When Cardinal Bergoglio was elected pope on March 13, 2013, and took the name of Francis (in Italian, “Francesco”), I thought immediately of Pope Francesco I, the fictional radical pope created by Walter P. Murphy in his epic 1979 novel The Vicar of Christ. But of course I put the parallel out of my mind immediately, because the new real-life pope was an elderly Argentinean with a sad, shy facial expression and a conservative reputation, not a radical who would turn the Catholic Church upside down.
Here’s a sample of the fictional Pope Francis, responding to some conservative cardinals who ask him why he has written a document that undermines the historic 1968 anti-contraception encyclical Humanae Vitae:
We have written a pastoral document, not a theological one. You theologians may spin your spidery webs but our task is to lead souls to Christ. Humanae Vitae was wrong. It must be discarded.
The real-life Pope Francis of today has said publicly — and quite recently, at that — that he endorses Humanae Vitae. But otherwise the fictional Francis sounds a lot like the real one. Note the contrast between “pastoral” and “theological” — if you want to give heartburn to conservative Catholics, a good shortcut is to make much of that distinction. And note also the contrast between the “spidery webs” of the “theologians,” and his simple concern for people’s souls; this rhetorical populism (e.g., the declared preference for “the smell of the sheep”) is a hallmark of the current pontificate.
And here’s the fictional Francis, contrasting the traditional view — that the pope and the Church “must speak with the clarity and the force of lightning . . . with absolute authority and absolute certainty and absolute finality” – with his own view of papal authority:
As St. Paul wrote to the Philippians, “Christ emptied Himself” of His right to Godness while He was on earth . . . then the Church may stumble and grope toward the truth, not fully comprehending the fire of ultimate truth that burns within it. It can err in the sense of failing to achieve ultimate truth.
I think the real-life Pope Francis is trying to combine this sort of papal humility — expressed in a much greater emphasis on “mercy,” dialogue, and outreach than on reassertions of dogma — with a desire not to flatly contradict any official doctrines. This is a tough task, hence the anxiety currently being experienced by so many professional Catholics of left and right (not to mention confused pewsitters). The Internet rage has risen to the point that Vatican spokesman Father Thomas Rosica is threatening to sue a Canadian Catholic blogger who harshly criticized him. (There is, incidentally, no better evidence than this of the media honeymoon Pope Francis is getting: Can you imagine how berserk the media world would have gone if Ratzinger’s assistant had sued, e.g., Andrew Sullivan, for saying mean things about him?)
All these reflections are occasioned by the fact that Walter Murphy’s novel about the radical Pope Francis has finally been released on Amazon Kindle – with a new introduction by, of all people, Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito. (Murphy was a mentor to Alito at Princeton.) Alito’s introductory essay is generous and detailed, and fans of the justice can read it all for free on the Amazon preview pages. As for the novel itself, it’s an old-fashioned popular page-turner, of the sort that dominated the bestseller lists in the era of James Michener and Arthur Hailey: rich in plot and detail, and often spanning many continents in its narrative reach. The protagonist is a Korean War hero and chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court before becoming the first pope from the Americas. Not the most plausible résumé, I concede; but every year, the boundaries of plausibility seem to get more and more capacious.