatholics, for example, are
deeply committed toenvironmental justice is a
phrase we like to use aren'tgoing to let up.
And just as under a much more,a much more pastoral and

(01:13:56):
pastorally liberal papacy, thepeople that really there's no
other word to use it if you readthe stuff they write that hated
this pope, were able to carryon their agendas.
Likewise, folks committed tothis, like that former
Vanderbilt Divinity student whonow teaches STEM in a high
school uh, backup at Virginia.
You know it's integral to howhe teaches he says um, uh, in
the school Uh, I forget if it'spublic or private school.

Speaker 4 (01:14:18):
Uh, so yeah, no, I think it's just like, just like
this BDS student who ended upconverting to Catholicism
because of something that um, asthat parish member that you
just spoke about would havedescribed as left wing or
leftist, or you that um, as thatparish member that, uh, you
just spoke about, would havedescribed as left wing or
leftist or you know whateversomething he disagreed with.
There's also been a largeinflux in um conversions from

(01:14:41):
evangelical, far rightProtestant, uh, coming into the
church too, and that's alsochanging.
Um, that's also changing themakeup of the church and how we
interact with each other.
Um, I know, as a cradlecatholic, I've got a superiority
complex that, on a good day, Ishould be cut off at the knees
for, but that cradle catholicismalso gives me an immense amount

(01:15:01):
of guilt and shame that policesme every day, um, which I I
enjoy, I like it, um, but Ithink the makeup of the catholic
Church is changing so much, anda lot of the conversions came
almost as a result of peoplerejecting Pope Francis and
saying, you know, holding on tostructure, holding on to order,

(01:15:21):
holding on to what they knew,and started maybe saying things
in plainer English and sayingthings in a much more, as Father
Morrill said, just sort ofhitting you with it.
Not, you know, he's going to cutto the chase, he's going to get
to the heart of the matter, andso that's also changing the
makeup of this too.

(01:15:41):
So it's not always, and PopeFrancis always used to say, the
church has to be universal,which is a very nice way of
saying you got to figure out howto get along, and also we have
to do all of these things.
And Catholic social teaching isalso a big eco.
Environmental justice in thechurch, I think, has primarily
always been a really easy quotes, easy push because of Catholic

(01:16:05):
social teaching and because ofthe churches.
We want it, even historicallyspeaking.

Speaker 3 (01:16:09):
Yeah, no, it's true.
Just to add a few details toyour good description there.
Francis, one of the criticismsfrom people that wanted a more
progressive papacy said well, hedidn't change any particular
doctrines, teachings or polity,and that's it's true.
His approach was much more.

(01:16:31):
The key thing for him was, as Imentioned quite a while ago,
the real life person in front ofyou, or the real life social
circumstances in which you are,and that the teaching.
There's a whole principle ofsubsidiarity in Roman Catholic
doctrine and polity, and theprinciple of subsidiarity is

(01:16:54):
whatever can be handled at themost local level should be
handled there.
Now, the recovery of that againpost-Vatican II now everybody
knows what that means when I sayit again has been an uneven
reception, right that for people, when they want, whether from
one or other extreme of agendas,want this something to be

(01:17:16):
imposed universally, in acertain way they get upset,
whereas what Francis was up towas how does it work in a
particular scene andcircumstance?
You attend to the actual, andif I give you an example, I
think would be a good one.
Back to the issue ofhomosexuality.
As you mentioned, gabby, thereare numerous countries in the

(01:17:39):
Southern Hemisphere I don't knowhow many but not insignificant,
where to be caught in?
Homosexual, they would say,activity is punishable even by
death.
Well, this Pope Francisexplicitly, more than once,
several times, condemned this inhis writings.

(01:18:00):
First of all, he was the onewho took John Paul's very
diplomatic language in anencyclical that said, under
current circumstances, it's hardto imagine that the death
penalty should be used byanybodyical.
That said, under currentcircumstances, it's hard to
imagine that the death penaltyshould be used by anybody.
Francis simply said the deathpenalty is intrinsically evil
and inexcusable.

(01:18:20):
Now, and the now meaning we haveways of protecting society from
anybody who's a pathologicalkiller or person that you know,
person that would do great harm.
The only justification forcapital punishment was the
protection of the social body.
It's not to punish like that.
You're going to punish bykilling.
The only justification was toprotect society from someone.

(01:18:45):
Well, the point John Paul madein the 1990s was look at the
sophistication of our prisons.
You don't you know, if peopleescape prison, usually they're
not in a maximum security level,prison Right.

