Global Currents article

Pope Francis, Liberalism, and a New Theology of Poverty

The tomb of Pope Francis in Santa Maria Maggiore. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Pope Francis will undoubtedly be remembered as a reformer of the Catholic Church. He was often perceived as radical, even revolutionary in his approach to changing contemporary Catholicism. Yet it was precisely the meaning of reform from the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) that has divided papal commentators, especially Catholics on both sides of the political spectrum. In the global North the political barometer often used for measuring Francis’s reform legacy was how well he adhered to, or deviated from, an ideal of progressive liberalism. This ideological and partisan political standard has confused and obscured much more than it has clarified and explained the reform papacy of Francis. Its continued usage will only perplex commentators trying to understand yet another pope from the Americas, Leo XIV, who is evidently pursuing the reform program of his predecessor, though perhaps in a different style.

The late pontiff had an approval rating in the US that apparently made President Donald Trump envious of the papal office. But he also had vehement critics among conservatives and progressives. Notably, both sides of the “culture wars” were in agreement that Francis had a failed liberal papacy. Francis’s opponents on the Left took his reform efforts to be, at best, ineffectual and half-hearted. The papacy ultimately failed to follow through and implement the doctrinal changes, usually related to sex and gender, demanded of a modern, more liberal Catholicism. On the Right, his papacy was viewed by some in the worst possible terms as disorderly, disastrous, and even diabolical. It was a futile attempt at liberal subterfuge against an unchanging faith and morality that younger traditional followers will find vindicated with a future conservative pope. As a Jesuit trained in the Spiritual Exercises, Francis did not conform to a progressive liberal ideal for Church reform but instead applied the spiritual standard of Jesus’s poverty. Despite the mixed reactions to Francis’s effort to reform the papacy in the example of its divine founder, his theology of poverty opened new pathways for Christian social and political engagement.

Contextualizing Francis’s Theology of Poverty

Pope Francis was not a liberal. Such a claim is a categorical error that ignores his Latin American social and pastoral background. One event that helps situate Francis’s theological inheritance from the global South happened just before his papal election, which he mentioned in his Spanish language memoir of Pope Benedict XVI, El Sucesor (2024). On March 13, 2013 during lunchtime at the Conclave that would elect Francis, a group of European cardinals asked then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio about the politics of liberation theology in Latin America and “the supposed political deviation of that theology” (54). For these European cardinals the political deviation was not progressive liberalism, but revolutionary Marxism. Bergoglio did not relate all he said to the cardinals, but his response would have drawn on his familiarity with Argentina’s distinctive theology committed to the integral liberation of poor communities through an analysis of the cultural history of a people instead of a Marxist social analysis of class.

The liberation of the people (along with their wisdom traditions) from both a domestic and foreign “enlightened” liberal culture, which prizes instrumental rationality and unrestricted wealth accumulation, was a rallying cry across the Patria Grande in the twentieth century. After the Second Vatican Council and Pope Paul VI’s social encyclical, Populorum progressio (1967), many Catholic leaders believed the Church could not remain silent on a continent longing for hope amid drastic social inequality. In this context of widespread poverty, Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez made a novel claim in A Theology of Liberation that “participation in the process of liberation is an obligatory and privileged locus for Christian life and reflection” (46). To a certain extent, liberation theology, like the “new political theology” of Johann Baptist Metz in Europe, was a form of Christian spiritual resistance to modern bourgeois liberalism with its privatization of religion, techno-scientific rationality, and sanctification of private property.

In Argentina, Paul VI’s opposition to the “international imperialism of money” and “private ownership of the means of production as an absolute right” inspired the Movement of Third World Priests, which faced deadly repercussions for its actions under the anticommunist military dictatorship (para. 26). The political assassinations of high-profile clerics associated with the nonviolent revolutionary movement in the 1970s during the “Dirty War” included Fr. Carlos Mugica and Bishop Enrique Angelelli, both of whom shared the cause of the working poor and a commitment to the socialization of property in urban and rural settings. Two Argentine priests who also belonged to the movement yet outlived it, Lucio Gera and Rafael Tello, were the architects of the pastoral ministry on the streets of Buenos Aires that became the basis of a people’s theology (teología del pueblo). Gera and Gutiérrez had a theological friendship that focused on prioritizing the poor. Their friendship lasted nearly a half century. It began at a small gathering of theologians at Petrópolis in 1964 and crystalized at the Latin American meeting of Catholic Bishops at Medellín in 1968, where poverty as institutionalized violence was explicitly addressed. Their great friendship even endured the official exclusion of Gutiérrez by conservative churchmen from the Puebla meeting in 1979, though that did not stop the new language of the preferential option for the poor from being included in the final document.

