At 88, Pope Francis dances the tango with the global Catholic Church amid its culture wars
(The Conversation) — Francis’ vision for a ‘synodal’ church is one built on trust and relationships − a dance where partners work together.
Pope Francis drinks maté, the national beverage of Argentina, in St. Peter’s Square on his birthday on Dec. 17, 2014.
David M. Lantigua
December 19, 2024
(The Conversation) — Jorge Mario Bergoglio was 17 years old when he first received his vocation to become a priest. It happened on Sept. 21, 1953 – the beginning of spring in Buenos Aires – during a spontaneous visit to the confessional, or what Catholics call the sacrament of reconciliation.
This spiritual turning point for the future Pope Francis has been widely reported. Less known is that his divine calling happened en route to a student gathering that would have involved food, music and dancing the Argentine tango.
Although he wound up skipping the festival, the tango still runs deep within Pope Francis. In 2014, thousands of Catholics gathered in St. Peter’s Square to honor the pope’s Dec. 17 birthday with his homeland’s famous dance. Now, a decade later, he is turning 88 and looking back. His autobiography – the first published by a sitting pope – will be published in January 2025.
Earlier this year, while doing research in Buenos Aires, I found myself drinking maté tea with several members of the Federation of Catholic Workers’ Circles. These locals, or “porteños,” told me Francis is a “theologian of the tango.”
As a scholar of Latin American Catholicism, I can see why Argentina’s most famous dance provides a cultural window to understanding the first pope from the continent.
A worldwide dance of the people
This iconic style of dance and music extolling personal intimacy emerged out of the Río de la Plata region of Argentina and Uruguay during the 19th century. Tango was born in poor, immigrant neighborhoods, with hybrid rhythms inspired by Afro-Uruguayan “candombe,” Cuban “habanera,” and the “milonga” music of ranchers.
Argentine tango involves syncopated movement, steps that are neither mechanically rehearsed nor sheer freestyle. Partners embrace one another and move with spontaneity and self-control. There is tremendous passion and musicality, tinged with sadness. Timing is everything in partners’ quest for unity.
A ‘milonga’ at the FI Tango Festival Porto 2023 in Porto, Portugal.
Similarly, Francis has shared his vision for a “synodal” church: one based on relationships of trust and solidarity. Rather than being led completely top-down, a synodal church is one where clergy and lay people walk together through difficulties, living out their faith in deeper communion with Jesus Christ.
In October 2024, the Synod on Synodality at the Vatican brought together bishops and other delegates from around the world, concluding a historic three-year process. The synod was a journey of listening, dialogue and consultation with lay Catholics. Local churches must listen to Christians “in the trenches … people who are struggling,” said Bishop Daniel Flores of Texas, one of the U.S. delegates at the assembly, who serves migrants on the border.
As the Catholic Church charts its third millennium, the synod symbolizes its attempts to discern the path ahead. Francis seeks balance between tradition and innovation, the local and the universal. Like a tango, the church’s dance cannot be too rigid, tightly gripping the past, nor too loose, conformed toward the world of today.
The opening session at the Synod of Bishops at The Vatican, the final assembly of the Synod on Synodality, on Oct. 2, 2024.
AP Photo/Andrew Medichini
Francis has challenged conservative critics opposed to reform, saying they are “closed up inside a dogmatic box” and cannot see beyond traditionalism – a deadening attitude where faith has lost its flavor.
Yet he has also warned against an “anything goes, everything’s the same” attitude toward change: “dale que va, que todo es igual,” in the words of tango singer Enrique Santos Discépolo. Those lyrics, well known to Francis from his youthful dancing days, come from “Cambalache,” Discépolo’s popular song of protest against fascism and moral relativism in 1934.
Catholic culture wars
Francis’ tango with nearly one-fifth of the world’s population has been a difficult one to lead, especially amid Catholic culture wars within the United States and Europe. Ever since the momentous Second Vatican Council of the 1960s, which introduced major reforms, progressive and traditional Catholics have been battling out the meaning of their church’s identity, debating the weight of tradition or innovation.
