When Trump Meets Francis/ Insightful Commentary in Commonweal

https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/when-trump-meets-francis



..."Francis has described his worldview as “Magellan’s gaze”: “One thing is to observe reality from the center and another to see it from the last place where you arrived […] An example: Europe seen from Madrid in the 16th century was one thing; however, when Magellan arrives at the end of the American continent, he sees Europe from a new point reached and understands another thing.” In seeing the world as an explorer (not a settler or a conqueror), as the son of immigrants, and as the leader of a global faith community, he takes it in with his mind, his heart, and his hands. Contrast how Trump kicked off his first foreign trip—the largest arms sale in U.S. history—to how Francis began his, a trip to “the peripheries” of Lampedusa in July 2013 at which he said: “Immigrants dying at sea, in boats which were vehicles of hope and became vehicles of death. That is how the headlines put it. When I first heard of this tragedy a few weeks ago, and realized that it happens all too frequently, it has constantly come back to me like a painful thorn in my heart. So I felt that I had to come here today.”


Forget the populist qualities that Trump and Francis supposedly share: Francis has a view of the world that Trump does not

Francis’s emphasis on the peripheries of the world was further confirmed with the surprise announcement on May 21 of a new consistory for the appointment of five cardinals from Mali, Laos, Sweden, Barcelona, and San Salvador (there is no new cardinal for North America). His geopolitical view is characterized by deep insight and a lack of heavy-handed interventions with local churches when it comes to decoding and discerning the complexity of global Catholicism and the world in general. He sees parallel trajectories in the fundamental solidarity between the Church and the world, quietly rejecting notions (“the Benedict Option” and other, more theologically refined versions of it) about withdrawing from the public square. Francis sees the world as a city, not a world divided between the “city of God” and the secular; a cosmopolitan and multicultural city for the Church to live in, not as a frontier to be conquered and fenced. He does not see the Church as a monastery to which Christians must retreat, under siege from the world. Francis’s world is not for settlers, but for the re-settled: the migrants and refugees who represent the religious icons of the seeker and of the bearer of the theological virtue of hope in a world where sometimes the first who are incapable of giving hope are Christians.

It will be interesting to watch and analyze Trump’s audience with Francis, because the meeting must be read in light of three “signs of our times.” The first sign is the widening gap between the United States and Europe. There is an ecclesial component (the theological and political opposition to Francis centered in the U.S.) and a geopolitical one (the Trump administration’s skepticism toward Europe and the European project from a political, economic, demographic, and military standpoint). It’s worth noting, for instance, that as the European project entered a period of economic and political crisis, EU leaders made a point of meeting with Francis—three times between November 2014 and March 2017.

The second sign is the political exploitation of religion for a hypocritical “turn to values.” In very different ways and with admittedly different goals, Trump and Francis de-emphasize biopolitical issues: what dominates their discourse are relations between political power and the economy. Francis expressed his view in the encyclical Laudato Si’, an encyclical as much about the relations between political and economic power as about the care for creation.

The third sign are the roles Trump and Francis embody given new political fault lines: nationalism vs. globalism, ethno-tribalism vs. cosmopolitanism. A worldview emphasizing walls is first of all impractical, but also immoral. Both the pope and the president deal with this issue on behalf of communities and populations divided by it. This doesn’t say much about their radically different positions on migrants and refugees, on the universal right to health care, or on the new arms race (just to mention a few examples), but it’s illustrative of the world they’re working in...."

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