Please enjoy an excerpt from the fifth chapter of my new book The Jesuit Disruptor: “The People’s Champion.”
The global prevalence of the “techno-economic paradigm” magnifies the need to ensure that life itself is not suborned. Francis writes: “Life gradually becomes a surrender to situations conditioned by technology, itself viewed as the principal key to the meaning of existence. In the concrete situation confronting us, there are a number of symptoms which point to what is wrong, such as environmental degradation, anxiety, a loss of the purpose of life and of community living. Once more we see that ‘realities are more important than ideas.’”
Francis’s disinclination to rank thinking over doing, ideas over realities—a marked feature of the Ratzinger papacy—first surfaced in official papal literature with his 2013 apostolic exhortation Evangelii gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel). The perception that Francis is not a thinker—frequently asserted by his critics as a demeaning assessment intended to stand in sharp contrast with his intellectually formidable predecessors—is a sad caricature. He is quite capable of serious thinking and can rise to the occasion when necessary, but his impulse is always to choose to address things on the ground and as they are rather than as conceptual entities.
An integral human ecology, with its respect for human dignity at every stage, its heightened sense of the connectivity of all Creation, its sensitivity to the unique cultural fabric and diverse systems that constitute the human family, must be an ecology situated in the “common good, a central and unifying principle of social ethics.”
Francis is interested in an alternative model to the “techno-economic paradigm,” and the common good model serves that purpose with its emphasis on subsidiarity, social peace, the flourishing of the family as the “basic cell of society,” and its commitment to distributive justice.
If it was in any way unclear where Francis stood on the liberationist dogma of the “priority of the poor,” Laudato Si’, in unabashed consistency with Evangelii gaudium, affirms his commitment to the poor, irrespective of any theological critique with which he might have some nuanced disagreement. The poor demand our attention; in obedience to the Gospel, we have no other option than to respond. Reality supersedes ideation.
Michael’s new book The Jesuit Disruptor: A Personal Portrait of Pope Francis (House of Anansi, Sept. 2024) can be purchased through Amazon Australia.
Dr. Michael W. Higgins has been involved with investigating and expanding the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, particularly in Canada, for over forty years. Dr. Higgins is the Basilian Distinguished Fellow of Contemporary Catholic Thought at the University of St. Michael’s College in Toronto.
With thanks to Pontifex Minimus.
Pontifex Minimus is written on the ancestral territories of the Haudenosaunee, Anishinabewaki, Attiwonderonk and Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation peoples, who have stewarded these lands since time immemorial.