Cardinal-Archbishop Bergoglio’s leadership in Buenos Aires during the 2000s imbibed the teología popular y pastoral of Gera and Tello. It amplified the lived faith of the poor on the social peripheries and their struggle to flourish with dignity. Numerous priests under Bergoglio’s care had been taught by them, especially Gera who served as Dean of Faculty of Theology at the city’s Pontifical University. Bergoglio frequently turned to the more affective sensus fidei (an instinctual sense of faith through love) known among God’s beloved poor, themselves agents of history, to evangelize and bring the hope of Jesus Christ to broader secular society. When he oversaw the drafting of the Latin American Bishop’s final document at the Aparecida meeting in 2007, the term “people’s mysticism” (mística popular) was used to convey the inseparability of traditional popular piety and progressive social justice, thus unsettling conventional political categorizations (no. 262). A main target of the Aparecida document was a neocolonial culture of liberal individualism, which detaches persons from communities and traditions of meaning in the quest for personal self-advancement and is indifferent to the common good (no. 46). This self-serving uniformity flattens cultural diversity, especially among poorer and historically dispossessed communities, such as Afro-Americans and Indigenous peoples in Latin America. For this reason, the document stated the need for the “decolonizing of minds and knowledge, to recover historical memory” of cultures systematically repressed and excluded (no. 96).

Remembering the Poor as Pope

Whatever transpired at the 2013 conclave over lunch must have assuaged any lingering political concerns about Bergoglio and liberation theology since he was elected pope later that evening after only five votes. Once he had more than the required two-thirds votes, his longtime friend from Brazil, the late Cardinal Cláudio Hummes, embraced him, saying, “Do not forget the poor” (No te olvides de los pobres). Francis’s papacy immediately began with a spiritual decision to choose the mendicant lover of poverty, peace, and creation from medieval Assisi as his namesake. He dropped the fancier papal attire and lived at the humble guesthouse of Casa Santa Marta instead of the Apostolic Palace. His papacy ended in a simple wooden casket at Santa Maria Maggiore, a Roman papal basilica outside the Vatican, after a corporal work of mercy donating €200K of his personal money to a juvenile prison. Francis was by all means a pastor to the world’s poor and excluded, not a sovereign prince for a new gilded age.

Although there has been some attention to the question of whether Pope Francis was a proponent of liberation theology, it is clear that he was an unqualified advocate for a theology of poverty, itself based on St. Paul’s teaching about “the mystery of Christ who lowered himself, impoverished himself, to enrich us” (2 Corinthians 8:9).  Liberal cultures indeed contain good and humane values that seek to minimize material poverty, lift up the poor, and aid the needy with charitable giving and philanthropy. However, Francis’s theological meditations go much further than bourgeois moral ideals: Christian poverty, a spiritual and voluntary act, is about giving what is one’s own and not merely from one’s excess. To choose poverty for the sake of enrichment because Jesus himself was poor exposes what no liberal ideology based on luxury or middle-class comforts would ever endorse. Pope Francis’s entire pastoral ministry and teachings make this preferential option for the poor the spiritual nucleus for converting the Church. The kind of reform Francis had in mind was formulated by ressourcement theologians of Vatican II, like Yves Congar, OP, and Henri de Lubac, SJ, whom Francis occasionally cited in his speeches and writings.

Francis was by all means a pastor to the world’s poor and excluded, not a sovereign prince for a new gilded age.

Francis’s first trip outside Rome was to the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa, where he brought to the world’s attention the poverty of stateless migrants and refugees from North Africa. In the twentieth century, the Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt referred to such persons as “superfluous” in her monumental work that deserves urgent re-reading today, The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt’s exhilarating diagnosis of the bourgeois origins of modern tribal and racial ideology challenged her readers to recognize “the existence of a right to have rights” despite the liquidating effects of imperialism and later Nazism and Stalinism (296). Francis often called contemporary migrants “throwaways” (descartados) of a globalized economy of exclusion and indifference, or displaced victims of a piecemeal Third World War. Neoliberalism, the technocratic paradigm, and the idolatry of money were, for Francis, twenty-first century threats not only to social well-being, but also to political stability and ecological sustainability.

The Annual World Day of the Poor created by Francis during the 2016 Jubilee Year of Mercy was a deliberate effort to recognize the dignity and worth of “socially excluded people.” It was one among numerous examples from his pastoral leadership going back to his Anti-Human Trafficking Masses in Buenos Aires. God chooses the poor by giving them a name. For example, the angel of the Lord told Joseph that Mary, his betrothed, would give birth to “God with us” (Emmanuel) in the flesh of an infant, named Jesus, born naked and poor. Pope Francis reminded listeners that the homeless man Lazarus, from Jesus’s Gospel parable, had a name at the divine judgment, whereas the rich miser begging Abraham for mercy after death did not (Lk 16:19–31). There is no greater recognition of social and political belonging, no greater dignity, than receiving a name directly from the Creator who loves and wills our existence. On the Fifth Annual World Day of the Poor, Francis declared that poor persons are icons of the flesh, “a sacrament of Christ” who “represent his person and point to him” (para. 3).

