Martin O'BrienThe remarkable Papacy of Pope Francis is being felt in Rome, writes Martin O’Brien
I recently heard a distinguished priest-theologian in Rome say: “Pope Francis is a slow burning nuclear bomb. There are explosions going on all the time and it is hard to know what he’s getting up to some of the time.”
Then at the Diocese of Down and Connor Faith & Life convention, John L. Allen of The Boston Globe and its new Crux website, one of the world’s greatest Vatican analysts, said: “You are all witnesses to the Francis Revolution.”
Such statements underline the impact of the Pope, the sense of excitement and unpredictability around him and also the unease he has caused to those he may have shaken in their comfort zones.
Pope Francis grabbed the imagination of the world from the moment he appeared on the loggia of St Peter’s Basilica to a huge crowd that included this correspondent more than 18 months ago.
There has been no let-up since, either in his wide appeal within and crucially far beyond the Catholic family nor in his determination to shake up the Church.
It seems obvious that being only human he cannot possibly deliver on all the often conflicting expectations around him, yet in a short time he has changed the Church forever.
Now with the eyes of the Catholic world trained on Rome at the beginning of the Extraordinary Synod of Bishops on the Family, one of the biggest initiatives of many that Francis has taken and one of his most crucial tests, it is timely to take a deeper look at the man who described himself as “a Pope from the end of the earth”.
Larger synod
It should be made clear, however, that we are at the beginning of “a synodical process” as one Vatican insider puts it and that final decisions will be taken by the Pope sometime after the second and larger synod in a year’s time.
There is nowhere better to examine ‘the Francis effect’ than in Rome where the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims and tourists from every corner of the globe who throng St Peter’s Square every week attest to the unique universality of the Church.
One member of the Curia, pre-eminently placed to talk about ‘the real Jorge Bergoglio’, is Buenos Aires-born Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo who knew the future Pope even before Jorge was ordained a priest.
When he spoke to a group of English-speaking journalists at the recent ‘Church Up Close’ seminar in the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome, one was struck by his observation that Francis “wants to respond to his experience as a pastor”.
He says that at the heart of “the programme of his pontificate” are two critical parts of the Gospel, the Beatitudes, and chapter 25 of Matthew’s Gospel where Jesus says we will be judged by how we feed the hungry and respond to the plight of the suffering and the marginalised.
Bishop Sorondo recalls that in Rio de Janeiro at World Youth Day, a young man asked Francis: “What should we do, Holy Father?” and that he replied: “Look, read the Beatitudes: that will do you good. If you want to know what you actually have to do, read Matthew Chapter 25, which is the protocol by which we will be judged.”
Bishop Sorondo, whom St John Paul appointed Chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences in 1998, says of Francis: “Like Mozart in music, he is creative and renews in different ways the substantive issues that he has in his mind and in his heart, not letting anyone else write or dictate them.”
He is challenging a world full of scandals such as human trafficking, the deification of money, the marginalisation of the elderly through “cultural euthanasia” which are met by “the globalisation of indifference” – a phrase the Pope first used to describe the plight of migrants at Lampedusa in his first trip outside Rome.
Bishop Sorondo says Francis “makes no distinction between Christians and non-Christians. All people are destined to the grace of Christ”.
Francis’ central concern is the “least brothers… the poor, the sick, the abandoned and the marginalised [who] are the flesh of Christ.
“By acting mercifully towards these ‘least brothers’ of ours, we do so towards Jesus Christ who suffers until the end of time in them,” says the Pope’s old friend from Argentina.
Perspective
A complementing perspective on Francis was shared by one of his close aides, Archbishop Rino Fisichella, an Italian whom Pope Benedict appointed first president of the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelisation.
He says that he knew from the moment of Francis’ election “we would be surprised by Francis” and that a key to understanding him is “an understanding of the importance of human language”.
At first people should “check the signs of Pope Francis”.
While is it important, of course, to listen to him and read him, “it is especially important to see him. He is speaking with his own very different signs”.
Archbishop Fisichella not surprisingly stresses the importance of reading Evangelii Gaudium but also the significance of Francis’ first and still his only encyclical Lumen Fidei, even though it was largely written by Pope emeritus Benedict.
The archbishop recalls: “Francis told me at our first audience we need to reflect with the heart. Now is the time to think with the heart.”
He thinks “people feel Pope Francis is close to everybody” because he has embraced Blessed John Henry Newman’s motto cor ad cor loquitur, heart speaks to heart.
Archbishop Fisichella says there is a mysticism at the heart of Francis’ theology expressed in his reference to “a mystical fraternity, contemplative fraternity” in Evangelii Gaudium.
He is not the only one I heard in Rome comparing Francis to Pope St Gregory the Great from the sixth century. Like Gregory, he is not interested in intellectual controversies. What is interesting for Francis is conversion.
No one is more aware of the Pope’s remarkable communication skills than Fr Federico Lombardi SJ, director of the Vatican Press Office, who with endearing understatement says: “It is [for us] still a time of learning how to serve the Pope in his communication to the world.
“The Pope’s attitude, substance and spontaneity means he can communicate [as in Korea] without knowledge of the [local] language.”
Pope Francis never loses an opportunity to send a message and his informality is stretching Vatican protocol to the limits.
At the Wednesday general audience, I noticed that Pope Francis actually walked off his dais to greet those lucky enough to be introduced to him, turning what would have been previously a stationary purely one-to-one encounter – snapped by the Papal photographer – into a series of little chats with a few people at a time.
It was explained to me that this is his way of showing that he is proactive in meeting people and that there is a little lesson there for all of us, even if it means, as one diplomat observed, that prima fila tickets no longer guarantee a picture with the Pope alone.