Michael Kirwan SJ

In the meeting between King David and the prophet Nathan (2 Samuel 12), the king is brought to account for his atrocious behaviour in bringing about the death of Uriah the Hittite and appropriating his wife. In this paradigm case of truth speaking creatively to power, Nathan tells the story of a rich man’s theft from his poor neighbour. David ‘burns with anger’ toward the perpetrator, only to be admonished – ‘You are the man!’ – since this is exactly how he has behaved. David acknowledges Nathan’s prophetic authority, and that he has sinned against the Lord.

The dilemma today: How does one ‘speak truth to power’ in an era of post-truth?

I will approach this dilemma in three steps. First, in the spirit of Ignatian repetition, I underline the ecclesial foundation and history emphasised in Gerry O’Hanlon’s paper. The accusation that the justice imperative is a foreign body, injected into the Church’s bloodstream by Marxist-inspired liberationist priests and religious and taken up by well-meaning but misguided liberal Christians, needs to be rejected. Pope Leo has reminded us in his apostolic exhortation, Dilexi Te, that the Church’s commitment to the poor does not begin in the late twentieth-century. This document traces this commitment from the Scriptures through two thousand years of tradition and praxis. I return to Dilexi Te at the end of this article.

Secondly, I will give a specifically Ignatian frame to our discussion, by considering the remarkable Presupposition (Annotation 22) that we find in the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius. The annotation calls for a hermeneutic of generosity, a deep listening to the other person, above all if what they are saying seems suspect or controversial:

So that the director and the person making the Exercises may collaborate better and with greater profit, it must be presupposed that any good Christian has to be more ready to justify than to condemn a neighbour’s statement. If no justification can be found, one should ask the neighbour in what sense it is to be taken, and if that sense is wrong he or she should be corrected lovingly. Should this not be sufficient, one should seek all suitable means to justify it by understanding it in a good sense.¹

This description, of how a ‘good Christian’ conducts themselves in dialogue, is more than a matter of courtesy or good manners or even strategic diplomacy. It offers the basis for a new kind of political wisdom and a vital tool for allowing the discourse of justice to flourish.

This will bring us to the third part of the article, which draws attention to a malevolent strand of political theology, all too recognisable in our present situation. This is to show how the challenges of ‘faithful justice’ in 2025 are different from 1975 and more complex, not least in the dilemma referred to above, of how to speak words of prophetic truth to power in an era of post-truth. We are living under a transformed cultural and political order; ‘our mission today: the service of faith and the promotion of justice’ cannot simply replicate what has gone before.

Part One: ‘I suppose there is a doctrine to this landscape’

The Second Vatican Council provided the impetus and trajectory for Decree 4 of General Congregation 32 (GC32), in its declaration that ‘the joys and hopes, the sorrows and anxieties’ of the world of today are identical to those of the Church. The world has become a locus theologicus, a place where God is to be encountered, and where conversation about God can happen. John McDade takes up this spatial metaphor, citing the poet Wallace Stephens: ‘I suppose there is a doctrine to this landscape.’

The council’s importance for theology lies in the new location it proposed for theological reflection. This most ecclesial of councils proposed, in Gaudium et Spes, that the Church ought to be characterised by a profound engagement with the reality of the world’s experience: no longer a Church set apart from the world within an institutional Christendom, but a Church that enters into profound solidarity with the experiences of human society, and takes humanity seriously in the unfolding of its history. This new location of the Church’s identity prescribes a new location for theology, and a revaluation of what is to count as properly theological activity. If human history becomes an indispensable locus revelationis for the Church … then human history becomes the locus theologicus for the post-conciliar theologian.²

This locational description reflects the immensely mobile Church that emerged from the council, a practical expression of its self-understanding as a ‘pilgrim people’. The influx of missionary priests and religious from the Global North to the Global South is a vital ingredient in the story of the theology of liberation. Within the Global North, institutes of theological and philosophical formation were relocated, from splendid rural isolation to urban settings. Young religious did their studies while living in ‘insertion’ or ‘intentional’ communities in impoverished areas, convinced that theology could only be authentically done from specific places and vantage points.

