Courtney McGrailThe Irish Catholic carries exclusive extracts from The Great Reformer by Austen Ivereigh, the most authoritative biography of the Pope yet. The book will be published in Ireland on December 4.
As euphoria spread through God’s holy faithful people in every pueblo and barrio across Argentina – and especially in the slums of Buenos Aires, where people ran from door to door yelling, “They made Padre Jorge the Pope!” – it dawned on [President] Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner’s advisers that this was much, much bigger than Argentina winning the World Cup in 1978, that Francis would be the most famous Argentine since Carlos Gardel, and that if la Presidenta didn’t come around, her ratings would sky-dive off a cliff.
Cristina got the message. Having at first welcomed the news of Francis’ election with a cold, curt message of congratulations, she performed not so much a U-turn as a screeching, tire-burning, slam-into-reverse road manoeuvre, and became, to coin a phrase, more papist than the Pope. Even the acerbic Hebe de Bonafini, president of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, found a way of climbing back from her former criticisms, telling Francis (she called him “Don Francisco”) in an olive-branch letter how surprised and delighted she had been to discover his work in the slums.
President Kirchner was the first dignitary to be received by Francis the day before his inauguration on March 19, when she brought him the iconic Argentine kit of yerba mate, gourd, bicentennial vacuum flask, and even sugar (“I take it without,” he told her). She giggled that she had never before been kissed by a Pope. The ice had melted.
Bridge builder
In the very early hours of the day of Francis’ inauguration, a crowd at a vigil outside the cathedral in the Plaza de Mayo suddenly received a call from him, relayed through loudspeakers.
He spoke in a language of great directness and tenderness, as if to his own family, asking them to care for each other, for the old and the young, for the world around them, and not to squabble or criticise, or, as he put it, no le saquen el cuero a nadie (“don’t take anyone’s skin off”). It was an old gaucho expression: the Pope was speaking to them not just in their own language, but using their idioms and inflection; he was now other, yet the same, a porteno Pontifex Maximus.
“We’re going to have to get used to a new way of doing things,” Fr Lombardi warned journalists in Rome, who were trying to adjust to Francis freedom and frankness.
On his first Sunday as Pope, Francis celebrated Mass at the little Vatican church of Sant’Anna in a surplice so simple that it sent shivers down the spines of Rome’s lace police. Outside the door, he greeted the congregation one by one as they came out, leading some media to dub him ‘the world’s parish priest’. After changing back into his papal vestments, he walked out of Sant’Anna gate, leaving Vatican territory for a few minutes to shake hands with those behind the barrier on the road to St Peter’s Square.
His security staff went into meltdown, complaining to an Italian newspaper that “unless things settle down, he’s going to drive us all crazy”.
Some said this directness and informality signified the dismantling of the monarchic papacy. In the daily La Stampa, the monk Enzo Bianchi put it more simply. Francis, he wrote, is “the Pontiff who became man”.
The appointed time
Francis used both the Mass and the Sunday Angelus that followed to announce a kairos – an appointed time in the purpose of God, the time when God acts in new and dramatic fashion: a call to action, repentance, and renewal. “Mercy is the Lord’s greatest message,” he told crowds in the square below from the balcony of the Apostolic Palace, quoting an old woman in Buenos Aires who had told him that without mercy the world would not exist.
“I asked her if she had taught theology at the Gregorian,” he joked, referring to the Jesuits’ famous university in Rome.
He was elated, and had a clear, joyful message he gave over and over: that God never tired of forgiving us, but we tire of asking him. He mixed humour and anecdotes, wished the crowd buon pranzo (have a good lunch), and commended Cardinal [Walter] Kasper, whose book Mercy he had read during the conclave, as “a clever theologian, a good theologian,” while laughing that he wasn’t just trying to increase the German’s book sales.
Under blue skies, the inauguration Mass two days later on March 19, the Solemnity of St Joseph, was attended by the delegates of 132 states, dozens of religious leaders, and a crowd of 200,000.
The religious leaders included, for the first time ever at a papal inauguration, or at least since the Great Schism of the 11th Century, the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew, drawn by Francis’ reference to himself as Bishop of Rome presiding in charity.
As he had done in 2001, when he became cardinal, Francis had sent a message home (this time via the nuncio) that he did not want people wasting money on flights to attend the Mass, and to give the money instead to the poor. But among his own invited guests was the cartonero leader, Sergio Sanchez. Francis’ theme was St Joseph’s protective, tender leadership: “Let us never forget that authentic power is service, and that the Pope, too, when exercising power, must enter ever more fully into that service which has its radiant culmination on the Cross.
“He must be inspired by the lowly, concrete, and faithful service that marked St Joseph and, like him, he must open his arms to protect all of God’s people and embrace with tender affection the whole of humanity, especially the poorest, the weakest, the least important, those whom Matthew lists in the final judgment on love: the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, and those in prison (cf. Mt 25:31-46). Only those who serve with love are able to protect!”
Speaks like Christ
Cardinal Christoph Schonborn of Vienna was in tears throughout the homily, whispering to Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York: “Tim, he speaks like Jesus.”
“Chris, I think that’s his job description,” Dolan replied.
After Mass, Francis went among the crowd in an open-air white SUV (also, technically, a popemobile), giving out energy and joy. There were banners in the square, quoting God’s words to Saint Francis of Assisi: Ripara la mia Chiesa (Repair my Church), and huge numbers of flags of Latin-American nations mixed in with the European ones.
The new source Church had arrived.
Francis spent a very long time among the people, kissing and embracing and shaking hands, stopping occasionally to sip from a proffered gourd of mate, which would become a tradition in his Wednesday audiences. He also began what would become another habit: stepping outside the vehicle to embrace, with deep tenderness, a severely disabled person.
The weekly time in the square, with its focus on the sick and the disabled and his banter with the crowds, would be key to the Great Reform: it reconnected the Bishop of Rome with God’s holy faithful people, healing the wounds of clericalism, which at its most vicious had permitted or covered up sexual abuse.
