Since I was six, there have been three popes. The first two were professors, which is not normal in the history of the Church—something to keep in mind, especially for those who become professors. The third, Francis, was not. Needless to say, this is not a comparison of relative intelligence. But it does mean that, in terms of one central aspect of the modern papacy, its teaching authority, Francis’s work is necessarily different from that of his two predecessors. Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI wrote documents imagining that they would be studied, and both gave weekly addresses that amounted to elaborate lecture series, the most famous being John Paul’s “Theology of the Body,” which involved 129 connected lectures over a five-year period. While Francis continued this tradition of papal catechesis—offering a series on vices and virtues this past year, one on the commandments in 2018, and others in between—they haven’t received as much attention. It’s interesting to note that, this past year, he interrupted his catechetical series on several occasions to speak with heartfelt directness about migrants or victims of trafficking. But it’s Francis’s daily homilies, press conferences, and messages to special groups, even more than his “lectures,” that contain some of his most memorable phrases. In every office he occupied in his long ecclesial life, right through bishop of Rome, Francis was ever the pastor close to his flock. And like all the best pastors, he was just as much of a teacher as any professor is.

But he taught differently. Many would say he taught by his actions, and that’s true enough. But what I mean is that his denkform—a German word for one’s overall pattern of thinking—was different. Above all, Francis taught using contrast-images. The contrast-image juxtaposes two options faced by believers. This approach has a deeply biblical heritage in the image of “the two ways,” such as the first psalm, which starkly contrasts the way of the righteous—“like a tree planted near streams of water”—with the way of the wicked, who are like “chaff driven by the wind.” Or think of Moses setting the law before the Israelites as a choice between the way of life and the way of death. Jesus’ preaching is filled with such contrasts: building on sand versus building on rock, the prideful wealthy Pharisee and the poor widow, the rich man and Lazarus, the foolish virgins and the wise ones, the sheep and the goats.

And Francis had a way with striking and powerful contrast-images. In paragraphs 22–28 of his 2013 apostolic exhortation, Evangelii gaudium, which emphasized the importance of a “missionary option” for all ecclesial work, Francis contrasted a Church whose identity is “to go forth,” “reach all the peripheries,” “take the first step,” and be permeated by the “smell of the sheep” with a Church preoccupied with “mere administration” and stuck in “a kind of ecclesial introversion,” featuring parishes that are a “self-absorbed group made up of a chosen few.” In a whopper of an image, he criticized ecclesial leaders who, in order to retain “a modicum of power,” would “rather be the general of a defeated army than a mere private in a unit which continues to fight” (96). The central teaching of Laudato si’ on the technocratic paradigm is also formulated by means of an intricate contrast-image:

Men and women have constantly intervened in nature, but for a long time this meant being in tune with and respecting the possibilities offered by the things themselves. It was a matter of receiving what nature itself allowed, as if from its own hand.… Now, by contrast, we are the ones to lay our hands on things, attempting to extract everything possible from them while frequently ignoring or forgetting the reality in front of us. Human beings and material objects no longer extend a friendly hand to one another; the relationship has become confrontational. (106)

This is rich moral contrast. It isn’t so much about being “for” or “against” technology as about reconsidering our overall attitude toward creation. Similarly, in Fratelli tutti, the opening chapter concludes with a remarkable contrast-image that captures two different ways of inhabiting a globalized world:

[T]he sense of belonging to a single human family is fading, and the dream of working together for justice and peace seems an outdated utopia. What reigns instead is a cool, comfortable, and globalized indifference, born of a deep disillusionment concealed behind a deceptive delusion: thinking we are all-powerful, while failing to realize we are all in the same boat.

Do we look at the world’s people with hope? Or do we retreat into an “indifference” that nevertheless continues to rely on all the technologies and resources of the global economy?

The list of Francis’s contrast-images could go on. From the examples I’ve offered, it should be apparent that they were often extraordinarily rich in detail and sharp enough to pierce the hearts of his audience. Those (like me) with affection for the writings of Francis’s predecessors can sometimes miss the power of teaching in this different way. And I think some of his critics mistakenly regard his “teaching differently” as a sneaky way to introduce “different teaching.” But the contrast-images were not restricted to one side of the Catholic divide. To compare abortion to “hiring a hit man”—as Francis did on multiple occasions—is, to say the least, jarring. But the image invites us beyond the abstract moral claim about the dignity of human life into the fraught, complex world in which abortions actually happen—a world where medical providers embedded in larger social structures conspire to push a violent solution on someone in a desperate situation. Similarly, the image of the “throwaway world,” which Francis used through his papacy, is not simply about ecology; rather, it is about persons who are “no longer needed—like the elderly,” and who are “readily sacrificed for the sake of others considered worthy of a carefree existence.” The image of “carefree” convenience captures the mindset that embraces both disposable water bottles and disposable lives, as opposed to inconvenient caring for both the planet and the most vulnerable people.

But Francis’s conservative critics were not reassured by these examples. I think this is because he seemed to have what amounts to a master contrast-image that dominated throughout his papacy: the aloof, self-enclosed, unloving Catholic (especially the cleric) who could barely disguise his disdain for others who do not measure up, as contrasted with the Catholic who, however flawed, radiates love and mercy. In Francis’s younger days, this critique of moral self-satisfaction was focused on certain Marxists in Argentina who (to borrow a phrase from Fratelli tutti) had a “false openness to the universal” that is “lacking insight into the genius of their native land or harboring unresolved resentment toward their own people” (145). Such people talk about liberation but are like “those who constantly travel abroad because they cannot tolerate or love their own people” (99).

