Cast a cold eye
On life, on death
Horseman, pass by! –epitaph: W.B.Yeats
Next up, the letter’s performative homage to the founder of the Jesuits, St. Ignatius Loyola. Yes, with any of the several more transparently weighty of the document’s concerning features, I might more conventionally begin this third essay in my series of deconstructions of the Pope Francis’ letter of midsummer 2024 encouraging Catholic seminarians’ interest in literature.[1] Yet still, no, the designed-ness of that thrice-endnoted genuflection in the direction of the revered founder of the religious congregation to which Francis himself belongs so startles me as I read the letter that I am required by it to start there. Then, next, I’ll address the most striking of the document’s postmodern features, the waving to friends and foes from his hiding place among the letter’s thirty-two endnotes of its most likely ghostwriter, the former editor of La Civilta Cattolicá who is now undersecretary for the Dicastery for Culture and Education, Father Antonio Spadaro, S.J.[2] Yes, there is much that is concerning in that waving. As for the three remaining items on our list of the letter’s concerning features—the document’s telling auto-hagiographical inclusion, its non-acknowledgement of Augustine as the Church’s archetypal opponent of the letter’s thesis, and the alarming reading list that the Holy Father would seem to be proposing for seminarians—yes, we’ll get to them in my future postings in this series, and, when we do so, it will be interesting because, among other things, I, a literature and writing prof, will be telling you that the Holy Father’s recommended reading list for the Church’s yet unfledged clergy would seem to have for its object the attenuation/compromising of their faith (assuming there is a difference between those two things).
But before explaining these two new, concerning features of the letter, what were the original three that I identified in my prior pair of “casting a cold eye” essays? They were these: the cunning of the letter’s basic rhetoric, wherein the Holy Father exploited conservative Catholics’ reflexively high regard for literary texts and for literary learning to bring them over to his side—the Pelagian, relativist, progressivist side—of the perennial divide in Catholic ethical culture between those who would accommodate the World and its mores, and those who wouldn’t. For that’s where the conservatives would be landed once they started reading literary texts and started factoring into their moral thinking those texts’ bewitching, rules-blurring, ethical scenarios—in the territory of the moral relativists. As for the second of the letter’s worrisome features, well, that would be the posting’s just-identified unspoken object, namely, the making relativists of the Church’s conservative Catholics. As for their progressive brethren, yes, the document has them in mind too. It wants to please them. And that too is no doubt an unspoken object of the document. Lastly, as for the third of the letter’s concerning features, I said in those prior essays that less than satisfying was the document’s zero recognition of a long-standing, anti-literature ethic in Catholic culture, one in which the histories of Jerome’s, of Augustine’s, and of Ignatius of Loyola’s renunciations of literary involvements were archetypal.
To begin, then, what’s wrong with the letter’s thrice-offered obeisance to St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, and, as such, the supposed spiritual father of J.M. Bergoglio, S.J.? This: that nowhere in that obeisance’s course does the writer of the letter note the saint’s archetypally antithetical experience to the letter’s agenda. To recall, at a critical moment in his young-adult life, a bedridden Ignatius called for the chivalric romances that had ever and always been his delight in his roisterous and often wayward life to date. However, when the caregiver in attendance handed him instead a Life of Christ, and, then next, when he read it, well, the rest was history, so to speak, for, soon thereafter, Ignatius would be a man with no time for the print follies of this world but, instead, an ever on-duty soldier of Christ focused solely on spiritual battles. This happened, I should add, not too long after the invention of the printing press and not too long before the appearance of Shakespeare and Cervantes on the cultural scene. In other words, hell of a sense of timing is the Lord’s. In any event, yet still, in a letter recommending literary reading to all who would grow spiritually, Loyola’s Jesuit descendent, Pope Francis, in quick succession recruits three times this saint’s name as he develops one of his letter’s subsidiary thoughts—without, as I say, mentioning the just-recalled, character-defining event in Ignatius’ life that would suggest his little agreement with the letter’s general agenda. And how ethical is that? Or, more charitably put, how straightforward? Not exceptionally so, if you ask me, and even less so if one steps back and considers in more general terms how alien to one another are the letter’s Pelagian features and Ignatius’ pronounced consciousness of evil’s agent force in the human heart.[3] Of course, yes, we are no doubt getting in the letter a taste of two or three generations of post-Vatican II, post-Woodstock, Jesuit happy-talk about the revised, updated, real [emphases mine] meaning of the 16th-Century founder of the Order’s hard-to-square-with-secular-modernity’s teachings.[4] And Francis could very well be sincere in speaking from that taste’s underlying perspective. Yet still, no, this reference to Ignatius in the second millennium’s third Pontiff’s letter on literature has the smell of orthodoxy signaling all over it, if you ask me—as does, it appears to me, the letter’s borrowings in other of its paragraphs from the words of John Paul II, C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot, irrespective, I should explain, of those distinguished folks’ fundamental impatience with the progressive, embrace-the-World philosophies of their own day. In short, yes, let’s insert into the list of Francis-letter-on-literature’s concerning features its co-optations of the Ignatius of Loyola brand.