Whether these transformations are best understood using a hermeneutic of rupture, continuity, or reform need not be addressed here. The sense of ‘dis- location’ is real; for many in the Church, especially those in religious life, the experience felt like a deeply unsettling rupture. Here is a new landscape, requiring its own doctrine.

It is easy to see in the ‘migration to the margins’ the seeds of later tensions. As Pope Francis argued in his dictum that ‘time is greater than space’, there is a danger of thinking in terms of location or territory that it can lead to separation and conflict. We define ourselves over and against one another in contested spaces – above all, ‘the centre versus the margin’. Battle lines were too easily drawn up around these binaries. Priests and religious will have vivid memories of the skirmishes: province meetings where firebrand scholastics would call for the abandonment of Jesuit boarding schools or berate the poor province treasurer for unethical investments, and, very sadly, the mass departure of good men and women who decided that their congregations could not support them in the very ideals they had inculcated. On this last point, I am haunted by a book published with the wonderful title Passionate Uncertainty.³ It comprises interviews and statements garnered from more than four hundred US Jesuits and former Jesuits about their reasons for joining and for leaving the order. The authors argue that as religious life became less supported and affirmed by a strong external Catholic culture, the order changed into an amalgam of subcultures, shaped around social mission, sexual identity, and an eclectic spirituality. Individual Jesuits found their companionship with other social justice warriors, in gay support groups, or in charismatic group prayer: a plethora of Jesuit identities, constructed over and against one another. It is hard to deny that, at times, expressions of the justice imperative have leaned into the Manichaean heresy, resulting in entrenched suspicion and mutual denunciation of the other side’s ‘bad faith’. The addictive nature of this kind of positioning is well captured by theologian James Alison’s description of the temperament of the ‘marginaholic’.⁴

GC32’s articulation of the summons to justice is inseparable, therefore, from a felt experience of collective and individual disorientation in the post- conciliar period. But this subjective experience of rupture cannot be cited as evidence of an aberration, an illegitimate departure from the Church’s tradition and history. This is clear from the extraordinary paragraph 69 of Gaudium et Spes, which insists on the universal destination of earthly goods:

God intended the earth with everything contained in it for the use of all human beings and peoples. Thus, under the leadership of justice and in the company of charity, created goods should be in abundance for all in like manner. … attention must always be paid to this universal destination of earthly goods. In using them, therefore human beings should regard the external things that they legitimately possess not only as their own but also as common in the sense that they should be able to benefit not only individuals but also others.⁵

This declaration of the right to a share of earthly goods sufficient for oneself and one’s family, and of people’s obligation ‘to come to the relief of the poor and to do so not merely out of their superfluous goods’, is reinforced by a litany of witnesses: St Basil, St Gregory the Great, St Augustine, St Thomas, St Albert the Great, St Bonaventure, Popes Leo XIII, Pius XII and John XXIII. Not a Marxist among them! In no sense can paragraph 69 of Gaudium et Spes be dismissed as a leftist aberration or a break with church tradition.

As Oliver O’Donovan asserted, this is a theologically given mandate, and only when it is accepted as such will it be effective. O’Donovan praises what he calls ‘the Southern School’ in its attempt to overcome the late-modern exclusion of religion from the public sphere.⁶ However, its effectiveness is hampered because of its reliance on currents within that same late modernity itself. An idealist tradition that champions Black consciousness, feminism, homophilia is unable to avoid the ‘backlash’ of outraged mobilisation: of white consciousness, patriarchy, homophobia. Thirty years on, we need only think of the retrenchment against the Black Lives Matter and MeToo campaigns, as well as the rolling back of diversity and inclusivity initiatives. Without a theological mandate, we are unable to break free of the dilemma, of ‘allegations of sectional interest volleyed to and fro across the net, never to be ruled out of court, never to land beyond reach of return’. Here we see the limits of a pervasive ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’:

Once totalised, criticism merely evacuates itself of content and turns into a series of empty gestures. One cannot gain a truer understanding of the world by criticism alone, any more than one can make a dish of mince with a grinder and nothing to put through it. Totalised criticism is the modern form of intellectual innocence – not a harmless innocence, unhappily, for, by elevating suspicion to the dignity of a philosophical principle, it destroys trust and makes it impossible to learn.  God commissions his prophets, but they cannot speak only of the errors of false prophets. They are also to speak positively, of God’s purposes of renewal and mercy towards weak and fragmentary societies.⁷

‘It destroys trust and makes it impossible to learn.’ O’Donovan’s analysis of thirty years ago rings true with the crisis of trust in our society, but also with the pervading climate in much of higher education. At the risk of sounding like a disgruntled culture warrior, I note the dispiriting emphasis on education as a kind of show-trial, in which authors and traditions are ‘interrogated’ for traces of patriarchal, homophobic, or imperial/colonialist sympathies. As O’Donovan points out, denunciation can never be the whole story.

For us, there is a further dimension to the impotence and even counter- productivity of prophetic protest. In the Trumpian era of post-truth and alternative facts, the paradigmatic encounter of Nathan and David, of ‘truth speaking to power’, seems no longer to apply. There is a new reflexivity about an authoritarian government’s capacity to anticipate and pre- empt criticism, usually in a way which projects onto opponents the very abuses they are being accused of. In such a climate, Nathan’s prophetic denunciation would not be able to ‘land’ but instead be met by denial, by ‘whataboutery’, or simply by a brute assertion of sovereign privilege.

This reflexivity includes an ability to harness criticism as a way of energising one’s base, of reinforcing identities grounded in mistrust, resentment, and performative cruelty. A classic example of this bind can be found in the case of singer Sabina Carpenter, who condemned as ‘evil and disgusting’ the use of her song in a US government video promoting ICE raids on immigrants. Her adversaries were able to retort gleefully that her protest had the unintended effect of giving greater publicity and amplification to the offensive video. Progressives and radicals find themselves trapped – ‘owned’ – in an ever-tightening net.

In short: our own ‘landscape in need of a doctrine’ is different, even from the ‘world of today’ addressed so hopefully by the Second Vatican Council fifty years ago. Then, as now, we are trying to get our bearings. Perhaps the council’s enduring significance is not simply its doctrinal formulations, but its courageous attempt to discern God’s will for the world under conditions of fearful bewilderment.

Part Two: Good constructions … to the rescue

One of the distinctive decisions of the council fathers was the avoidance of the anathemas and denunciations that traditionally accompany conciliar definitions. This is not because heresies have disappeared. But a new approach to dealing with them, deriving from an Ignatian insight, is hinted at in the Presupposition (Annotation 22) of the Spiritual Exercises, and its presupposition that any good Christian has to be more ready to justify than to condemn a neighbour’s statement.

Quite simply, this is mind-blowing, especially when we consider its genesis in the gruesome world of early modern religious antagonisms. Ignatius himself was investigated by the Inquisition. It is interesting to note that this Annotation may not originate from Ignatius’ experience at the hands of the inquisitors, but rather it may derive from the protocols of the inquisitors themselves. The notion that I should take on the responsibility of making my argument as strong and coherent as possible, and also that of my interlocutor, is extraordinary. It runs counter to everything we normally associate with the skills of dialectic, rhetoric, controversy. It goes beyond the respectful listening called for by the synodal process, for example, insofar as it urges a creative and active collaboration with the thought processes of our interlocutor.

To cite Oliver O’Donovan once again: it is a practice that can perhaps rebuild trust and make it possible to learn. Of course, such a presupposition is not applied as well as it should be. I am not always a ‘good Christian’. It is very hard to kick the Manichaean habit – just ask St Augustine! – and try as I might, I find it very hard to ‘rescue’ religious truth from the pronouncements and actions of Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, or Nigel Farage. Nevertheless, a systematic application of something like Annotation 22 may be essential if the temperature of contemporary political discourse is to be lowered, and if trust and learning are to be nurtured once again.