Speaker 2 (01:18:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:18:59):
Now with homosexuality.
So he was condemning.
He would even point out,francis, that, hey, this
includes for homosexual people.
You can't justify killing themand you should get those laws
off your books.
That's a pretty radical thingin some sub-Saharan African
countries, right.
On the other hand, he clearlywas fine with the current

(01:19:22):
director of the Doctrine ofFaith office putting out a short
instruction two Decembers agosaying that priests, deacons,
bishops can impart individualblessings on spontaneous
occasions to people inhomosexual committed
relationships.
Right, there's a big blow up,you see People loving it, people

(01:19:46):
saying it doesn't go far enough, and then people that are
flipping out and hating it.
People say it doesn't go farenough and then people are
flipping out and hating it.
But the bishop cardinal in Congo, kinshasa, closest to Francis,
one of his close advisors gotback to him and said we want you
to know publicly that we're notgoing to do that and that
doesn't apply here.
And Francis said to him fine,you're in a different set of

(01:20:08):
circumstances there, him.
Fine, you're in a different setof circumstances there.
Work on it in whatever way youcan.
That doesn't cause a kind ofsocial unrest that would cause
more violence.
That was the issue as I readabout it.
So that's an example of, well,there can be a universal kind of
instruction.
Now, that wasn't an encyclical,that wasn't you know what I'm
saying.

(01:20:28):
It wasn't even issued by thepapacy, it was issued by another
artist, local circumstances andconditions that, let's face it,
that's the truest meaning ofthe word politics.
You've got to figure out whatis the doable in the Roman
Catholic language, for thecommon good, here and now.
That could change going forward.
But right now, how do we do it?
And that's the whole notion inCatholicism, also the

(01:20:51):
development of doctrine.
Why?
Because bedrock belief, ofcourse.
Thomas Aquinas in the 13thcentury, brilliant theologian,
wrote it up best that bedrock toRoman Catholic belief is that
the God who's saving us,redeeming us, delivering us, is

(01:21:11):
the same God who created us.
This is a big deal actually.
Therefore, god works throughour humanness, which includes
our politics and ourinterpersonal relationships, and
, and, and, and, and, and, and,and.
So it's that whole.
To put it pithily, that gracebuilds on nature.

(01:21:32):
And Rahner, a great theologianof the 20th century, said let's
even put it better than thatthat grace pervades nature.
And then there are explicitways that grace, grace just
means gifts of God, gratia,god's graciousness towards
humanity in the whole creationcomes through and in creation

(01:21:52):
and humanity and because weevolve, and John Paul II made
that clear in one of his letters.
Believing in evolutionary theoryabout how creatures have
evolved on the earth, he said,does not conflict with the
mythology of the first book ofGenesis.
That didn't get a whole lot ofpress.
I think it's a rathersignificant point against

(01:22:13):
fundamentalists, right?
He said those stories servethis purpose.
Scientific theory serves thispurpose and we don't.
Biblical fundamentalism isbullshit, you heard it here
first folks.

Speaker 2 (01:22:25):
Biblical fundamentalism.

Speaker 4 (01:22:29):
I want to pivot to for telling Tutti here, just
because it is my favorite ofPope Francis's encyclicals.
Before we wrap up here, I'mgoing to read another excerpt,
because you can't stop me.
Pope Francis writes there's agrowing loss of the sense of
history, which leads to evenfurther breakup.
And he's talking about justsort of the globe.
A kind of deconstructionismwhereby human freedom claims to

(01:22:50):
create everything starting fromzero, is making headway in
today's culture.
The one thing it leaves in itswake is the drive to limitless
consumption and expressions ofempty individualism.
Then he continues on these arenew forms of cultural
colonization.
Let us not forget that peoplesthat abandon their tradition and
, either from the craze to mimicothers or to foment violence,

(01:23:13):
or from unpardonable negligenceor apathy, allow others to rob
their very soul, end up losingnot only their spiritual
identity, but also their moralconsistency and, in the end,
their intellectual, economic andpolitical.
One effective way to weakenhistorical consciousness,
critical thinking, the strugglefor justice and the processes of

(01:23:35):
integration is to empty greatwords of their meaning or to
manipulate them.
Nowadays, what do certain wordslike democracy, freedom,
justice or unity really mean?
They've been bent and shaped toserve as tools for domination,
as meaningless tags that can beused to justify any action.
And then, just as a final note,he then continues some parts of

(01:23:57):
our human family, it appears,can be readily sacrificed for
the sake of others consideredworthy of a carefree existence.
I mean, geez wow, fratelli Tutti, huge, not as huge as Lodalto C
.
I think that's an injustice toFratelli Tutti, but he really.
I mean, the theme of thedocument is to emphasize this
universal fraternity, toemphasize social friendship, to

(01:24:20):
emphasize that we belong to oneanother and that I think at the
beginning he uses the Cain andAbel.
He eventually relies on GoodSamaritan, primarily throughout
it, but he also makes mention ofCain and Abel, which I love,
but that we are each other'skeepers and that we belong to
each other just like we belongto the earth.
How does this encyclical expandon traditional Catholic social

(01:24:43):
teaching?
And then, what theologicalfoundations really supported the
vision for him writing andreleasing this encyclical?
I know those are two reallysmall questions, so have at it.

