Pope Francisco : It turns out that “shitposting” is a technical term.
Dealing with the practice of launching cheap and easy provocations into the digital space to create maximum chaos and panic with minimum effort, scholarly communication is a great literature that encompasses an entire subfield of study.
I didn’t know it until I knew it, which was only on Tuesday afternoon EDT, when I learned it while searching for a word of art to play on the digital natives to whom I was trying to explain what Pope Francis had just done.
If you remember, it is said that Pope Francis redoubled his commitment to “factionalism” – frockiagin –, this time saying that it has air in the Vatican.
The Vatican press office apologized for the first use of the offensive word, but it is quite possible that the Pope did not receive a memo about his apology.
Five words were taken out of context and almost universally misinterpreted: “Who am I to judge? “- has given a great boost to the narrative engine of the Pontificate Francis, which exploded when news of the first use emerged a few weeks ago.
The second alleged use of the insult is more than a big headache for the Vatican’s communications apparatus. This is the kind of thing that sets up cascading failures. In nuclear terms, it’s somewhere between Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
If the CYA were an Olympic event, the difficulty score for spin operations in it would be off the charts (impossible to execute and fatally dangerous to attempt) and basically not worth attempting.
Olympic score
Scoring in Olympic gymnastics is a complex matter. It has two parts: difficulty and execution. Calculating a gymnast’s score for any routine adds the difficulty score to the performance score and subtracts the “neutral deduction” for things that are generally technical errors related to clothing, practice routines, timing violations, etc. Pope Francisco
An international panel of judges, usually six, evaluate each gymnast’s performance in a routine. The gymnast’s performance score is an average of the judges’ individual scores, with only one detail. The highest and lowest performance scores from the six judges are removed.
During international competitions, the regular drop in high and low scores prevents judges from overly favoring their own athletes and/or treating competitors from rival national teams excessively harshly.
In a word, the scoring method is designed to keep everyone honest.
I thought about that day, in relation to Francis’s pontificate, when I was trying to find a way to explain what the last eleven years have been like without referencing any of the narratives associated with Francis’s reign.
If we are to believe one of the two main and competing narratives, Pope Francis is either a revolutionary reformer with something like an ecclesiastical version of the Midas touch, or he is a con man who is at least half-heretical and completely corrupt.
The reduction of the story(s)
We can embrace the complex and abandon both narratives, as if they were the judges’ highest and lowest scores on an execution panel at the Summer Olympics.
If we subtract the narrative element – at least its effects – then what is left is a bunch of extravagant legislative measures, latent crises that often explode into scandal, and ersatz pontifications that often have a lot of sizzle but rarely serve up a steak that is edible.
Pope Francis’ reform of the Roman Curia has not given us a functional government tool. Francis still largely governs without him. His reform of Vatican finances has neither stopped corruption nor prepared the Vatican to return to positive numbers. His reform of Vatican justice has given us a mock trial. His improvement in ecclesiastical supervision and discipline has given us Zanchetta, Ricard and Rupnik (among others). Pope Francisco
Even if it hadn’t been, it would have been difficult to completely separate the narrative elements, and for two different but closely related reasons: Francisco is the great imitator, even if you like him, and Francisco is feeding both narratives – sometimes in turn, sometimes together, with a powerful will.
The dog bit the man / The man bit the dog.
It may be no surprise that an 87-year-old South American religious cleric appreciated the views expressed, and less deserving of the title, that the son of a former janitor and working-class immigrant should use such language for entertainment. However, when the former cleric doorman is the Pope of Rome, those comments are sure to make the newspapers, even if it is a story like “a dog bites a man.”
The undeniable shock value of the comments is only a small part of it.
One would expect the Pope – any Pope – to take a hard line regarding Church teaching and discipline. At the same time, in the normal course of things the Pope is expected to speak kindly of people, especially people.
Active in journalism for 8 years, experience from electronic to digital media, eager to learn and be attentive to political news.
