People, by Pavel Filonov
In a Fratelli Tutti zoom reading group a friend began by saying “can we start by looking at paragraph 158 – what on earth is going on there?!” It tries to capture what “a people” is and what it isn’t, and in fairness it isn’t particularly clear. This is one of several times I’ve heard from people who are baffled by Francis’ use of the language of “people” and “culture” in Fratelli Tutti. Pope Francis has called for us to ‘prepare the future’ in response to COVID-19, I believe that better understanding these concepts can help us discern what a response to the encyclical and COVID-19 could look like in our own context.
To try to open up what Pope Francis means by “people” and “culture” I’ll look to some of the foundational ideas that underpin the Theology of the People a school of theology that developed in Argentina after the second Vatican council, and which has had a huge influence on Pope Francis. Although at the time the then Fr Bergoglio wasn’t one of the main thinkers of the school, he was the one who convened conferences and brought thinkers together, and most of those involved were his collaborators and friends.
While it’d be fair to say that the reforms of the second Vatican council came as something of a surprise to many in the Latin American Church[1] it soon made up for this in its reception of the council. Debates and discussions about its reception led to a new and distinctively Latin American theological approach, which shifted its centre of gravity from European culture and history to the ‘concrete reality’ of the peoples of Latin America.[2] This new theological approach, the Theology of Liberation, was embodied in the Latin American and Caribbean episcopal conference in Medellin, Columbia, in 1968, and while many in the English speaking world will be familiar with its socioeconomic strands, fewer know of its sociocultural strand, the Argentinian Theology of the People.
This cultural strand, the Theology of the People, holds that God is working in a particular way in popular culture, but its richness and particularities are being eroded and risk being eviscerated by a modern liberal technocratic model of development. In a 1992 article about modernity and the third world Juan Carlos Scannone SJ begins by noting that modernity reaches the third world from the outside; that “experience has shown that modern science and technology, when not considered in themselves but in their social and cultural impact, are not neutral instruments which can adapt to cultures without changing them profoundly”[3]. For Scannone these influences are most often negative: “it was not only the market or particular technological (e.g. military) advances, but also other modern values such as science and technology themselves, democracy or even the Enlightenment, which were and are used as ideological instruments to dominate, oppress or marginalize the third world”.[4]
In an earlier work Scannone explores this sociocultural imperialism by looking to two different approaches to history experienced in Latin America, characterised by the two different verbs in Spanish: ser and estar, both translated in English as “to be”. Ser and its conjugations are used to talk about the state of something that is permanent - so I would use the ser form to say “I have ten fingers”. Estar, however, is used when something is in a temporary state: “estoy bien” is “I’m fine”, but 10 minutes or 10 hours later maybe I won’t be. According to Scannone, ser correlates to a technocratic liberal approach that is much more rigid, cold, universalising and pretentious, while estar is open, reflective, relational and based in the reality of the here and now, content with its own particularity.[5] For Scannone and the other Theology of the People thinkers, the cultures and histories of peoples aren’t things that can easily be quantified and catalogued, but are something much richer that embody various forms of wisdom, and are characterised by this more particular and relational style and way of being.
To be clear, culture here is not so much the things you’d see reviewed in newspapers and magazines, or things you’d pop out to see after a nice brunch on a weekend. Instead they’re our own particular ways of relating to others, to reality and to those things that give us meaning in life or help us be “more fully human”.[6] It’s these characteristics, ways of living, particularities, and expressions of values that we may more easily recognise in others when we’re visiting places very different to our own. It is this understanding of culture that Francis, echoing Paul VI, invites us to evangelize when they talk of “the evangelization of culture”, alongside entering into dialogue with it in order to inculturate the Gospel.[7]
For Paul Ricoeur, these many great cultures of our world are “the nucleus on the basis of which we interpret life”; they are “the ethical and mythical nucleus of humanity”[8]. For the Theology of the People, popular culture is not without the need of the purification and maturity[9] that Christianity can offer, but when combined, it can become a theological locale: a place in which God is working, and we can encounter and hear more clearly what He wants from us today.[10] It is from this perspective that the Theology of the People critiques the prevailing economic system, and more broadly “enlightenment reasoning that serves as a mask for ‘the will to power and profit’”.[11]
It’s from this kind of approach that we can better understand Pope Francis’ often used image of the polyhedron: the need for development to take local culture more seriously and to resist homogenisation which can come in many guises. If it’s not enough that rich cultures are being eviscerated, what we’re also losing is the opportunity to hear where God is calling us; the ‘holy ground’ of these particular cultures.
For the Theology of the People it is a people who inhabit these cultures. A working group of the Argentinian bishops conference[12] struggled to clearly define a people after spending a huge amount of time discussing it.[13] They recognised that any biological/familial, economic, essentialist, positivist, legal, or voluntarist definitions were insufficient to define it. In Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis describes a people as something mythical: it is something so rich in meaning that it’s somehow beyond normal definition.[14] CEOPAL in the end came to a kind of definition which, like that of Pope Francis, uses lofty and imprecise language:
The people are an organised community’ says Pius XII. The people, then, are those who participate in the life of the community, this is why they don’t oppress; since the violence of oppression disrupts the community, and consequently, the oppressor is not part of the people. The people is a community organization that does not oppress.[15]
It is the poor who are often the heart of the people, as in experiencing a lack of power they know what it means to need and rely on others.[16]
An integral part of what it is to be a people is to be a community who are organised and working for the common good, and to be rooted in their own cultural history. It is this that the Theology of People is always moving towards: the practical means for the people and the poorest amongst them to find their liberation and salvation. In this way we can see how the Theology of the People is theological-pastoral: the pastoral and theological are held together, integrated as is needed for close work with popular culture and the poorest. Ministry, then isn’t, just what comes after theology; something done to people. Rather, ministry and its deep engagement with peoples is also something theological.