Speaker 3 (01:24:53):
I'll try not to go too long on it.
First of all, you've beenhelpful, gabby, in pointing out
that Fratelli Tutti is anencyclical.
I mentioned earlier EvangeliiGaudium, which was an apostolic
exhortation or a lesser documentin these gradations, but it

(01:25:13):
really fed what you'redescribing there, that Fratelli
Tutti.
A few years later he's clearlybeen working and reworking and
sharpening how to state this.
It builds on I mentioned JohnPaul II, that fantasy from 78 to
2005, having done somethinglike 16 encyclicals I forget the

(01:25:35):
exact number, might be more,but when he uses the Canaan-Abel
story, for example, john Paulmade that the bedrock biblical
story for one of his moraltheology encyclicals, or moral
theology slash, social ethicsencyclicals.
So very often there's going tobe that kind of building Again
and Fratelli Tutti has found away to build on papalorum

(01:25:58):
progressio and build on ahundred years plus of papal
encyclicals dealing with social,what we'd say social justice,
starting with that one in 1891about human labor.
Very often they're issued evenon anniversaries of prior
encyclicals.
So I guess the short answerbecause that passage I don't

(01:26:21):
know how it works in podcasts, Ireally don't but whether the
reference can be given to peoplebut that particular paragraph
or article within the document.
You've identified a key onethat grasps it.
But it builds on what we findin prior encyclicals and other
documents as well, and he'lleven quote the US Catholic

(01:26:44):
bishops in 1986 issued apastoral letter entitled
Economic Justice for All, andother bishops' conferences in
other parts of the world havedone similar work, and so he'll
draw on a lot of that wider ifyou go through all the footnotes
world.
But there you have it right.
I mean he names a kind of vapidindividualism and imitantism,

(01:27:10):
meaning the imminent, whateversatisfies me right now, or my
immediate circle or whatever.
But that individualism and thatdenial of history right, that's
a very convenient thing to doand the denial of the social
fabric, so to reduceChristianity, for example, just

(01:27:31):
to individual moral failings,that that's what ethics and
morality is about.
And he's standing on theshoulders of his predecessors.
No again, we've been created associal beings.
We've been created as the wayhumans are are social, therefore
political, therefore economic,therefore educational, therefore

(01:27:54):
familial, and that all of theseare of a piece.
And that's why that's such apowerful encyclical, as you
pointed out, pulling all thosetogether and saying these things
are not unrelated.
But if we look at, he doesn'tuse the language.
It's what I prefer.

Speaker 4 (01:28:08):
If we look at how global neoliberalism is
functioning, prioritizing andvalorizing the individual
consumer as a standard andanswerable only to themselves,
that's how we've gotten wherewe've gotten Exactly in me is
saying well, there's a lack ofdiscernment, there's no thought

(01:28:30):
before, there's no reflection,there's no what is going to be?
I would even probably wageragainst saying the greatest good
, because that's already beenweaponized against.

Speaker 3 (01:28:39):
You're paraphrasing the very good, the very passage
that you read where he's sayingit.
You've just described the kindof vapid or shallow or I don't
know what individualism that, atthe end of the day, doesn't
really satisfy people, right?
You move from one thrill to thenext.
That's what a consumer cultureis based on, anyway.

(01:29:02):
Right?
As soon as you buy it, you havebuyer's remorse and even the
way the media operates.
It's always about predicting thefuture, what you need to know
about, right?
So they're all flipped out nowabout this conclave, right?
You see how quickly it pivotsfrom any consideration of what
his papacy was.
It's only considered to theextent that they want to predict

(01:29:23):
who's going to buck it or who'sgoing to continue it.
The whole news cycle is basedon instant stories that are
salacious or exciting andotherwise predicting, predicting
, predicting.
And as soon as the event haspassed, it's just forgotten.
That's what I read when I read,you know, the denial of history

(01:29:45):
.
You just forget about it andit's all about what's the next
thing.
Well, it's just like consumingand marketing.
I mean, I have a four-year car,car, I love it, this little
toyota corolla, and I get theseconstant emails from the
dealership we want to buy yourcar because I don't use it much.
I live two miles from my office.
It's great, you know, but theysee there's be a great car to

