by Daniel B. Gallagher

When I retired after a decade of service at the Holy See, things were not going well. That was in 2016. Truth be told, things were already not going well even under Benedict XVI. The Roman Curia is a bureaucratic mess.

But magisterial messes are even worse, and a massive one occurred four years after my departure.

It wasn't a spontaneous comment made during an impromptu press conference. It wasn't an off-the-cuff, ambiguous statement on a topic like marriage, LGBTQ rights, or capital punishment. It was an entire theological vision. Or lack thereof.

This October marks five years since the biggest bungle of the Francis pontificate. Sadly, it is closely connected to the very name Jorge Bergoglio chose upon his election to the See of Peter. Interpreting Saint Francis, his legacy, and the charism he bequeathed the Church has always been difficult. Fratelli Tutti massively compounded that difficulty.

Most criticisms of Francis's 2020 encyclical focus on a specific item in the laundry list of issues he presents as crucial to our time: racism, immigration, interreligious dialogue, the dignity of women, capital punishment, and others. But I've seen very few critiques of the document's foundational principle.

Even though Francis himself described the encyclical as a hodge-podge of prior homilies, addresses, and catechetical talks, at its core is a highly dubious and risky enterprise: namely, the bracketing of Christ from Christianity in the attempt to enter into dialogue with the world about the meaning of "fraternity and social friendship."

"Although I have written it from the Christian convictions that inspire and sustain me, I have sought to make this reflection an invitation to dialogue among all people of good will," he wrote. (6) It is the "although" that is crucial here. Francis implies that the convictions about fraternity and social friendship that flow from his Christian faith can be communicated to others in a way that doesn't depend on that faith since they can indifferently flow from other faiths or simply from the un-evangelized human condition.

Francis justified his approach by appealing to Saint Francis's engagement with the Sultan of Egypt, Al-Malik al-Kamil, in 1219:

Unconcerned for the hardships and dangers involved, (Saint) Francis went to meet the Sultan with the same attitude that he instilled in his disciples: if they found themselves "among the Saracens and other nonbelievers," without renouncing their own identity they were not to "engage in arguments or disputes, but to be subject to every human creature for God's sake."

Saint Francis's enjoined the friars to refrain from arguments and disputes not as a way of bracketing Christ's commandment to preach the Good News, but as the very means of fulfilling it. Saint Francis fully intended to convert the Sultan, not to merely share with him a Christian vision of fraternity and social friendship minus Christ.

Without a foundational Christocentric principle, Fratelli Tutti quickly descends into platitudes that are almost laughable:

Let us dream, then, as a single human family, as fellow travelers sharing the same flesh, as children of the same earth which is our common home, each of us bringing the richness of his or her beliefs and convictions, each of us with his or her own voice, brothers and sisters all. (8)

The idea is that Christianity shows or models the kind of community humans are inherently capable of. Yet the early Christians knew well that the koinonia they enjoyed was a gift. It was attributable to divine action, not human achievement. It consisted in the Mystical Body of Christ, not a political paradigm. It motivated the baptized not merely to preach something that Christ preached, but to preach Christ Himself.

This was the foundational principle of John Paul II's first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis (1979). The primary focus of Christian disciples should be on the community they have been made a part of through grace, not the co...