We hear much about the “Francis effect” these days, seeking its measure in mass attendance, collection baskets, or journalistic attention. Gerald Arbuckle has taken a very different approach, offering profound ecclesial hope through an analysis of aging and effective mourning. In the fifty years since Vatican II, a generation inspired by its promise has aged under devastating decades of loss and change. Arbuckle proposes that youthful creative vitality is possible once again, both personally and institutionally, in the public acknowledgment and mourning of loss. It is signs of this institutional process and its attendant promise, he believes, that we are seeing in the church today because of Pope Francis.
The book is carefully structured to lay a foundation in Scripture and cultural anthropology for understanding the essential necessity and restorative power found in appropriate mourning. Arbuckle culls passages from Scripture that consider both personal and collective aging, recognizing the consistent theme of relinquishment, leaving behind whatever holds us back from the journey forward toward wisdom. But it is in Christ himself as the paschal mystery that we recognize true wisdom: “Death is the beginning of new life in Christ” (31).
Distinguishing between grief as an emotion and mourning as a process of dealing with grief, Arbuckle walks us through an anatomy of each with their many varieties and stages. Most powerful are the examples Arbuckle offers of the impact suppressed grieving can have on cultures prohibited from expressing themselves in public mourning. The examples of cultural trauma in Warsaw, Soviet Russia, Chile, Spain, and Bougainville establish a kind of cultural mirror in which readers may gradually begin to recognize, with perhaps a shock, their own experience in the church today.
Effective expression of loss and grief is the only way beyond the impasse of personal or cultural trauma. Any reader from an ethnic Catholic background will find a certain kinship in Arbuckle's description of mortuary rituals of traditional cultures. For despite his critique of the Roman funeral ritual for the continued remnants within it of a medieval mythology stressing the ordeal of death and judgment, the revised order of 1989 still offers an oasis of healthy recognition in a Western culture of denial of death.
In perhaps the most powerful section of the text, Arbuckle presents a compelling comparison between the characteristics of growing, youthful cultures and aging, mechanistic cultures that reach an impasse in the cultural trauma of unexpressed grief. It is only through permission for public mourning and consequent refounding that an aging institution can avoid extinction. The cultural examples Arbuckle provides of this process are compelling and especially so in the life cycles of religious congregations, both those successful in the refounding process and those not.
Finally, in the last quarter of the text, Arbuckle explicitly takes up the “Francis factor,” applying the life cycles of organizational cultures to the church since Vatican II. He identifies the initial enthusiasm of a youthful culture that was suppressed by an unreformed Curia finally giving way to unexpressed grief as creativity and faithful dissent were ruthlessly repressed and punished to the point of cultural trauma. Arbuckle sees in the attitudes and symbolic gestures of Pope Francis the possibility for hope and a chance for breaking through the impasse in rituals of public mourning and the refounding of structures.
The text is readable for parish discussion, but especially helpful for those in various pastoral ministries facing discouragement, decline, or closure. The optimism of Arbuckle is contagious because of the foundation he has so carefully laid in analysis and evocative examples from cultural anthropology. The real possibility of change, however, swings upon the pivot point he identifies as the major challenge facing Pope Francis: can he “translate his symbolic gestures into wider structurally supported action at key levels of the church” (198)? Cultural change is a slow process. Only the Holy Spirit knows if Pope Francis will live long enough and be succeeded by sufficiently effective leadership to make the difference. However, resurrection is our destiny; how long it takes is only the journey.
