The influence of Romano Guardini on Pope Francis
By Maurits Potappel LLM MA
Maurits Potappel is PhD Researcher at the Theological University of Utrecht.
The influence of Romano Guardini on Pope Francis
On Easter Monday 21st of April 2025, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Pope Francis died. He is sometimes depicted as an anti-intellectual Pope who was not schooled philosophically and theologically to the same degree as his predecessor as Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. It is however often forgotten that Bergoglio was trained as a Jesuit and got a deep theological and philosophical formation of six years and served as a university rector of the Colegio de San José in Argentina. One of the key thinkers to understand the intellectual life of Pope Francis is Romano Guardini. Francis discovered Guardini relatively late in his life. He stated: ‘Before 1986, I had read Guardini, yes, but only in spiritual reading. The books The Lord, The Mother of the Lord, and so on forth. My reading took a different element when I took in hand Der Gegensatz [opposition]’.[i]
Romano Guardini and polar opposition
Francis was grasped by the thought of Romano Guardini and started a doctorate for which he went to Germany in 1986. ‘Since then, Guardini, whose philosophical point of view was to be the subject of Bergoglio’s doctoral thesis, became the author who accompanied him in his reflections on the social and the ecclesial motivated by his attempt to understand antinomies and their solutions.’[ii] The title of his doctoral dissertation was Polar Opposition as Structure of Daily Thought and of Christian Proclamation. Although he never finished his doctorate, Romano Guardini remained an important figure for the intellectual thought of Pope Francis.[iii] He continued to work on his doctoral thesis throughout his life and planned to finish his thesis after he would retire in the retirement home for clergy in the Flores district of Buenos Aires.[iv]
One of Guardini’s thoughts which would play a central role for Pope Francis was the idea of ‘polar opposition’. This idea was developed by Guardini in the book Der Gegesatz. Here, two opposite poles are accepted and resolved at a higher level in a synthesis. Francis commented on this idea:
‘opposition opens a path, a way forward. Speaking generally, I have to say that I love oppositions. Romano Guardini helped me with his book Der Gegensatz, which was important to me. He spoke of a polar opposition in which the two opposites are not annulled. One pole does not destroy the other. There is no contradiction and no identity. For him, opposition is resolved at a higher level. In such a solution, however, the polar tension remains. The tension remains; it is not cancelled out. The limits are overcome, not negated. Oppositions are helpful. Human life is structured in an oppositional form. And we see this happening now in the church as well. The tensions are not necessarily resolved and ironed out; they are not like contradictions’.[v]
Synthesis and harmony
We can see this idea of synthesis in four principles of Francis which he drew from Guardini: ‘time is greater than space; unity prevails over conflict; realities are more important than ideas; the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.’[vi] The idea that unity prevails over conflict is thus a synthesis in which the polar opposition gets resolved. ‘In this complex relationship between unity and diversity lies the nucleus of Bergoglio’s “Catholic” thought.’[vii] In the synthesis, the Holy Spirit played a crucial role according to Francis.
‘Harmony, I’ve said. This is the right term. In the Church, harmony is made by the Holy Spirit. One of the first fathers of the Church wrote that the Holy Spirit “ipse harmonia est,” It is harmony itself. Only He is the author of plurality and unity at the same time. Only the Spirit can give way to diversity, plurality, multiplicity, and at the same time create unity. Because when it is us who try to create diversity, we provoke divisions, and when it is us who want to create unity, we give rise to uniformity and homogeneity.’[viii]
Francis and Guardini on liturgy
Another point of influence of Guardini is visible in Francis’ writings on the unity of liturgy, symbols and creation. For example in his encyclical letter Desiderio Desideravi Pope Francis quotes Romano Guardini four times when it comes to liturgy. Francis for example refers to the work Liturgische Bildung, written by Guardini in 1923, where Guardini writes that ‘man must become once again capable of symbols’.[ix] Francis contrasts the man who is capable of symbols with the modern man who ‘has become illiterate, no longer able to read symbols’. Francis extends this thought to ‘the symbol of our body’ as he calls it. ‘Our body is a symbol because it is an intimate union of soul and body; it is the visibility of the spiritual soul in the corporal order; and in this consists human uniqueness, the specificity of the person irreducible to any other form of living being. Our openness to the transcendent, to God, is constitutive of us.’[x]
Here we see some core thoughts which relate to a personalistic anthropology in which the body and soul form a unity aimed at the transcendent. Francis relied on Guardini to introduce the human person in the liturgy of the eucharist which is full of symbols. Symbols which Francis gestured every day, from kneeling for the sacrament to crossing the chest, from kissing the altar to incensing a statue. Francis contrasts the man capable of grasping symbols with the materialistic man and the spiritualistic man, two extremes which portray a wrong understanding of the person. The materialistic man sees only matter and the spiritual man sees only spirit.
Laudato Si
For Francis the key to become a man capable of perceiving symbols lies in creation, as explained in his encyclical Laudato Si. This encyclical, issued in 2015, will be one of key parts of his legacy for the Church and the World. Francis places man into the world of creation, with the earth and the fellow creatures. It is the ‘consumerist’ who does neither understand the right relation to symbols, nor the right relation to creation.[xi] The consumerists sees only goods he can use for himself. Pope Francis instead states that there is a deeper ‘quality of life’ to discover than the consumerist life. This is the sacramental life, which finds its deepest meaning in the liturgy, but which is prefigured into creation and closely tied to creation.
