Pope Francis and The Patriarchy
The Pope, JD Vance, and Systems of Hierarchy
Welcome to My So-Called Feminist Life: Essays, interviews, and book reviews that wrestle with what it means to be a feminist today. This week, I bring you an essay about my lapsed Catholicism, feminism, the weirdness of secular Easter, and the death of Pope Francis.
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There’s a cadence to a Catholic mass. And even if you’ve left the church years prior, even if you can’t in good faith support an institution that asks for money and then uses it to cover up child abuse by its own members, even if the members of the congregation don’t approve of you anymore, even if you haven’t tasted that chewy disc on the tongue melted away by a sip of bad wine in years — it all comes back.
Our Father, who art in heaven,
Hallowed be they name,
When Kingdom come,
Thy will be done,
On earth,
As it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread
And forgive us our trespasses
As we forgive those who trespass against us
And lead us not into temptation
But deliver us from evil
For the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory are Yours
Now and Forever.
Amen.
Hail Mary, Full of Grace
The Lord is With Thee
Blessed art thou among women
And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
Pray for us sinners
now, and at the hour of our death,
Amen.
I decided to be agnostic when I was a teenager. This was not a decision I came to lightly. Growing up as one of five children — we were a big Catholic family — Catholicism was the easiest answer to most questions I had as a kid. Stories about the past were found in the Bible. My parents met because they went to neighboring Catholic High Schools in Portland, Oregon (one for boys, and one for girls, naturally). We went to mass every Saturday evening (because it was less crowded than Sunday morning). We attended classes on the Catechism as children in order to take our First Communion and give our First Confessions (mine was about being mean to my younger brother. The Priest told me I could help my mom empty the dishwasher to repent). Being Catholic was a culture I grew up in, and an identity I was born into, and I never really resisted it. I was a highly anxious child and death felt like it was always looming. I prayed every night as a way to ward off bad things. Having certain answers, a text to point to, ancestors who thought the same way, that was a comfort.
But when I was 13, my parents divorced and we stopped going to mass. Soon after, the crisis of child abuse within the church became public. I learned it impacted members of my family directly. And maybe it was all of this happening at a time when I was learning to be a more grown up person in the wider world, but parts of the Church started to seem absolutely nonsensical. Priests couldn’t marry. Nuns couldn’t either. So was marriage bad? If those closest to God were not allowed to do it? Or was it just women in general were too tempting, too sinful? Men, after all, made the rules in the Church. The stance on homosexuality. The government schools. The cruelty associated with Catholic education. I could never see how rejecting others ever made any sense in a religion, a philosophy that was constantly asking us to consider the poorest, the disabled, those in need of the most help. Kindness toward others, recognizing the humanity in each other, that was the lesson I most often took away from mass. But the system itself seemed set up in direct opposition to all of this.
I’m not sure I remember exactly whether I outrightly noticed that the entire hierarchy of Catholicism was also built on the idea that men were powerful and women were servile. But it was clearly there, baked into every wafer that was supposed to represent the Body of Christ. As a teen, I tried other forms of religion, but never found anything that really aligned with my growing sense of the world. I still paid attention to who the Pope was — which man was chosen to be Pope — but always wholly skeptically. I have felt, like many “lapsed Catholics,” both a part of and very purposefully not a part of, the Church all of my adult life.
These days, raising two children agnostic in a world that is both less religious and strangely more theocratic, I’ve been wondering what I am passing on to them about how we should live in the world, about the answers to the big, deep questions, fears, and anxieties that all children have. Easter has been a particularly strange holiday for me as a parent. Perhaps because I think it’s one of the weirder Christian holidays to secularize. Perhaps because even as a child I found it strange that this incredible story of a person literally rising from THE DEAD was celebrated with an imaginary rabbit who left us bad chocolate?
Maybe this is hypocritical but I can kind of figure out Christmas as a secular holiday. There’s winter solstice and sparkly lights and cookie sharing and yes, gifts, that can all kind of be explained for their own merit. But I felt like, if we were not Christian, if we did not believe Jesus was God, then why would we celebrate this random Sunday in Spring on which this person supposedly rose from the dead, by giving my children baskets full of candy and trying to convince them that this imaginary bunny person was behind it?