Francis never wanted it forgotten that the faithful people were the ones who mattered, the ones whom the clergy were there to serve, to build up, to heal and nurture.
“The Church,” he had told journalists the previous Saturday, “is the holy people of God making its way to encounter Jesus Christ. Only from this perspective can a satisfactory account be given of the Church’s life and activity.”
It was the hermeneutic – the key to understanding the Church – he had urged on the Jesuits in the 1970s and 1980s, and on his clergy in the 1990s and 2000s. Now it was a lesson he was giving the universal Church.
Cynics take fresh look
At the end of that audience in the Paul VI Hall to thank the media for their work during the conclave – a tradition begun by Benedict XVI in 2005 – Francis did not give the usual apostolic blessing, noting that many of them were not Catholics or even believers.
“I cordially give this blessing silently, to each of you, respecting the conscience of each, but in the knowledge that each of you is a child of God,” he told them.
“They had been struck by the graciousness of that gesture; and now, as they packed up after the inauguration Mass and made for home, some of the reporters – especially the atheists or agnostics among them, who had arrived in Rome shaking their heads at the stories of Vatican corruption and hypocrisy – confessed their amazement at what had taken place there over the past fortnight: how a ship run aground was now ploughing through the waves again, lifted by a fresh strong wind that seemed to come out of nowhere.
That was the wonder of it: that this could happen at just the moment when the long night of institutional failure was at its darkest, when all seemed old, tired, and desolate. As Jorge Bergoglio had written 20 years earlier, in the sadness of his Cordoba days: “It is a corpse, and divinity is hidden in it, and will be resurrected… God’s reforms happen right there, where there is no other solution but to hope against all hope.”
Overhauling monarchist model
Since that remarkable first week, Francis has been overhauling the centralist, monarchic model of the Vatican and putting in place structures that, following the same inadequate metaphor, can only be described as republican. It is not fast work.
“When Cardinal [Carlo Maria] Martini talked about focusing on the councils and synods, he knew how long and difficult it would be to go in that direction,” Francis said in October 2013. He wanted to proceed, he said, “gently, but firmly and tenaciously” down that route of collegiality and synodality.
Less than a month after his election he created a council of eight cardinal archbishops from across the world to advise him in the governance of the universal Church and to plan the reform of the Roman Curia.
He described the C8 as “the beginning of a Church with an organisation that is not just top-down but also horizontal.”
This kitchen cabinet meets about every two months in the Vatican. “I am always present at the meetings,” Francis told La Stampa.
“But I don’t speak, I just listen, and that does me good.”
The cardinals are from India, Germany, the Congo, the United States, Australia, Honduras, and Italy, thus at a stroke counteracting the danger identified by Yves Congar: when Church personnel are selected from a certain type – usually safe pairs of hands, who defend fidelity and tradition but take no risks and cause no surprises – the institution ends up placing a barrier between the centre and periphery.
The C8 cardinals bring the periphery – the continents of the world – into the centre, offering “perspectives other than those that get to the Holy See,” in the words of Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez de Maradiaga of Tegucicalpa, Honduras, who chairs the C8.
Papal senate
It was clear from the two-day meeting of the whole college of cardinals in February 2014 that Francis wants them to take a larger role in governance of the universal Church, as in the days before the Reformation when it acted as something akin to a senate. Francis’ creation of 19 new cardinals (16 electors) the day after that meeting, February 22, reflected the future direction he wants for the college: to increase the voice of poor countries, correct the Eurocentric imbalance in the college, and reduce the number of curial cardinals.
There were no new US cardinals, only four Roman curial appointees, and just two from European dioceses; the remaining red hats were from the developing world (including his hand-picked successor as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Mario Poli), meaning that the 122 cardinals eligible to vote are now evenly divided between Europe and the rest of the world. (Future consistories, continuing this trend, will no doubt put European cardinals in a minority, reflecting the distribution of Catholics in the world.) This was the “consistory of the poor” in the words of Cardinal Dolan: red hats went either to marginal and impoverished places – Haiti and Burkina Faso – or to megacities where rich and poor rub up against each other, such as London, Seoul, or Rio de Janeiro.
Where possible, the cardinal advisers in the C8 are also heads or former heads of the supranational bishops’ bodies: Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich, Germany, and Oswald Gracias of Mumbai, India, were presidents, respectively, of the European CCEE and the Asian FABC, while Laurent Monsengwo Pasinya of Kinshasa (Congo) and Francisco Errazuriz Ossa, emeritus of Santiago (Chile), were past presidents of the African SECAM and Latin-American CELAM.
Thus, without great fanfare, Francis has made the Vatican not only accountable to the local Church (rather than the other way around) but to the collegial expressions of that Church, which the Vatican has too often ignored or seen as a threat.
He has signalled his intention in Evangelii Gaudium to give bishops’ conferences (including supranational bodies such as CELAM and CCEE) “genuine doctrinal authority”. In this way Francis has opened the door to the restoration of the early Church balance of the universal and local Church, so that Santo Domingo in 1992 can never happen again and future Aparecidas will flower in other continents, when it is their time to become source Churches.
It is even possible to imagine, as Archbishop John R. Quinn does in the book which Francis says he wants implemented, that in the future there will be self-governing regional patriarchates which appoint their own bishops and decide on liturgical questions.
Room to breathe
Collegiality also implies that the Pope and the Vatican do not overshadow the local Church. When the annual Vatican directory, the Anuario Pontificio, came out in May 2013, Francis was described simply as “Bishop of Rome,” with all his other elaborate titles consigned to a later page.
Observing in Evangelii Gaudium that “excessive centralisation… complicates the Church’s life and her missionary outreach,” Francis has ordered a reduction in the number of documents and conferences coming out of the Vatican agencies: his view is that too much Roman theology and law-making have suffocated local Church initiatives and freedom of action (as with his own battle over same-sex marriage in 2010).