On one side are conservatives – many of them young – who critique secular liberal values that they believe attack the age-old institutions of religion and family. On the other are liberals – many of them aging – on a mission to adapt or dispense with traditions they consider outdated.
Both sides of the Catholic culture war seem to buy into the caricature of Francis as a liberal, revolutionizing Roman Catholic tradition. Even so, some progressive fans consider his reform efforts ineffectual and half-hearted – especially their thwarted hopes that the pontiff would ordain female deacons or permit married clergy.
His detractors believe Francis’ papacy is a disaster better forgotten – or pray it will prove a liberal “last gasp” before the arrival of a more conservative pope.
Francis himself, however, has not shown partiality to either side, criticizing particularly vocal critics on the right yet without empowering progressive factions on the left. The pope moves to a rhythm quite different from the culture wars in the West.
Worshippers gather at the Martyr Stadium in Kinshasa, Congo, on Feb. 2, 2023, during Pope Francis’ six-day visit to South Sudan and Congo.
AP Photo/Moses Sawasawa
Building a new bridge
Francis’ legacy will turn on the faith and popular piety of Catholics in the third millennium, most of whom are from South America, Africa and Asia. By 2050, the Catholic Church outside Western Europe is projected to make up three-quarters of the global Catholic population. Francis is not so concerned with building a bridge between warring sides of progressives versus traditionalists, or liberals versus conservatives, but between different cultures of the global North and South.
Furthermore, the church’s worldwide pastor is less interested in ivory tower theology than the faith of people on the streets, where the tango and the earthier “milonga” – his personal favorite – were born. Poor neighborhoods in the greater Buenos Aires area, where he joined other “slum priests” in prayer and fellowship as an archbishop, orient his popular theology. In his teachings, the piety of common people, whether public processions for the Virgin Mary or celebrating holy days, offer a transcendent antidote to hyperindividualism and materialism.
Pope Francis, then known as Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, kisses the foot of Cristian Marcelo Reynoso during a Catholic Mass in Buenos Aires with young people trying to overcome drug addictions in 2008.
AP Photo
Francis has emphasized that the church is of and for the poor, a theme with roots at the Second Vatican Council – and most famously developed by Latin American bishops and theologians, such as Gustavo Gutiérrez, the Peruvian priest who died in October 2024. Whether instituting a World Day of the Poor for the global church, organizing world meetings of worker-led popular movements or cutting the salaries of the Roman Curia, Francis, I believe, sees it as the mission of the synodal church to center the poor in reforms.
Like the tango of a “porteño,” Francis’ passionate leadership has been both disciplined and effusive, building a bridge of solidarity, not a wall of division, between the church and the world beyond the West. It is a legacy and task that will long outlive his papacy.
(David M. Lantigua, Associate Professor of Theology, Co-Director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, University of Notre Dame. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)
(The Conversation) — Francis’ vision for a ‘synodal’ church is one built on trust and relationships − a dance where partners work together.
Pope Francis drinks maté, the national beverage of Argentina, in St. Peter’s Square on his birthday on Dec. 17, 2014.
Alberto Pizzoli/AFP via Getty Images
David M. Lantigua
December 19, 2024
(The Conversation) — Jorge Mario Bergoglio was 17 years old when he first received his vocation to become a priest. It happened on Sept. 21, 1953 – the beginning of spring in Buenos Aires – during a spontaneous visit to the confessional, or what Catholics call the sacrament of reconciliation.
This spiritual turning point for the future Pope Francis has been widely reported. Less known is that his divine calling happened en route to a student gathering that would have involved food, music and dancing the Argentine tango.
