Hooray! The Pope Calls for Literature

Will his July letter change anything?

About a month ago, Pope Francis wrote a letter that might mean a lot for literature and the humanities, with ripple effects on culture. It could challenge tech dominance. It could improve the tone of politics. It could ameliorate poverty and suffering. It could —

Well, we’re already in the realm of the improbable. You get the idea. Still, there’s no telling how the letter might glimmer into life somewhere in the wide world where papal words matter.

I learned about the letter while preparing this week’s post on another subject. It’s not every day that a pope has something to say about my profession, so I pushed the other draft aside and fell to reading the Letter of His Holiness Pope Francis on the Role of Literature in Formation, a 44-paragraph call for priests, ministers, and indeed all Christians (it’s not a long leap to say all people) to read “novels and poems as part of one’s path to personal maturity” (Paragraph 1).

Cool. Swap out Christians for everybody, and that’s the very thing I’m getting ready to say to 18-year-olds next week. That wily Francis read my mind.

You don’t have to be Roman Catholic or even Christian to appreciate an articulate, well-researched, relatively brief letter about the significance of literary reading from a figure with the reach and authority of the pope.

It may amount to nothing, but here’s why I’m hopeful.

Pope Francis is the author of dozens of books, like this one, on his signature theme of mercy.

Why literature?

The letter addresses itself to a gap felt in seminaries (and, we might add, throughout culture) today: “With few exceptions, literature is considered non-essential” (Paragraph 4). It strikes me that Pope Francis’s thesis in paragraph 5 offers an invitation to secular educators as much as to institutions of religious training:

With this Letter, I would like to propose a radical change of course. In this regard, I would agree with the observation of one theologian that, “literature… originates in the most irreducible core of the person, that mysterious level [of their being]… Literature is life, conscious of itself, that reaches its full self-expression through the use of all the conceptual resources of language” (emphasis mine).¹

We have glimpsed what happens to humanity in the absence of self-consciousness — how easily we descend into violent tribalism. Both literary and religious study — if conducted with this intention — have the ability to strengthen our sense of amazement in the face of irreducible mystery. And when we cultivate this amazement, we become a different kind of Christian (for the pope’s interest) or citizen.

Among my generation of literary faculty who went through graduate school during the heyday of “cultural studies” (the 1990s), there is a small but visible movement back to the universals that brought us to literature in the first place: recognition, enchantment, companionship, joy. The pope’s words may arrive at a fertile time for the field of literary studies.

What should we read?

In just two years as a high school literature teacher prior to the age of thirty, Pope Francis came to an understanding about the selection of reading materials. It was innovative in the 1960s, though it is now more widely accepted:

Naturally, I am not asking you to read the same things that I did. Everyone will find books that speak to their own lives and become authentic companions for their journey. There is nothing more counterproductive than reading something out of a sense of duty, making considerable effort simply because others have said it is essential. On the contrary, while always being open to guidance, we should select our reading with an open mind, a willingness to be surprised, a certain flexibility and readiness to learn, trying to discover what we need at every point of our lives. (Paragraph 7, emphasis mine)

Why is this a big deal?

What makes the Pope’s letter potentially ground-breaking is the way he offers a role for literature in relation to lives of faith. The implications redound to everyone. Cumulatively, his paragraphs on “Faith and culture” put forth a major challenge for Catholics and Christians (or all people?) to reject participation in the cultural offerings of division and anger and cultivate empathy instead. Here are a few samples:

Literature … proves essential for believers who sincerely seek to enter into dialogue with the culture of their time, or simply with the lives and experiences of other people. (Paragraph 8)

How can we speak to the hearts of men and women if we ignore, set aside or fail to appreciate the “stories” by which they sought to express and lay bare the drama of their lived experience in novels and poems? (Paragraph 9)

Contact with different literary and grammatical styles will always allow us to explore more deeply the polyphony of divine revelation without impoverishing it or reducing it to our own needs or ways of thinking. (Paragraph 10)

Pope Francis isn’t just calling us back to books. He’s oh-so-gently letting his readers know that they can do better in the empathy department, and then he’s calling on them to “enter into dialogue with the culture of their time,” to “speak to the hearts of men and women,” and — most radically — to hear the musical “polyphony of divine revelation” in the voices, and the very grammars, of other people. If his readers think they are already doing Christianity pretty well, his letter says: Read some novels and get back to me.

In other words, the Pope defines the human experience and the role of the Christian in ways already influenced by literary (and spiritual) reading.

I hear in Francis’s reasoning an unspoken confidence that the more people read books and poems selected as “authentic companions for their journey,” the more the extreme malformations of modern religion will slip back into the margins of life, and wisdom and ethics take their rightful place in world leadership.

If American Catholic Christians alone in the world take the Pope’s message to heart and act on it, a revolution in mercy — this Pope’s signature word — will take place.

Oh, sure, how likely is that?

