“Comedy is born from the komai — that is, from the peasant villages — as a joyous celebration after a meal or a feast. Comedy does not tell of famous and powerful men, but of base and ridiculous creatures, though not wicked; and it does not end with the death of the protagonists. It achieves the effect of the ridiculous by showing the defects and vices of ordinary men. Here Aristotle sees the tendency to laughter as a force for good, which can also have an instructive value: through witty riddles and unexpected metaphors, though it tells us things differently from the way they are, as if it were lying, it actually obliges us to examine them more closely, and it makes us say: ah, this is just how things are, and I didn’t know it.”

Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

At an Economist blog, Pope Francis was charged with Leninism, or something like it. Then he was asked for commentary on that accusation, and responded thus, with characteristic humor:

He was asked about a blog post in the Economist magazine that said he sounded like a Leninist when he criticised capitalism and called for radical economic reform.

“I can only say that the communists have stolen our flag. The flag of the poor is Christian. Poverty is at the centre of the Gospel,” he said, citing Biblical passages about the need to help the poor, the sick and the needy.

“Communists say that all this is communism. Sure, twenty centuries later. So when they speak, one can say to them: ‘but then you are Christian’,” he said, laughing.

You don’t have to do much googling to find hand-wringing over whether or not Pope Francis is a Marxist, Leninist, communist — or some other permutation of politically charged bad guy. These accusations are never meant to argue seriously; they’re smears, they’re an attempt to take a claim that is radical and domesticate it, make it familiar and digestible to an audience that doesn’t want to deal with a disrupted political narrative. It is quite flatly uncomfortable to imagine politics to be the province of Christian ethics, and economics at that; it is troubling to think the eye of God peers into the market, where some other invisible hand is usually the preferred deity. It is easier to pretend Pope Francis’ ethical analyses of economics aren’t religious, that they’re purely of a secular vein of prima facie rejected political orders still coasting along in collective middle American nightmares on the bad fumes of the Cold War. The Pope is a Marxist! isn’t the whole narrative, it’s just a metonymy; the narrative is: The Pope is a Marxist because he claims poverty is injustice and that it can be corrected in part through state activity, and we all know this Marxist diagnosis is unChristian and unAmerican and wrong.

How do you disrupt a story like that? You can sit around and try to pick it apart, try to produce its genealogy, show the world it’s built on a toxic rhetorical foundation. There are a lot of people who devote careers to that, and it isn’t bad work.

But in a sit-down interview you don’t have that kind of time or space, and the swiftest way to split open an entrenched narrative is to cause people to look at it upside down, so that’s what Pope Francis did: he took the anti-Capitalism-is-anti-Christian-and-pro-Communism story and flipped it over, making it say pro-communism-is-pro-Christian-and-anti-Capitalism, which is not to say that communism is necessarily Christian in character, but that the wellspring of ethical rightness that forms its proletarian core has its precedence in Christianity. It’s not a tightly tailored argument because it is only the reversal of what was already a shitty argument, but the reversal reveals a truth — this is the nature of comedy.

What makes it funny — surprising, even — is that it is not, of course, communists themselves who are throwing the accusation of communism at Pope Francis, but rather right wingers who are rankled by his Christian-ethical perspective on economics. Therefore, when Pope Francis says that “communists say [concern for justice for the poor] is communism”, what he means is “communists say, according to the critics who accuse me of communism…” When he turns the story around and points out such a preoccupation within communism would actually be very Christian, he lands the decisive blow against his critics: “that in my thought which you call communism can more rightly be called, well, Christianity.“

So he finishes with the implicit question: which one do they have wrong, communism or Christianity? Or both? It’s not an impassioned defense of communism, though it turns on the poignant observation (which others have made in greater depth and detail) that there are Christian ethical premises at hand in the formation of certain political ideologies which nonetheless developed away from those roots. In doing so Pope Francis is at his absolute best in terms of disrupting narratives about the role of Christianity in politics and the ownership of certain ethical concerns by particular political orders. Instead of using the communist-ness of an idea to evaluate whether or not it can be truly Christian, he uses the Christian-ness of an idea to determine whether or not communism, by nature of its co-opting of the idea, might have some merit after all. In doing so he makes the Christian ethical foundation of a political focus (in this case, justice for the poor) the litmus test for the potential worthiness of a political order operating off of it, rather than the opposite, which would evaluate one’s Christianity by its adherence to a given political order (not-communism.)

And I think it’s a good move, especially for Christians trying to think about politics in a world that would gladly exclude Christian ethical reasoning from political discourse altogether unless it’s willing to play by pre-determined rhetorical rules, slipping neatly in where sex and reproduction are concerned and excusing itself politely when money comes up. Humor was a great choice, and an enlightening one, and you don’t need Umberto Eco to prove that “faith with a smile” can really reveal the radical, shocking realities of the Christian faith, in part because the faithful so often forget them. Pope Francis is excellent at refusing to conform to conventional political categories because for him the faith precedes the categories, as it sensibly should for anybody poking into Christian ethics.