Although he wound up skipping the festival, the tango still runs deep within Pope Francis. In 2014, thousands of Catholics gathered in St. Peter’s Square to honor the pope’s Dec. 17 birthday with his homeland’s famous dance. Now, a decade later, he is turning 88 and looking back. His autobiography – the first published by a sitting pope – will be published in January 2025.
Earlier this year, while doing research in Buenos Aires, I found myself drinking maté tea with several members of the Federation of Catholic Workers’ Circles. These locals, or “porteños,” told me Francis is a “theologian of the tango.”
As a scholar of Latin American Catholicism, I can see why Argentina’s most famous dance provides a cultural window to understanding the first pope from the continent.
A worldwide dance of the people
This iconic style of dance and music extolling personal intimacy emerged out of the Río de la Plata region of Argentina and Uruguay during the 19th century. Tango was born in poor, immigrant neighborhoods, with hybrid rhythms inspired by Afro-Uruguayan “candombe,” Cuban “habanera,” and the “milonga” music of ranchers.
Argentine tango involves syncopated movement, steps that are neither mechanically rehearsed nor sheer freestyle. Partners embrace one another and move with spontaneity and self-control. There is tremendous passion and musicality, tinged with sadness. Timing is everything in partners’ quest for unity.
A ‘milonga’ at the FI Tango Festival Porto 2023 in Porto, Portugal.
Similarly, Francis has shared his vision for a “synodal” church: one based on relationships of trust and solidarity. Rather than being led completely top-down, a synodal church is one where clergy and lay people walk together through difficulties, living out their faith in deeper communion with Jesus Christ.
In October 2024, the Synod on Synodality at the Vatican brought together bishops and other delegates from around the world, concluding a historic three-year process. The synod was a journey of listening, dialogue and consultation with lay Catholics. Local churches must listen to Christians “in the trenches … people who are struggling,” said Bishop Daniel Flores of Texas, one of the U.S. delegates at the assembly, who serves migrants on the border.
As the Catholic Church charts its third millennium, the synod symbolizes its attempts to discern the path ahead. Francis seeks balance between tradition and innovation, the local and the universal. Like a tango, the church’s dance cannot be too rigid, tightly gripping the past, nor too loose, conformed toward the world of today.
The opening session at the Synod of Bishops at The Vatican, the final assembly of the Synod on Synodality, on Oct. 2, 2024.
AP Photo/Andrew Medichini
Francis has challenged conservative critics opposed to reform, saying they are “closed up inside a dogmatic box” and cannot see beyond traditionalism – a deadening attitude where faith has lost its flavor.
Yet he has also warned against an “anything goes, everything’s the same” attitude toward change: “dale que va, que todo es igual,” in the words of tango singer Enrique Santos Discépolo. Those lyrics, well known to Francis from his youthful dancing days, come from “Cambalache,” Discépolo’s popular song of protest against fascism and moral relativism in 1934.
Catholic culture wars
Francis’ tango with nearly one-fifth of the world’s population has been a difficult one to lead, especially amid Catholic culture wars within the United States and Europe. Ever since the momentous Second Vatican Council of the 1960s, which introduced major reforms, progressive and traditional Catholics have been battling out the meaning of their church’s identity, debating the weight of tradition or innovation.
On one side are conservatives – many of them young – who critique secular liberal values that they believe attack the age-old institutions of religion and family. On the other are liberals – many of them aging – on a mission to adapt or dispense with traditions they consider outdated.
Both sides of the Catholic culture war seem to buy into the caricature of Francis as a liberal, revolutionizing Roman Catholic tradition. Even so, some progressive fans consider his reform efforts ineffectual and half-hearted – especially their thwarted hopes that the pontiff would ordain female deacons or permit married clergy.
His detractors believe Francis’ papacy is a disaster better forgotten – or pray it will prove a liberal “last gasp” before the arrival of a more conservative pope.
Francis himself, however, has not shown partiality to either side, criticizing particularly vocal critics on the right yet without empowering progressive factions on the left. The pope moves to a rhythm quite different from the culture wars in the West.