This theological-pastoral approach is also a challenge to us in that it tries to restore the “sense of unity, lost to enlightenment reason, between theory and praxis, between scholarship and holiness, between theology and ministry”[17]. This sense of unity in theology and ministry, unity of history and salvation history is captured well in the document produced by the Argentinian Bishops working group and published in the name of the Argentinian Bishops in 1969 which stated:
The Church must discern its liberating or saving action from the perspective of the people and their interests, for inasmuch as the people are the subject and agent of human history, which is intimately linked with salvation history, the signs of the times become present and decipherable in the events proper to the people or that affect them … This means: loving the people, becoming attuned to them and comprehending them; trusting in their creative capacity and in their transforming power; helping them to express themselves and organise themselves; listening to them, grasping and understanding their sayings and forms of expression even though they may come from a culture different from our own; being familiar with their joys and hopes, anxieties and suffering, needs and values; knowing what they want and desire from the Church and its ministers; discerning in all of that what should be corrected or purified, what is currently the case but only transitory, what has permanent value and holds promise for the future; not separating from them, or getting ahead of their real desires and decision; not transferring to them issues, attitudes, norms or values that are foreign or alien to them, especially when these deprive them of or weaken their reason for living and reasons for hoping.[18]
This practice isn’t just about finding ways to put Catholic Social Teaching into action, but more fundamentally integrates it into a richer understanding of what the mission of the Church is, and what each of us are called to do. It’s evangelic and salvific at the same time as it is liberative, and responds to the real needs of peoples, especially the poorest and most vulnerable.
It is this movement that is behind Pope Francis’ many references to peoples, the need to respond in a place of rootedness, and the value of popular movements. Popular movements are those movements and communal political expressions which are ‘of the people’ or rooted in the people. It is these bottom up movements that we can make into essential social and political expressions in which peoples are able to build the common good and rebuild humanizing bonds between people. Pope Francis is telling us that part of what we do as Christians is to recognise, value and root ourselves in our own culture so that we can come together and work in the style of the ‘popular movements’ to rehumanise our societies and our world.
As we try to work out how to ‘prepare the future’ after COVID-19 and respond to Fratelli Tutti, perhaps we should ask ourselves these question: how, as communities, do we rediscover or engage more deeply with our own local and particular cultures? And how do we ourselves become and support others in our communities in building ‘bottom up’ and ‘popular’ movements which can achieve together much more than we can apart?
Chris Knowles is a co-founder of Forming Missionary Disciples and Project Leader for the Together for the Common Good Plater Trust Laity Leadership Project. He also currently teaches CCRS at the University of Roehampton.
[1] Segundo Gallilea, ‘Latin America in the Puebla and Medellin Conferences’, The Reception of Vatican II, Giuseppe Alberigo, Jean Pierre Jossua, Joseph A. Komonchak (eds) (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1987), p. 59.
[2] Juan Carlos Scannone, ‘Theology, Popular Culture, and Discernment’, Frontiers of Theology in Latin America, Rosino Gibellini (ed.) (Orbis: New York, 1979), p. 214.
[3] Juan Carlos Scannone, ‘The Debate about Modernity in the North Atlantic World and the Third World’, Concilium 6 (1992): 78-96, p. 82.
[4] Idem., p. 83.
[5] Michael R. Candelaria, Popular Religion and Liberation (New York: State University of New York Press, 1990), p. 47.
[6] Lucio Gera, in Rafael Luciani, Pope Francis and the Theology of the People (New York: Orbis, 2017), p. 31.
[7] Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, no. 68-70
[8] Rafael Luciani, “Francis and the Pastoral Geopolitics of Peoples and Their Cultures: A Structural Option for the Poor”, in Theological Studies 81.1 (2020): 181-202, p. 182.
[9] Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti, no. 158.
[10] Scannone, ‘Theology, Popular Culture, and Discernment’, p. 222.
[11] Idem., p. 225.
[12] This working group of the Argentinian Bishops Confrence, CEOPAL, was created to lead the reception of the documents of Vatican II and the Medellin conference and were key to the development of the theology of the people.
[13] Sebastián Politi, Teologia del Pueblo (Editorial Guadalupe: Buenos Aires, 1992), p. 239. My own translation.
[14] To say that the people as a concept is analetical is appropriate. See Eduardo Mendieta, ‘Philosophy of Liberation’, The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (Winter 2020 Edition) Edward N. Zalta (ed.) URL: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberation/#Onto.
[15] Sebastián Politi, Teologia del Pueblo, p. 240.
[16] Lucio Gera., ‘Pueblo, religion del pueblo e Iglesia’, Iglesia y religiosidad popular, CELAM (ed.) pp. 258-283, p. 271.
[17] Rafael Luciani, Pope Francis and the Theology of the People (New York: Orbis, 2017), p. 25.
[18] The San Miguel Document, in Luciani, Pope Francis and the Theology of the People, p. 7.