Part of the task of the Pope and his doctrinal watchdog is to maintain the boundaries of Catholic consensus, without which unity is impossible; but it is a role to be exercised circumspectly. In January 2014 he warned the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) against a temptation “to understand the doctrine in an ideological sense or to reduce it to an ensemble of abstract and crystallised theories. In reality, doctrine has the sole purpose of serving the life of the People of God and it seeks to assure our faith of a sure foundation.”
To avoid diminishing the role of bishops’ conferences which a continually traveling ‘imperial’ Pope can imply, Francis has concentrated his visits outside Rome on Italy: he made just one (to Rio de Janeiro) in his first year.
His visits in 2015 will focus on the growing Church of Asia: after Korea in August 2014, he will be in Sri Lanka and the Philippines in January 2015, and possibly Japan. Other than these the United States in September 2015 is the only visit confirmed at the time of this writing.
Francis has avoided referring to, say, gay marriage or euthanasia laws being passed in particular countries, leaving it to the local bishops to issue statements and work out specific Church policies: in Evangelii Gaudium, Francis quotes Paul VI as saying that it was not the ambition or the mission of the Pope to provide single answers to widely varied problems, and that it was “up to the Christian communities to analyse with objectivity the situation that is proper to their own country”.
Yet he is happy to support local bishops in breaking new policy ground, as when he called, in July 2014, for the protection of young migrants crossing the Mexican border into the US.
Cardinal Rodriguez, the chair of the C8, said in January 2014 that high on the Pope’s agenda was making the synod a “useful and powerful tool of collegial leadership”, rather than a body “meeting in Rome every three years”.
Francis sees a reformed synod as essential to overcoming Vatican centralism and reconnecting the centre with the periphery, from where, he believes – with Yves Congar – prophetic change comes. (“If there is sin on the part of the reform movement in refusing or misunderstanding the demand for Church unity,” wrote Congar, “there is a parallel sin for the institution to misconstrue or stifle prophetic impulses,” adding that the obligation of the centre is to attend to the periphery, “when the sap is bubbling in a tree having growing pains”.)
Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, whom Francis named secretary-general of the synod not long after his election, said in June 2013 that the Pope was looking for “a dynamic, permanent synod, not as a structured organism, but as an action, like an osmosis between centre and periphery”.
The centrality of the synod in Francis’ plans can be glimpsed in an April 1, 2014, letter to Cardinal Baldisseri which used legal terms to describe the synod seldom heard since the 1960s. In nontechnical language, Francis means for the reformed synod to have real power to deliberate on major questions facing the Church, just as it did in the early centuries of Christianity. It will be a body outside and above the curia itself, accountable to the Pope but also to the bishops.
The Vatican’s chief canon lawyer, Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio, one of those who helped get Francis elected, is working out the details.
Cultural challenges
The synod’s modus operandi has already been turned on its head. In early October 2013, after Francis met over two days with Baldisseri’s synod council, it announced a two-year process of deliberation on the topic of “the pastoral challenges of the family in the context of evangelisation,” tackling a broad gamut of thorny issues, including the question which dogged the 2005 synod – of access to sacraments for the divorced and remarried.
Unlike the long-winded, abstract preparatory documents bishops were sent prior to previous synods, this one was concise and practical, beginning with a 38-question survey of the faithful by bishops’ conferences in November-December 2013.
The synod council received responses to the consultation from 114 bishops’ conferences and about 800 Catholic organisations, enough to ensure that, following the Aparecida template, the synod started not from an abstraction but from a direct knowledge of the cultural challenges of the moment.
Rather than cram it all into a three-week discussion, there is a staged process of discernment over two years: a two-day discussion by the cardinals in February 2014, a smaller, shorter ‘extraordinary’ synod of bishops (with about 190 voting members) in October 2014 to collect ideas and float proposals, and a full ‘ordinary’ synod (without about 250 voting members) in October 2015 to propose solutions to the Pope.
The events surrounding the consistory of cardinals in late February 2014 offered an excellent vantage point from which to witness the astonishing new level of activity these days in Rome.
A veteran Vatican watcher who flew in during those days commented on “a virtual gridlock of commissions, councils, and consistories” triggered by Francis’ reforms. International consultants and accountancy firms were in and out of the Vatican: McKinsey to review communications, KPMG to raise accounting standards, Ernst & Young to overhaul the finances of the Vatican City government, and the Washington-based Promontory Financial Group to sift through the operations of the IOR (the so-called Vatican Bank) as well as APSA (Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See), which manages the holdings of the Holy See.
Francis called the 185 cardinals together for a two-day meeting to hear and discuss Cardinal Walter Kasper’s thinking on family and marriage. There were public disagreements among the cardinals over Kasper’s presentation, but Francis didn’t mind: Guardini and Congar had taught him that contrasting positions, held together in tension, loyal to fundamentals but open to the action of the Holy Spirit, were necessary to forge a new, better consensus. The differences, he said, made for an intense, enriching discussion.
“I am not afraid of this, in fact I seek it,” he later told Corriere della Sera.
Shun worldiness
At the consistory to create cardinals he told them to renounce being princes of the Church, to shun a “worldly mentality” of “rivalry, jealousy, and factions,” as well as “intrigue, gossip, cliques, favouritism, and preferences”.
A cardinal, he said, “enters the Church of Rome, not a royal court”. Jesus, he said, came not to teach good manners but “to show us the only way out of the quicksand of sin, and this way is mercy”. He said they should “oppose arrogance with meekness” and use “the language of the Gospel: yes when we mean yes; no when we mean no”.
Just after the consistory, the first major overhaul of the curia was announced: a new Secretariat for the Economy, headed by the Australian cardinal, George Pell, in turn accountable to a new Council for the Economy made up of professional lay experts as well as bishops with financial experience.
A few months later, in July 2014, Cardinal Pell announced a series of reforms to the so-called Vatican Bank, stripping out its investment portfolio and reducing it to a savings and loan for religious congregations.
The Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR) had already shrunk its balance sheet, after closing roughly 3,000 accounts that did not fit its new profile. Cardinal Pell said the aim was to create a model for good practice and administration, and be “boringly successful”.
Pell also announced an 11-member media commission headed by former BBC chairman Lord Patten to implement a plan to streamline the Vatican’s overlapping communications outlets.
An international curia
The reforms had an underlying pattern: to inject lay technical expertise, to internationalise (or ‘de-Italianise’) the running of the curia, and to focus its activities on its core purpose.
These are some of the criteria behind the root-and-branch overhaul of the structure of the curia being studied by the C8, who have made clear they are looking not just at updating or modifying Pastor Bonus, the 1988 constitution that gives the curia its current form, but a complete rewriting of it, to be announced in late 2014 or early 2015.
Francis’ Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, is a 60-year-old Italian career diplomat who is the antithesis of his predecessors. Where Cardinals Sodano and Bertone were driven in limousines, Parolin prefers to walk alone, a humble and evangelically minded reformer in the mould of Francis. His austerity appears in even sharper contrast to his predecessors following revelations in May 2014 that Cardinal Bertone’s retirement quarters in a building next door to the Casa Santa Marta had merged two apartments and a terrace to yield a square footage several times that of Francis’s two-room apartment.
The Secretary of State has traditionally had a dual role: as both the Vatican’s chief diplomat, responsible for the Holy See’s foreign relations, and as chief of staff, managing the curia. It is likely that in the future he will concentrate on the first, while a new post will be created for the second, a moderator curiae who will run the Vatican’s bureaucracy.
The C8’s overhaul will simplify and streamline the bloated, complex, and frequently overlapping jurisdictions of the Vatican’s nine congregations (which are powerful, legislative bodies), 12 pontifical councils and seven pontifical commissions (both largely advisory), and three tribunals.
A new Congregation for the Laity is a virtual certainty, putting the body that represents God’s holy faithful people at the same level as those managing bishops and clergy. The Vatican’s councils and commissions are likely to be either merged or closed or put within a congregation. Cardinal Rodriguez, for example, has suggested that the Council for the Family could be headed by a married couple, and sit inside the future Congregation for the Laity.
Changing the culture
Other changes in the Vatican bureaucracy are underway, aimed at changing its culture. Most curial posts remain unconfirmed; Francis has scrapped bonuses and the title of monsignor for priests under 65; and from February 2014, Vatican department heads were told to end new hires, wage increases, and overtime in an urgent effort to cut costs and offset budget shortfalls.
At the same time, Francis has introduced compulsory retreats for all who work in the curia, and is looking for other ways of nourishing and supporting the 4,000 or so staff.
Francis has become the most accessible of modern Popes, almost always to be found at lunchtime in the Santa Marta restaurant, where he has his own table set aside, but stands in the queue with his tray like everyone else.
Visitors report that he comes out of the Santa Marta to greet them personally, while hostel guests are often shocked to find that when elevator doors open the Pope steps in (“I don’t bite,” he reassures them). There is no longer a bottleneck around the Secretary of State, and the leaks have dried up.
The changes have not always made him popular. Francis’ extraordinary popularity beyond the borders of the Church is in contrast to the view of him in the Vatican, where there is considerable grumbling. The old guard has lost control: once-powerful officials feel out of the loop.
The founder of the Sant’Egidio community, Andrea Riccardi, says that “resistance is to continue business as usual”. Some are furious at Francis’ apparent contempt for decorum and tradition: they say his decision to wash the feet of women on Thursday of Easter week was in direct violation of the rubrics, and that as Pope he is free to change them but not to disregard them.
Others point to the harsh language he has used in regard to the curia’s courtly ways, and feel he is not on their side; Francis’ ‘elder son’ problem is an issue in the Vatican, too. Yet it would be wrong to see the tension as between the curia and Francis’ advisers. “There are plenty of staff in the curia who agree that it cannot stay as it is and are supporting us with their own proposals,” says Cardinal Rodriguez. “The curia is by no means a monolithic bloc.”
It is a measure of the success of Francis’ campaign against spiritual worldliness – a theme he has returned to time and again in his preaching and addresses, sometimes in harsh language – that Vatican extravagance is now a news story. Pope Francis was furious, for example, at a VIP banquet for 150 businessmen and journalists on the veranda of the Vatican Prefecture for Economic Affairs during the April 27, 2014, ceremony to canonise John XXIII and John Paul II, which reportedly cost its sponsors – an insurance firm and an oil company – $25,000 (€20,000).
The idea that Francis might disapprove has had its own chilling effect: observers report a sharp reduction in the number of limousines in the Vatican parking lots and a greater hesitancy to use extravagant clerical vestments.
Only a month after Francis’ election, a veteran Italian cardinal with a weakness for crimson-trimmed garments and elaborate insignia of office entered his usual restaurant dressed in modest black clerical clothes. Quizzed about his new look, he said: “Under this Pope, simple is the new chic.”
Unprecedented popularity
Drenched from a tidal wave of unprecedented popularity, by the end of his first year Francis seemed to grace every magazine cover and to top every poll, hailed as a model leader who had reversed the fortunes of his ailing institution and made it again a force in the world.
Vanity Fair sent the first bouquet in July 2013, declaring that “his first 100 days have already placed him in the category of world leaders who make history”.
At Christmas he was Person of the Year in Time magazine as well as the Times of London and the gay magazine, The Advocate.
He was the subject of long feature articles in Rolling Stone and the New Yorker, topped the list of Fortune magazine’s list of world’s greatest leaders, named “fourth most powerful person in the world” (after the presidents of the United States, Russia, and China) by Forbes and fifth among the world’s top thinkers by Prospect magazine, alongside economists and philosophers such as Amartya Sen.
The Economist said that the Harvard Business School should study Francis alongside IBM’s Fou Gerstner and Apple’s Steve Jobs as an example of “turnaround CEOs” who breathe new life into dying organisations, describing him as “the man who has rebranded RC Global in barely a year”.