Worshippers gather at the Martyr Stadium in Kinshasa, Congo, on Feb. 2, 2023, during Pope Francis’ six-day visit to South Sudan and Congo.
AP Photo/Moses Sawasawa
Building a new bridge
Francis’ legacy will turn on the faith and popular piety of Catholics in the third millennium, most of whom are from South America, Africa and Asia. By 2050, the Catholic Church outside Western Europe is projected to make up three-quarters of the global Catholic population. Francis is not so concerned with building a bridge between warring sides of progressives versus traditionalists, or liberals versus conservatives, but between different cultures of the global North and South.
Furthermore, the church’s worldwide pastor is less interested in ivory tower theology than the faith of people on the streets, where the tango and the earthier “milonga” – his personal favorite – were born. Poor neighborhoods in the greater Buenos Aires area, where he joined other “slum priests” in prayer and fellowship as an archbishop, orient his popular theology. In his teachings, the piety of common people, whether public processions for the Virgin Mary or celebrating holy days, offer a transcendent antidote to hyperindividualism and materialism.
Pope Francis, then known as Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, kisses the foot of Cristian Marcelo Reynoso during a Catholic Mass in Buenos Aires with young people trying to overcome drug addictions in 2008.
AP Photo
Francis has emphasized that the church is of and for the poor, a theme with roots at the Second Vatican Council – and most famously developed by Latin American bishops and theologians, such as Gustavo Gutiérrez, the Peruvian priest who died in October 2024. Whether instituting a World Day of the Poor for the global church, organizing world meetings of worker-led popular movements or cutting the salaries of the Roman Curia, Francis, I believe, sees it as the mission of the synodal church to center the poor in reforms.
Like the tango of a “porteño,” Francis’ passionate leadership has been both disciplined and effusive, building a bridge of solidarity, not a wall of division, between the church and the world beyond the West. It is a legacy and task that will long outlive his papacy.
(David M. Lantigua, Associate Professor of Theology, Co-Director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, University of Notre Dame. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)
(RNS) — CatholicVote has slowly emerged as a player in conservative politics, often as a sharp-elbowed crusader in the culture wars.
President-elect Donald Trump announced CatholicVote President Brian Burch will be the next ambassador to the Vatican.
(Photo courtesy CatholicVote)
Aleja Hertzler-McCain and Jack Jenkins
December 20, 2024
(RNS) — President-elect Donald Trump announced Friday (Dec. 20) that he has nominated Brian Burch, the president and co-founder of CatholicVote, as ambassador to the Holy See.
Burch wrote on X that he was “deeply honored and humbled” to be nominated, expressing gratitude to family and those at his organization. “I am committed to working with leaders inside the Vatican and the new Administration to promote the dignity of all people and the common good,” he wrote.
CatholicVote has emerged as a reliable ally of the president-elect and helped to garner Catholic votes for the GOP in November; additionally the lobbying organization and political action committee has focused its efforts on fighting abortion rights, advocating against LGBTQ+ inclusion and civil rights, and criticizing immigrant ministries.
Burch has been a vocal critic of Pope Francis’ decision to oust two conservative Catholic leaders from their positions, and he has dismissed the efforts of the most recent synod, a top priority for the pope, as a ruse.
Ken Hackett, an ambassador to the Holy See during President Barack Obama’s second term, told RNS that while Burch’s opposition to Francis could possibly be overstated, he might run into some trouble in the post.
“This is the pontificate of Pope Francis, and while there may be many in the Curia that don’t agree 100% with everything Francis does or decides, he is still the pope, and if you’re seen as in opposition in any way to him, you’re not going to get the doors open,” Hackett said. “If he has a reputation that is in any way anti-(Pope Francis), I don’t think he’s going to find a lot of comfort.”
