A Humble Pope, Challenging the World

Mangalore Today News Network

Vatican City, Sep 19, 2015:  Days after the election of Pope Francis, word reached the Vatican press office that the new pontiff was unexpectedly celebrating morning Mass. Other popes had presided over morning services, too, but as the world (and the Vatican press office) would soon realize, Francis did things his own way.

 

This Mass was offered in the small chapel of the Vatican guesthouse where Francis had chosen to live - not, as in years past, at the ornate Apostolic Palace. His audience was not the cardinals of the Roman Curia but gardeners, janitors and Vatican office workers. And Francis was not merely presiding, as had Pope John Paul II. He was preaching, without notes, as if he were a simple parish priest.

If one with a big message.

"The church asks all of us to change certain things," Francis said during one of his morning homilies, as he invoked a Gospel reading from St. Paul. "She asks us to let go of decadent structures - they are useless."

The symbolism of the morning services, which Francis now holds four times a week, is clear: a humbler papacy, where the pope is foremost a pastor to the flock, not a king. But a humbler papacy hardly means humbler papal ambitions. Francis is not just trying to change the Roman Catholic Church. He seems determined to change the world.

Popes are expected to challenge society. But Francis, 78, who lands in Cuba on Saturday and prepares to arrive in Washington on Tuesday for his first visit to the United States, has achieved a unique global stature in a short time.

His humble persona has made him immensely popular, a smiling figure plunging into crowds at St. Peter’s Square. He speaks in deeply personal terms about people discarded by the global economy, whether refugees drowned at sea or women forced into prostitution. His blistering critiques of environmental destruction have seized the world’s attention.

But he is also an inscrutable tactician whose push to change the church has stirred anxiety and hope - and some skepticism. Many conservatives project their fears onto him. Many liberals assume he is a kindred spirit. Others argue that Francis is less concerned about left or right than he is about reversing the church’s declining popularity in Latin America and beyond.

Francis has not fully revealed his hand. But his spiritual mission to place the poor at the center of the church has enabled him to thrust it to the center of the global debate on issues such as climate change, migration and the post-2008 rethinking of capitalist economics.

To some degree, the question of how Francis will change the church - and its role in society - misses the point that much change has already occurred. Doctrine is the same, but Francis has changed its emphasis, projecting a merciful, welcoming tone in a church that had been shattered by clerical sexual abuse scandals and identified with theological rigidity. He has emphasized its historic connection to the destitute while sidelining culture war issues. In turn, his geopolitical influence, and that of the church, has risen.

In the United States, Francis’ biting critiques of the excesses of capitalism - if ringing true to many people - have caused discomfort even among some sympathizers and outright disdain from critics, who have called him a Marxist or a Communist. Those who have known Francis for years laugh at those labels, yet they agree that he can be elusive, having refused to be placed neatly inside an ideological box since his early days as a young Jesuit leader in Argentina.

"He delights in confounding categorizations," said Austen Ivereigh, author of the biography "The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope." "There is a sense in which the elites always want to own him, and he’s always eluding them."

From the moment he stepped onto the central balcony of St.

Peter’s Basilica and greeted the masses after his unexpected election in March 2013, Francis made history as the first Latin American pope. He even told a joke that night about how "his fellow cardinals" had gone to the "end of the world" to find a pope.
It was a lighthearted reminder of the great distance to his native Argentina from the Vatican. But what now seems clear is that Francis was not only telling a joke. The "end of the world" was a metaphor for the slums, and the worldview of the Latin American church that he was bringing to the Vatican.

The Archbishop of the Slums

For many Argentines, Jorge Mario Bergoglio (pronounced Ber-GOAL-io) was a mystery. When he became archbishop of Buenos Aires in 1998, he converted the official residence into a hostel for priests and moved into the downtown diocesan office building. He took a small bedroom with a portable heater that he switched on when the building’s heating system automatically shut down on weekends. He often cooked himself meals in a small kitchen.

