Photo by Ashwin Vaswani
With its meteoric rise chronicled in the New York Times under the comical headline “Two Religious Conservatives and a Marxist Walk Into a Journal” Compact magazine since its inception carved out a novel niche: its masthead featured an eclectic blend of diverse political currents, from religious conservatives to Marxist feminists, under the banner of fighting neoliberalism.
What is to be understood as neoliberalism is, unfortunately, up for grabs, since “neoliberal” remains of the 21st century’s more abused terms. More on that later.
Upon closer examination, even the Marxist elements were in fact former Marxists turned religionists: philosopher and former editor-in-chief Nina Power, after her encounter with the works of forgotten heterodox priest Ivan Illich, converted to Anglicanism. Other, secular editors such as Geoff Shullenberger are also scholars of Illich and of René Girard (the philosopher who allegedly inspired JD Vance to become Catholic). Yet all these opinion-makers artificially segregate Illich from the revolutionary intellectual movement of liberation theology, which bloomed throughout 1970s and 1980s Latin America, until it was destroyed, with many of its thinkers assassinated by the hirelings of Reagan-era geopolitics.
One would expect a self-professedly Catholic publication to take at least some interest in what the Pope thinks. Naturally, a popular online gazette claiming to be a samizdat for rogues and a haven for free thinkers in the contemporary wasteland of cancellation, could not afford to sound sycophantic by recycling a Pope’s every tweet.
But such an outlet could at the very least have dialogued with the range of Francis’ thought—on the rights of immigrants, on wars devastating the Middle East, or the fetishism of technocracy; or even Francis’ polemics against Western NGOs who pressure impoverished countries’ schools to implement and teach their children contemporary Western ideas about gender as a precondition for receiving financial aid (Francis called this “ideological colonization”). Only the last of these polemics seems to fall within the wheelhouse of Compact’s left-conservative sensibilities. For a publication that took on self-proclaimed heterodox Catholic positions and columnists since its founding in 2022, Compact kept eerily silent, oblivious if not hostile to “the hippie Pope” until his death. One would sooner expect such a boycott from more traditionally conservative, anti-communist Catholics—the denialists who scorned Francis’ alleged proximity to the “heresy of Liberation Theology” and who purposefully exhibited portraits of Karol Wojtyla and Ratzinger all throughout Jorge Bergoglio’s era.
But with Francis’ death on Easter Monday, silence would been too blatant, too awkward. So, Compactsummoned the pen of Nathan Pinkoski, whose article reads as a postmortem hatchet job on Francis.
In his piece Pope Francis’ Managerial Revolution , Pinkowski insinuates that Francis’ was the great neoliberal papacy.
Repeating the words “managerial”, “manager” no less than 18 times, Compact’s columnist argues that Francis’ efforts towards ecumenicalism or interfaith dialogue, while prioritizing “process” over “legislating” like a theocrat, are signs of Francis having embodied the scourge of neoliberal admin culture, in which there is much sentimental talk and soft power weaponization, but little action, and nothing concrete achieved.
There is some, minimal substance to these claims. Hilariously, Francis opened a Human Resources department in the Vatican, and HR is the token of managerial culture. Yet nowhere does Pinkosky bring up context. Francis took over a church plagued by scandals involving pedophilia and extremism—only in part, the legacies of Pope John Paul II who approved the bloody, physical destruction of the liberation theology movement in Latin America, and who for decades ignored a mountain of reports on sexual abuse, while protecting culprits like archbishop Theodore McCarrick, (who Francis defrocked, and who also died last month). Next to Francis’ campaigns—flawed though earnest—to expel molesters and corrupt officials who had robbed Vatican Bank, Francis conducted previously unthinkable investigations into the abuse of nuns by priests, going so far as to dissolve a congregation in which sexual slavery was discovered. He did not do enough, and too often worked in secrecy. And yet—contrary to Pinkosky’s claim that “the manager” Francis did not legislate—in 2019 the Argentine crafted laws abolishing the codes of pontifical secrecy that had proven so instrumental for coverups.
Strangest of all is where Compact’s columnist alleges that “Francis did more than any other pope to bring the concepts of the modern American political scene into Catholic teaching, trying to theologize opposition to the American right.” This can only mean that
1. Compact finds that Pope Francis should have blessed the Trump-Rubio immigration policy, despite that in the US over 10 million Christians—overwhelmingly devout Catholics—face probable deportation. 1 in 5 US Catholics live at risk of deportation, meaning that an even more staggering number of Catholics in the US have close relatives facing deportation.
2. Compact which radically departedfrom its original antiwar conservatism after October 7th , opines that Francis should have applauded US support for Netanyahu’s Gaza war, even as Israel targeted some of the world’s most ancient sites of Christian heritage for destruction. The list includes: the monastery of St Hilarion (4th century) the Byzantine church of Jabalia (5th century) the church of St Porphyrius (5th century). Francis should also have cheered on the bombing of more modern edifices, such as Gaza’s only Roman Catholic church (The Holy Family Church, built in 1974) and the recent attack on a Baptist hospital on Palm Sunday.
No self-respecting Pope could have maintained that deference. Especially not after Francis canonized two saints from 19th century Palestine—Marie Alphonsine Ghattas and Mariam Bawardy.
