One of the goals for our getting together to discuss encounter and democracy was something like what the Catholic Worker movement calls "further clarification of thought"—sought, in that tradition, through round-table discussions and Friday night meetings. And the public session on Friday afternoon occasioned some further clarification of thought about the notion of encounter on my own part—in a way that I hadn't anticipated.
Through the day I stressed, as I often do, that Francis' notion of encounter isn't an abstraction, and that we know what he meant by it in part because we saw him in acts of encounter throughout his pontificate. He was a pope for whom the personal scale and the face-to-face encounter were both natural or instinctual and a vivid expression of his pontificate's themes and style. But our accounts of encounter on Friday tended toward the abstract nevertheless.
Then during the public session, two people in the audience each asked questions about how encounter might be related to the arts. Without premeditation, I answered the first question in a local, topical way. The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts—well, that, it seemed to me—was a space for encounters of the kind that Pope Francis had had in mind. Classical music, opera, ballet, drama, musicals, and comedy all draw patrons of all political dispositions. At the Kennedy Center, unlike in Congress, as far as I know, people weren't seated on one side of the aisle or the other according to their political dispositions. No, people of various outlooks mingled together, some of them repeatedly over many seasons due to subscription and membership arrangements. Through live performance, the audience members were brought together in time and space both by the performers (many of them from outside the U.S.) and with them, each encountering the other in an unrepeatable way—with their fullest selves called forth through the power of live art, each respecting the wholeness and basic integrity of the other. This, it seems to me, is something akin to encounter as Francis characterized it and carried it out.
Is it any wonder that the Kennedy Center, thus constituted, became a target for the destructive energies of the Trump administration? Alas, it is not.
Is it a stretch to propose an embattled performing arts center as the site for the human experience a great pope saw as vital to "social friendship" and central to his pontificate? I don't think so, but I'm now going to read Fratelli tutti again with this notion in mind.
