Moreland on "Pope Francis and the Project of Catholic Legal Theory"

Next up, Michael Moreland on "Pope Francis and the Project of Catholic Legal Theory."  What contribution is he making to the Project?  He starts in a "negation" mode and warns about overstating the role and importance of the Pope or popes.  "Catholic Legal Theory" can be, but perhaps should not be, excessively refracted through or framed in terms of, the thought of the current pope.

That said . . . what about Francis?  What about the significance of  his being "Argentine," "Jesuit," "Spiritual Director and Religious Superior," "Francis," and "Post-Vatican II"?  Francis has sounded a theme, Michael suggests, of a "theology of encounter":  "Being a Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty ideal, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon . . . ."  Pope Francis was also heavily influenced his thought by the experience of the Church in Argentina, and with Peronism, and with Argentinian anti-capitalism and by what Michael calls the Church's "historically fraught relationship to the state."  His role as a spiritual director in the Ignatian tradition is another formative influence:  He has written, for example, about the "fundamental realities" that "we recognize and abhor our sins and their roots in the spirit of the world, and we converse about all this with Jesus 'suspended on the Cross.'"

Michael also shows and talks about some particular paintings and works of art -- including his favorite painter, Chagall -- that have, in interesting ways, shaped and marked Pope Francis, in particular his Marian devotion.  For the future . . . (1) less speculative and more pastoral; (2) anti-liberal (economically); (3) reform from "the periphery"; and (4) new "source churches" in global Catholicism.