How the Culture Wars Came to the Catholic Church

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 21 March 2023

⏱️ 22 minutes

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Summary

The pontificate of Pope Francis, which just reached its tenth year, has brought a greater willingness to engage with modern issues. Francis has addressed Catholics on the climate emergency, arguing a religious position against consumerism and irresponsible development. Without changing the Church’s doctrines, he struck a very different tone than his predecessors Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI on the inclusion of gay people and the involvement of women in Church leadership. The traditionalist reaction against Francis has also been unprecedented, with prominent figures in the Church openly seeking to discredit him. The New Yorker contributor Paul Elie, who recently wrote about this decade of Francis’s leadership, explores how tensions in the Church were overtaken by an American-style culture war. Elie speaks with Bishop Frank Caggiano, of Bridgeport, Connecticut, and M. Cathleen Kaveny, a prominent law professor and theologian at Boston College. “For John Paul,” Kaveny says, “the main challenge that the faith faced was moral relativism. The conservatives . . . are worried that [moral relativism] is not appreciated by Pope Francis.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:11.6	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:15.9	Ten years ago, the Catholic Church faced a startling situation, unprecedented in modern times.
0:22.8	The Pope, Pope Benedict, resigned.
0:25.7	And when his successor was appointed, Pope Francis, he too was a break from the past.
0:30.9	He was the first pope from Latin America, in fact, the first non-European pope for a millennium.
0:37.0	And Francis seemed far more willing to engage with contemporary problems.
0:41.3	He wrote an encyclical, a letter to the faithful, on the climate emergency,
0:45.3	talking about consumerism and irresponsible development.
0:49.3	Francis also struck a very different tone on gay rights. But as much as Francis has been more open than previous popes on a series of issues,
1:00.0	the reaction against him from traditionalists has been all the more outspoken and truly angry at times.
1:07.0	How exactly did the culture wars come to the Vatican and the Catholic Church?
1:12.6	Paul Eli just published a piece about a decade of Francis's leadership.
1:17.2	Paul, after a decade, what stands out for you as the most notable efforts and achievements of this Pope?
1:25.8	Well, Pope Francis has done so much on the environment, on the opening of the church to
1:31.8	non-Christian religions, on focusing the church outward toward the poor, on cleaning up the structure
1:38.5	of the Vatican, and making a lot of fresh appointments both in Rome and around the world.
1:46.0	But what really stands out to me is the openness that he's brought to the church, a church that felt closed and locked down
1:52.0	after years of fairly authoritarian leadership under John Paul II and then Benedict the 16th
1:58.5	is now open and showing signs of change. Paul, now I'm looking
2:04.0	at this from obviously way outside the church, but it seems from what I understand, from what I read,
2:09.3	that opposition to the Pope is much blunter than ever before, anything we've ever seen.
	...

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