Writing in Forbes last year, Steve Moore, a Catholic, asked: “What is the theological case for telling those in the poorest villages of the planet where people still live at subsistence levels, that they have a moral obligation to save the planet by staying poor and using less fossil fuels, less energy and electricity?”
Three months later, Vatican Radio ran the telltale headline: “Pope: Christians Should Kneel Before the Poor.” The article cited Pope Francis’ assertion that “poverty is the great teaching” Jesus gave us, and that “the poor are not a burden but a resource.” He capped his homily with, “How I wish that Christians could kneel in veneration when a poor person enters the church.”
His comment was a red flag that went largely unnoticed. Only a handful of Catholic bloggers remarked on it. They are sensitive to Francis’ tendency not to genuflect at those sacred moments during Mass that traditional rubrics require it. Yet he kneels to wash—and kiss—the feet of juvenile offenders or women in a Buenos Aires maternity hospital. Why not at Mass? Have the poor become surrogates for the Eucharist? And what are we to make of elevating poverty from a condition to be addressed to a teaching to be cherished?
An oblique response to Moore’s question came this February. On the flight back to Rome from Mexico, Francis admitted the orphic quality of his preoccupation with poverty: “The word ‘people’ is not a logical category. It is a mystical category.” In this euphoric apparition, the pueblo—the indigenous poor—are a primal entity. Poverty retains a hint of Eden, and the poor are themselves agents of redemption for the developed world.
Therein is the core of Francis’s “theology of the people.” A strain of liberation theology, it lends a Christological gloss to Marxist theorizing. Tinged with neo-völkisch romance borrowed from the Europe it disdains, Francis’ theology mythologizes the poor, particularly the ethnic poor: native peoples, mestizos, those on the shadow side of Western history.
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