THE LETTER OF PAUL TO KARL.

Pope Francis recently departed this life, leading my Chicago Boyz colleague Mike to suggest his papacy unmoored the Roman Catholic Church.

[I]nstitutions work best when they remain “tethered” to their founding principles. A balloon that is connected by a tether to the ground may rise or fall, but it isn’t going to go floating off into the wild blue yonder.

One of the problems we have in this country is that our political institutions and culture, while superficially remaining the same, have become untethered from the founding principles of natural rights and social contract.

A problem with many Christian churches is that they have become untethered from their core doctrines whether those are rooted in biblical interpretation or a form of dogma. That is not to say that there aren’t debatable issues within either, but those debates become unduly influenced by social factors.

While we like to think we are defined by what we claim to be, we are better rooted in what we claim that we are not, which provides the boundaries necessary within our inherent human frailties (especially the limits of human reason) to function.

There have been many battles within the Catholic Church over the centuries. The most recent is centered on the issue of “modernization” that was accelerated by Vatican II. As one can expect, Francis’s embrace of this process is celebrated by the Left.

Francis was not only a Jesuit but from Argentina and the more “liberal” precincts of the Church. While his ascension to the papacy was seen as a way to spur needed reform after various scandals involving clerical sexual abuse and money, it also marked a radical turn from the conservative theology espoused by Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

In this Francis did not disappoint. He suppressed the recent re-introduction of the traditional Latin Mass. His various pronouncements, using his traditional authority to promote liberal goals — such as seeming to endorse gay clergy, the blessing of same sex couples, and artificial birth control — ran contrary to established church doctrine, in favor of a more libertine culture for no more reason than “modernization.”

More depressingly, for an office that rests its legitimacy on its being the descendant of Peter, the rock on which Christ built his church, he seemed to endorse the idea that other religions offered other pathways to God.

[Ross] Douthat states that such actions as the above have led to the Church suffering the same fate of other untethered institutions

Another regular Chicago Boyz contributor, Sgt. Mom, quips, "All I got is that after his term as Pope, I’m really wondering if bears really do poop in the woods."  The Babylon Bee riffs,  "Catholic Church To Consider Electing Pope Who's A Catholic This Time."

But is that correct?  Although deliberations in conclave are supposed to be secret, apparently in the spring of 2013 the Holy Spirit moved somebody to observe that Cardinal Bergoglio's remarks in the Sistine Chapel sounded like the voice of Jesus, at least the voice of Jesus as understood by theologians of the Social Gospel.

When Francis inspired the world with gestures of humility and acts of Christian love—washing the feet of prisoners or of Muslim immigrants, for example—he was not being “radical” or innovative. In picture-perfect performances for the age of memes, he was meticulously reenacting ancient traditions of Christian iconography, which were themselves the condensed images of spiritual teachings.

If you sometimes wonder whether Bolshevism and Christianity have a common intellectual progenitor, Roger Lancaster's essay will not disabuse you of that notion.

Francis expressed ideas about the order of social relations that predate capitalism and are older than modernity.

It would be a stretch to suggest that Francis was a socialist, although there is much for socialists to glean from his teachings about compassion, solidarity, and openness. One might better place him in the robust tradition of Christian humanism. The renewed salience of that tradition might prod us to reflect on the Church’s relationship to socialism.

It started, he argues, with the apostles holding property in common.  Maybe that miracle of loaves and fishes really happened?  Let us draw the curtain of charity over the Plimoth Plantation holding property in common, and starving.  "Variations on the derived phrase, 'from each according to his ability to each according to his needs,' was circulated among Christian socialists and early materialists until it famously found a home in Marx’s description of communism."

Well, Stalin began his intellectual journey as a seminarian.  Religion is not so much an opiate as a competing vision.

In the period of Feudalism’s long decay, Joachite prophecies intermingled with anticlerical, antipapal, and revolutionary movements until a wave of revolutionary ferment swept 15th century Germany. These movements took as their aim the abolition of private property, the leveling of social classes, and the establishment of an egalitarian millennium. The proliferation of such movements prefigured the Protestant Reformation and helped set the stage for The Great Peasant War of 1525, which Thomas Muntzer believed would bring about a state in which all would be equal and each would receive according to his need.

Philosophically, Marx carefully tried to derive socialism from humanism via atheism; the real-world story involves a complex millennial history. The Church is where socialism was born. Socialist ideas found their purchase there up until the birth of secular socialisms. Occasionally, socialist ideas were in the mainstream of Christianity, sometimes they were at its margins, and often they were suppressed by the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

Premodern Christian socialist movements set the template, ultimately, for Marx's thoughts about broad epochs of world history culminating in socialism. And then, in the mid-20th century, liberation theology took up again and renewed this unofficial but not-very hidden tradition.

The distinction?  In Christian tradition, the Messiah came once and will come again, but not when the Joachites or Muntzer expected it, nor when the Millerites expected it.  The first coming of that Socialist messiah has not yet been realized.

Make of it what you will, dear reader, that the Feast of Thanksgiving took place after the inhabitants of Plimoth abandoned their holding property in common.  Continue your education: make a trip to southwestern Illinois to visit Bishop Hill and Nauvoo.  Bishop Hill was another settlement of Christian Socialists, as people understood the concept in the first half of the nineteenth century.  Today there are a few buildings on a historic site, not a congregant nor a comrade to be found.  It might also come as a surprise that the Latter Day Saints started practicing the tenets of Christian Socialism; there were a few rifts in the church concerning the politically correct expression of that faith during their time in Nauvoo. After the Saints went on their trek to the other side of the Rockies the French Icarians who brought their Christian Socialism into an empty Nauvoo left Illinois was the beginning of the state's varietal wine business.  (Yes, dear reader, viticulture is a thing in Illinois and Ohio, to go along with the fruit of the soy vine!)

There is one survival of the Saints' version of Christian Socialism: tithing.  That's not inconsistent with libertarian precepts regarding taxing: if the congregants lay up reserves to love their neighbors as themselves, of what use is a government-sponsored welfare state?  And look at the election returns where the Saints live.