Pope Francis as Interpreter of Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises

Abstract

Pope Francis as Interpreter of Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises Matthew Ashley (bio) In September of 2015 Pope Francis recorded a message for a meeting of the International Congress of Theology, held in Buenos Aires on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the theology faculty at the Catholic University of Argentina. In his address, he communicated his understanding of theology, beginning with a reflection on the relationship between what I call “academic theology” and pastoral theology: Not infrequently an opposition is generated between theology and pastoral thinking and action, as if they were two opposing, separated realities that didn’t have anything to do with one another. Not infrequently we identify the doctrinal mindset with being conservative and retrograde, and, conversely, we think about the pastoral mindset from the perspective of adaptation, reduction, accommodation. As if they had nothing to do with one another. What gets generated in this way is a false opposition between the so-called “pastorally minded” and the “academics,” between those on the side of the people and those on the side of doctrine. What gets generated is a false opposition between theology and thinking pastorally, between believing reflection and believing life. And then life has no room for reflection and reflection finds no room in life. The great fathers of the church, Irenaeus, Augustine, Basil, Ambrose, just to name a few, were great theologians because they were great pastors.1 Francis states that one of the main contributions of Vatican II was overcoming this opposition, and, because of this, one of the principal tasks of theology is “the arduous work of distinguishing the message of Life from its forms of transmission, from its cultural elements that have a time encoded within.” He continues, “not to do this exercise in discernment leads in one way or another to a betrayal of the message.” He concludes, “This meeting of doctrine and the pastoral mindset is not optional, it is constitutive of a theology that aims to be ecclesial.”2 While this understanding of theology can be taken as a brief for the centrality of pastoral or practical theology to the work of academic theology, I follow two hints for arguing that it can also be understood as pressing the centrality of the discourse of spirituality. First, “believing life” (vida creyente) strikes me [End Page 165] as an apt synonym for spirituality, which is often described as “lived faith.” Both namings intend to point to the way that life is actually lived out in the ambient of belief. Francis’s point here, I believe, is that vida creyente, “believing life,” has its own integrity and structures that should be taken more seriously by theology. Homologously, as recent scholarship has stressed, Christian spiritualty, or “lived faith,” incorporates in its own way the conceptual parameters, the doctrines that belong to Christian faith at one particular moment in history, which academic theology, for its part, labors to understand and interrelate more conceptually and abstractly. Second, he names this work of integrating the doctrinal element of Christian faith (lo doctrinal) and the pastoral element (lo pastoral) as a work of discernment, a term of art from Christian spirituality in general, and from his own spiritual tradition, founded by Ignatius of Loyola, in particular. He elsewhere names discernment as the element of Ignatian spirituality that is most important for his exercise of the Petrine ministry, and describes it in strikingly similar terms to those he used when addressing the theologians gathered in Buenos Aires.3 For him, discernment exemplifies the attitude of John XXIII, the architect of the Second Vatican Council, and takes place “in the presence of the Lord, looking at the signs, listening to the things that happen, the feeling of the people, especially the poor.”4 We may add to these hints the fact that Francis has made it clear on more than one occasion that his Jesuit formation and his experience as a Jesuit, including as provincial of the Jesuits of Argentina in the 1970s, have decisively shaped his thought and papal practices, much more so than particular theological figures or schools. Unlike his two predecessors, the Argentinian pope was never an academic, and...