The Great Reformer

by Austen Ivereigh

  Cristina got the message. Having at first welcomed the news of Francis’s 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 maneuver, 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.1

  In the very early hours of the day of Francis’s 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 criticize, 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 porteño Pontifex Maximus.2

  “We’re going to have to get used to a new way of doing things,” Father Lombardi warned journalists in Rome, who were trying to adjust to Francis’s 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.”3

  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 humor and anecdotes, wished the crowd buon pranzo (“have a good lunch”), and commended Cardinal 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 Saint Joseph, was attended by the delegates of 132 states, dozens of religious leaders, and a crowd of two hundred thousand. The religious leaders included, for the first time ever at a papal inauguration, or at least since the Great Schism of the eleventh century, the Orthodox patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew, drawn by Francis’s 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 Sánchez. Francis’s theme was Saint 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 Saint 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!

  Cardinal Christoph Schönborn 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.4

  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 proferred 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.

  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 plowing 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 twenty years earlier, in the sadness of his Córdoba 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.”5

  * * *

  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 descri
bed as republican. It is not fast work. “When Cardinal 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.6

  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 organization 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 center and periphery. The C8 cardinals bring the periphery—the continents of the world—into the center, offering “perspectives other than those that get to the Holy See,” in the words of Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez de Maradiaga of Tegucicalpa, Honduras, who chairs the C8.7

  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’s 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 handpicked 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.8

  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 Errázuriz 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 signaled 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.9

  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 centralization … 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 lawmaking 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 crystallized 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.”10

  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 analyze 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 U.S.11

  Cardinal Rodríguez, 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 center 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 center 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 center and periphery.”12

  The centrality of the synod in Francis’s 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.13

  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 evangelization,” tackling a broad gamut of thorny issues, including the question which dogged the 2005 synod—of access to sacraments for the div
orced 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 thirty-eight-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 eight hundred Catholic organizations, 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.14

  * * *

  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’s reforms.15 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.16

  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.