Conor M. Kelly and Kristin E. Heyer: The Moral Vision of Pope Francis

Conor M. Kelly and Kristin E. Heyer’s The Moral Vision of Pope Francis explores Pope Francis’ papacy and makes sense of it for a Catholic audience in the United States. Featuring contributions from expert theologists and ethicists, the book speaks to different aspects of the “Francis revolution,” offering a fresh perspective on changes within the Roman Catholic Church. Read on for a Q&A with the editors about selecting contributors, their takeaways from the Boston College conference, and their hopes for the Francis revolution.

When selecting theologists and ethicists as contributors, what qualities and qualifications were you looking for?

When we thought about our ideal contributors, we had two priorities in mind. First, we wanted theologians and ethicists who had relevant expertise in the areas that are most important to Francis, so that they could help shed new light on the implications we might be missing in the United States. This meant, for example, finding a contributor who could speak to Francis’s re-prioritization of peacebuilding ahead of the ethics of war, or identifying the right scholar to help apply Francis’s promotion of the preferential option for the poor to the US context. On this level, we were delighted with the range of exceptional scholars willing to join the project, as we believe each contributor has excelled in the subject-specific analysis we knew the field could use. Second, we were also concerned with cohesion across the volume, so we prioritized scholars who could speak to the unique Ignatian dimensions of Francis’s background and pontificate. It has been great to see the confluence of both these priorities in every chapter in the finished book.

What inspired you to explore Pope Francis’s papacy now rather than 10 years ago?

Two things have become clearer as time has passed, making this volume much more relevant now, a decade into Francis’s papacy, than it would have been at the start. The first is that the distinctiveness of Francis’s papacy is much more apparent with the benefit of a little hindsight. Certainly, there were indications from the start that the pontificate of Pope Francis would not be “business as usual” (as we note in the introduction), but the full extent of his vision for the transformation of the Church was still just implicit at the outset. We, as a Church, needed some time to appreciate what Francis was inviting us to explore, so a little distance was necessary before we could even talk about something like the moral vision of Pope Francis in a coherent sense. The second thing that has become clearer over the last decade is that there is a real reluctance on the part of US Catholics to engage with Francis’s vision for the Church. On one level, this is not surprising, given how many of Francis’s priorities—such as his desire for a Church that is poor and for the poor, or that is rooted in mercy—cut against the reigning values found in our US culture (to say nothing of our US culture wars). On another level, however, the extent of this gap has only become clearer over time, increasing the need for a volume that would link Francis’s moral vision to a US-specific context.

What are the main reasons you believe “Francis’s approach to moral questions has to be reverse engineered” in order to fully understand his work through the lens of moral theology?

Unlike his immediate predecessors, for the most part Pope Francis does not systematically address matters of moral method or applied theological ethics. Instead, we find an implicit moral vision animating his official teachings, homilies, gestures, and modes of engaging the world church. When he does treat concrete issues, it tends to be episodic and with an effort to avoid the pigeonholing that can prevail in polarized contexts. Therefore we needed to “reverse engineer” the implications of these ample modes of witness in order to distill their implications precisely in terms of moral theology. We note in the book that our approach is more consistent with Francis’s own style of leadership, which exhorts by inspiring a wider imaginary rather than pronounces in measured maxims.

What stood out to you the most from the conference held at Boston College to workshop and discuss the book?

Two things stood out from our Boston College conference: the opening public panel offered a dynamic and substantive conversation among four of the volume’s contributors, which truly engaged our attendees—students, faculty and community members alike. This was an early indication to us of the hunger for and potential impact of a comprehensive volume like this. Second, during the conference’s workshop stage, authors were able to respond to one another’s drafts, thereby thinking together about common elements and constructively shaping the whole and its component parts. In fact the candid conversations there led us to change the title from the “Moral Theology of Pope Francis” to the “Moral Vision of Pope Francis,” given the directions our collaborative thinking took.

What do you hope to see from the “Francis revolution” in the future?

In the future, we hope to see a willingness to embrace the revolutionary way of being church, signaled in our chapters addressing Francis’s emphases on responsive listening, mercy, contextual realities, and pastorality, rather than a retreat to modes more defined by circumscribing clarity or purity. This will depend less on his appointments, promulgated teachings, or successor, and more on the extent his work shapes the entire people of God. The engagement modeled by the Synod, the invitation to discernment, and confrontation of reality’s complexities (all underscored in the volume) offer promising signs of longer-term appropriation of the “revolution” going forward, but only if the faithful are willing to embrace Francis’s call in their own lives. To this end, the priorities identified in the conclusion to the volume give a good sense of what it would mean to reshape our way of being church in light of Francis’s leadership, as the call to a renewed concern for the poor and marginalized, a greater tolerance for the ambiguity of complexity, and a deeper attentiveness to structural influences can help the church be more fully the community it is called to be.