Christopher R. Altieri is a journalist, editor, and author of three books, including Reading the News Without Losing Your Faith (Catholic Truth Society, 2021). He is a contributing editor to Catholic World Report.
We often hear that Pope Francis is either a revolutionary reformer with something like the ecclesiastical version of the Midas touch or he is a gaslighting grifter who’s at least half a heretic and thoroughly corrupt. Neither is correct.
It turns out that “shitposting” is a technical term.
There’s a great literature, approaching a whole subfield of academic communications studies, treating the practice of tossing cheap and easy provocations into digital space to generate maximum chaos and consternation with minimum effort.
I didn’t know that until I did, which was only on Tuesday afternoon EDT when I learned it while searching for a term of art that would play with the digital natives for whom I was trying to explain what Pope Francis had just done again.
In case you missed it, Pope Francis reportedly doubled down on “faggotry”—frociaggine—this time saying there’s an air of it in the Vatican.
The Vatican press office apologized—kind of, sort of—for his first use of the offensive term, but it’s quite possible the pope didn’t get the memo about his apology.
Five words ripped from context and almost universally misconstrued—“Who am I to judge?”—have fueled much of Francis’s pontificate’s narrative engine, which sputtered when news of the first use got out a few weeks ago.
The second reported use of the slur is more than a major headache for the Vatican’s communications apparatus. It is the sort of thing that sets off cascading failure. In nuclear terms, it is somewhere between Three Mile Island and Chornobyl.
If CYA were an Olympic event, the difficulty score for the spin operation on this one would be off the charts—impossible to execute and mortally dangerous to attempt—and basically not worth trying.
Olympic scoring
Olympic gymnastics scoring is a complicated business, by the way. There are two parts to it: Difficulty and Execution. The calculation of a gymnast’s score for any routine adds the Difficulty score to the Execution score and subtracts “neutral deductions” for things that are usually technical errors relating to attire, warm-up routine, time violations, etc.
An international panel of judges—usually six—evaluates each gymnast’s execution of a routine. The gymnast’s execution score is an average of the judges’ individual scores, only there’s a wrinkle. The highest and lowest of the six judges’ execution scores are dropped.
During international competition, the regular dropping of highest and lowest scores keeps judges from favoring their own athletes too much and/or treating competitors from rival national teams with undue harshness.
In a word, the scoring method is designed to keep everyone honest.
I thought of that the other day, in connection with the Francis pontificate, when I was trying to come up with a way to explain what the last eleven years have been without referencing any of the narratives associated with Francis’s reign.
If you credit one of the two principal and competing narratives, Pope Francis is either a revolutionary reformer with something like the ecclesiastical version of the Midas touch or he is a gaslighting grifter who’s at least half a heretic and thoroughly corrupt.
Subtracting the narrative(s)
We could embrace the complicated and drop both narratives, as though they were the highest and lowest scores from judges on an execution panel at the Summer Olympics.
If we subtract the narrative element—the effects of it, at least—then, what’s left is a hodgepodge of extraordinary legislative measures, simmering crises that frequently explode into scandal, and ersatz pontification that often has lots of sizzle but rarely serves any edible steak.
Pope Francis’s reform of the Roman Curia has not given us a functional governing apparatus. Francis still mostly governs without it. His reform of Vatican finances has neither curbed corruption nor set the Vatican on course to break back into the black. His reform of Vatican justice has given us sham trials. His reform of pastoral oversight and discipline has given us Zanchetta, Ricard, and Rupnik (inter alia).
Even if that were not the case, it would be tough to excise the narrative elements completely, and so for two distinct but closely related reasons: Francis is great copy regardless of whether you like him, and Francis is feeding both narratives—sometimes in turns, sometimes simultaneously—with a powerful will.
Dog bites man / Man bites dog
It may be a small wonder that an 87-year-old South American religious cleric harbors the views he reportedly expressed and is less-than-headline-worthy that an ex-bouncer and a son of working-class immigrants should have such language to entertain. When the ex-bouncer cleric is the pope of Rome, however, remarks like that are going to make the papers, even if it is something of a “dog bites man” kind of story.
The undeniable shock value of the remarks is only a small part of it.
One would expect the pope—any pope—to take a hard line on Church teaching and discipline. At the same time, one would in the normal course of things expect the pope to speak kindly of people, especially of people carrying a heavy cross.
That’s one reason the pope’s nasty remarks make a “man bites dog” story, or half of one at any rate, the other half being his thoroughly documented penchant for putting variously compromised figures in high places.
In the Vatican, at least, Pope Francis has already inverted the order of things by putting people like Msgr. Battista Ricca in offices of trust and responsibility, then talking trash about the too many unfortunates admitted to priestly formation.
Instead of taking a hard line on principle and in practice, while speaking kindly and dealing gently with souls, Pope Francis winks at misbehavior and calls people nasty names behind closed doors.
Same old, same old
Subtract the narrative element and put the headline-worthy acts of stunning misrule in brackets for just a minute.
You’re mostly left with, “Meh.”
Pope Francis is an erratic 87-year-old South American religious cleric with frequently poor judgment and some very peculiar ideas about how things ought to be. He governs by personal rule—a hallmark of leadership culture in his religious society, for good and for ill—and has some quirks of character and disposition that make him reluctant to adapt to circumstance.
Normally, none of that would make much difference, but Francis happens to be the pope of Rome.
What if the pope is just a guy?
For that question, I don’t mean Pope Francis. I mean any guy who comes into the office Francis got in 2013.
The office Francis holds for the time being is one with special powers and peculiar guarantees, but the men who come into the See of Peter all have feet of clay—just like the chair’s very first occupant and namesake—and they don’t shed their nature when they put on the Fisherman’s Ring.
The sooner we all start dealing with that, the better it will be for everyone and everything.
I’m still not quite sure what shitposting is or whether Francis’s use of frociaggine counts for it, but—near as I can tell—it is the digital/internet love child of “shock radio” and “smack talk” in sports.
It’s a great way to get ratings and get the crowd going, but it’s no way to govern.