The British Guardian decided Francis was now “the world’s loudest and clearest voice against the status quo” and the Financial Times said that he was “the leading global symbol of compassion and humility”.
But not everyone was happy. A Pakistani souvenir seller near St Peter’s lamented that Francis “is always talking about the poor and so the poor come to the Vatican and they have no money to spend”.
Without altering a single core Church doctrine – which a Pope is not at liberty to do – Francis had achieved what had seemed impossible only a year earlier: to speak to the heart of contemporary Western culture. Catholics no longer had to hunker down defensively; as one journalist put it, “the overall effect has been to restore the Church as an admirable and loveable presence on the world stage”.
Explaining exactly what Francis had done, however, was more challenging. Time named Francis its Person of the Year for “pulling the papacy out of the palace and into the streets” and for “balancing judgment with mercy”. Yet its advance publicity – subsequently corrected – claimed that he had “won hearts and headlines with his common touch and rejection of Church dogma and luxury”. Time’s canonisation was an attempt, as one observer put it, to turn Francis into “a crusading humanist on the verge of making the Catholic Church socially acceptable at Manhattan dinner parties”.
The article struggled to make sense of how a Pope had changed everything when he had changed no doctrine, concluding eventually that he was a master PR operator. But this was unpersuasive. What drew people to Francis was that he was completely himself, acting in total freedom and honesty, indifferent to the headlines. As the Financial Times noted, Francis “has a sincerity and authenticity that no world leader can match”.
What had captivated the world – though few dared to put it as plainly as Cardinal Schonborn did at the inauguration Mass – was that Francis’ actions, words, and gestures had awoken in Western culture a dim, often unconscious, yet powerful memory of someone once loved but since lost.
A revolutionary
“Some say you are a revolutionary,” a journalist from the Barcelona newspaper La Vanguardia put to him in June 2014. Francis answered: “To me, the greatest revolution is what goes to the roots, to recognise them and see what those roots have to say at this time. There is no contradiction between being a revolutionary and going to the roots. Indeed, I believe that [strengthening] identity is the way to bring about real change. You can never take a step [forward] in life unless you do it by going back, by knowing where I come from, what surname I have, what cultural or religious surname I have.”
One who goes to the roots is a radical (from the Latin radicalis – forming the root). Francis’ radicalism is born of his extraordinary identification with Jesus after a lifetime of total immersion in the Gospel and mystical prayer.
That identification leads him to want to simplify and focus, to increase the opportunities for God to act. It is a dynamic, disconcerting leadership, which while delighting most Catholics and attracting people beyond the boundaries of faith, has dismayed and disconcerted a number of ‘parties’ within the Church. In this, Bergoglio and Francis have been consistent: a radical may be deeply appealing, but can never be universally liked.
Francis’ proclamation of a kairos of mercy stems from his discernment that a world being transformed by technology and wealth is prone, above all, to the illusion that human beings, not God, are sovereign.
Mercy is the great antidote to progressive optimism as well as conservative pessimism, for it grounds its hope in God’s forgiveness of our sins, rather than our belief in our own resources. That is why the poor are quicker to grasp Francis than the rich and the educated – and why the opposition to Francis has come from elite groups invested in particular narratives.
One of those narratives, especially in Europe and the United States, was exposed in the 2012 synod: that the Church is in decline as result of a hostile culture to which the necessary response was a defensive stance that stresses purity and loyalty.
In demonstrating that, unconsciously, Western culture is attracted to Christ, Francis has shown that an evangelising, missionary Church is possible. The narrative of decline and defensiveness was “like a winter coat, protecting against the cold,” observes Michael Sean Winters. “Francis has taken the coat and encouraged everyone to recognise it is not that cold anymore. The effect is disorienting for those who suddenly find themselves coatless and, what is more, wondering why they had the coat on in the first place.”
A missionary key
Francis’ freewheeling communication and his proclamation in a missionary key – that is, putting love and mercy and healing first, before rules and doctrines – have particularly offended some on the frontline of America’s culture wars.
Some see Francis’ off-the-cuff remarks in his daily homilies and frequent interviews as creating ambiguities liable to be exploited and misunderstood by the Church’s enemies. What had given them “the confidence, the solid doctrinal ground they needed to fight the good fight,” in the words of one pro-life writer, was “a system in which every word spoken or written by a Pope, or for that matter by any office of the Vatican, has been carefully examined and vetted”. Now, she added acidly, “there appears to be no one minding the store”.
An early example was in May 2013, when Francis in a morning homily said that Jesus Christ had redeemed everyone, “including atheists”, which seemed to imply that atheists could be saved without converting. These and other remarks led to criticism that he was “naive” and “imprudent,” giving succour to those (liberals) attacking the Church.
On the eve of Francis’ trip to Rio de Janeiro, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia warned that conservatives “have not been really happy” about Francis, and that “he’ll have to care for them, too”.
Their unhappiness increased in the autumn of 2013 with Francis’ blockbuster Jesuit interview, which produced what was to them nightmare headlines:‘Pope bluntly faults Church’s focus on gays and abortion’ (New York Times),‘Pope Francis: Church can’t “interfere” with gays’(CNN), and‘Pope Francis: the Church needs to mellow out on abortion’ (San Francisco Chronicle). They convinced many that Francis was selling out to secular modernity, a conviction reinforced by the encomia from liberal citadels such as Time and The Advocate.
Engaging nonbelievers
The Jesuit interview was followed just weeks later with another explosive one in La Repubblica, the result of Francis meeting its founder, a 90-year-old Catholic turned atheist intellectual named Eugenio Scalfari.
The Scalfari–Francis dialogue showed the Pope’s great skill in engaging nonbelievers. It began over the summer of 2013 through the pages of La Repubblica and continued in the interview that Scalfari wrote up in the same paper in early October.