(01:30:05):
resell, okay, with low mileageand everything, and it's a great
.
I think cor is a great car, um,but they want me to buy it.
I don't want another car, youknow, last one lasted me 10
years.
It's fine, but that's socountercultural, right, right.
Why would you not want to justkeep getting the latest,
whatever?
But it's always about this,this unanchored and ungrounded

(01:30:26):
yeah, lurching forward all thetime, more, more, more, rather
than you like.
When I think back to my Slavicgrandmother and grandfather, who
gardened into their 80s, right,like they had this whole way of
living from the peasant lifethat they always had had, even
in the States.
But they didn't.

(01:30:46):
In fact they weren't eveninterested.
They were upset when my parentsgave them a colored TV for
Christmas one year.

Speaker 4 (01:30:53):
Wow, I think we might have had the same grandparents.

Speaker 3 (01:30:55):
There you go.
Because my grandma was.

Speaker 4 (01:30:58):
I mean, she refused to have a mobile phone, she had
a landline.
I had to call her on thelandline once a month if I
wanted to talk to Donna, which Idid.
She just, I mean, gardened wellinto her eighties, gardened
until she died, but everythingwas slow, there was no rush,
there was no.
Oh, I have to know this.
They would play Jeopardy everynight on the TV while they,

(01:31:19):
while they ate dinner.

Speaker 3 (01:31:20):
They enforced no phones in the house.

Speaker 4 (01:31:23):
They said no mobile phones in the house.
You're going to be present withus, and it wasn't about
selfishness.
It was about teaching theirkids and their grandkids to slow
down and to connect with thepeople that were there, which I
thought was archaic as a child,and as an adult, I still crave
my grandmother's living roomwhere there were no phones
allowed, and she would shame youif you had it out.

Speaker 3 (01:31:48):
But you know, even what you just described, that is
a life also that has its ownanticipations, but the
anticipations are seasonal, andso life is shaped much more
around the agricultural cycle,right, which is very Laudato Si
stuff, quite frankly, but it'sshaped by the agricultural cycle

(01:32:10):
.
Now, a lot of people can't livein that, given their, where
they live, right, their urbanlife or whatever.
But the point would be, it's alife that's shaped by holidays
that aren't just you know thestupid ass.
Christmas trees go up in theSeptember, and I really am a
horrible Grinch, and but it'sbecause I love that stuff.

(01:32:33):
But you know, for us this wentup with the Oantiphons on the
18th of December and it stayedup till the 6th of January.
You celebrated a full season ofChristmas.
Look at the differenceChristmas is over, I discovered
here in Tennessee, when you goto bed on the 24th.

Speaker 2 (01:32:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:32:51):
And I didn't understand that.
I was invited for Christmasdinner my first year by a nice
young man and he said youhaven't got anybody.
I said great, what time.
Two o'clock, great.
And on the 24th at about 2.30,I geta call from like where are
you going to come?
I'm like yeah, tomorrow, no,it's right now.
I said but it's not Christmastomorrow.

(01:33:34):
No, this is it.
But the point would be it's,you know, whereas your
grandmother's life, mygrandparents life, governed by
the reason of the market and thereason of technology, is that
time has flattened out and alltime is, he says, this
oppressive continuum that isonly relieved by the next
purchase, by the next excitement, which goes like a flash.
And instead he says what weneed to recover is the wisdom of

(01:33:57):
time that's grounded in thepast, hopes for a future, lives,
a present, you see, and it'sshaped by customs, etc.
And so there was a lot ofanticipating, but it wasn't
market anticipation was oh great.
My grandparents, see, they wereOrthodox, so Easter was the big
deal, christmas was quite minor,but Easter, kaboom, right, and

(01:34:22):
just the anticipation of it.
And they went totally veganduring Lent and everything.
As one of their greattheologians, russian Orthodox,
and everything.
As one of their greattheologians, russian Orthodox,
american Orthodox theologianwrote you can only feast, well,
if you've fasted.
All we do is feast.
When I lived in the Jesuitcommunity at Boston College, I
mean the table was reallywealthy every night.

(01:34:42):
I mean it was a standard ofliving that some of us would
have preferred a more simple.
You know blah, blah, blah.
But the thing was, when we getto what was called a first class
feast, like Easter or StIgnatius Day, the food was.
The food every day was so highlevel that what changed it was
the white tablecloths andnapkins came out.

