Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (73 page)

The temperamental differences between the two popes were never more in evidence than during Pope Francis’s return to Latin America in late July 2013, when he journeyed to Brazil for World Youth Day. Politically volatile, riven by deep and destabilizing economic and social injustices, Brazil is the world’s largest Catholic country, where the faithful nominally total 123 million, though in fact rapidly expanding Evangelical and Pentecostal churches have been making drastic inroads for more than a generation. Francis was here in his element, refusing to travel in armoured vehicles, reaching into the ecstatic crowds who pressed round him, visiting the favela of Manguinhos, perhaps the worst slum of Rio de Janeiro. Close to three million people filled every inch of Copacabana beach for an all-night prayer-vigil and Mass led by the pope (allegedly the largest Mass ever held) and his speeches and sermons, laced with folksy football metaphors, emphasized everywhere the need for the Church to go out to the people with the message of God’s mercy. The turning away of formerly Christian peoples from the Church had been a major preoccupation of Benedict XVI, but he had laid the blame for that leakage squarely on the shoulders of a secularist culture blind and deaf to its own deepest sources. Speaking of the Church’s losses in Brazil to an assembly of Brazilian cardinals, bishops and clergy, Francis addressed this Ratzingerian theme in distinctly unRatzingerian terms:

But he called on the Church rather than the culture to examine its own conscience.

There was a need he told them, for a Church adapted to local circumstance,
with

Above all,

On the return air-journey to Rome, Pope Francis amazed journalists by giving an impromptu press conference of great frankness, in the course of which, while reiterating traditional teaching that homosexual acts were sinful in themselves, he added, ‘If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will,
who am I to judge him?’

It is clear, then, that the new pope’s priorities and instincts were both different and more generous than those of the anxiety-ridden hyper-orthodoxy of the previous pontificate. While still a cardinal, Jorge Bergoglio called for an ‘overhaul of the inner workings of the church’ and a ‘pastoral conversion’ which would move the institution from being ‘the regulator of the faith’ to ‘one that is a transmitter and facilitator of the faith’.
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But many doubted whether a Vatican outsider in his late seventies could translate that aspiration into action. This was a man schooled in the Jesuit spirituality of discernment, and distrustful of his own first impulses, which he on more than one occasion said were almost always wrong. Nevertheless, exactly one month after his election the Vatican Secretariat of State announced that Pope Francis ‘taking up a suggestion that emerged during the General Congregations preceding the Conclave’ had established ‘a group of cardinals to advise him in the government of the universal Church and to study a plan for revising the Apostolic Constitution on the Roman Curia, ‘Pastor Bonus’.’ This reform commission consisted of eight cardinals selected from each of the continents and subcontinents. Only one ‘Curial’ cardinal was included, Cardinal Bertello, Governor of the Vatican City State, and though the makeup of the group was theologically varied (it included moderates like Sean O’Malley of Boston and Oswald Gracias of Mumbai, but also Oceania’s only cardinal, the conservative bruiser George Pell of Sydney) they were united by an openly critical attitude towards Vatican bureaucracy.
The group was chaired by the charismatic Honduran Cardinal Oscar Maradiaga, one of those calling most outspokenly in the pre-con-clave period for administrative reform and a more outward looking Church. The precise remit of the eight cardinals was not clearly defined, but all the more terrifying for its open-endedness. The pope himself had made clear that high on his own list of desirable reforms was the granting of effective powers to the Synod of Bishops, which under his predecessors had been a toothless talking-shop, constrained by a Curial agenda. There were tremblings in the Vatican at the stacking of so powerfully unpredictable a Commission with a
posse
of unsympathetic outsiders. The commission did not meet till October 2013, a mark of Pope Francis’s deliberately unhurried approach to the task of Curial reform. The group’s chairman, Cardinal Maradiaga, however, made it clear that though they would not rush to formulate their recommendations, their proposals would constitute no mere ‘tinkering’, but a ground-up overhaul of all the Church’s central structures.