When they met in the Santa Marta, Scalfari shared his journey to unbelief, a classic modern tale of a young adolescent believer who in high school meets Descartes and ends up believing that the individual, “the seat of free thought,” is the basis of all existence.
Through gently probing questions, and disarming honesty about the Church’s failings, Francis caused Scalfari to look again at the Church he once loved, and to admit the painful insufficiency of his humanist philosophy, which was too ethereal to be capable of meeting the challenges of humanity.
They parted not just friends but collaborators, agreeing that selfishness had increased at the expense of love, and this needed reversing by men and women of goodwill. The exchange was warm, respectful, and engaging, as well as clarifying of their differences, and left Scalfari smitten.
Later he wrote up their exchange from memory. (Scalfari had offered to show it to Francis before publishing it, but Francis said that would be a waste of time, telling him: “I trust you.”) The interview was full of things Francis clearly said and believed, but included phrases that were very unlike his, as well as details that were obviously wrong – such as Scalfari’s claim that Francis had doubted before saying yes to his election, or that Francis no longer believed that sin existed because God’s mercy and forgiveness were ‘eternal’.
After some weeks of questions and clarifications, the Vatican removed the article from its website, saying that it was unreliable in particulars although trustworthy overall. The whole episode left observers amazed. How could the Pope agree to an interview that was not recorded or transcribed? Didn’t he know that he was the Pope?
The same happened after another Francis–Scalfari meeting (about sex abuse in the Church and the mafia) in July 2014. Scalfari’s write-up in La Repubblica once again put in the Pope’s mouth words that, as Fr Lombardi later clarified, he never said.
It was clear that to Francis the misuse or misunderstanding of what he might say weighed less than the relationship he had established with Scalfari, and the reaching-out beyond the Church’s borders that it enabled.
This missionary, pastoral approach, whose object is to speak to the heart of the other, lies deep in Jorge Bergoglio’s Jesuit soul and clashes directly with a monarchic view of the papacy in which the task of papal communication is clarity, consistency, and dignity.
New papal style
Fr Lombardi has been urging journalists and commentators to accept the emergence of a whole new genre of papal speech: informal, spontaneous, and sometimes entrusted to others in terms of its final articulation, one that requires, he says, a “new hermeneutic” in which “the general meaning, rather than particular terms, should be interpreted”.
Yet critics say most people are not capable of those distinctions; they care only that the Pope said it. Accusing Francis of creating “confusion, consternation, and bewilderment among the faithful,” one conservative commentator worried that “such an informal and often ambiguous method of communication cannot help but erode the more solemn teaching authority of the papacy,” adding that “a Pope, like a monarch, should realise that when it comes to public utterances, less is more”. Francis, however, does not see himself as a king, but a fisherman.
A final straw for many came when at the end of April 2014, a woman in Argentina civilly married to a divorced man said she had received a call from Francis in which he told her to ignore her priest and go to another parish to receive Communion.
Fr Lombardi refused to comment, saying that the Pope’s phone call did not form part of the magisterium, any more than were his daily homilies at the Santa Marta chapel.
Whether or not Francis said what the woman claimed he said was unclear: Cardinal Bergoglio’s Head of Press, Federico Wals, says he frequently made such calls in Buenos Aires, but would never advise anyone to disobey Church teaching.
But to many in the curia and elsewhere it seemed irresponsible of the Pope to be making any such call in the first place, not least because it could be used to bypass local priests and bishops.
Responsive
Francis hears these criticisms and has responded by tempering some of his habits, but the tension will not go away: he insists on the freedom to make direct personal contact with the world outside the Vatican.
It is one of Bergoglio’s paradoxes: the Pope of collegiality exercises his sovereign authority in ways that can seem high-handed. Above all, Francis understands people: his is a highly personalistic government, which bypasses systems, depends on close relationships, and keeps a tight control.
He understands power, and how to use it. “The irony,” says a well-placed Jesuit at the Vatican, “is that this Pope, great agent of decentralisation in the Church, is personally the most centralised Pope since Pius IX. Everything has to cross his desk.”
If conservative Catholics are orphaned – Benedict XVI was a father figure to them – liberal or progressive Catholics feel they belong again. Fr Thomas Reese, SJ, of the National Catholic Reporter, believes that “we’re going back to where we were after the Second Vatican Council, before things closed down,” adding that he hadn’t been “this hopeful about the Church in decades…It’s fun to be Catholic again”. His long-time conservative sparring partner, George Weigel, wondered “what the heck he’s been looking at in the Catholic Church in the United States, such that he’s spent ‘decades’ being unhappy”.
Reese was expressing a widespread feeling among progressive Catholics made to feel for decades that they were heretics or unwelcome. As William Donohue, President of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, ruefully puts it: “The left smells a certain victory right now.”
Liberal misinterpretation
Yet many liberal Catholics have misinterpreted Francis’ freedom and freewheeling communication in terms of greater doctrinal flexibility. Liberal reform lobbies in northern Europe have been perplexed by his insistence on the integrity of Catholic teaching, as well as his willingness to discipline clergy for failure to teach it.
He has backed the Vatican’s reform of the main American umbrella organisation of nuns to ensure its fidelity to Catholic teaching; approved the excommunication of a priest in Melbourne, Australia, who advocated women’s ordination; and criticised the attempt to pick and choose doctrine, saying that fidelity to its teaching is a fundamental part of belonging to the Church.
He also made clear in a November 2013 letter to Archbishop Agostino Marchetto that he supports the more conservative understanding of the Second Vatican Council espoused by Benedict XVI. Francis may be a radical reformer, but he starts from the assumption that the task of the papacy is the preservation of the doctrine handed down by Jesus Christ, and that in order to preach the Gospel Catholics must be rooted in core shared understandings of that doctrine.