‘The Sacraments are a privileged way in which nature is take up by God to become a means of meditating supernatural life’ Francis writes in Laudato Si. The world of creation and the world of the liturgy are not two separate entities but are deeply connected. The world of creation gets a deeper meaning by the sacramental life according to Francis. ‘Through our worship of God, we are invited to embrace the world on a different plane.’[xii] And here symbols play an important role in re-addressing creation to its deeper meaning. ‘Water, oil, fire and colours are taken up in all their symbolic power and incorporated in our act of praise’.[xiii] The human person therefore has a task to fulfill, a specific vocation to respect nature and to discover the deeper spiritual meaning of creation via the sacraments and symbols that allow creation to be transformed.
Consumerism and the techno-economic paradigm
An important obstacle which prevents the human person of seeing the true beauty and the sacramental dept of creation is extreme consumerism and a ‘techno-economic paradigm’ as Pope Francis calls this. Pope Francis quotes Romano Guardini who stated that modern man accepts quite simply ‘the gadgets and technics forced upon him by the patterns of machine production and of abstract planning; they are the forms of life itself. To either a greater or lesser degree mass man is convinced that his conformity is both reasonable and just.’[xiv]
Technique, which has made great discoveries possible, therefore also possess a danger for the modern man according to Pope Francis. The human person loses the possibility to see the uniqueness of creation and thinks that life is produced rather than received. Again, Francis quotes Guardini to illustrate this problem of the mind of the modern man. ‘The technological mind sees nature as an insensate order, as a cold body of facts, as a mere ‘given’, as an object of utility, as raw material to be hammered into useful shape; it views the cosmos similarly as a mere ‘space’ into which objects can be thrown with complete indifference’.[xv]
In fact, the technological mind loses the capacity to see the depth of life and quantifies nature. According to Francis, ‘the intrinsic dignity of the world is compromised’.[xvi] This lack of seeing the true meaning of creation has a negative consequence for the creation, which is abused, and for the human person himself. The human person fails to understand his place in the world and ‘ends up acting against himself’.[xvii]
Conversion and the idea of the gift
Against these attitudes of consumerism, a purely techno-economic paradigm and of abusing creation Pope Francis places the act of conversion. A conversion is needed in the heart and mind of the human person. ‘It entails gratitude and gratuitousness, a recognition that the world is God’s loving gift’.[xviii] By becoming aware of nature as a gift, we see our relationship with the rest of creation. Just as creation is a gift, so is the also the re-creation and the redemptive act of the liturgy. ‘The liturgical celebration purifies us, proclaiming the gratuity of the gift of salvation received in faith.’[xix] By participating in the liturgy, the human person gets redeemed. ‘Every posture of the human body, every aspect of the created order, is redeemed in Christ through the liturgy’ is the fundamental insight of Guardini and retranslated by Pope Francis.[xx]
The goal of this conversion is reaching the fullness of the human existence, his right relation for the human person with his Creator and his fellow creatures. Pope Francis refers to Guardini in the search for a right measure for the time we live in. ‘The only measure for properly evaluating an age is to ask to what extent it fosters the development and attainment of a full and authentically meaningful human existence, in accordance with the peculiar character and the capacities of that age.’[xxi] If there are obstacles which prevents this fullness of the human existence, they must be removed, transformed or put into a new perspective, in order that the human person becomes open for his Creator and his fellow creatures.
Here the human person has to come into action, and therefore Pope Francis always stressed upon the connection between the inner life and the life of action, the life of prayer and the life of pastoral care, the life of spirituality and the life of concrete material help, the liturgy and creation. It is this life of action by which Pope Francis is often understood, but behind this life of action lies an intellectual world which borrows crucial ideas of, amongst others, Romano Guardini.
[i] Massimo Borghesi, The Mind of Pope Francis, Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2017, p. 101.
[ii] An Intellectual Biography of Jorge M. Bergoglio
[iii] Massimo Borghesi, The Mind of Pope Francis, Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2017.
[iv] Massimo Borghesi, The Mind of Pope Francis, Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2017, p. 101.
[v] Massimo Borghesi, The Mind of Pope Francis, Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2017, p. 104.
[vi] Intellectual biography traces influences on Pope Francis' thought - Detroit Catholic
[vii] An Intellectual Biography of Jorge M. Bergoglio
[viii] Gianni Valente, Francesco. Un papa dalla fine del mondo, EMI, Bolonia, 2013, p. 35.
[ix] Romano Guardini, Liturgische Bildung (1923) in Liturgie und liturgische Bildung (Mainz 1992) p. 36.
[x] Pope Francis, Desiderio Desideravi, 2022, par. 44.
[xi] Pope Francis, Laudato Si, par. 144.
[xii] Pope Francis, Laudato Si, par. 235.
[xiii] Pope Francis, Laudato Si, par. 235.
[xiv] Romano Guardini, Das Ende der Neuzeit, 9th edition, Würzburg, 1965, pp. 66-67 (English: The End of the Modern World, Wilmington, 1998, 60).
[xv] Romano Guardini, Das Ende der Neuzeit, p. 63 (The End of the Modern World, 55).
[xvi] Pope Francis, Laudato Si, par. 115.
[xvii] Pope Francis, Laudato Si, par. 115.
[xviii] Pope Francis, Laudato Si, par. 220.
[xix] Pope Francis, Desiderio Desideravi, 2022, par. 20.
[xx] Pope Francis and Romano Guardini: The Next Stage of Liturgical Renewal| National Catholic Register
[xxi] Romano Guardini, Das Ende der Neuzeit, Würzburg, 1965, pp. 30-31.