(01:35:02):
But you know what I'm saying,and it wasn't a whole lot of
fasting in Lent and the pointwould would be I'm with you.
Uh, that's the kind of stuffthe pope's writing about for
telly tutti in different ways,but he wrote it well that, such
that we're riffing off it thisway well, I think.

Speaker 4 (01:35:19):
I think it's also about connection.
Right like the market that'sselling us things that they
could call it, um, they try tosell a social connection.
I think they've tried to makeit into a data point or
something for them to track, but, at the end of the day, they
can't commodify what I had in mygrandmother's living room or

(01:35:40):
what you experienced with your,with your grandparents, um, that
you can't commodify it.
It's it's human beingsconnecting with each other and,
through each other, connectingwith the earth.
I mean, her teaching me togarden is still her teaching me
to sew, even.
I mean that's.
You know, my favorite place tohang out with her was in her
sewing room, where she wouldwork all day, and when she

(01:36:02):
wasn't there, she was, you know,on a very old knee pad that
definitely should have beenreplaced in the garden, and that
was how she spent her day, andthere was no rush to get
anywhere.
She drove the speed limit, notbecause she was safe, but
because she said, I'm in no rush.

Speaker 2 (01:36:15):
I'm in no rush.
Can I jump in real quick?
It's interesting.
I can't believe that we've hadtwo guests on already that just
shit-talked Christmas I don'tknow how much, but it's like
Jorg was on here and was likeChristmas is more about hanging
out than hanging out with yourstupid family, or something like
that.
Do you remember, Gabby, what hesaid?
Like something along thoselines.

Speaker 4 (01:36:34):
Yeah, he was.
I think he also dogged on, likeyou, setting up your stupid
nativities, you know.

Speaker 2 (01:36:41):
Yeah, but he said something about family too.
Yeah, yeah yeah, and now wehave Father Moral going like
your stupid ass Christmas treethat you set up I just in
september.

Speaker 3 (01:36:51):
I love christmas trees I I love christmas trees.

Speaker 4 (01:36:56):
I'm, I'm, I'm a total lover I just saw that hate in
your eyes I hate him inseptember for the christmas tree
well, because think about itright, like they, I mean I hate,
yeah, yeah, yeah, you're notgonna get.

Speaker 3 (01:37:07):
Get me dude.

Speaker 2 (01:37:09):
I'm not going to let you get Father okay, well, the
real reason I wanted to jump inwas so Pope Francis, it seems
like, has this critique ofconsumption along this sort of
line right and again, to sort ofbring it to Wendell and Cook

(01:37:29):
kind of questions.
So there's the critique ofconsumption.
That seems like it's pretty bigthere, but where is he on
reimagining or reinvigorating orarguing for a different form of
production?
Again, this like anytime I hearthings about consumption, while

(01:37:52):
we can get it to like a sort ofbroader societal sort of
questions, it usually sort ofhits something about like the
individual is fucking up in someway, right, but it doesn't
really go back to those forcesof production and market that
are creating the conditions inwhich the individual is like
operating and making decisionsin in the first place.
And so I'm wondering how muchwas Francis?
Because I've never read any ofthese I mean amazing documents

(01:38:17):
that you are all-.

Speaker 4 (01:38:18):
Not religious.

Speaker 2 (01:38:19):
But like I'm a Protestant I'm supposed to not
read it.
So where is his critique on thesort of production level?

Speaker 3 (01:38:29):
Or is there Well, I'll speak.
Gabby might want to speak fromFratelli Tutti, but for me, at
Evangelii Gaudium he talks, hedescribes the structural
problems and what needs to bechanged is systems both of
economic production andconsumption, that he likes.
This word excludes people.

(01:38:50):
So he's saying that there haveto be ways in which people are
not just tools or consumers ofthe economy, but rather there
has to be a change such thateveryone well, you know,
everyone.
Again, it's a bit romanticsounding there, but there have
to be a different way of theeconomy from the base up

(01:39:12):
operating, such that the vastmajority of people are not
excluded from how things aredetermined to be operating and
how things are determined to beproduced.
The other word he uses a lotthere's exclusion and there's
inequality and those two oftenpair up where they'll, paragraph
by paragraph, play off eachother.

(01:39:34):
In a certain chapter in thatparticular document that I'm
referring to and I can't quoteit off the top of my head
sufficiently, but those are keypoints where he also describes
this.
This what I would like to hearin your statement something much
more systemic than justindividual.
The problem is the individualconsumer or that were

(01:39:55):
manipulated by the consumerindustry.
On those again, the footnotes,a lot will rush to the several
documents by John Paul II, theone by Paul VI, et cetera.
Likewise, I used to teach theUS Catholic bishops letter on
economic justice for all when Itaught at Boston College.
They worked a lot with socialethicists.

