Title:Pope Francis, the Pope of Dialogue

In his 2017 book Jorge Mario Bergoglio: Una biografia intellettuale, Massimo Borghesi attempts to excavate the intellectual “pattern of thinking” of Pope Francis by exploring the Pontiff ’s engagement with some of the 20th century’s greatest minds. One name that looms large in Borghesi’s account is the Italian-German theologian and professor Romano Guardini (1885–1968). Guardini proffered powerful theological insights that addressed the great challenges of the 20th century: fascism, existentialism, history, progress, and modernity, to name a few.

The encounter between Francis and Guardini resulted in the Pope’s reimagining of the Hegelian notion of history along the lines of dialogue rather than dialectic. Hegel proposed an understanding of history characterized by perfection and progress. Guardini, however, proposed an alternative understanding of history—one that might be characterized as “reconciliation thinking”—not a naïve, optimistically progressive process but a synthesis of polar opposites into a higher, transcendent plane.

The more seasoned Pope Francis insists that reality is superior to the idea.

For Guardini, it is the Church—as a living container—that provides the space in which the Holy Spirit can forge this new synthesis, a synthesis that operates on a transcendent plane of coexisting elements that pull in opposite directions. He argued that in Christ and in Christ’s Church, the contraries of life are resourceful tensions. They become creative contraries. Through its traditions, its sacraments, and its witness, the Church, too, is conceptualized as a tension of opposites within a unity. Thus Guardini argues for a Catholic form of dialogue in which Christ is the “both/and” —the unifier, as St. Paul suggests, of all things: men and women, Jews and pagans, the enslaved and the freed.

As a young Jesuit, Bergoglio was drawn to the idea of a constructive tension of polarities through the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. The Exercises encourage a person to simultaneously have faith as if all depends on God, yet to act as if everything depends on us. This classically Jesuit position of holding polarities together allows the follower of Christ to be deeply in the world, yet open to the transcendent—to be contemplatives in action.

For Bergoglio, Guardini’s reconciliation thinking suggests that polarities need each other. They need to be in a constructive tension that resists the zero-sum dialectics of ideology and opts for the more holistic approach of dialogue. To fail to engage in this dialogue is to drive out human realities and pastoral complexities of life. In doing so, you sin against mercy, which is always attentive to the experiences of the human person. This is what the more seasoned Francis means when he insists that “reality is superior to the idea.” To do otherwise is to end up in some form of idealism at best, or nostalgia for something long dead at worst.

Francis learned that dialogue is not merely a practice, but a virtue. This means that institutions like Georgetown University must find ways to create dialogical spaces where fragmentation and deconstruction are not the guiding principles of our thinking.

In the current age of political disintegration, the university must become a sanctuary of dialogue constituted by a mutuality that seeks truth in community, puts winning on hold, and resists the zero-sum game of competition that infects our politics and media frenzies. It confronts the fallacy of intellectual manipulation and imposition masquerading as education. It is, in short, its own end.

Dialogue is a sacred space where God can be heard and where God adapts to the blessed particularities of individuals. I think this is Francis’s call to Jesuit higher education.

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