The words of a Catholic pope, arriving at a fertile time, can sink into the ground of widespread cultural and global consciousness, beyond the Roman flock. Perhaps you, too, remember this example:

I was a college student when then-Pope John Paul II visited the United States to urge this country to use its power to advance social justice around the world. The Polish head of the Roman Catholic Church made “life” the signature word of his mission, as the Argentinian Pope Francis chose “mercy.” Before he left the U.S. back in September 1987, Pope John Paul II exhorted, “If you want equal justice for all, and true freedom and lasting peace, … then, America, defend life from conception until natural death!”²

The Pope’s clear, consistent message to “defend life from conception” galvanized a generation of Catholic activists. The movement only grew stronger when the pontiff formalized his longstanding position on abortion in an official Vatican encyclical. In Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life) (1995), the Pope spoke against “a certain Promethean attitude which leads people to think that they can control life and death by taking the decisions about them into their own hands” (The Gospel of Life, part 15). By contrast, he reminded, “At the dawn of salvation, it is the Birth of a Child which is proclaimed as joyful news” (part 1).

In the 1980s and 1990s, the sitting pontiff gave moral clout to the interpretation of a “right-to-life” philosophy as an opposition to abortion and euthanasia. Followers interpreted this not only as a guide to personal behavior but as a mandate for political action. Voters began to think of themselves not only as the U.S. Constitution envisioned them — voting each person for his (or her) interest — but as defenders of a constituency without a vote (the unborn). In fact, George Washington argued against interest groups and factions forming around causes other than one vote-one interest; he saw such groups as injurious to democracy.

But the Polish Pope was not formed by democratic theory or George Washington; he was formed by genocide — the death of families and babies — in twentieth-century Europe. If a reader does not harden herself against phrases made familiar by political activists, she can feel the grief and horror of twentieth-century mass murder between the lines of Evangelium Vitae.

The question is: Will the current pope’s reorientation of Catholic Christianity around “mercy” and now literature and the examined life land on equally fertile soil as John Paul II’s vigorous service of “life”?

That remains to be seen.

How this resonates with other things I’m reading

I read the latest post from

Dana Leigh Lyons

at

Sober Soulful

while drafting this essay, and was struck by the relevance of her opening quotation from senior Buddhist teacher Gil Fronsdal, who said, “If you’re so mesmerized, so enamored, so obsessed with what’s happening ‘out there,’ you’re actually missing yourself in a profound way” (“It’s Not Political. It’s Hate.”)

I read this as an affirmation of Pope Francis’s call to “explore more deeply the polyphony of divine revelation without impoverishing it or reducing it to our own needs or ways of thinking.”

I have developed a theory that the most reliable spiritual truths can likely be arrived at through multiple traditions, so this one has a ring of truth. When we reduce others to “our own … ways of thinking,” it amounts to a mesmerism or obsession, the opposite of true experience of ourselves or the other. To miss ourselves is to miss the other, and vice versa. It’s also to miss polyphony.

Dana Leigh Lyons

was asking for discourse based in listening and love. According to Pope Francis’s letter, we can train and prepare ourselves for that kind of discourse by attuning our ears to novels and poetry. That is more or less why I started this Substack in the first place. Thank you, Pope Francis, for getting the word out. Thank you, Dana, for distinguishing politics from hate.

.

One of the most important essays I think I’ve read about the current American political scene is

Dee Rambeau

’s “Politicians suck. Deal with it.” “Each time around the big top in the clown car over the last 40+ years,” writes Dee, “ … Nope, Nope, and Nope.”

It strikes me that Pope Francis’s letter is about politics — our human life together — as much as about literature. What makes Dee’s essay important is that it speaks for a large number of people in democracies who distrust everyone jockeying for power and the whole political frenzy of clever talk.

I hear Pope Francis corralling religion and literature together to ask a single question: And where is love in this encounter?

It takes practice to “hold space” (we say now) for love in times of duress, conflict, hopelessness, and need. Practice with literature, I hear Pope Francis saying.

In a short section of his letter called “Never a disembodied Christ,” the pontiff writes,

We must always take care never to lose sight of the “flesh” of Jesus Christ: that flesh made of passions, emotions and feelings, words that challenge and console, hands that touch and heal, looks that liberate and encourage, flesh made of hospitality, forgiveness, indignation, courage, fearlessness; in a word, love. (Paragraph 14)

I see in our political tangle the pope’s “flesh” of Christ — indignant and hopeful, fearless and afraid. In free countries, we strangers meet each other in this mess of flesh, falling easily into rancor unless we have strong habits of bringing love from inside out.

Is it easier to do this if we have a habit of literary reading?

Put me on Team Pope. I say, yes, let’s carry poems in our pockets when we go out into the fray.

Ever hopeful,

Tara

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Around Substack

Earlier this month, I contributed a short essay to

M. E. Rothwell

’s series

The Books That Made Us

about my first childhood poetry anthology. It’s called “Melody, Mystery, Majesty, & Mirth.” Thank you, Mikey! Evidently, your series anticipated Pope Francis’s letter about the importance of literature for the process of maturation. Way to go!

.

New York Times bestselling novelist

Evelyn Skye

is offering scholarships for writers at her newsletter

CREATIVE. INSPIRED. HAPPY with Evelyn Skye

. See her August 11 post for details.

1. A footnote in the papal letter cites R. Latourelle, “Literature,” in R. Latourelle & R. Fisichella, Dictionary of Fundamental Theology (2000), p. 604.

2. “The Papal Visit; Pope Condemns Abortion in the U.S. as He Ends Visit,” New York Times Sept. 20, 1987. NYT Online.