Pope Francis – the woke Pope. That’s how many have thought of him for some time. The environmentalist, talking about the urgency of saving the planet; the passionate advocate of countries welcoming yet more refugees; the critic of the old world, lambasting it for its treatment of the developing one. A Guardian-reading pontiff, if ever there were one, constantly alert to any hint of injustice. But now Pope Francis has been on the attack again, but not assailing the usual targets of wokery. This time he has had his sights on cancel culture, using the Pope’s annual address to the diplomatic corps at the Vatican to criticise those who deny or reinterpret history. He warned them of ideological colonisation, of efforts at revising history invading many circles and institutions.
It was notable that while speaking in Italian, he used the English phrase “cancel culture” to make his point, for it has barely touched Italy or entered public discourse. It reminded me of conversations I had in the past with Vatican officials when I was writing a book about Britain and the papacy: I began to realise that many in Rome view Britain as a laboratory, where secularism and other trends develop first. So if cancel culture has emerged here and in the US, the Pope and his colleagues will be fretting that it will inevitably move from the English-speaking world to take root in the continental Europe. Cancel culture to them is the child of a post-Christian society.
Roots matter in the Vatican. Pope Francis is considered by many to be very different from his predecessors, John Paul II and Pope Benedict, who were much more conservative about internal church matters, such as the liturgy. But they sing – to use an appropriate term for these churchmen – from the same hymn sheet on the importance of Europe’s Christian heritage and fear it is in danger of being lost. Post-Christian Europe, they have all fretted, is losing sight of its values. Pope Benedict wrote a book, Senza Radici – Without Roots – about this very topic, while in December Francis warned that banning Christian terms was a fad and watered-down secularism, and his Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin has condemned attempts to cancel the Christian dimension of Europe. In his latest book, Let Us Dream, published in 2020, Francis also warned against taking down statues.
For him, chucking a statue of slave trader Edward Colston into Bristol docks is unacceptable – not because he condones slavery in any way – but because denying history is a deeply flawed intention. Instead, he says, history needs to be understood through the prism of its own time, not the notions of today.
Confronting the past is inevitably painful, and the Church knows that more than most. Think of its own history: the cruelty of both sides in the Reformation and the way that popes have previously silenced critics. But if that history is removed or denied, we learn nothing, we come from nowhere and we are nothing. History sheds light on the choices we make about values and the society we live in. If we deny it, all that holds us together is a shallow, forced consensus – the most fragile of cultures.
The Pope’s intervention is a welcome one, then, but don’t be surprised if it causes a raised eyebrow or two among certain Catholics. They have been in uproar over his efforts to clamp down on use of the Tridentine Mass, also known as the Old Rite, and a throwback to an ancient form of liturgy. So while the Pope is giving welcome leadership to the world on opposition to cancel culture, there’s a certain form of it going on inside the Catholic Church. He might want to sort out the mess in his own backyard too.
