james carroll

Podcast • April 12, 2013

Speaking of Pope Francis: What’s in a Name?

At the Harvard Divinity School, we’re listening in on the euphoria around the new Pope, Francis. What’s in a name? A lot, it turns out. What’s the real brand of the Jesuit order that shaped ...

clooney carroll 4

At the Harvard Divinity School, we’re listening in on the euphoria around the new Pope, Francis.

What’s in a name? A lot, it turns out.

What’s the real brand of the Jesuit order that shaped and marks this priest? Well, it goes deeper than I knew.

And how differently, really, does a pope from the Global South see a church outgrowing its Old European roots? Listen here.

First up here: the novelist and relentless scold of his church, my friend James Carroll on the pope’s “astonishing choice of this name.”

There’s a ringing clarity to it that took the world’s breath away. It was ingenious. It was worthy of a great poet. Look at who Francis is. He isn’t just the man of the poor. He’s also the green saint. There are festivals of St. Francis that are celebrations of Gaia, of holy earth, where people bring all the animals into the church, all the plants. It’s a magnificent tradition. It’s St. Francis. St Francis is the saint of the environmental movement. St. Francis is a secular saint. People who’ve long since given up any impulse to religious expression have St. Francis in their gardens. St. Francis belongs to the world. This man choosing this name conveyed something non-verbally, non-rationally, pre-rationally. It just rang!

James Carroll, at right in photo, at the Harvard Divinity School, with Francis Clooney and Chris Lydon, April 2013

It was Jim Carroll’s line that Pope Francis named himself for the heart of the church, and that he comes from the brain of the church. It was for the Jesuit on our panel, Francis Clooney,S.J., to unpack that “Jesuit ethos.”

So what is the Jesuit thing about? It’s the greater glory of God, the ‘magis,’ the more. Finding God in all things, the ability to imagine the borderlands, to step outside — to be the church where there is no church. To go to the farthest parts of the world, to learn the languages, to be in the different cultural settings, the be in all the difficulty places. All these things can be said… and still the essence of it — the life source for the Jesuits — is that the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola, based in his own mystical experience — is not a book of doctrine. It’s not a catechism. It’s not a book that you can sit down and read and say: I have learned. It’s a book of exercises, in which one has to put oneself into the situation of existentially confronting your own limitations, you own sickness, your own age, your own death — and then launch into walking with Christ, contemplating Christ, and then see where it comes out the other end.

Francis Clooney, at left in photo, at the Harvard Divinity School, April 2013

About a church that we all know is expanding in Africa, Latin America, and Asia: what does the new face of the Church say to Islam? And could there be another signal in that name the Pope chose? Could it be a reference to the meeting that St. Francis of Assisi arranged for himself with the Sultan of Egypt during the Fifth Crusade in the 13th Century?

I was struck that the church Frank Clooney and Jim Carroll were describing sounds so much more humble, more forgiving, maybe more human, than the church we grew up in. A lot of us, I think, will be paying closer attention. Jim Carroll underlined the virtue of humility in the church when a question came about the Pope’s history as Bishop of Buenos Aires during the “dirty war” under brutal military junta in the 1970s and 80. Did he look away from the torture of his priests, even Jesuits? How much would it matter? Jim Carroll’s answer challenged and enlightened a packed house.

Fritz Eichenberg, wood engraving, "The Prayer of Saint Francis" (1979)

Fritz Eichenberg, wood engraving, “The Prayer of Saint Francis” (1979)

Podcast • April 10, 2009

James Carroll: Practicing "Americanist" Catholic

Click to listen to Chris’s conversations with James Carroll (56 minutes, 26 mb mp3) “Practicing” — meaning: James Carroll: radical, pastoral, sacramental …that through these disciplines, rituals, and searches, we have some prospect of getting ...

Click to listen to Chris’s conversations with James Carroll (56 minutes, 26 mb mp3)

“Practicing” — meaning:

James Carroll: radical, pastoral, sacramental

…that through these disciplines, rituals, and searches, we have some prospect of getting better. This, therefore, is practice like the practice of an art or sport. That we are practicing means, above all, that we are not perfect — not in faith, hope, or charity. Not in poverty, chastity or obedience. Not in the cardinal virtues, or the works of mercy, or the acts of contrition. Not in peace or justice. Not in the life of prayer, which is nothing but attention to the presence of God. In all of this we are practicing, which is the only way we know to be a Catholic.

James Carroll, Practicing Catholic, Houghton Mifflin, 2009. p. 10

“Americanist” — meaning: stamped with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s individualism and universal in-dwelling spirit. Embodied in the Boston priest of JFK’s inaugural, Richard Cardinal Cushing, who was moved by his love of his sister’s Jewish husband, Dick Pearlstein, to bury the old Roman boast that there was “no salvation outside the church.” Jim Carroll’s Americanist piety moves in a zone between, on one hand, our overtly secular national culture and, on the other, the anti-modern, anti-democratic European church tradition that Pope Benedict XVI seems to be reviving.

“Catholic” — meaning:

The practicing Catholic is at Mass. What makes a Catholic? This tradition is sacramental. The practice of Mass trumps all doctrine. We can have disagreements with the Pope and the bishops — about abortion, birth control, stem cell research, the miracles of the saints, all of that. But what we have in common is the intuition that at the table, around bread and wine, we encounter each other and God in a profound way. It’s food. It feeds a kind of hunger. Catholics go to Mass. What is a practicing Catholic? It’s somebody who goes to Mass.

James Carroll in conversation with Chris Lydon in Boston, April 10, 2009.

Jim Carroll, like me, was in the last generation of Latin-Mass altar boys, a child of the “faux-medieval” Catholic Church before the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s. He was a Paulist Priest and university chaplain for five years, and was then absolved of his vows to pursue a rival vocation: writing. For most of 30 years now Jim has modeled to me what it could mean to modernize a tradition that, even if we didn’t quite grasp it, grasped us forever.

Long ago over lunch with our friend, Bernard Avishai, the question was, “No kidding, do you believe in God?” When I hesitated a while, Jim said: “Chris, you believe in music…,” which I surely did. That was a rough start of a religious inquiry which led, not least, to my second baptism at the Twelfth Baptist Church in Boston in 1987. Along the way, Jim, Bernie, I and a grown-up variety of seekers (mostly Jews and Catholics, of many degrees of conviction and curiosity) read and chewed over the Bible, twice, from Genesis to Revelation.

Our conversation resumed this Good Friday morning over coffee and Jim Carroll’s arresting new book, Practicing Catholic. Jim is a learned radical in religion, ever at odds with the hierarchy, and still “incurably pastoral.” I think of myself as an ill-educated spiritual enthusiast, “eternally hungry.” And so it astonishes me to read anew how often our searching paths crossed over the years — around Emerson, for example, and Cardinal Cushing, who baptized me at birth; also Martin Luther King Jr., William Sloane Coffin, Thomas More and Thomas Merton.

Part of my puzzle in all these ruminations is whether Jim and I are sharing the fixations of one generation of American guys, or rather questions that reach all sorts of other people sooner or later. So your own versions of Jim’s questions and mine – church, tribe, belief, modernity and God – are entirely to the point and much more than welcome.