(01:40:18):
I know one of them, a Jesuit,who was one of the drafters of
it you know helped write thething.
Who is a social ethicist anddoes a lot of stuff on the
economy, david Hollenbeck.
And there they try to they dothey lay out what they think are
issues about labor productionetc.
But I would say it's fair tocharacterize that Francis.

(01:40:39):
He doesn't go into to myreading.
He doesn't go into suchquestions in the kind of detail
and perhaps even more technicaldetail or language as one would
find in some of those previouspopes and cyclicals.
Or, for example, the USCatholic bishops won on the
economy, but it's helpful, thankyou.

Speaker 4 (01:41:01):
I will say so and I agree with that.
The closest that he got from myown notes on fertility duty is
and I'm going to read it againand I know we're pushing time
here, so bear with me he writesin the section titled A
Universal Love that PromotesPersons.
Every human being has the rightto live with dignity and to
develop integrally.
This fundamental right cannotbe denied by any country.

(01:41:22):
People have this right even ifthey are unproductive or were
born with or developedlimitations.
This does not detract fromtheir great dignity as human
persons, a dignity based not oncircumstances but on the
intrinsic worth of their being.
Then he continues somesocieties accept this principle
in part.
They agree that opportunityshould be available to everyone,

(01:41:43):
but then go on to say thateverything depends on the
individual.
From the skewed perspective, itwould be pointless to favor an
investment in efforts to helpthe slow, the weak or the less
talented to find opportunitiesin life.
Investments in assistance tothe vulnerable could prove
unprofitable and they might makethings less efficient.
What we need, in fact, arestates and civil institutions
that are present and active,that look beyond the free and

(01:42:05):
efficient working of certaineconomic, political or
ideological systems and areprimarily concerned with
individuals and the common good.
Then he continues bear with meeveryone.
If society is governedprimarily by the criteria of
market freedom and efficiency,there is no place for such
persons, and fraternity willremain just another vague ideal.
To claim economic freedom whilereal conditions bar many people

(01:42:30):
from actual access to it andwhile possibilities for
employment continue to shrink isto practice doublespeak.
Words like freedom, democracyor fraternity prove meaningless
for the fact that only when oureconomic and social system no
longer produces even a singlevictim, a single person cast
aside, will we be able tocelebrate the feast of universal
fraternity.

(01:42:50):
A single person cast aside willwe be able to celebrate the
feast of universal fraternity.
Truly human and fraternalsociety will be capable of
ensuring an efficient and stableway that each of its members is
accompanied at every stage oflife, not only by providing for
their basic needs, but byenabling them to give the best
of themselves, even though theirperformance may be less than
optimum, their pace slow ortheir efficiency limited.
And that, to me, was as close ashe got to saying.

(01:43:11):
The structure of productionitself must change.
But again, he's writing this inthe context of COVID-19 as well
.
And so a lot of from FratelliTutti.
A lot of it is about even hisconcern for the elderly, that in
this throwaway culture, theelderly are being cast aside,

(01:43:31):
cast aside, and that thestructures, even our
governmental and politicalstructures that exist, that say
that they are going to care forthe sick, the poor, the needy,
the elderly, they're not doingthat in practice, precisely
because of the economic.
But he, yeah, he's not.
I'm with Father Morrill on this.
He does not go in to say we'reoverproducing outright.
I think it's implied, butthat's just, it's up to

(01:43:54):
interpretation.

Speaker 2 (01:43:55):
Yeah, or like argue for, like worker ownership, like
or like you know, economicdemocracy in a very explicit
sense.
He's sort of like yes.
Sort of yeah, okay, that makessense.

Speaker 4 (01:44:04):
Yeah, what does he say?
He says something in FratelliTutti the right to private
property can only be consideredas a secondary natural right,
and that the common good takesprecedent over the right to
private property.

Speaker 2 (01:44:18):
Yeah, that's.
Even that's pretty radicalright there.
I mean, private property iskind of the.

Speaker 4 (01:44:23):
Which I was shocked at, because I was like, oh,
they're not going to be happyabout that.
That's the goal.

Speaker 3 (01:44:28):
But there he's.
He'd be footnoting preciselyfrom John Paul II's encyclicals.
But also this reaches back.
My course in social ethics, wayback doing my MDiv at the
Jesuit School in Berkeley, wastaught by a Latin American
social moral theologian who wasvisiting us, ricardo Antoine

(01:44:48):
Sitch, and but we used one ofhis books that that shows
reaching back to the patristicera, early church fathers, how
they're saying basically whatJohn Paul says in one of his
documents.
He goes there is a socialmortgage on private property.
Oh, the critique of usury alsoat like that early on were like,

(01:45:12):
yeah, sorry, and so it's it'sthe stuff you read, john
Chrysostom and stuff thatwhatever riches you have,
actually belong to the poor.
But this whole thing aboutprivate property Aquinas again
wrote about it because he was soencyclopedic right, the
church's social teaching on thatis that the right to private
property is to be respected.

