Mystifying as the Cubs can be, they are a lot easier to talk about than religion. So it’s no surprise that Archbishop Francis George has spent more time over the last two weeks fielding questions about Our Losers of Wrigleyville than about, say, the legitimacy of general absolution.
For his part, Father Frannie (as his homies greet him) seems delighted to take on the mantle of the native son. He is the prelate who talks knowingly about prairies, 16-inch softball and the Addison Street bus.
Don’t be misled by the Windy City banter, however. George has spent more time in Rome than in the United States since 1974. He is a missionary by training, not a parish priest.
And Archbishop Francis George approaches Chicago with the eyes of an anthropologist–an outsider keenly interested in the idiosyncrasies of modern, big-city American culture.
That may sound like an odd description for the boy from Portage Park, but George’s intellectual and practical background allow him to step back and view his new post with the same kind of detachment he has used to study the Roman Catholic Church in Greenland, in Korea, in 18th Century Quebec.
More specifically, his writings suggest a combination of anthropologist and missionary–a missiologist, in theological jargon–on a search for the elements in culture that embrace his faith, and those that fight it.
“Discussion of culture is as important to the Church as discussion of grace or of nature,” George wrote in a 1992 article in which he exhorts the church to engage in dialogue with cultures around the world.
In another article, he puts it more personally: “If our social systems and culture are, at least in part, evangelically deficient or even corrupt, so are we all.”
Though George’s articles and academic dissertations have not made him a household name, even in the small world of Catholic theologians, his quest to understand the collision of faith and culture puts him in the middle of one of the most interesting discussions going on in Christianity today.
As highfalutin as some of them sound, the questions that underlie George’s writings during the last decade are practical: If you can’t ignore the world outside the church door, how do you use it to promote your worship?
Can Catholicism thrive in a Western, secular, materialistic society? And what does it mean to preach the traditions of the Roman church 5,000 miles from St. Peter’s?
Not coincidentally, these issues of culture also happen to be a favorite theme of Pope John Paul II.
The Polish pope’s distaste for the convenience-loving, slippery-slope relativism of the West is, by now, well known. But it is balanced by his less-publicized fascination for the way Catholicism sprouts up from outposts in Africa, Asia and South America.
The pontiff has written letters and encyclicals on culture, set up a Vatican commission on the topic, and hopped the globe as if he were the world’s last living missionary.
Rev. Richard McBrien, a prominent liberal theologian at the University of Notre Dame, says the pope’s teaching on issues of culture is central to the work of the church.
“I disagree with this pope on many things, but I have to give him credit . . . The pope is much more open than many conservatives to adaptations of worship in different cultures,” notes McBrien. “It’s a very important topic.”
Rev. Avery Dulles of Fordham University, McBrien’s counterpart on the right, agrees that John Paul II’s writings on faith and culture may be one of the pope’s lasting contributions.
“I think the pope has continually challenged us to evangelize not only individuals, but the culture, so that we have some Christian art and literature and music,” Dulles says.
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And though neither Dulles nor McBrien boasts any familiarity with George’s writings, Dulles did visit the archbishop when he was in Portland last year to give a speech. After talking to George, and looking at the rows of Pope John Paul II’s writings–in many languages–on his bookshelves, Dulles came to a quick conclusion.
“This archbishop is right on this pope’s wavelength,” he says.
In fact, George’s interests in culture track so closely with the pope’s that his latest dissertation, a 1990 doctoral thesis in theology entitled “Inculturation and Ecclesial Communion,” begins and ends with analysis of John Paul II’s teachings on faith and culture.
That paper hops from 17th Century Canada to modern Thailand, visiting a host of times and places in between.
More recently, for obvious reasons, George’s attention has shifted to one peculiar culture that is full of crosscurrents and contradictions: the United States.
The U.S., he explains in the 1992 article “Evangelizing American Culture,” is a country that has retained many of its Puritan values, but remade them for secular use.
The Puritan church’s reliance on personal testimony has found analogues in modern politics, psychotherapy and perhaps–though George doesn’t go this far–daytime talk shows. He does say that Puritan eschatology, the belief in the coming end of this world, has echoes in modern predictions of nuclear holocaust and ecological disaster.
Puritanism, however, is only one thread, woven together in modern America with enlightenment deism, revolutionary democracy, pragmatism, activism and “the cult of successful results.”
By all accounts, George personally enjoys some of the fruits of that hybrid culture. He is said to love poetry, opera and movies–“2001: A Space Odyssey” and “The Last Picture Show” are reported to be favorites–and is a voracious reader of everything from current events to obscure philosophers.
But even in his reading, he sometimes takes the approach of an outsider.
Eugene Selk, chairman of the philosophy department at Omaha’s Creighton University, where George taught in the late 1960s and early 1970s, said that when George returned to the United States in 1986 to run the Center for the Study of Faith and Culture in Cambridge, Mass., he felt a little out of touch with his homeland. So, to bring himself up to speed, George read the collected works of the American historian Garry Wills–precisely the kind of preparation a good missiologist undertakes.
What does having a missiologist as archbishop portend for the Catholics of Chicago? What does it mean to the rest of the city?
One could imagine George taking a more aggressive stance toward those parts of the culture he finds inimical to the faith, much as Pope John Paul II has criticized Hollywood’s sex and violence, Wall Street’s unrestrained capitalism and much that lies in between.
In the 1993 article “The Church and Cultures,” George wrote that believers “inevitably find in their culture positive obstacles to understanding the faith and living the gospel, and those obstacles will have to be transformed or eliminated from the culture.”
On the other hand, in the same piece, he notes that between faith and culture, “the relationship, the dialogue, should always be friendly.”
Perhaps, as some reports of his time in Yakima suggest, his interest in different cultures makes him more attuned to minority needs. As he notes in an article, the church in America must understand the cultures Hispanic, Asian and African-American Catholics bring to their worship, even as the church looks for fertile ground in “the dominant culture.”
Another clue comes from a much simpler document then-Rev. George helped draft for his fellow missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate in 1972.
“We will always cultivate an open and respectful attitude toward the people among whom we live, as well as toward the values imbedded in their culture,” the document directs. “We live within the world, not beside it.”