Gov. Al Smith of New York, the original “happy warrior,” might have been elected the first Catholic president in 1928 had it not been for the politics of prejudice and fear running rampant in the country. Actually Pious XI, Pope at the time, would not have been a bad influence. He negotiated a modus operandi with Mussolini but turned against fascist Italy when Nazism began to rear its ugly head. He opposed the Third Reich in Germany and the antisemitism of Rev Charles Coughlin in America.
Herbert Hoover, raised a Quaker, won instead in 1928. Thirty years or so later, John F. Kennedy, an Irish Catholic from Massachusetts, was careful to distance himself from the Vatican while in the Senate. With a run for the White House probably in mind he backed away from federal funds for parochial schools. Then, as a candidate, he reassured a gathering of Protestant clergy in Houston and that he would follow the Constitution, not dictates from Rome.
JFK was lucky in his Pope. John XXIII was as bright a light in St. Peter’s as Kennedy was in the White House. John XXIII called the Second Vatican Council to open up the Church to a modern role in the modern world. You might even say he foretold the unlikely coming from Argentina of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the first Pope to choose the name Francis, another advocate for a kinder, gentler Catholicism.
Francis was the first Jesuit Pope. Jesuits have not always done well in the Vatican. For some in the Holy See they are too committed to education and cultivation of the intellect. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Jesuit palaeontologist as well as theologian, may have won the Legion of Honor in France, but in Rome his works often were condemned and little credit was given, according to one report, to the part he played in finding the Peking Man fossils in a cave near Beijing. Pope Francis, however, spoke highly of Teilhard de Chardin.
I came to understand the Jesuits when Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse, an Episcopal priest who spent the last third of her life in Dallas, told me about working as a psychiatrist with the Jesuits in Boston. One of them told her she was resisting a call to the priesthood. But, Ruth, I asked. How that possible. You are a women, hardly a prospect for the Catholic clergy. “Because” she said, “there is nothing they will not consider.”
The same could be said of the Jesuit Pope lost from the world last week. There were tears in unexpected places. A friend called from Los Angeles, distraught at the news. Stephanie Ruhle could barely say good night to her audience on MSNBC after a tearful tribute to Francis. I too felt bereft, knowing we would have to manage on our own now, without the big heart, the decency, the compassion that was more than mere morality— important, of course, and in frighteningly short supply, but when buttressed by the stands he took, over and over, to teach his church, his country, every country, the meaning of a moral life, his own principles grew into a construct both simple and sublime.
His repeated confrontations with the current regime in Washington have defined the character on both sides of the argument. Before the deep dispute over immigration grew irreconcilably grave, however, Pope Francis gamely received the American first family in 2017. The women were all gussied up in black, with Ivanka looking oddly like a bride with a headdress floating in the air around her, as fashion writer Vanessa Friedman observed in the New York Times, and Melania swathed in mourning dress and veil, like “a Sicilian widow.”
The head of the family flashed one of the few happy smiles I’ve seen on him in the last eight years—it was a visage of pure delight—but the Pope seemed to be wishing he could be anyplace else but there. It was kind of like Britain’s late Queen Elizabeth who twice had to entertain this thrilled visitor from the Oval Office. The first time he complained to her that Prime Minister Theresa May would not heed his advice about Brexit. What was the Queen supposed to say to that, forbidden as the monarch is to take any part in politics.
On Easter Sunday, only a day before he died, Francis was obliged to meet with a man without qualities named JD Vance, the American vice president with whom he had seemed to spare a few months before about the proper ordering of love. Vance said that Christian love should apply first to family, neighbors, community, fellow citizens, then the rest of the world. The Pope replied in a letter to U.S. bishops that “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extends to other persons and groups.”
The subject, of course, was forced deportation of immigrants. About that Pope Francis instructed, “The rightly formed conscience cannot fail to make critical judgment and express its disagreement with any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal status of some migrants as criminality.”
Border czar Tom Homan, like Vance a Catholic, retorted that the Pope “should stick to the Catholic church and fix that and leave border enforcement to us.”
That is exactly what Francis was unwilling, even in the last weeks of his life, to do.