(01:45:32):
But there is in this languagethere.
But it is socially conditionedand that, what the socially
conditioning is, it's answerableto and this reaches from late
Greek philosophy right throughChristianity, in the Latin West
at least.
It's answerable to the commongood.
And what's meant by the commongood?

(01:45:54):
People often are like what doyou mean by this common good?
The common good, basically, isthis the common good is social
conditions so set up andmaintained such that every
individual can live a good life.

Speaker 2 (01:46:10):
It's crazy that you had to define common good right.
We live in such a fuckingbackward world where, like, even
a conception of the common goodis just like.
I don't even know what the hellyou're talking about.

Speaker 4 (01:46:22):
Well, and George, you'll love this.
He actually says at 123, thequote I did earlier, which was
the right to private property,can only be considered a
secondary natural right, issection 120.
Right after he quotes St PaulVI, and in section 123, he says
the right to private property isalways accompanied by the
primary and prior principle ofthe subordination of all private

(01:46:45):
property to the universaldestination of the earth's goods
and thus the right of all totheir use.
And my god, I mean come, comeon.
And I mean because in the samesection he's like oh, business
abilities, the ability to makean increased wealth, is a gift
of god and also that should bedone for, uh, the development of

(01:47:06):
don't butcher it, gab, don't doit.
Business abilities, which are agift from god, should always be
clearly directed to thedevelopment of others and to
eliminating poverty, especiallythrough the diversified creation
of work opportunities.
You can, you can use the giftsfrom god to increase and develop
your wealth.
That, where that wealth goes,is what matters.

Speaker 2 (01:47:29):
And like how, that is the common good, you know we
need to finish up here, but Ihad, let's, let's do like one
last question each.
Does that sound good, gabby?
There's a critique that I oftenhave about a lot of like
rhetoric within liberationtheology, and it sounds like
pope francis is kind of hittingthis too, where the language of

(01:47:51):
poverty is often used, and Ifind that when poverty is used
while it forefronts thepreferential option for the poor
, it also in some waysobfuscates class analysis.
Do you find that to be the case, like where the poor are there

(01:48:12):
and we need to lift up the poor,but there's sort of like a?
There's a way in which theworking poor sort of disappeared
, or the period are disappeared,and class becomes sort of
pushed aside for sort of ablanket concept known as the
poor?

Speaker 3 (01:48:32):
Yeah, I would challenge that interpretation
with regard to Latin Americanliberation theology by making
again insistence upon thecontext that the poor in Latin
America largely are the workingpoor.
To read some of the texts thatwe read in the course you did

(01:48:54):
with me, like Rigoberto Manchu'saccount or the Romero biography
, what you find?
There are people who are forcedinto working on these large
fincas, right, so they're thepoor, but they're the working
poor.
But the only way they cansurvive is to go work on these
coffee plantations or whatever,and then, like something in the
US 125, 150 years ago, they'restuck in a situation they can't

(01:49:18):
leave and they have to buy alltheir food from the company
store which charges more thanthey earn.
Right, that's a basic story in1970s, 1980s.
Latin American liberationtheology a type.
So I may be wrong.
Again, I don't know, I've neverlived there, I've only lived in
Guyana, which wasEnglish-speaking northern part

(01:49:41):
of South America, briefly.
But the description is I'vebeen understanding it from
specialists is that the languageof the poor in Latin American
liberation theology can bemisguided or perhaps misread.
But it could be misguided tooin the case of some protagonists

(01:50:03):
, but I want to be convinced bythe argument that it's a
misreading If we read it as thepoor are people who are all
sitting around on their handsand have nothing to do and no
opportunity, like as can happenin the United States, that so
much of the poor are the workingpoor.

(01:50:24):
Now the critique from Mujeristatheology, of course, is then the
further circumstances for women, oppression of women within
that.
So there are ways that this canbe refined and better worked
out, no doubt.
But if it's a diminishment ofthe class, the need for

(01:50:46):
identification of classstratification and the
empowerment of the economicallylower social classes, that would
not be a strength of liberationtheology.
I think, something that, if thecritique has come that that's
the way it's been used in LatinAmerica.
Yeah, that's helpful.
Something better needs to bedone, gabby.

