Can He Convert?: An Argentinean Scholar Reflects on the Selection of Pope Francis

Santiago Slabodsky
sslabodsky@cst.edu

Decolonial interpreters of Global South societies know very well that the geographical location of thinking and praxis is never a sufficient condition for a liberationist discourse. The coloniality of knowledge–this is the endemic reproduction of imperial epistemological designs in postcolonial societies–is as prevalent as discourses of liberation. Responses to the election of the Archbishop of Buenos Aires for the papacy, however, have presupposed the merging of the two antithetical trends in the region. On the one hand is a conservative Catholicism with sources in the Spanish Falangism that served as longtime ally to reactionary powers; on the other hand is a liberationist trend that has original sources in the protests against the conquest and exploded as a movement in the 1970s as an ally to Third Worldist movements. While Jorge Bergoglio may be a moderate force within the first tradition, his record speaks by itself. During the military dictatorship he collaborated in the persecution of his socially engaged subordinates. In the current political scenario he has declared a “divine war” against civil equality and started a crusade against the new wave of social transformations that are taking place in the region. Some members of this network, however, still want to hope that Pope Francis will have a “Romero conversion.” I commend the positive wishes of friends and colleagues (independently of the fact that some contest this reading of Romero). I would love to share with them this hope since I consider deeply interesting that a Latin American Jesuit was chosen as a descendent of Peter and I dream he would call for a Third Vatican Council. Catholics around the world could benefit from a radical re-evaluation of class, racial and sexual politics. But I cannot. While Romero allegedly converted in the 1970s in the streets of San Salvador, Bergoglio had over forty years to convert in the streets of Buenos Aires. But he did not. There is no reason for us to believe he can convert inside the walls of the Vatican.

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About the Author: Jason Craige Harris

Jason Craige Harris is a third-year master's candidate in Black Religion in the African Diaspora and a Marquand merit scholar at Yale Divinity School, where he was recently awarded the Mary Cady Tew Prize for exceptional ability in history and ethics. He earned a bachelor’s in religion and African-American studies from Wesleyan University and received the Giffin Prize for excellence in the Study of Religion, Spurrier Award for ethics, and an official citation for academic excellence issued by the 2009 Connecticut General Assembly. As a fellow at Wesleyan’s Center for the Humanities and a recipient of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, Harris wrote a senior honors thesis analyzing theological anthropologies along political and racial fault lines in U.S. Evangelical history. His research and writing are principally concerned with black life, Christianity, (post)colonialism, violence, feminisms, critical social theory, and ultimately planetary flourishing. Concerns arising from the academic study of Africana religion, philosophy, and ethics particularly inform his inquiries. Through an interdisciplinary framework, he probes the systems of values that undergird dominant epistemological, rhetorical, cultural, and religious forms to determine to what extent, if at all, they conduce to robust conceptions of justice. With an eye toward contemporary social problems, he considers the religious strategies and visions that historically marginalized peoples have created to respond to conditions of living and being delimited by restrictive understandings of race, gender, religion, and nation. He is a general editor at the Journal of Postcolonial Networks, where, among other things, he helps to facilitate conversations on race and postcolonial/liberation theologies. As a Christian minister and budding public intellectual, Harris seeks and invites others into more holistic and attuned, less violent and constrained, ways of narrating the self and the divine. Areas of Interest and Research:   African American Religious Studies  Africana Philosophy African American Moral, Social, and Political Thought African American Intellectual History Liberation and Postcolonial (Christian) Thought  Philosophies of Liberation Contemporary Religious Thought Race, Gender, and American Christianities  Evangelicalisms and Pentecostalisms Histories of Race Discourse in the Americas (Christian) Social Ethics  Critical Social Theory/Social Philosophy Theories of Race, Gender, and Power Method and Theory in the Study of Religion He is deeply committed to a praxis in which dualities of mind/heart, mind/body, and emotions/thought are consistently challenged and replaced with integrated models of selfhood that cherish self-multiplicity - the point at which the postcolonial becomes self-consciously embodied. He also enjoy taking walks in the coolness of the day, singing, laughing, and writing poetically and theoretically on his lived experience, whatever helps to bring more beauty and justice into the world.

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