The God Squad

Last updated on: January 2, 2014 at 8:19 am by Guest Contributor

The God Squad 2014-01-02T08:19:00-05:00 Guest Contributor

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Pope Francis, already Time magazine’s person of the year, has been heralded everywhere, often as a welcome new voice for the liberal cause– although such is his hold on the popular imagination that his name is hitched to causes he may not recognise, including American Esquire’s list of best dressed men. Since his election last March, he has done much to revive the tarnished image of Catholicism. In a more minor key, as befits the leader of a much smaller communion, the archbishop of Canterbury is doing something similar for Anglicans. Predictably, there isnow a backlash. The argument against goes like this: neither of these men is truly liberal, and the pope is the head of a deeply conservative organisation that is hostile to women, institutionally homophobic and fundamentally concerned with the protection of the status quo. These criticisms unquestionably contain some truth, but there’s an important message in the enthusiasm these leaders have generated in the secular world.

The pope and Justin Welby certainly have an unusual amount in common, beyond the experience of leading the two largest communions in the Christian world and sharing the dilemma of trying to meet the cultural and organisational challenge of managing churches whose numbers are growing fastest in the global south while based in headquarters and funded from the heart of the global north. They are both outsiders in their churches – Francis the first pope to be a member of the Jesuits, the rigorous guardians of the one true faith; the archbishop drawn to Anglicanism by the evangelical style of Holy Trinity, Brompton. They took charge of their very different organisations (the Catholic church has more than a billion members to Anglicanism’s 80 million) in the same month. And most obviously, they have both preached a return to Christianity‘s traditional concern for the poor and the excluded, which has had the helpful consequence, among others, of distracting attention from their internal rows over doctrinal purity and sexual misconduct.

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