Speaker 4 (01:51:07):
To wrap us up, if there's one piece or belief or
document quote theme from PopeFrancis's theological vision
that you hope continues to shapethe church, what would that be?

Speaker 2 (01:51:25):
One thing Mine was good too, father Morrill.
All right, mine was a goodquestion.

Speaker 3 (01:51:30):
It's not a zero sum game, but I'm sorry I didn't pat
you on the head, but I wouldsay I think the key thing going
forward from his papacy is hischosen theme throughout, from
the start, and that is the themeof mercy and compassion, which,

(01:51:53):
if you read what he means by itand observe what he means by it
, it is not patronizing, okay,but rather it's all about being
with and for others.
With, you know, not just for,not just you know hand out
charity, but it's gotta be.
He wants people to becooperative with each other.

(01:52:13):
He wants people to be in agenuine solidarity would be a
political, economic language.
The theological language iscommunion, or communio, because
it's believed that this is alsocharged with the communion or
the grace of the love of thetriune God.
Okay, but I'd say that's a bigpart of it, and even a quote
from Evangelii Gaudium that Idid have in front of me as you

(01:52:36):
were speaking.
He's talking about the economic,the global system.
That's not any good.
He goes in this context.
Some people continue to defenda trickle down theory which
assumes that economic growthencouraged by a free market will
inevitably succeed in bringingabout greater justice and
inclusiveness in the world.
The rest of the paragraph goeson.

(01:52:57):
He says that's not at all ofyou, that the problem with the
trickle down is it starts fromagain I get wealthy, or a
certain cadre of the population,like one half of 1%, get
wealthy, and then the trickledown, it's literally the crumbs
off the table.
Right, though they don'tpresent it that way, what he's

(01:53:18):
talking about, whether for aWendland Cook podcast or writ
large across his consistenttheology, is you don't start
from there, you always startfrom Fratelli Tutti, that we are
all sisters and brothers andeverything has to build from, be
always answerable.

Speaker 2 (01:53:37):
Thanks so much, father Moral.
We'd like to end with askingour guests, along the lines of
Augustine's language around hope, having two beautiful daughters
, anger and courage.
And we're wondering where doyou find your anger?
We're wondering where do youfind your anger these days and
where do you find courage thesedays?
And thank you again for beingwith us.

Speaker 3 (01:53:58):
Well, thank you for the opportunity.
It's been really wonderful.

Speaker 2 (01:54:00):
Really wonderful.

Speaker 3 (01:54:02):
Well, anger is my fundamental emotion, so that's a
touch I love that George knowsthat Yosemite Sam is my hero.

Speaker 2 (01:54:10):
And deep personal like you're in basically.

Speaker 3 (01:54:16):
Yes, and just as frustrated.
But I would say the angerespecially focuses on this very
denial of social responsibility.
Let's take the ecology, forexample.
But it can go to the economy,it can go to how we position on
the world stage.
Right that everything the angerI have is against a kind of

(01:54:40):
neoliberal individualism thatbecomes the doctrinaire
justification for denyingclimate science, for denying, uh
, the science of vaccines, etcetera, that stuff.
Really, it's like what?
We're going back into, thefreaking Stone Age.
And there's the anger, thecourage, off the top of my head,

(01:55:03):
honest to goodness.
The courage comes in thisconversation today and every
such experience that I have withthe privilege of working with
students and other people ofgoodwill and concern and I guess
that's an homage, then, to thePope, because again it's
Fratelli Tutti.
The courage comes from ustogether, and especially with

(01:55:24):
bright people like yourselves,who today have often said things
better than I ever could, whotoday have often said things
better than I ever could.

Speaker 2 (01:55:29):
We mentioned Boff several times during our talk
and it reminds me.
I think he said something likewe do not simply live, we always
live together.

Speaker 3 (01:55:40):
And.

Speaker 2 (01:55:40):
I think about that right now, from your last point,
father Morrill, if people wantto get in touch with you, how
would you recommend they do that?

Speaker 3 (01:55:51):
Well, it's just my email address, which they'll
also find if they Google.
My name, bruce, and the lastname M-O-R-R-I-L-L, but that's
it.
It's brucemorrill atvanderbiltedu.
That really is the best way todo it.
But also, if you just Googlethat, and probably the first
page they're going to list isthat faculty page.

Speaker 2 (01:56:10):
Well, as one American Catholic once said, you're not
welcome here and you better notcome back.
Thanks, father, thanks Father,thank you both.

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Holy Troublemaker: The Jesuit Pope Who Challenged the Status Quo with Fr. Bruce Morrill

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