He avoided the limelight, rarely speaking to the media, and spent little time in the affluent parts of the capital. His focus was Argentina’s poor. He created a cadre of priests who worked and lived in the slums of Buenos Aires, and he made regular visits, leading religious processions or saying Mass. Before every Easter, he visited prison inmates or AIDS patients or the elderly.

For Francis, the transformative event of his early priesthood was the Second Vatican Council, the meetings from 1962 to 1965, which stirred sharp internal debates and ended with the church adopting a new openness. Mass could now be celebrated in native languages, not just Latin, and the church resolved to open unprecedented dialogue with members other faiths, including Jews.

But for many Catholics, the council proved deeply unsettling and politically divisive. By the 1970s, the Jesuits were divided, partly over different interpretations on how to achieve social justice, and the number of new priests dropped sharply. In Argentina, several Jesuits had embraced a Marxist-influenced strain of liberation theology, a Latin American movement calling for structural change to help the poor.

At only 36, Bergoglio was placed in charge of Argentina’s Jesuits. He would later acknowledge his immaturity for such a position. But he won a loyal following and was praised for replenishing the numbers of new priests.

However, his hard-nosed style also brought him enemies. He would be dogged for decades by accusations that he failed to protect two priests who were kidnapped and tortured by the brutal military government ruling Argentina during the 1970s - allegations that have been challenged by biographers and were later refuted by one of the two priests. Among some Jesuits, he was considered an archconservative.

’Dung of the Devil’

Francis’ first months as pope were a veritable lovefest: Here was the ordinary-guy pope, paying the bill at the hotel where he stayed before his unexpected election; keeping his plain black shoes instead of red papal slippers; eschewing the papal apartment for rooms in the Vatican guesthouse. He washed the feet of inmates, women and a Muslim. He kissed the head of a grossly disfigured man. He signaled a more welcoming public attitude toward homosexuals by saying, "Who am I to judge?"

Traditionalists grumbled, but Francis had managed, seemingly overnight, to rebrand the church, at least in style. But then the substance started coming, too. He released what amounted to his papal mission statement in November 2013, with the publication of "Evangelii Gaudium," a sweeping 224-page document that many Catholics received as an optimistic call for a tolerant, joyous Catholicism open to the world, and the world’s poor. But many capitalists were jolted by Francis’ blunt attack on the global economic system as "unjust at its root."

He expanded the theme in June in his landmark environmental encyclical, "Laudato Si’," in which he held rich countries most responsible for climate change and obligated them to help poor ones deal with the crisis. Then in a July visit to Bolivia, Francis compared the excesses of capitalism to the "dung of the devil" and apologized for the church’s role in Spanish colonialism in Latin America, warning of the "new colonialism" of materialism, inequality and exploitation.

To some conservatives in the United States, the Argentine pope seems to be making a frontal assault on the American way. Rush Limbaugh blasted him as a Marxist. Others labeled him a communist or socialist. Some affluent Catholic donors withdrew pledges or expressed discomfort.

The labels rang false to many who knew Francis in Argentina. In Buenos Aires, Francis sharply criticized Marxism, especially as some priests sought to intermingle the dialectics of violent class struggle with the social justice goals of Catholic teaching. Later, he sharply criticized the neo-liberal belief that market economics were a cure-all for the poor.

The Mona Lisa

Francis is practicing his English. Friends, diplomats and others say he has written his address to Congress and is concentrating on the delivery.

The United States is preparing, too. Activist groups promoting different social causes have been going to Philadelphia in advance of Francis’ appearance. Panels have been convened in Washington and elsewhere to plumb the Francis agenda, the Francis psyche, the "Francis Effect."

"People project their aspirations onto him," a senior Vatican official said. "Some people might have hopes raised that are not going to be fully realized. For some people, there might be an expectation that there might be a lot of institutional change on things like gay marriage or ordination of women."

Francis does not seem to mind the contradictions, or even regard them as such. He has encouraged open discussion - even criticism - in advance of the synod in October. He seems determined to open up the church, yet he has not disclosed the exact path he wants the church to follow.

But everyone who knows him agrees that Francis, ultimately, will make a decision. Then the popular, enigmatic pope will show his hand.

 

Courtesy: NDTV