A ‘hermeneutic of generosity’ allows us to ‘rescue’ theological styles that have been written off for their abrasiveness or immaturity; the theology of liberation being a case in point. It is very easy for its detractors to dismiss this controversial and abrasive style as ‘heretical’; in fact, it seems to be a basket of heresies! Insofar as it leans into the Marxian view of class conflict as foundational, it veers toward ‘Manichaeanism’. Insofar as theologians speak all too loosely of ‘building the kingdom’ – as opposed to receiving it at God’s hands – it is ‘Pelagian’. Insofar as liberationist readings of the Old and New Testaments have sometimes been depreciative of the Jewish people and their faith, they are open to the charge of Marcionism or supersessionism.

In short, there are plenty of reasons why one might decide that the liberationist idiom of theology is best consigned to the dustbin of history. The injunction of Annotation 22, however, will not allow this. It is precisely where the speaker’s argument is weak or dubious that we are called to build and to actively look for ways in which it might be ‘rescued’.

Nor is this entirely a matter of rational argument. When asked whether he would like to rewrite and correct his earlier works, Gustavo Gutiérrez maintained that he wrote them as love letters to the Church, and no one in their right mind would want to ‘correct’ the love letters they wrote as adolescents.

Part Three: Some political reflections

It goes without saying that the theological disposition required by Annotation 22 looks as unlikely in our own day as presumably it did at the time of Ignatius – if it was originally intended as a formula for the charitable negotiation of disputes about orthodoxy between Christians. Its relevance today would be more expansive; not least in overcoming the late-modern liberal ‘Great Separation’ of politics and faith. This is central to the theology of the Southern School (to use O’Donovan’s phrase): despite the widespread view that politicians ‘don’t do God’, theologians of liberation have insisted that God, or a vision of God’s kingdom and its partisanship for the poor, must be included in any worthwhile political project.

However, this insistence on a divine dimension to politics reads very differently in the aftermath of 9/11 and similar religiously-inspired atrocities. To a secular outsider, the difference between a Christian liberation theologian invoking the God of Exodus and an Islamist invoking the God of jihad, is not obvious. In the era of Donald Trump, the dangers of mixing religion and politics has intensified, with the resurgence of Christian nationalism in the United States and elsewhere. It is not enough to call upon God in our politics; the question of which God is being invoked is paramount.

Here it is important to take note of a particular cluster of religious ideas, derived from the German legal theorist Carl Schmitt (1888–1985). Theorists of the Left and Right have grappled for decades with Schmitt’s problematic thought, not least because his diagnosis of the weakness of liberal democracy during the Weimar Republic led him to be an apologist for National Socialism. Schmitt’s thought has taken a strong hold on key figures in the Trump administration. Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire and mentor to J. D. Vance, has suggested that our contemporary political crisis mirrors that of 1930s’ Germany and that Carl Schmitt should be our guide.

For Schmitt, ‘all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularised theological concepts.’⁸ Ideas such as sovereignty, authority, legitimacy and legitimation have theological roots, i.e. they relate ultimately to the doctrine of God. A genuinely secular (i.e. religionless) political order is not possible, because any attempt to construct a political system without God lacks foundation. This is why, for Schmitt, liberalism is ineffective and illegitimate.

Within this broad justification of ‘political theology’, Schmitt worked out a number of eerily familiar themes. First, ‘the specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and foe’; the Freund/Feind (friend/enemy) distinction.⁹ Politics is essentially conflictual and political stability is achieved by a clear alignment of allies over and against enemies. Schmitt resisted initiatives of cooperation, such as the League of Nations (forerunner of the UN), because they ended up destabilising the world order. He drew theological support for this idea from the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11, where it seems God introduces linguistic diversity because he does not want us to cooperate with one another!

A second theme is the declaration that ‘sovereign is he who decides the [State of] Exception.’¹⁰ As a jurist, Schmitt was much taken by the paradox that states working within the rule of law nevertheless relied on ‘pockets’ of lawlessness (think of secret services, extra-judicial killings, extraordinary rendition, emergency measures such as detention without trial). True political power rests with the one who can declare a state of ‘exception’ or suspension of the rule of law. When Donald Trump channels his inner Napoleon to say that ‘the one who saves his country is above the law’, this is what is going on.

