POPE FRANCIS’ REPARATIVE VISION: A POSTMODERN HERMENEUTIC OF CATHOLIC UNCERTAINTY

Abstract

Various readers of Pope Francis identify in his papal texts a striking openness to uncertainty, embodied in a rejection of fear and an embracing of alterity. These themes are united to a program of reform touching on doctrinal, ecclesiological, and pastoral matters; as well as attendant wider theological, philosophical, and affective issues. However, the general unsystematicity of both these readings and Francis’ texts themselves makes it difficult to receive those texts in a way that integrates these various themes.

The critical theorist, Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick distinguishes between paranoid and reparative hermeneutics. At the heart of this distinction are their respective attitudes towards uncertainty. Paranoid hermeneutics see uncertainty primarily as a source of danger. Consequently, they attempt to foreclose uncertainty by deploying totalised, self-confirming theories which anticipate and determine their objects so as to construct them as manageable threats. In contrast, reparative hermeneutics view uncertainty with hope, looking to it as the source of unforeseen joy. Correspondingly, they are less totalising and determining, instead allowing the unknown to reveal itself.

In drawing this typology, Sedgwick integrates affective and epistemological themes in such a way as to provide a powerful tool for understanding the cluster of themes identified in Francis’ writings. This thesis deploys Sedgwick’s typology in order to produce a correspondingly integrated reading of Francis. It constructs a systematic reading of Pope Francis’ key papal documents in order to show how he provides theological resources for a reparative hermeneutics in Catholic theology, contrasting this with more paranoid impulses within the Magisterial tradition as exemplified in John Paul II’s Veritatis Splendor. In doing so, it seeks to show how Francis provides the materials for an alternative Catholic imagination, founded on a systematic theology that enables us to embrace uncertainty with hope.