The concrete faces of the poor and excluded, not unlike Emmanuel Levinas’s biblically and Talmudically inflected phenomenology, communicate divine transcendence. Riffing on Arendt, I would often hear Gutiérrez say later in his career that “the poor are those who do not have the right to have rights.” In Francis’s final autobiography, Hope, coinciding with the Jubilee Year and his death, Francis returned to the characteristic theme of his reform papacy: “The Church’s preferential option toward the poor must also bring us to know and appreciate their cultural way of living the Gospel… When, as members of the Church, we get close to the poor, we discover—beyond the enormous difficulties of life—a transcendent sense of life” (174).

Against both political liberalism and economic neoliberalism, Francis identified popular piety in the streets and the social function of property as antidotes to the privatization of religion and the new tyranny of money.

The way of poverty, as lived by the earliest followers of Jesus, was the stubborn anchor and controversial standard of Francis’s reform papacy devoted to changing the worldly culture of modern Catholicism in the West, from the Vatican to the parish. Francis sought to clean house, so to speak, by introducing a new culture of apostolic poverty at the Roman Curia, which is the administrative center of the Holy See at the Vatican. This alternative logic (or way of thinking) had greater and lesser successes, though it was largely misunderstood by political commentators. Whether reducing the annual salaries of the cardinals, or making “simplicity of life and love for the poor” a necessary job requirement for working in the Curia, Francis was determined to institutionalize proximity to the poor as the authentic criterion of Christian discipleship and unity. In his first address to the media after the 2013 conclave, he told the audience, “How I would like a Church which is poor and for the poor!” If this spiritual standard of apostolic poverty did not afford the late pontiff a ready-made solution for rectifying the worldwide clergy sex abuse crisis, straightening out Vatican finance, or strengthening women’s participation in the Curia and across the life of the Catholic Church, at least it broke open the possibility for sincere structural reforms centered on love for the poor and listening to the excluded without the traps of worldliness and clericalism.

Francis’s blueprint for radical Church reform under an “apostolic” framework was his first letter, The Joy of the Gospel (2013), which expressed his desire for a Church of and for the poor (para. 198). He also exhorted “each individual Christian and every community… to be an instrument of God for the liberation and promotion of the poor, and for enabling them to be fully part of society” (para. 187). This apostolic exhortation, which Pope Leo XIV resolutely reaffirmed in his first speech to the cardinals, shows just how mistaken the label of liberalism is for understanding Francis. Against both political liberalism and economic neoliberalism, Francis identified popular piety in the streets and the social function of property as antidotes to the privatization of religion and the new tyranny of money. Francis even referred to popular piety as a locus theologicus (or source) for gaining wisdom about God (para. 126). He stressed the image of the polyhedron to reflect a unity in diversity instead of a neocolonial culture of liberal individualism. All these themes received more theological explanation in his two social encyclicals on integral ecology (Laudato si’) and social friendship (Fratelli tutti).

Decolonizing Ecology with Indigenous Knowledge

In Francis’s reflection on the Amazon synod, Querida Amazonia (2019), he showed the decolonial aspects of his thinking through his constructive dialogue with Indigenous cultures of the region. On the one hand, he claimed—in an unprecedented way among popes—that the Amazonian bioregion is itself a theological locus where believers can encounter the living God (para. 57). On the other hand, he praised the culture of material simplicity among Indigenous Amazonians who uniquely know how to live well (buen vivir), because “God’s little gifts” matter more than “accumulating great possessions,” and ecological care for creation is privileged over needless destruction of things (para. 71). What may appear as living in poverty to a bourgeois standard is considered great wealth when harmony between family, community, and Pachamama (Mother Earth) are preserved. This alternative way of thinking from Indigenous communities can contribute toward an integral ecology not focused on economic progress, but sustainable living and intergenerational solidarity to better care for our common home. Francis’s letter to the Amazon also showed the influence of the Argentine cultural anthropologist and philosopher Rodolfo Kusch, from whom Francis learned the mythical and organic sense of a people rather than a logically abstract concept. In the Introduction to the English translation Kusch’s Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América, Walter Mignolo makes the important point about Kusch’s contribution to decolonial thinking and “awareness of immigrant consciousness.”

Conclusion

With nearly half of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics inhabiting the Americas, it is not surprising to see the first pope from this side of the Atlantic followed by a US-born pope indebted to a Latin American pastoral approach learned in Peru. The observation of Brazilian Jesuit Henrique de Lima Vaz in 1968 that the Latin American church was shifting from a projection of Europe to a source for global Catholicism has now been validated by history and, in the eyes of the faithful, the Holy Spirit. That Pope Francis brought a theology of poverty from his home continent to reform the Church, beginning with the Curia, and to address the new challenges to today, is a legacy sure to endure in the twenty-first century with Leo XIV.

David Lantigua
David Lantigua is Associate Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame where he is Co-Director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism. He is author of Infidels and Empires in a New World Order: Early Modern Spanish Contributions to International Legal Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and co-editor with Lawrence Clayton of Bartolomé de las Casas and the Defense of Amerindian Rights: A Brief History with Documents (University of Alabama Press, 2020). His current book manuscript examines the Latin American theological and cultural dimensions of Pope Francis's social thought and its implications for global Catholicism in the twenty-first century.

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