Stereotypical critiques of the Francis papacy always held that he was more beloved in the secular world than among Catholics, who were supposedly dizzied by his progressive media stunts. But this is a thoroughly Eurocentric view that underestimates how the Roman church has been one of the most strategic and agile transnational political organizations to have survived across millennia.
The Vatican understands full well that most of today’s devout are to be found outside Europe: in Latin America and the Philippines foremost, and not least among the tens of millions of Latino immigrants to the US. European Catholicism is by now eccentric, dominated by a politicized Polish nationalist laity who still want to believe that Wojtyla is Pope and that Jesus spoke Polish. In Spain, meanwhile, Catholic fealty continues to dwindle intractably after the damage done by Franco’s pet priests.
The church is inherently populist, analytical and strategic, and has always applied the gospel’s parable of the sower, which cautions against proselytizing in “barren and shallow soils” as are found in today’s Global North. While practicing Catholicism did not grow vastly under Francis, his modest success was that the numbers did not plummet in what we once called the third world, abandoned and once orphaned of its Jesuit luminaries by Pope John Paul II.
Nearing hysteria, Pinkowski goes from his legalistic conservative tone to the opposite extreme, mentioning Catholic progressives’ disappointment with the “process” having thwarted their desired progressive causes: “Theological liberals were disappointed; they never got married priests or female deacons.” Pinkowski omits mentioning what stood in the way of such reforms, or that a Pope is no Ayatollah doling out fatwas—rather, Popes must contend with the pressures of a mostly conservative popular base.
“Synod on Synodality” was the comical name Francis used for the massive cycle of conferences he organized, in which believers would debate the future forms of the church—an experiment guided by the democratizing notion of reaching consensus fidei or “consensus among the faithful”. (“Managerial” processes are usually more top-down.) In those meetings, an international coalition of churches and congregants voted on a spectrum of issues, including the call for women deacons. Though Francis ensured that women were allowed to vote in such a council for the first time in ecclesiastical history, the proposals featuring paragraphs addressing women deacons, as reported in Catholic media, “received the most “no” votes among participants. They were passed 277-69 and 279-67 respectively.” In an ancient and deeply anti-liberal institution, change occurs gradually at best.
Calling the deceased pope “neoliberal” is the kind of old hacksaw that one would have sooner expected of the people whom Compact and other anti-woke publicists usually decry—that art of describing any person or idea one dislikes with the magic adjective “neoliberal”.
In this kind of vulgar Marxist conceptualization of “neoliberalism”, often advocated by Compact journalists like Batya Ungar-Sargon, we run into a fallacy that such authors make about the ruling economic ideology: in this view, all international encounters and cosmopolitanism, and all immigrants, are cast as agents of neoliberalism, bearing the blame for the global financial crises which have sunk countless societies into a futureless abyss of uncertainty. This worldview portrays immigrants as the harbingers of liquid modernity; though often in rags, border-crossers are possessed by the specters of capital, and must be smoked out for the common good. As a recent Lee Fang piece exposes, the corporate employers exploiting cheap migrant labor are held unaccountable by these “America First” mobilizations. In such callous, Sophistic misinterpretations of the problem of neoliberalism, often found in the arguments of figures like Curtis Yarvin, the immigrant (rather than the CEO) is targeted for being the importer of economic chaos and herald of globalization, and whosoever on the left defends immigrant rights is a traitor against the workers. By contrast, Francis saw that the fashionable animosity towards refugees is itself a byproduct of neoliberalism—what he called “the globalization of indifference.”
Compact calls itself an American radical outfit but has not understood the task of radicals as Rosa Luxembourg had: to educate and organize workers and the oppressed, rather than to merely kindle and exacerbate workers’ pre-existing pettiness and prejudices in a bourgeois romanticization of class warfare.
Nor has Compact understood the heterodox Catholic tradition, for it has dismissed liberation theology, the movement that sought above all to educate and organize the poor and excluded. Liberation theology would compensate for how past socialist and Marxist movements had ridiculed and trivialized religion altogether, at the expense of alienating the majorities—a mistake repeated even more blatantly by today’s middle class left.
Compact could consider rebranding as an Evangelical publication. In the history of Catholicism, when Christians raise the middle-finger to the papacy, it’s called Protestantism. Much of contemporary Catholic thought posits that the origins of the West’s postmodern individualist societies are to be found precisely in the entrepreneurial mindset of Lutheranism. With its read-between-the-lines foreign policy allegiance to Netanyahu, in the current media Dead Sea-scape Compact comes off more as an Evangelical gazette than as the “Catholic cool” aesthetic it had aimed for.
If there is anything to hold against Francis, it would be his career back in Argentina. During the 1970s dictatorship, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was fairly quietist and shunned radical priests like the murdered Carlos Mugica. Argentine poet Juan Gelman told interviewers how, after returning from exile to Argentina in 1990s, he had resorted to Bergoglio to aid Gelman’s quest to locate the stolen child of his son and daughter-in-law (the activist couple had been forcibly disappeared by the junta). “He said there is nothing he can do,” Gelman bitterly recalled. Nobody in Argentina had expected courage, let alone popular militancy, at the beginning of Bergoglio’s papacy. Perhaps one of Catholicism’s most interesting and novelesque qualities is that it contains an at-times revolutionary capacity for redemption.