Also on the list, I would urge, belongs the phenomenon of the document’s most likely ghostwriter waving his hands post-modernistically at ideological friends and foes from his hiding place in the letter’s catalog of endnotes. This penman behind the scenes is almost undoubtedly, as I mentioned above, Father Antonio Spadaro, S.J., the once editor of La Civilta Cattolicá who is now undersecretary for the Dicastery for Culture and Education. And, as for his waving his hands, one sees such a thing happening in each and every of the seven times his own writings are cited and/or end-noted in the document. Yes, roughly 22% of the 32 endnotes that close this document identify its likely ghostwriter as the source of a phrase or thought. Wow! That’s a lot of self-referentiality, as we say in the literary business that is his and mine! In any event, yet still, I denominate Spadaro only the most likely ghostwriter of the letter because, to be fair, there is indeed some possibility that its actual penman in the shadows is the Holy Father’s other, more infamous amanuensis and advisor, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, that is, the Argentine prelate and theologian who is credited with composing the most controversial of documents yet issued during the Francis pontificate.[5] Yet still, no, the literature/culture beat is more the European Spadaro’s than it is the South American Fernández’. In the titles of this erudite Vatican servant’s many books are found the names of prose authors Raymond Carver, Jack Kerouac, Antonio di Benedetto and Pier Vittorio Tondeli, as well as of poets Walt Whitman and Karol Wojtyla. He has, too, written a text on creative writing’s possibilities as a spiritual exercise. The blurb of another of his books promises reflections from Musil, Mann, Kafka, Dickinson, Lee Masters, Hemingway, and Flannery O’Connor. Further, I find on YouTube a video-lecture of his that might have, in its initial publication moment twelve months ago, served as a trailer to the forthcoming Francis statement on literature.[6] And, lastly, by way of pushing his candidacy as this letter’s likeliest ghostwriter, I’ll point out that in my viewing of the just-mentioned video lecture, I see lecturer Father Spadaro pull back on a smile and I hear him verbally stumble as he attributes to Francis an apostolic letter marking the 700th anniversary of the death of poet Dante Alighieri. And what were those facial movements of his in that moment if not giveaway, postmodern gestures signaling his own authorship of the Pope’s tribute to the Divine Comedy author?
An overlarge, kid-colored sculpture of a living-room recliner set out on the front lawn of my own home university, the rainbow-swashed gas tank alongside Boston’s I-93 expressway, a Groucho Marx episode on Youtube, indeed, a Groucho Marx episode in its original setting, a telenovela about nada, a play titled Six Characters in Search of an Author, the novel with footnotes that is David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, the similarly inspired novel titled The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth—postmodernity, it’s a difficult word to define but we all know it when we see it. And, yes, we see it for sure in all that is now-you-see-me, now-you-don’t in the seven endnotes at the bottom of this Papal letter, notes in which the document’s ghostwriter Antonio Spadaro, S.J, identifies himself as the source of a word or thought. Those endnotes say to the progressive, pro-Francis crowd of the document’s readers, Like me for what I’m doing here, while, too, they say to the conservative, anti-Francis crowd, Dislike me for the same reason. (Yes, postmodernists do like to have fun.)
But why should the progressives like it and the conservatives dislike it that the ghostwriter so often shows himself in this letter? Because, doing so, he is blurring the distinction between writer and ghostwriter, and that—the blurring of distinctions—is something that the p’s like and the c’s dislike. Also, if they are alert to things, the p’s ought like and the c’s dislike the ghostwriter whenever he goes into his happy-talk chatter about readers, not writers, making books. For that chatter, as another reader of the letter has already observed, is typical of what we in the literature business call “reader response criticism,” and it, too, results in the blurring of distinctions and the relativizing of judgments.[7] And, lastly, to the maximum delight of the p’s and the maximum vexation of the c’s, the ghostwriter of this document ultimately steps back in the shadows where he belongs and lets Francis sign the paper’s bottom. Yes, doesn’t that delight and vex! As for why, because, of course, for us Catholics the distinction between Pope and everyone else doesn’t blur.
Yes, on the list of this document’s concerning features certainly ought appear the postmodern performance of its ghostwriter.
Enough for today. Next up, the letter’s Augustine omission.
[1] Pope Francis. “Letter of His Holiness Pope Francis on the Role of Literature in Formation.” The Holy See. Dicastero per la Comunicazione – Libreria Editrice Vaticana. July 17, 2024. https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/letters/2024/documents/20240717-lettera-ruolo-letteratura-formazione.html.
[2] Payne, Daniel. “Pope Francis appoints Father Spadaro to Culture and Education post,” Catholic News Agency, 14 Sept. 2023, https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/255365/pope-francis-appoints-father-spadaro-to-culture-and-education-post.
[3] Wright, Vinita Hampton. “Challenged by Ignatius.” Ignatian Spirituality.com, 2009-2024, https://www.ignatianspirituality.com/challenged-by-ignatius/.
[4] See, for example, Ashley, Matthew J. “Pope Francis: Theology as an Instrument of Consolation,” in Renewing Theology: Ignatian Spirituality and Karl Rahner, Ignacio Ellacuría, and Pope Francis by Matthew J. Ashley (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022), pp. 233-288.
[5] Loup Besmond de Senneville. “The other Argentinian who is shaking up the Vatican,” Le Croix International, 4 Mar 2024, https://international.la-croix.com/news/religion/the-other-argentinian-who-is-shaking-up-the-vatican/19293.
Ed Condon. “Pope Francis’ Fernández Miscalculation.” The Pillar, 10 January 2024, https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/pope-francis-fernandez-miscalculation.
[6] La Civiltá Cattolica. “Antonio Spadaro on Pope Francis, Literature and Catholic Imagination.” Youtube, uploaded by La Civiltá Cattolica, 27 July 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5dEL0cbmCs.
[7] Andrew Petiprin. “Pope Francis offers an idealistic, anti-utilitarian approach to reading literature.” The Catholic World Report, 7 Aug. 2024, https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2024/08/07/pope-francis-offers-an-idealistic-anti-utilitarian-approach-to-reading-literature/.