The central structure most urgently in need of overhaul was the IOR, the Vatican Bank. As Archbishop of Buenos Aires Bergoglio had cleaned up the diocesan banking arrangements there, which promised well for his likely approach to one of the most notorious of Vatican black-spots. When, in June 2013, a senior Vatican bank official, Monsignor Nunzio Scarano was arrested for suspected money-laundering, Francis acted vigorously, appointing a five-strong committee of investigation to review the Bank’s procedures and mission; it included a female Harvard law professor, and had plenary powers to override all other authorities and to summon any documentation as they investigated the Bank’s legal structures and activities. The following month both the director and deputy director of the Vatican Bank ‘resigned’, and the pope made it clear that all options for reform were open questions, including the continued existence of the Bank itself. The changes were welcomed by the world financial community, who, however, insisted on the need for the new administration of the Bank to press on with the achievement of greater transparency and still more far-reaching internal reform.

In November 2013 Pope Francis issued what might be considered the first formal manifesto of his pontificate, the ‘Apostolic Exhortation’,
Evangelii Gaudium.
This long, wide-ranging and slightly garrulous document recapitulated many of the reformist themes broached by the new pope in interviews and sermons over the previous eight months. The
document, which appeared in the major European languages but without an official Latin version, was pitched in a consciously personal and informal tone, unlike any previous papal utterance. Emphasizing the joy of the Gospel even in the face of the challenges of a broken world, Francis deplored the pessimistic defeatism which ‘stifles boldness and zeal’ and ‘turns us into querulous and disillusioned pessimists, “sourpusses”’: commentators wondered what the Latin for ‘sourpuss’ might be. There was an echo here of John XXIII’s opening address to the Second Vatican Council,
Gaudet Mater Ecclesia
, and Pope Francis deliberately evoked the language of Vatican II, speaking, for example, of the need to discern ‘the signs of the times’, a reformist key phrase. In one of the most striking passages of the document, Francis called for ‘a conversion of the papacy’: John Paul II, he reminded his readers, had invited suggestions for a renewal of the papal office to make it more visibly an office of service, but ‘we have made little progress in this regard’. The papacy and the central structures of the Church needed to hear the call to ‘pastoral conversion’, because ‘excessive centralization, rather than proving helpful, complicates the Church’s life and her missionary outreach’.

In particular, Francis insisted there had been a failure to realise a truly collegial spirit within the Church. Specifically, ‘the juridical status of episcopal conferences’ needed rethinking, so as to give them ‘genuine doctrinal authority’. We become a barrier to the Gospel when ‘we speak more about law than about grace, more about the Church than about Christ, more about the pope than about God’s word’. The Church ‘is called to be the house of the Father, with doors always wide open. It never closes itself off, never retreats into its own security, never opts for rigidity and defensiveness.’ The Church needs to ‘grow in its own understanding of the Gospel and in discerning the paths of the Spirit’, and so it accepts and works with people as they are, not as they ought to be, even if in the process, ‘its shoes get soiled by the mud of the street’.

In that spirit of openness, the clergy must be heralds of mercy, not of judgment, sensitive to the specific circumstances of people’s lives, ‘the confessional must not be a torture chamber but rather an encounter with the Lord’s mercy which spurs us on to do our best. A small step, in the midst of great human limitations, can be more pleasing to God than a life which appears outwardly in order but moves through the day without confronting great difficulties.’ God, the pope insisted, ‘is mysteriously at work in each person, above and beyond their faults and failings.’
In what many took to be a reference to a need to reconsider the exclusion of divorced and remarried Catholics from communion, Francis insisted that the Eucharist ‘is not a prize for the perfect, but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak’, adding that this principle had ‘pastoral consequences that we are called to consider.’