Shortly after the Jesuit interview in which he spoke of not needing to speak all the time of issues such as abortion, he gave a blistering address to Catholic doctors on the very subject, in which he linked abortion to the throwaway culture, saying that “each child who is unborn, but is unjustly condemned to be aborted, bears the face of Jesus Christ… who even before he was born, and then as soon as he was born, experienced the rejection of the world”. In Evangelii Gaudium he has shown how being pro-life needs to be part of a broader narrative linked to human rights. “Human beings are ends in themselves and never a means of resolving other problems,” he says. “Once this conviction disappears, so do solid and lasting foundations for the defence of human rights, which would always be subject to the passing whims of the powers that be.”
Humanae Vitae
Francis has taken a similarly clear line in support of Paul VI’s 1968 ban on artificial contraception, Humanae Vitae, a touchstone issue for many liberal Catholics and their publications and the reason for their discontent with the papacy.
In his interview with Corriere della Sera a year after his election, Francis praised Paul VI’s prophetic genius in rejecting the recommendation of the body of experts he had appointed, saying “he had the courage to place himself against the majority in defence of moral discipline, acting as a brake on culture, opposing present and future Neo-Malthusianism.” (The term Neo-Malthusianism – a reference to population control ambitions of the eugenics movement – was how the 1968 CELAM document of Medellin described the values behind artificial contraception.)
Although the synod might consider pastoral issues related to the living-out of the teaching, “there was no question of changing the doctrine,” Francis said.
Missionary and mystical
Francis’ radicalism is not to be confused with a progressive doctrine or ideology. It is radical because it is missionary, and mystical.
Francis is instinctively and viscerally opposed to ‘parties’ in the Church: he roots the papacy in the traditional Catholicism of God’s holy faithful people, above all the poor. He will not compromise on the hot-button issues that divide the Church from the secular West – a gap liberals would like to close by modernising doctrine. Yet he is also, just as obviously, not a Pope for the Catholic right: he will not use the papacy to fight political and cultural battles he believes should be fought at the diocesan level, but to attract and teach; nor does he feel the need endlessly to repeat what is already well-known, but wants to stress what has been obscured – God’s loving kindness and forgiving mercy.
And where Catholic conservatives would like to speak more about morality than social issues, Francis is happy to do quite the opposite, to rescue Catholicism as a ‘seamless garment’.
Francis is seeking to unite the universal Church, just as he did with the Jesuits in the 1970s, by anchoring it in the ordinary faithful and the poor while focusing the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics on mission and evangelisation.
He is inviting the ‘parties’ to renounce their faith in their own schemes and notions of Church. He offers the greatest chance in generations to heal the divisions between liberal and conservative Catholics: he is the first Pope to be a product of, rather than part of, the Council; yet he spotted, early on, the temptation to take it down the wrong path, and resisted it boldly.
The joint canonisation in April 2014 of John XXIII and John Paul II, icons for each ‘side’ in the division over the Second Vatican Council, was an important moment in this unifying task. In the United States, the canonisation inspired a prominent Republican and a prominent Democrat to make a joint statement calling on their fellow Catholics to leave their bunkers and to embrace a common platform that sees both abortion and immigration as pro-life issues, in which “defending the sanctity of life and fighting for social justice are not clashing political agendas, but part of the same moral framework for building a just society”.
Debt to Benedict
For Francis, as for his generation, the ‘great light’ was Paul VI, whom he has put on the road to sainthood. Another moment for helping Catholics to come to terms with the legacy of the council will be the funeral, when it comes, of Benedict XVI – the first time a Pope will have buried another.
Benedict, a reassuring father figure to Catholic conservatives, is nonetheless the great enabler of the Francis papacy, the one who discerned the end of an era and nurtured a new one into being, encouraging the Latin-American Church to take its place as the source for the universal Church. Francis’ debt to Benedict was symbolised on Copacabana Beach in July 2013, when Francis told the pilgrims that Benedict was following it all on television and praying for everyone there. There were hesitant cries of Benedicto! from the youth, which Francis encouraged: “Si! Benedicto! Benedicto!” he cried.
When the time comes, Francis has said that he, too, will decide whether to resign (“I will do what the Lord asks me to do,” he told La Vanguardia). Many believe that is unlikely, that Francis will wear himself out in the role before becoming frail. “Let’s be frank, at my age I don’t have much to lose,” he says when a reporter asks about his vulnerability in the square each week.
But if he did resign, many close to him in Buenos Aires believe that, improbable as it may seem, Francis would return to his beloved city. And if he did not, but took up residence in the Mater Ecclesiae, what would that be like for the new incumbent? It is one thing to have Pope emeritus Benedict XVI up the hill, another altogether – as the Jesuits in Argentina could attest – having an emeritus Francis.
Gospel essentials
Jorge Bergoglio’s radicalism comes from his willingness to go to the essentials, to pare back to the Gospel; despite his powerful intellect, his political mind, and his theological sophistication, his belief is primitive, undiluted: God is sovereign, the devil is active, we must discern and choose.
After 50 years discerning spirits, Francis sees the devil not as a myth or theological proposition but a daily reality, the ‘prince of this world’ who hates holiness and tempts through riches, power, and pride to persuade us to look to our own resources, not God’s.
“The origin of the hatred is this: we are saved; and that prince of the world, who does not want us to be saved, hates us and gives rise to the persecution that from the earliest times of Jesus continues until today,” he said in a May 2013 homily, which warned that “with that prince you cannot dialogue”.
He sees the devil behind the intractable, violent conflicts of the world.
When he brought together Israeli president Shimon Peres and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas at the Vatican to pray for peace on June 8, 2014, he told them: “More than once we have been on the verge of peace, but the evil one, employing a variety of means, has succeeded in blocking it. That is why we are here, because we know and we believe that we need the help of God.”
Power of prayer
Francis conversely believes in the power of prayer to perform a “diplomacy of the impossible”. Thus, on September 8, 2013, Francis knelt before an icon of Our Lady in St Peter’s Square while leading a three-hour peace prayer vigil for Syria, accompanied by tens of thousands of people in the square and hundreds of thousands more around the world who begged God to bring to an end the barbaric, heartrending carnage in that country.