But during Francis’s pontificate, it was above all those on the ecclesial right who were called out. In his critique of “spiritual worldliness” in Evangelii gaudium (94–96), a particular image emerges: 

The self-absorbed promethean neopelagianism of those who ultimately trust only in their own powers and feel superior to others because they observe certain rules or remain intransigently faithful to a particular Catholic style from the past. A supposed soundness of doctrine or discipline leads instead to a narcissistic and authoritarian elitism, whereby instead of evangelizing, one analyzes and classifies others, and instead of opening the door to grace, one exhausts his or her energies in inspecting and verifying.

The description here is so detailed that one can’t help wondering if Francis has some specific people in mind. It’s worth noting that he also goes on to identify “spiritual worldliness” with those who have “a fascination with social and political gain, or pride in their ability to manage practical affairs, or an obsession with programs of self-help and self-realization. It can also translate into a concern to be seen, into a social life full of appearances, meetings, dinners, and receptions.” In short, spiritual worldliness can affect people across the ideological spectrum. Still, it would be hard to dispute that Francis had those aloof, self-righteous, and liturgically retrograde “neopelagians” in his sights throughout his papacy.

And in one sense at least, Francis was right to focus on them. There is no doubt that this contrast-image—between narcissistic and authoritarian elitism and Gospel humility—was an important corrective to a certain kind of “super Catholic” who emerged during the previous two papacies. Such Catholics seem oblivious to Jesus’ severity toward all forms of spiritual elitism in the gospels. And if there was a certain “I came not to bring peace but the sword” tone to Francis’s papacy, it mainly had to do with his insistence that this particular way of appearing uber-faithful, combining conspicuous ritualism with rigid moralism, was not in fact faithful at all.

In another sense, however, this example displays the great danger in using the finely wrought, piercing contrast-image as the primary tool for understanding the Gospel. How easily such contrasts become their close cousin, the stereotype! And how easy it is to weaponize stereotypes against others! It is clear enough in the Bible, especially in the gospels, that the first and primary purpose of the contrast-image is self-examination, not stone throwing. The images ask us to examine our own hearts for signs of indifference and self-absorption. But it is easy to forget this, and once we do, the contrast-image quickly becomes just another weapon on the ecclesial battlefield. For example, in his reading of the Good Samaritan parable, Francis states that “there are only two kinds of people: those who care for someone who is hurting and those who pass by” (70). These two types of people, he says, give birth to two communities: one with “a pure and simple desire to be a people, a community, constant and tireless in the effort to include, integrate, and lift up the fallen” and one that succumbs to “the mentality of the violent, the blindly ambitious, those who spread mistrust and lies” (77).

Is the world really that simple? Or is this dangerously close to what psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff call one of the three “great untruths” of our age: that the world is made up of the good people and the evil people. I don’t mean to blame Francis for increasing polarization in the Church. After all, every papacy occurs (for good and ill) in a specific context—and Francis’s papacy coincided with the rise of social media and so-called “populism.” At least some of the polarization in the Church has been caused by these potent forces. Still, it’s fair to say that the contrast-image can easily be distorted by the caricatures that dominate social media. I am painfully aware that Catholics often have stereotyped views of other kinds of Catholics with whom they have little real human contact. I know Catholics who love the Tridentine Latin Mass who also open their homes to the homeless for showers and meals, and Catholics who are committed to traditional Catholic sexual teaching whose family and community lives are models of anti-consumerism and ecological restraint. On the other hand, I know Catholics whose passion for the pastoral openness of the Francis papacy is accompanied by a fervent faith in God and commitment to the sacraments, not some sort of lukewarm, nominal Catholicism—Commonweal readers will hardly need reminding of this.

So perhaps Francis’s style of teaching, with its stark contrasts, needs to be brought into contact with his lifelong fascination for the reconciling of opposites. Francis’s intellectual biographer, Massimo Borghesi, quotes an interview with Francis in which he discusses his never-completed doctoral thesis on Romano Guardini and his conception of opposition as something that “opens a path, a way forward.” Such oppositions are not reconciled by a Hegelian synthesis, but by a process in which “the tension remains” and “the limits are overcome, not negated.” Borghesi quotes a late letter from Guardini himself explaining his work as “a theory of confrontation, which does not happen as a struggle against an enemy, but as a synthesis of fruitful tension, that is, as a construction of concrete unity.” Such an approach helps explain some of the well-known and somewhat cryptic maxims in Evangelii gaudium—“the whole is greater than the part,” “time is greater than space,” “realities are more important than ideas.” All this may seem wildly abstract. Yet the root of this thinking is the concrete reconciliation of God and humanity in the person and work of Christ, who overcomes boundaries of the material and the spiritual, the human and the divine, not by means of ideas, but rather in the concrete reality of a person and a sacramental community. In expounding the aphorism “unity prevails over conflict,” Francis insists that peace “is not about a negotiated settlement but rather the conviction that the unity brought about by the Spirit can harmonize every diversity.” This confidence ultimately requires that we “go beyond the surface of the conflict” in order to “see others in their deepest dignity.” Seeing others in this way is based on the confidence that “Christ has made all things one in himself” through the cross.

This is a difficult approach to unity, and especially from the vantage point of the bishop who is meant to assure the Church’s unity! Nevertheless, in such a polarized world and Church, it is important to keep this eschatological hope for unity alive, even as we recognize the sinfulness and division revealed in Francis’s contrast-images. This teaching challenges all Catholics in our self-satisfied certainty that we know what is right and what is to be done. Accepting this challenge doesn’t mean giving in to our enemies or yielding to their opposite certainties; it means accepting the invitation to a communion greater than any we could design for ourselves.