By far the most controversial section of
Evangelii Gaudium
was its discussion of the marginalization of the poor in a world dominated by free market economics. Too many people, Francis claimed, had an unwarranted trust in a ‘trickle-down’ theory of wealth, imagining that ‘economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world’. But such a belief was belied by the realities of world poverty. It depended on ‘a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralised workings of the prevailing economic system.’ The result was a ‘globalization of indifference’ masquerading as economic pragmatism, and meanwhile, ‘the excluded are still waiting’. Ideologists of the absolute autonomy of the marketplace thereby legitimated ‘the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose’, which denied ‘the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control. A new tyranny is thus born.’
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This manifesto delighted those who felt that under John Paul II and Benedict XVI the Church had boxed itself into a sterile confrontation with the modern world: it appalled those who looked longingly back to the previous two pontificates as a golden age of doctrinal clarity and fidelity to a demanding gospel. Horrified neo-conservative politicians denounced Papa Bergoglio as a Marxist, while equally alarmed neo-con-servative Catholics sought to explain away the reformist tone of the Exhortation. George Weigel, biographer and confidante of John Paul II, insisted that
Evangelii Gaudium’s
emphasis on evangelization ‘demonstrates the seamless continuity between John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis, and the continuity between the John Paul—Benedict interpretation of Vatican II and Francis’. But this was to ignore the dramatic shift in papal rhetoric and the decentralizing emphasis of the document itself, which echoed and underlined the symbolic reversal or abandonment over the previous nine months of some of the dominant themes of Benedict’s papacy. The removal in December 2013 from the key Vatican Congregation for Bishops of some of Benedict’s admirers and appointees, such the prominent confrontational American ‘culture warrior’ Cardinal
Raymond Burke, and their replacement by more liberal and pragmatic figures like Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Westminster, himself appointed cardinal in February 2014, were also significant indications of a shift in the wind. Archbishop Ganswein, ‘Bel Georgio’, reported in the German press as having declared Pope Francis’s refusal to live in the Apostolic Palace was ‘an affront’ to his predecessor, denied that he had made such remarks, but put on record his real difficulties in serving both as companion and
aide
to Pope Benedict and as a member of the bewildering and unsettling new regime: every morning, as he declared, ‘I find myself … waiting to see what will be different today’.

By the end of his first year in office, both world and Church were waiting to see what, in the long term, would be different under Papa Bergoglio. His political skills as well as his consciousness of the conflicting hopes and fears invested in him were evident in April 2014, when in a master-stroke of ambiguity he canonized in a single ceremony two of his recent predecessors. John XXIII and John Paul II were, respectively, icons of the left and the right within the post-conciliar church. John XXIII was regarded by many as the pope who for good or ill had taken the lid off the authoritarian and law-bound fortress-church of Pius XII, in the process unleashing a tidal wave of change. John Paul II, by contrast, was seen both by his admirers and his critics as the pope who had attempted to press that lid firmly back on again. Raising both men to the altars of the Catholic Church as popes who had ‘cooperated with the Holy Spirit in renewing and updating the Church in keeping with her pristine features’, Francis singled John out for his ‘exquisite openness to the Spirit’, and characterized John Paul as ‘the pope of the family’, invoking him as protector of the forthcoming Synod on the family.

There was similar ambiguity evident in the subsequent announcement that Francis would beatify the other great pope of the Conciliar age, Paul VI, in October 2014, at the end of that synod on the family. There were widespread expectations that this first synod of the pontificate would reveal the real extent of Francis’s commitment to collegiality and freedom of episcopal discussion. Many hoped that the synod might soften the church’s teaching and practice on such matters as the admission of divorced and remarried Catholics to communion, and perhaps even on the legitimacy of artificial birth-control. The beatification of the Pope of
Humanae Vitae
, who was also however the pope who had abolished the old Latin liturgy, had something of the same intriguing ambivalence as the canonizations of Roncalli and Wojtyla. And there
were many who reflected on the piquancy of these unprecedentedly swift and numerous papal canonizations, by a pope otherwise so manifestly concerned to downplay the mystique surrounding his own office.