A third aspect of Schmitt’s thinking is his concern with space and territoriality, and specifically with land appropriation, as the basis of international order. Not coincidentally, his idea of Grossraum (‘large space’) was worked out at the same time as Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, in search of Lebensraum (‘living space’). The similarity to the Monroe Doctrine, which understands the political interests of the United States in terms of its geographical location, has not gone unnoticed.

Finally, in keeping with the theological ‘ancestry’ of political ideas, there is a recovery of disturbing biblical concepts, such as the ‘apocalypse’ and the ‘Antichrist’. Schmitt shows particular interest in the mysterious notion of the katēchon (e.g., 2 Thessalonians 2:6–7). This Greek term, which features in Paul’s letters, means the ‘restraining force’. It is an ambiguous phenomenon, insofar as it restrains chaos and disorder and delays the apocalypse; but by the same token it postpones the final, triumphant manifestation of Christianity. The idea is taken up by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan in the seventeenth century, to indicate the essence of politics as the forceful restraint of chaos and disorder. Famously for Hobbes, the natural state of human beings is a dismal ‘war of all against all’. In turbulent twentieth-century Germany, Schmitt breathed new life into this mythological thinking. It is present once again in the apocalyptic strain of the religiosity of the MAGA right, with its desire to hasten and welcome the end time, rather than delay it.

Contemporary political theology has largely been an attempt to go beyond or around Schmitt: to acknowledge the difficult paradoxes of liberalism, secularism, universalism which he identifies, but without embracing his unpalatable solutions. With Peter Thiel there seems to be an openness not only to Schmitt’s diagnosis but also to his proposed remedy. As noted, he parallels the apparent exhaustion of liberal democracy in our time with the experience of Germany in the 1930s. He draws on Schmitt’s ideas for the purpose of shifting the Overton Window: that is, of expanding of what a given society considers to be politically acceptable. Politically, the implications for democracy are disturbing; religiously, Thiel has declared his preference for the Church of Constantine over the Church of Mother Teresa. That is to say, for political power over compassion (from this perspective, the papacy of Pope Francis is a joke).

Much of Thiel’s musings read like a Dan Brown novel (the ‘Antichrist’ which so concerns him is, specifically, the prospect of a unified ‘world government’, which happens to be of a left-wing persuasion). Nevertheless, they are deployed by an immensely rich and powerful individual, and need to be taken seriously for their implications for liberal democracy in the US and beyond.

In short, this new landscape has, for its ‘doctrine’, a century-old, warped version of the Christian Gospel. Precisely because it feeds on Christian and biblical concepts, those of us wishing to think faith and justice together cannot simply appeal to Scripture and to church tradition. The noxious variant of religiously-inspired politics, so powerfully articulated by Thiel and others, is fuelled by the potential of nationalised religion for mobilising aggression and resentment and for freeing political leaders from human constraint.

If ‘our mission today’, the linking of faith and justice, is to be effectively re- articulated, it will need to include what the liberation theologians denounced as idolatry and what should also be called out as political and religious Manichaeanism. This ancient heresy held that good and evil were equal cosmic principles – the theological ancestor of the Freund/Feind distinction. It is fundamentally incompatible with Christianity, as Augustine eventually came to recognise. Concepts such as the ‘Antichrist’, or lurid imaginings of apocalyptic upheaval, do not take us to the heart of the gospel message of loving peace triumphant.

In identifying the difficulty of ‘speaking truth to power in a post-truth era’, I began with the biblical story of Nathan and King David as the paradigm of such a confrontation. David is brought to acknowledge the truth of his situation not by direct accusation, but by Nathan cleverly drawing him into a story of injustice which, as it turns out, mirrors his own. What happens, therefore, if the perpetrator refuses to enter into the narrative, rejecting out of hand the possibility that any story other than their own has authority or validity? I have noted Oliver O’Donovan’s assertion that a strategy of denunciation (unmasking, deconstruction etc.) cannot be enough by itself, especially under conditions of postmodern reflexivity. He offers the image of a tennis match where accusations are batted back and forth without ever successfully landing a point. There are multiple strategies of evasion and diffusion available to the unjust ruler. Like Nathan, we need, perhaps, to be attentive to the power of alternative narratives; to construct compelling stories rather than convincing arguments.