My children, of course, are exposed anyway. Last Friday, my three-year-old did an egg hunt at his (non-religious) preschool, complete with a teacher dressed in a bunny costume that he told me was “very scary and confusing.” So he hid on the playground while the other kids got their eggs. When my oldest asked if the Easter bunny was coming this weekend, I told him no.
“The Easter Bunny isn’t real,” I said.
“He’s a mythical creature?” he asked.
“That’s right,” I confirmed. “But your grandparents will probably get you treats.”
Their grandparents, as has become tradition, did in fact, send them Easter baskets with candy and little toys that they delighted in. We spent the rest of the day not doing much of anything. Which was a balm after weekends of spring break and birthday parties and swimming lessons. Later, my three-year old told me that bunnies love eggs, because if they find them, they’ll hatch into little baby Easter bunnies. (See, it’s confusing.)
On Monday, hearing the news of Pope Francis’s death, I felt a sting. Because Francis actually did represent the part of the church I appreciate having been raised with. And I wonder if my children are going to absorb the same lessons I did through the routine and tradition and culture that Catholicism offered me. Just because we are not Catholic or Christian or religious in an organized way does not mean we don’t believe in things, or that I don’t want my children to believe in things, to have some certainty about the world, especially as the world becomes less and less certain.
Apparently, Pope Francis’s last visitor the day before his death was Vice President JD Vance. They were meant to meet that Saturday, but the Pope had sent senior officials instead, who noted that there was an “exchange of opinions” about refugees, migrants, and ongoing conflicts in the world. Then, the following day, Francis allowed Vance to see him to “exchange Easter wishes.” I had to wonder if Francis just wanted to look this guy in the eyes so he understood.
The Pope’s Easter message, after all, seemed pointed toward Vance (and Trump). “I appeal to all those in positions of political responsibility in our world not to yield to the logic of fear which only leads to isolation from others, but rather to use the resources available to help the needy, to fight hunger and to encourage initiatives that promote development,” he said. “These are the ‘weapons’ of peace: weapons that build the future, instead of sowing seeds of death!”
This wasn’t the first time Pope Francis seemed to use pointed language against actions of the Trump administration, and perhaps directly toward Vance, a recent Catholic convert. Back in February, Vance had recently used a Catholic concept known as “ordo amoris,” the correct order of love, to defend the mass deportations of migrants from the United States, a cornerstone of the Trump doctrine. Vance argued on Sean Hannity’s show that this concept delineates a hierarchy of care — to family, then neighbor, then community, and finally to those elsewhere.
Pope Francis was so offended by this that he wrote a letter to all U.S. Bishops, appearing to address Vance’s assumption directly, just before he was hospitalized with weeks-long pneumonia in February. “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan,’ that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”
Last week, I couldn’t help but return mentally again and again about the Pope’s sentiment, and the persistence to stand up to Vance personally.
I have admired the ways in which Pope Francis tried to break down the hierarchy in the Church during his papacy. He refused to ride in a bulletproof Pope mobile. He insisted on washing the feet of women (the first Pope to do so), including imprisoned women. He consistently asked that the world be a kinder, more loving place. He turned a former palace adjoining the Vatican into a homeless shelter. He even requested burial in a plain wooden coffin, in a simple tomb. I so admire that he used his last precious day on Earth to remind someone doing evil, and trying to do so in the name of the Church, that he is wrong.
And yet, one man cannot fix a system that is upholding a literal patriarchy.
The Kingdom, the Power, the Glory are His. Hers? The Fruit of thy Womb.
When my children ask me the hard questions about the world, I keep finding myself repeating some version of: this is how things used to be. They were not right. They did not make sense. We’re trying to do better. And I realize this is breaking a pattern from my own upbringing, which answered my questions with: Look to the past. Read the Bible. Follow the tradition.
Tradition can feel comforting: Sometimes I still yearn for the cadence of a Mass. The incense. The prayers. The repetition. The comfort of knowing your place.
But tradition also excuses deep wells of harm. The irony, I suppose, is that the man who represented this particular harmful tradition used his last days to call out another system, hell bent on erasing any progress we’ve made.
I think what I want my children to know is that comfort is easy. But discomfort is is how we change.
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