“How I wish that all men and women of goodwill would look to the Cross, if only for a moment,” he said. “There, we can see God’s reply: violence is not answered with violence, death is not answered with the language of death. In the silence of the cross, the uproar of weapons ceases and the language of reconciliation, forgiveness, dialogue, and peace is spoken.”
Among the prayers that night were many to St Therese of Lisieux. The next day, Sunday, while strolling in the Vatican Gardens, a gardener handed Francis a white rose. The following day, the Russian president’s plan to destroy Syria’s chemical stockpile forestalled a proposed US bombing.
He believes, too, in the power of personal relationship to act as a vehicle of God’s grace, which is why he took with him to the Middle East his close Jewish and Muslim friends from Buenos Aires, Rabbi Abraham Skorka and Omar Abboud – the first time a Pope’s official entourage had included leaders of other faiths. Seeing the three constantly together sent a powerful message in that divided region, and when the three hugged in front of the Western Wall in Jerusalem, the tears flowed freely.
Christian unity
Personal friendship has also brought about a breakthrough in Christian unity through his friend Bishop Tony Palmer, the evangelical Pentecostal who had come to know Cardinal Bergoglio in Buenos Aires.
When Palmer met Francis in the Casa Santa Marta in January 2014, the Pope recorded a message on Palmer’s iPhone for him to take the following week to a meeting in Texas of hundreds of mega-church pastors and evangelical leaders.
In the grainy film, Francis, seated in a green felt chair with a poinsettia plant in the background, spoke of his yearning for the separation of Christians to end, and spoke of a “miracle of unity” that had begun. When the video went viral, Palmer was inundated with messages from evangelical leaders across the world asking how they could be part of it.
On June 24, 2014, Palmer brought leaders of five evangelical organisations – which together represent perhaps 800 million people – to meet Francis at the Santa Marta. At the meeting the leaders said they wanted visible unity with the Bishop of Rome, to start with a joint declaration of faith in unity for mission, in which Catholics and evangelicals renounce all rivalry or attempt to convert the other, and declare themselves united in announcing the same Gospel.
A few days later, as he left London for two weeks in South Africa, Palmer described the meeting to me in a telephone call from the airport. He said Pope Francis had been “like a brother” to the guests: “open, down-to-earth, humble, authentic, spiritual but very friendly and warm”.
He and the leaders had met for an hour, and then lunched with Francis until 3pm. Palmer said Francis had been “one of the boys. It was beautiful.”
Palmer said he hoped that the extraordinary declaration discussed at that meeting would be signed in 2017 in Rome, at a special joint Catholic-Lutheran ceremony to mark the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses. He said Pope Francis had taken the draft away with him and was pondering it, and that Palmer expected to have news on his return to Britain.
Shortly after he came back, just as this book was going to press, Palmer was killed in a motorcycle accident. His funeral in Bath, England, was a full Catholic Requiem Mass; afterward, he was buried in the local Catholic cemetery, united at last to the Church in which he felt so at home. In a message to his wife, Emiliana, which she read at the funeral, Francis said he and his close friend had “prayed often in the same Spirit”; that Palmer had given his life, out of love of Christ, to the unity of the Church; and that those who loved him would be inspired by his zeal to build on his precious legacy”.
Whirlwind of news
Vatican journalists are busy now. Gone are the days when they could prepare a story using carefully crafted phrases from embargoed homilies and statements: every event is made tense by what Francis might do or say.
Their editors want stories: Francis sells. The reporters often use the words unprecedented, unusual, and historic in their intros. The Vatican has become a whirlwind of news.
Francis has given more interviews in 18 months as Pope than in 12 years as cardinal archbishop (“I could kill him,” laughs Federico Wals, his old press officer), along with airborne press conferences where no question is off the table.
The effect has been each time to bring him closer. In one interview at the end of June 2014, with the Rome daily Il Messagero, the reporter felt comfortable enough to ask if she could make a criticism. “Of course,” said Francis. She took him to task for talking about women only as wives and mothers, rather than rulers of states or big businesses. He understood the point, and said they were working on a new theology of women.
Later in the same interview, Francis said that he had more or less kept the same lifestyle as he had in Buenos Aires, with a few necessary modifications: “to change at my age would be a bit ridiculous”, he said. He tells friends there are things he misses: not being able to go out, take a bus. But they report him happy and relaxed, more demonstrative and joyful. He enjoys being Pope.
He left Buenos Aires, promising to return, but never did. In his native city he is a benign phantom now, smiling beatifically out from posters in the slums, an icon of joy, a national treasure, and the topic of a three-hour ‘papal tour’ organised by the municipal government of Buenos Aires, which is promoting the city as a pilgrim destination.
The bus takes you from a modern little house built over his parents’ casa chorizo in Flores, to the church where he was baptised, past the convent where he was taught, and the basilica in whose confession he first heard the call around which he has built his life.
It carries on to the secondary school where he studied chemistry, the clergy retirement house on calle Condarco, the seminary where he had part of his lung removed, the parish where Maria Desatanudos continues unravelling the knots in peoples’ lives, and finally the curia and cathedral on the Plaza de Mayo, where you are shown the kiosk which delivered his newspaper and the barber who cut his hair.
It is all far from him now, but it never leaves him.
The frontier is new: the mission now is to the globe. As ancient Christian civilisation is cruelly destroyed in Iraq, the Church is re-born in Asia. Yet some things stay the same. He rises at dawn each day to listen, then goes out to proclaim the kairos, entering the hearts of God’s holy faithful people. Each day brings novelty, and that’s how it should be when the Holy Spirit is given space to act.
“Listen up,” Francis told thousands in St Peter’s Square on Pentecost Sunday 2014. “If the Church is alive, it must always surprise,” he said. Then came the mischievous grin. “A Church that doesn’t have the capacity to surprise is a weak, sickened and dying Church. It should be taken to the recovery room at once.”