The doom-loop which, in the digital age, seems to have trapped progressive thought, requires attention. Protest and prophetic indignation are cynically and gleefully recast and amplified as evidence of liberal impotence and naïveté. As well as the challenge of speaking truth to power in a post-truth era, here is a second dilemma: how do we denounce vicious Manichaean separatism, without ourselves lapsing into Manichaeanism? Can we extract ourselves from infernal tennis match without end? Here, perhaps, the difficult discipline of Annotation 22 comes into play.

I offer two final observations. Firstly, it is interesting to note that the ecclesial resistance to the excesses of the Trump regime have centre not on ‘the poor’ in general, but on a specific category, namely the defence of migrants: witness the statements of Pope Leo XIV and of the US bishops. This can be taken as an affirmation of Fr Pedro Arrupe’s prophetic insight that the plight of refugees needed special attention; hence his establishment, as Jesuit general, of the Jesuit Refugee Service in 1980. If mobility and relocation are distinctive features of the ‘pilgrim Church’, then the plight of those forcibly displaced or unsettled is equally a sign of the times, an urgent sign of the non-kingdom.

Secondly, for the purposes of this article, I have book-ended, as it were, a particular slice of ecclesial history, beginning with the Second Vatican Council (specifically Gaudium et Spes) and arriving at the recent exhortation, Dilexi Te. It is within the sweep of these two documents that Decree 4 of the thirty-second general congregation finds its place, not as an aberration or a modernist deviation, but an impulse rooted wholly in the history and doctrine of the Church.

Dilexi Te is reminiscent of Paragraph 69 of Gaudium et Spes in its exhaustive piling up of scriptural and patristic references to indicate an unwavering testimony. I would venture to suggest that a possible weakness of the exhortation is precisely its overwhelming abundance of examples. There is a danger, in this profusion, that the radical demands of paragraph 69, concerning the universal destination of earthly goods, is not sufficiently foregrounded. There is also the perennial danger that the imperative of ‘justice for the poor’ is obscured or diluted when we speak of ‘love for the poor’.

Nevertheless, Dilexi Te’s ‘great cloud of witnesses’ is an act of generous inclusion, not least in its description of liberation theology. Francis distanced himself from the mainstream strands of Latin American liberation theology, preferring instead a culturally-grounded ‘theology of the people’. By contrast, the exhortation affirms many of the liberationist concepts that were controverted, both by critics and among the liberation theologians themselves. The option for the poor; alienation; structures of sin; the poor as subjects capable of agency – these ideas are now firmly embedded in the Church’s teaching and tradition.

Dilexi Te insists like a drumbeat on the centrality of the Church’s concern for the poor, in myriad forms and across many contexts. But it also a ‘good construction’ in the Ignatian sense, insofar as it ‘rescues’ some of the notions that have grounded both the successes and the misfirings of the last fifty years, as the Church and the Society of Jesus have tried to construct ‘a doctrine to this landscape’.

Michael Kirwan SJ is a Jesuit theologian, currently based at the Loyola Institute, Trinity College Dublin, He had previously taught for twenty years at Heythrop College, University of London. One of his research interests is political theology.

Notes

1. St Ignatius of Loyola, Presupposition 22 of SpiritualExercises, in Joseph A. Munitiz and Philip Endean (eds), St Ignatius of Loyola: Personal Writings(Penguin Books, 1996), p. 289.
2. John McDade, ‘Catholic Theology in the Post-Conciliar Period’, Adrian Hastings (ed.), Modern Catholicism: Vatican II and After(SPCK: 1991): pp. 422–423.
3. Peter McDonaugh, Eugene C. Bianci, Passionate Uncertainty: Inside the American Jesuits (University of California Press, 2003).
4. James Alison, ‘Confessions of a Marginaholic’, in Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay (DLT, 2001).
5. From Gaudium et Spes(The Holy See, 1965), 69.
6. Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 3.
7. O’Donovan, Desire of Nations, p. 11.
8. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology (University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 36.
9. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 26.
10. Schmitt, Political Theology, p. 5.