Hackett emphasized the difficulty of the job in an interview with RNS. “The job for somebody who has had nothing to do with the Vatican is exceptionally complicated. The Vatican and the various dicasteries in the Vatican operate in ways that you don’t intuitively understand,” he said. “State Department doesn’t tell you exactly how to work in the world of Pope Francis.”
The former ambassador said he received an important piece of advice when he began the job: “It’s not transactional, it’s all relational, and if you understand that, then you build the relations, and building relations takes a long time.”
RELATED: Conservative PAC sues Biden administration, targeting nuns, liberal Catholics in records request
CatholicVote has slowly emerged as a player in conservative politics, often as a sharp-elbowed crusader in the culture wars. In 2022, the group filed a lawsuit against Joe Biden’s administration targeting Catholic Charities, select bishops and even sisters such as Sister Norma Pimentel, an advocate for immigrants sometimes referred to as “Pope Francis’ favorite nun.” The effort was an attempt to secure communication records between the U.S. government and Catholic groups regarding humanitarian aid at the border. They filed a second, similar lawsuit, to gain access to communication between the groups around controversial abortion laws. In 2023, CatholicVote raised around $500,000 in a failed effort to change the Kansas Constitution to remove the explicit right to an abortion.
CatholicVote President Brian Burch in a recent video. (Video screen grab)
They have also led the way in several high-profile campaigns against LGBTQ+ people, including after the funeral of trans activist Cecilia Gentili at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and amid backlash to the Los Angeles Dodgers honoring a drag and charity group — the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, who dress as nuns — during Pride Night.
RELATED: Backlash to trans activist’s St. Patrick’s funeral reveals deep fault linest
Marianne Duddy-Burke, executive director of DignityUSA, an LGBTQ+ Catholic organization, told RNS, “CatholicVote is among the right-wing Catholic groups that have been waging war against LGBTQ civil rights and acceptance in the church for years, so his appointment as ambassador to the Holy See is a real setback.”
Duddy-Burke said she had worked “very closely” with the staff of the embassy during the Biden and Obama administrations and said the office had been “really effective in ensuring that LGBTQ issues have been part of the agenda of the U.S. dealing with the Holy See in terms of their vulnerable persons responsibility, and it’s just devastating to think that our country’s voice will no longer continue on that path.”
The group has also been willing to wade into traditional electoral politics. During the 2018 midterm elections, Steve Bannon teamed up with CatholicVote to use geofencing — a method that tracks cell phone location data — to target people who had been inside Roman Catholic churches in Dubuque, Iowa, with get-out-the-vote ads. The group ramped up its use of the technology in the 2020 presidential election, targeting nearly 200,000 voters in Wisconsin and framing the project as a potential game-changer for Trump.
“If your phone’s ever been in a Catholic church, it’s amazing, they got this data,” Bannon said in a deleted scene from the documentary “The Brink.”
CatholicVote also ran ads in support of Trump this year, including one featuring Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s choice to run the Department of Health and Human Services.
Massimo Faggioli, an expert on Pope Francis and professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University, told RNS, “This appointment speaks more to the domestic politics of Donald Trump than to the international affairs.”
He said the choice was interesting given that Trump and J.D. Vance, his running mate and a Catholic, both seemed to position themselves on relatively good terms with the Vatican during the campaign. The Vatican seemed even cautiously optimistic that a Trump presidency could aid in their hopes for peace in Ukraine and Gaza.
“I think it’s possible that the Vatican will try to be less confrontational with Trump because they might think that he could solve these two wars,” Faggioli said.
The theologian said Burch seems to be different from Trump’s first choice for ambassador to the Holy See, Callista Gingrich, whom Burch described as more institutional and not “political” in her post.
Faggioli said it was possible Burch would become less partisan when he took the post, and he anticipates the embassy staff, who have been operating without an ambassador since Joe Donnelly stepped down in July, will “try to help the ambassador, at least in public.”
“It remains to be seen what this means for relations between the Trump administration and Pope Francis,” he said.
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