The Paschal Event of Wonder: Pope Francis, Planetary Crisis, and the Capacity for Surprise

Date of Award

5-1-2025

Degree Name

Ph.D. in Theology

Department

Department of Religious Studies

Advisor/Chair

Vincent Miller

Abstract

In the encyclical Laudato Si’, Pope Francis insists on the social and ecological exigency of wonder. Absent a sense of wonder, he claims, one’s relation to creation—to other human beings and the natural world—risks being reduced to a shallow and utilitarian instrumentality. Francis thus implicates a lack of wonder in our society’s “throwaway” culture—which sloughs off anything, people or plastics, that outlasts its usefulness—and the global environmental crisis. Wonder, on the other hand, fosters openness to the intrinsic depth and value of otherness, and it is vital to personal fulfillment. Francis’s claims for wonder align with the findings of contemporary affective researchers, philosophers, and religious studies scholars, among others, who have extolled wonder as ethically, epistemologically, and environmentally salutary. However, this recent interdisciplinary discourse also contains troubling hints of more problematic latencies in the passion: tendencies towards self-aggrandizement, manipulation by malign actors, quietistic withdrawal from reality, cognitive closure, antirational thinking, and possessiveness. This dissertation examines Pope Francis’s intellectual and spiritual biography to argue that his notion and practice of wonder avoid these pitfalls. Accordingly, I search his writings for heuristics that might open for us a pathway to a sounder wonder, one that is life-giving for both human beings and our common home. In Francis’s thought, wonder—“the capacity for surprise”—is a condition of possibility for encountering otherness, whether other people, the natural world, alien cultural traditions, or the divine. Highlighting his engagement with certain Latin American philosophers, from whom he derived the epistemological priority of the peripheries, I argue that this prominent theme of the Francis papacy—las periferias—is a deep source of his wonder. Venturing to the peripheries reveals surprising, more capacious, and more truthful perspectives than one could gain by remaining in spaces over which one exercises control (“the center”). Which is to say, truth is inherently surprising, a wonder decentering the self. Moving deeper into the pope’s biography, I find that his encounter with the thought of Gaston Fessard during his early formation in the Society of Jesus was particularly significant. Fessard’s interpretations of the Spiritual Exercises would become an originary source of Francis’s notions of both wonder and hope. From Fessard, Francis derived an active mysticism that, beginning in a wondrous encounter with the mercy of God, proceeds to seek transcendence by means of self-abandoning love and service in and on behalf of the world. At the same time, lacking any assurance of the empirical success of her worldly mission, the active mystic, or disciple, anchors her hope in the definitive surprise of Christ’s Resurrection, transforming apparent failure into cosmic triumph. The wonder of the Resurrection strengthens the disciple to unite her will with the often-surprising will of God, in the hope of participating here and now in the world’s eschatological transformation. The wonder that emerges from this study of Pope Francis possesses a Paschal character. Passing through a negative moment of dispossession and de-stabilization, the Paschal wonder of Pope Francis leads to an ever-greater openness of heart, receptivity to truth, and renewed life.

Keywords

Theology

Rights Statement

Copyright 2025, author.

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